2018
Korespondence
Povzetki
In Quest of Attuned Architectural Atmospheres
Contributions of Enactive Cognitive Theory and Neurophenomenology
In my most recent book, I unpacked the centrality of the concept of atmosphere for architectural meaning and its historical roots. In order to fully grasp the possibilities of Stimmung and its implementation nowadays, creating life-enhancing atmospheres responsive to human action and to place in the fullest sense (as both natural and cultural context), a proper understanding of consciousness and perception beyond Cartesian misunderstandings is crucial. To this aim, insights drawn from neurophenomenology and so-called third-generation cognitive science prove indispensable. This paper discusses some of these insights.
Out of This World in Two Parts
What is the role played by the beholder in Modernity and in contemporary world? While we are witnessing a progressive denigration of the visual act—understood here as a cognitive and initiatory action—, the visual image has now assumed an increasingly central role in the epistemological trend of making architecture and artistic production. This essay tries to historically frame the slow process of regimentation of the vision, and its liberation that has occurred in recent times thanks to the experiments conducted in the context of the contemporary art; thus the space of artistic experience is redefined as a place in which one sees oneself see.
Hiding in Plain Sight
Donald Judd’s Non-Referential Architecture
The artist, Donald Judd, is best known for his sculptural objects and large-scale serial installations, but in the years preceding his premature death in 1994, he had begun to shift his attention more and more toward works of architecture. Using the redesign of a simple cabin attributed to Judd as a case study, this article exposes and examines the correspondences between his art and architecture that bind them together as a single body of work which acknowledges only the most superficial distinction between the two.
Diagonal Poems of the Right Angle
Parallels in Practice in the Works of Richard Paul Lohse and Aldo van Eyck
An essay exploring one example of a largely unexamined tradition within modernism, which from its beginning was understood by its leading practitioners to integrate and engage all the arts. In this tradition, spatial concepts, ordering principles, experiential precepts and design methods are shared in the work and teaching of both modern painters and modern architects. As an example of a “parallel in practice,” where contemporaries were directly influenced by each other’s thought and work, the essay pairs the Swiss painter Richard Paul Lohse (1902-1988) and the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck (1918-1999). In their respective works, Lohse and Van Eyck explored the deployment of rigorous right-angle grid ordering systems, into which were woven diagonal tensions including shear, rotation and pinwheel compositions, without ever using any literal diagonal forms, elements or spaces. Lohse and Van Eyck shared the belief that the underlying ordering principles of art and architecture held implications for both urban and social structure, extending from the domestic room to the urban community to the society at large, and that spatial and formal structure in art and architecture had the capacity to enrich everyday life and to make the world a better place.
Pictorial Abstractions
Visualizing Space in the Eras of Modernism and Information
Since its beginnings, abstract art followed the idea of reductionism and abstraction of the real, often in order to reveal internal, essential yet invisible truths that lay beyond the sensorial complexity of the everyday world. Today, the reductionist forms of abstract, geometric and minimal art, likewise referred to as non-representational or non-objective art coexist with and within the complexity of new pictorial abstractions, with some of them reflecting a new space paradigm seen as a form of complex and dynamic nonlinear reality, while others subvert the aesthetic logic of digitally generated (algorithmic) abstract forms. This essay focuses on selected space conceptions as manifested in modern and postmodern abstract painting through the prism of concurrent scientific explanations of spatiality. It illuminates spatial concepts of emptiness and absence and the idea of a dynamic expansive multidimensional space in the framework of chosen avant-garde painting and analyzes the representation of space understood in terms of invisible energy field, sublime image of the infinite or optical spatial tactility in the abstract expressionist painting. Furthermore the essay deals with space and light experiments in painting of Light & Space artists and presents examples of contemporary abstract painting of the information era that are influenced by digital technology and its virtuality as well as by the aesthetic and formal implications of scientific theories of complexity and nonlinear dynamic systems.
Attractors in Thought
How might Donald Judd, American artist (1928-1994) have been influenced by the revisionist theories of art historian George Kubler? This essay, constructed in a set of six interchangeable “planes” of thought, considers Kubler’s seminal 1962 work, The Shape of Time, Remarks on the History of Things, as it relates to Judd’s emergence and subsequent preeminence in the international artworld. The structure and terms of Kubler’s thesis bear close reading with several corresponding instances in Judd’s collected writings, and, indeed, Judd’s practice. Passages in Kubler’s book resonate with the style and empirical philosophy of the artist, as do specific terms and concepts, prime objects, entrance, sequences, series and a defense of the ungraspable actuality of time. The essay is a primer for further research and discourse of the works and underlying thinking in both art and architecture of Donald Judd.
The Human Face Mirror
This paper investigates the relationships between the real, perceived, desired images and the reproduced image of the human face and of the physicality of the subject who transfers it to his own self-portrait. There are many correspondences; both objective and interpretable, and visual arts have built on this practice a very long tradition that has lasted for centuries. However, the availability of advanced representation tools today allows the reproduction of a myriad of verisimilar images of the self, or perceived as verisimilar, experimenting multiple identities to trace the most suitable figure to tell about us to the others. The object of the study is the representation of one’s own image, conveyed by drawing techniques – analogical, digital, and hybrid – in order to identify methodologies and practices capable of communicating it. Correspondences should not only be sought in the likely adherence to the portrayed subject, but rather in the set of graphic artifacts that from time to time manifest themselves in the cognitive narrative of her individuality and become instruments to design social identity.
Wayfaring through Poem-Drawing in Spatial Design
Correspondence as Self-Altering Along Place-Making
By traveling, the wayfarer cultivates an enhanced sensitivity towards the surrounding phenomena while continuously changing position. While immersed in the places marked by his movement and memorized by his attention, his displacement also situates his glimpse above the ordinary appearance of things. Wayfarers interpret the given world: they never perceive maps, writings or drawings as complete recipes for defining a Path, but they ground abstract concepts into personal and shared experience. There is an intense level of correspondence and co-creation between the researcher and the phenomenon of research. This paper aims to exhibit wayfaring through poem-drawing as an attentive movement towards a meaningful spatial solution, allowing: a thorough process of observation of the self and the place of intervention; a discernment of site-specific values and wounds; a creational judgement and interpretative imagination in design. Poem-drawings are knots of slowness and reflection on the creational flow. They encourage relational thinking (a meshwork of meaning) and they integrate different modes of knowledge (theoretical, embodied, technical) into a design-oriented reflection.
Pedagogical Palimpsests and Cosmic Landscapes
This essay offers an overview of a graduate design studio taught at the University of South Florida School of Architecture and Community Design. The essay discusses context and place through the lens of the West Texas landscape and the town of Marfa, Texas. Architectural design studio pedagogy and its various informants are the focus of the discussion. The essay reviews how certain historical correspondences addressing design fundamentals rooted in architectural education in the 1950s, remain relevant and even transformative in the current curricula. Finally, the paper offers speculation and direction regarding the nature of the architectural thesis project.