PERIPHERIES


'The act of framing contains perception within a measurable border. The frame is the priori formal device of representation, creating closed boundaries between viewer and viewed. Framing confirms a window through which the visible is divided into separate components. This affirms the cartesian idea of context understood through separation.
'The frame dislocated the viewer from the context. The subject is rendered and separated for the purposes of the gaze.
' Peripheral vision is notional, existing outside the frame of the field of focus.'

MORNING SONG

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival.  New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety.  We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses.  I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's.  The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars.  And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

- Sylvia Plath.

Oh Sylvia! That first line, how it grabs me! 

ARCAM




ArCAM, Architecture Centre Amsterdam.
Thesis case study #3
See here for a pdf of the project, here for a write up at archdaily, and here for construction photographs.

From the Rene van Zuuk website (excuse the 'english'):


Rene van Zuuk Architeckten is a Dutch based office that has a wide variety of project. Underlying in all the designs is the continuous search for methods which can guide the projects. The aim is to unite a maximised degree of 'particularity' of the final product with simplicity in manufacturing. Rene van Zuuks knowlegde of building production technology, is of crucial importance. Almost every project derives its expression from an idea, an invention that initiates and boosts the design process.
These inventions are clearly visible in his most well known buildings. The Architecture Centre Amsterdam (ArCAm) building which is a direct result from transforming blob architecture into well thought-out architecture that is based on production methods.



DIA

dialogues: architecture's origin in language Ian Pollard University of Dundee Dundee UK

“A Dialogue [...] is always a confrontation of irreducibly different viewpoints, [...] an exchange of concrete, unique pieces of information for [...] abstract, general ones[...]"
- Octavio Paz

Ian Pollard, President's Medal Thesis Nominee, writes of his Thesis:
Dialogues is an extended enquiry into the relation of architecture to language. It examines the processes of expression and social roles of language in relation to those of architecture. It also questions the role that language inhabits alongside the acts of drawing and making. One motive for drawing such analogies, and for pursuing them, is to generate ideas about the social roles of architecture and the mysterious translations of the design process. Another is to provide a framework through which architectural history may be understood critically in relation to contemporary practice.

The greater dialogue, however, begins before Vitruvius and Alberti and connects the human catalyst of Gothic architecture, Abbott Suger, with the architecture parlante of Étienne-Louis Boullée. It connects Adolf Loos’ proto-modern understanding of architecture as a built polemic with the philosopher-architect Ludwig Wittgenstein’s search for the philosophical foundations of all buildings. It connects the futurist bombast of Antonio Sant’Elia with the grammar of Mies and Le Corbusier’s built rhetoric. It also connects, in a tradition borne from the Piranesean shadows, the paper architecture of Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin to the allegorical archi-texts of Douglas Darden. This thesis merely eavesdrops on this interaction of ideas for a fleeting moment.

The methodological structure of the thesis is reflected in its eventual presentation as a series of five pamphlets; each documenting a distinct stage within the overall process of enquiry. The first, Apologia, describes the personal motives and convictions which frame the subject area. The second, From Allegory to Archetype, is an essay which explores in depth five areas through which language and architecture may be observed in meaningful interaction; namely structure, memory, philosophy, criticism and translation. The third and fourth pamphlets, Architectural Investigations, document a corpus of studio projects by which the observations of the the previous essay are investigated, challenged and even employed. The series of pamphlets then concludes with a critical reflection of the thesis itself in recapitulation and examination of the process undergone.