SECTION HOUSE

April 14, 2015 by Sophie Hamer in SPACES

The Cloud Collective's Section House, located on a public green strip in Oisterwijk is just that: a physical, dense section through a typical house. It seems to exist halfway between building site and ruin, halfway between house and playground, halfway between real and unreal.

It recalls Whiteread's Ghost- though what is given material presence is not negative space, but the cut of the section. We feel, in it, the resistance of lost matter meeting matter. The drawing is firmly in control of the material - the projected slice is given weight beyond itself.

Catherine Ingraham , in an essay titled Losing It in Architecture has called the architectural drawing a lament. Here, indeed, we see the architect's marks stand in for his absent object, calling it into presence. At the same time, the structure breaks no rules, rather, the logic is misapplied, drawn out from itself. The delight is in what the conventional can allow when we engage with it critically.

The Section House acts as an operator, what Stan Allen might call a 'transaction' between the abstract realm of geometry and the material stuff of building.

SPLASHING

April 13, 2015 by Sophie Hamer in THINGS

Richard Serra's 1968 work Splashing is one of those inherently evocative works which takes on new lives through the different media it engages.

The process of creation is embodied in the work: hardened lead thrown against the base of a wall when molten. Once solidified, we are invited to reconstruct Serra's action in our mind. The violence of his throw is brought to life through the 'after-image' - his performance embedded in the object.

POSSIBILITY ON THE URBAN EDGE

April 13, 2015 by Sophie Hamer in PLACES

Possibility is the long view, and our orientation towards it. It is also the spirit of that orientation – the attachment we feel to the projected future.

There is a special kind of possible that seeps through the everyday, and is an embedded trajectory within the lived-place. For Henri Lefebrve, part of the urban project was the continual regeneration of the idea of the urban. He asks us to continually re-look at what exists, to reconsider the possible.

Productive sites for thinking and making in this way can be found at the edges of material, spatial and conceptual categories. For me, Bali is a kind of 'urban edge', at which slippages occur. With this instability comes the possibility of knowing things differently.

Bali is tied up in its possibility of urbanity. For Lefebvre, the “possible is also part of the real and gives it a sense of direction, an orientation, a clear path to the horizon” (2003: 45). Bali is the edge of the possible; it straddles the current urban thing and what the urban thing might productively become.

POSTCARDS OF AMBIGUITY

February 23, 2015 by Sophie Hamer in THINGS

In this 'Postcard' series, Whiteread uses a hole punch to cut out negative spaces in the rooms, capturing the three-dimensional concerns of her sculptural form in a two-dimensional manner. The well-known touristic images are obscured by the cluster of circular abscesses, and they become ambiguous. More of Rachel Whitereads' drawings at the Tate Britain courtesy of the Guardian here, with accompanying article here.

Alongside the postcards are a collection of pseudo-technical drawings, including the revealing 'Study for "House"'. In this work, Whiteread uses an everyday and meaning-laden medium - correction fluid, or 'twink' - to simultaneously create and erase. The house is 'corrected' into a 'pure' whiteness, it becomes absent, yet at the same time, we are more aware of the space the object occupies after the 'intervention'. White is at once pure and ghostly, the house in the images becomes both nothing and, oddly, sky.

COA MUSEUM

February 20, 2015 by Sophie Hamer in SPACES

The triangular volume of Cabilo Rabelo's COA Museum sits an installation in the landscape, a large scale, monolithic piece of land art. Emerging from the ground, the simple, raw materials evoke the local stone yards and reflects two different natures: the concrete’s matter, and the local stone’s texture and colour. Then suddenly, just as you are certain of its solidity, it seems, improbably, to be released: the building floats out over the landscape, hovering, as if it weighed nothing.

A museum which reflects its context and content, forming a background and a foreground at once. It’s value is subtle, intrinsic, and undeniable.

Find out more about this beauty here, on ArchDaily.

PALAZZO DELLA CIVILITA DEL LAVORO

February 13, 2015 by Sophie Hamer in SPACES

Planned for the 1942 World Exhibition as a celebration of the Colloseum, the iconic pallazo was Mussolini’s architectural symbol of his Fascist world. In simplified neo-classical style, the superimposed loggias of the travertine-marble clad building make it as distinctive as it is mesmerising.

This year, fashion giants Fendi took over space as their headquarters, and will inhabit it for the next 15 years at least. Fendi intend on opening the ground floor up to house exhibitions celebrating Italian craftsmanship.

ESCAPISM

February 11, 2015 by Sophie Hamer in PLACES

Light, people, time...everything escapes eventually.

GUILD

February 11, 2015 by Sophie Hamer in THINGS

Architectural beauty brand Aesop invite viewers into their complex, beautiful interior design and construction process in their stunning film "The Guild of Artisans". It's not often that the act of making is understood with as much delicacy as the final product - but here, Aesop pay perfect homage. The close-ups, lighting, and sequencing of the film are testament to the brand's approach to design as a multi-sensual task.