bodyoftheory
tectonics
The Tectonic Sensibility
One of the problems that haunts any discussion of tectonics in architecture (typically defined as the raising of construction to an art form) is that it can often seem like an obvious fallacy is being committed, broadly of the pars pro toto variety. If we become too fixated on the fabric of the building as … Continue reading
Architectural Projects of Marco Frascari: The Pleasure of a Demonstration
Review of: Architectural Projects of Marco Frascari: The Pleasure of a Demonstration, by Sam Ridgway (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), ISBN 978-1-4724-4174-4, Hb, pp. 109. This is a useful collection of commentaries on the fascinating work – both written and built – of the Italian architect and academic Marco Frascari, who died in 2013. Frascari, born in 1945 “under the … Continue reading
Performing Place: A Conversation with Sioned Huws
Invited by the Nottingham based international centre Dance4 I recently took part in an online conversation with choreographer and performer Sioned Huws. Originally from Bangor in north Wales, Sioned has been working for a number of years with community groups in northern Japan, helping to record, preserve and promote traditional forms of dance, such as … Continue reading
Ingold on Making – Agency and Animacy
In his latest collection of essays subtitled ‘Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture’ [1] Tim Ingold continues his interdisciplinary investigations into the messy world of making. Written in a typically lively, direct and highly accessible style, one of the strengths of Ingold’s approach is the intimate connection between philosophy and field work – you get the … Continue reading
‘Sensing Spaces’ – Architecture Re-materialised
Architecture exhibitions typically struggle to deal with the problem of the absent object. When you can’t actually fit the main exhibit inside the gallery space it’s tempting to revert to the default option of the all-too-familiar ‘book-on-the-wall’. In other areas, museums have been keen to move away from this predominantly text-based model, preferring instead to … Continue reading
Architecture as Process: Objects-Things-Lines
Tim Ingold likes to rough-up the edges of things. As an anthropologist he’s more interested in people than architecture-as-such, but whether he’s talking about objects, buildings or bodies, the boundaries between them soon become fuzzy. In a way reminiscent of the philosopher David Hume’s idea of the self as a ‘bundle or collection of different … Continue reading
DAAR / Thomas Demand
The latest exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary puts together two unlikely subjects – the disputed territories of Israel and Palestine and some rough-and-ready cardboard mock-ups of 1960s American villas. Galleries 1 and 2 are occupied by DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency) a three-person art and architecture collective based in Palestine. Called ‘Common Assembly’ the work in the show is … Continue reading
Latest Book
BORSI, K., EKICI, D., HALE, J., HAYNES, N., ed's. Housing and the City (AHRA 2020). Abingdon: Routledge, 2022.
Latest Article
JIN, X., & HALE, J., Unbinding architectural imagination: Wang Shu’s textual bricolage in theoretical writing and design. Journal of Architecture, 28(1), 2023.
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