ZERO

Stumbled across Thomas Kongo's 2009-2010 Zero Project today. Situated within the present-day post-recession scenario, he questions the pervasive architecture desire to build, add, and create: in essence, to deny the zero. Kong explores and proposes an alternate model of architecting which he terms 'Unbuilding' - using the zero, the spaces which are neither positive nor negative -as his model. 

ABSTRACT

Provisional Thesis Abstract, July 2011

An Ethics of Dialogue


        This thesis explores the production of, legitimization of and engagement with the built environment of Wellington City. It is primarily concerned with the nature, direction, and productivity of relationships between architects, clients, users, other constructional professionals and members of the broader public, and with the implications of these relations for the practice of architecture and modes of design. The thesis steps off from a analysis of the exploding number of 'Architecture Centres' across Europe, seeking not only new engagements between individuals, but new engagements with the processes and practices of the built environment.

       Embedded in much present-day architectural thinking is a reliance on the definitional terms 'inside' and 'outside'. These terms seek to exclude any person, concept or object which might bring processes of the built environment as we know them into question. This exclusion and self-definition is echoed in practice and in the space of the city.

Engaging an alternative Levinian 'ethics of dialogue' as a driving philosophy, the thesis investigates the voices of three individuals (Bruce Robbins, literary critic; Jonathan Hill, critical architect; and Sarah Whiting, proponent of the post-critical pragmatists) who conceptualise the inside and outside in different ways, from notions of the homely and the homesick, to the sensual and the institutional, and the fashionable and the autonomous. The thesis utilises drawing as a tool to spatialise these voices and to map dialogues between individuals and sites.
        This investigation forms the foundation for the the built proposition of the thesis. The 'Doorway to the Built Environment' is a committed public building sited on and under Post Office Square which acts as a non-prescriptive space for debates, exhibitions and investigations concerning the built environment to occur. Within the context of the thesis, the building is proposed as a mode of questioning, rather than as a solution. The boundary between inside and outside is transgressed by informal space, by the voices of the usually unheard, by the shadows of the existing city. It invites all, providing a public democratic platform in which the built environment becomes collective rather than individuated in production, legitimisation and engagement.  

BACH

In 1999, architect Jaafar Chalabi collaborated with Nacho Duato on Multiplicity: Silence and Forms of Emptiness.  The piece - a dance - explored architectural and musical themes of the Baroque through the set’s voluptuous geometries and J.S. Bach’s life story.
It was the site — Weimar, Germany — of this commissioned dance work that inspired the idea of an homage to Bach; this in turn informed the musical score, the choreographic variations and fugue, and Chalabi’s exploration of convex and concave folds, creating convoluted interior and exterior spaces within the scaffold-supported curtain wall.

UNDER/OVER


Tatiana M Vela Jara 
· · · Hand drawings are explorations and processes of the project itself. They can capture in one space the past, present and possible experience of an idea - an idea that itself has come out of the first few drawn lines.  In this way, particualarly the hand-made drawing can reveal the maker's attitude and complexity, energy or vigour - and how it relates to the project itself. These drawings are mainly drawn by hand in various layers and various methods: pencil drawing, collage and hand cut outs of photographs. Photoshop was used minimally to obtain contrasts and layering - adding textures only when necessary. The drawings intend to show the contrast of very different worlds: overground and a secretive underground. Layers are intended to be shown in their complexity and interrelated to each other. This way of drawing and representing evolved from the drawing that explored the inherent nature of the site. (cutout 3d drawing) · · ·  Sheffield

via project context

OBLIQUE



Claude Parent and Paul Virilio in the ‘The Function of the Oblique’ used oblique planes to create architecture of disequilibrium in an attempt to bring the habitat into a dynamic era of the body in movement. 
“We wanted above all to create an “ordinary place” where experimentation rreplaces contemplation, where the architecture is experienced through movement and the quality of that movement. The purpose of the oblique was to encourage a constant awareness of gravity, bringing the body into a tactile relationship with the building.”  
Habitable circulation - “It is no longer feasible to separate habitation from circulation”.

Paul Virilio and The Oblique - Interview

via catrina stewart

BLURSKING


 - Marjan Colletti
Blursking

The refurbishment project of a flat in Bolzano/Bozen, Italy, engages in the research undertaken on blur and superposition. Partly sanded glass walls act as physical partitions of functions, yet link the spaces together in a blurred and soft perception of a whole environment. Here, the wall is considered as an intrafacial screen. Rather than blocking the view, the screen allows the gaze into, and contemplation of, spaces semi-visible behind the blurry wall; it monitors events and light conditions and displays them to the other side, affecting that space as well.

The body, always present, vanishes into blurriness and inhabits the wall as well as the space. Fake reflections trigger curiosity, and refractions add layers and layers of details that create a cloudy’ and ‘soft’ experience of the space and of the walls. Other horizontal elements cut through functions and spaces, merging them. They perform the major infrastructural functions of the flat and soften the rigidity of boundary conditions, while relating two spaces contemporarily. Three transparent gaps allow visual penetration through the glass walls: at eye, hand and foot level; all levels allow the soft toys to ‘play’ in the flat. In certain circumstances, these transparent gaps construct fake reflections and projections.