Simon Weir | The University of Sydney (original) (raw)

Object Oriented Ontology in Art and Architecture by Simon Weir

Open Philosophy, 2023

The domestic spaces of the built environment are traditionally associated with residential archit... more The domestic spaces of the built environment are traditionally associated with residential architecture. But the domestic spaces can also extend out, metaphorically, into familiar public spaces in which one may feel at home, and also extend inwards into self-perception, insofar as you may say that you dwell within yourself. This article begins by recalling Vitruvius' fundamental notion of architectural utilitas concerns accommodating not a building's owners but foreigners and strange outsiders. Vitruvius' view on utility heavily favoured architecture's socio-political function, and the guests he believed that architecture ought to accommodate were not merely a home's owners or their visiting friends, but those people who are more distant from a home's owners: those who are stranger and less well understood, known as xenos and who ought to be respected under the Ancient Greek religious and ethical principle of xenia. It is on these grounds that Vitruvius makes an ethical critique of residential architecture in favour of the virtue of public architecture. Next the reach of xenia is proposed to extend towards those who are different not merely because of ethnic differences but cognitive and sensory differences. Such accommodations are today accounted for as part of accessibility design and salutogenic design. Similar conceptions are noted in Nietzsche's notion of an "architecture for the perceptive" and the surrealist's interpretation of the minotaur as a hybrid not only of animal and human but a hybrid of civilised citizen and barbarian outsider. Together these sketch out an expanded sense of the domestic that includes public spaces designed to accommodate strange outsiders and the hybrid forms used to signify them.

Odyssey, 2021

The Lotus Conceals At the southern end of Tokyo's Ueno Park is Shinobazu Lotus Pond, 55 000m2 of ... more The Lotus Conceals At the southern end of Tokyo's Ueno Park is Shinobazu Lotus Pond, 55 000m2 of lotus flowers. The lotuses completely cover the pond, you don't see any water, only their light pink flowers set against wide, dark green leaves. It is uncanny to come to a pond and not see water. You imagine it's there, concealed beneath the surface. Without the surface reflections that you always see in bodies of water, at night it is an unusually dark object. In the metropolis' shining night, a pool of genuine darkness.

Architecture Philosophy, 2021

Simon Weir in conversation with Graham Harman about OOO and Architetcure

Make Sense - 2020, 2020

Ambitious designers everywhere still ask about the Corinthian column: how can we design such endu... more Ambitious designers everywhere still ask about the Corinthian column: how can we design such enduringly alluring, idiosyncratic, irrational objects? Within the context of Object Oriented Ontology, this short paper presents a unique interpretation of the Cornthian Capital as an examplar of a new tectonic theory: "Occasionalist Tectonics".

Open Philosophy, 2020

Graham Harman describes the allure of art as the tension and fusion of a real object to sensual q... more Graham Harman describes the allure of art as the tension and fusion of a real object to sensual qualities so that it makes it seem that the inwardness of reality is opened to us. Yet real objects are withdrawn; how are we aware of their fusion? Since Harman’s ontology mandates that contact between real objects occurs only through sensual objects, this essay explores the idea that art’s allure must be a tension between sensual objects that draw the experiencer to believe, or alieve, they are in contact with the withdrawn real. By looking at the examples in representational painting and sleight of hand magic, we see that ontographic art objects use at least four, carefully separated sensual objects to produce their aesthetic effect. The conclusion summarises allure as a sensual object process, speculates on art’s dialetheic confusion of sensual and real objects giving an enduring allure to idealism, and notes potential motifs of an infrarealist resistance.

Open Philosophy, 2019

The practice of Ontography deployed by OOO, clarified and expanded in this essay, produces a high... more The practice of Ontography deployed by OOO, clarified and expanded in this essay, produces a highly productive framework for analyzing Salvador Dalí’s ontological project between 1928 and 1935. Through the careful analysis of paintings and original texts from this period, we establish the antecedents for Dalí’s theorization of Surrealist objects in Cubism and Italian Metaphysical art, which we collectively refer to as ‘Ontographic art,’ drawing parallels with the tenets of Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented philosophical programmes. We respond to the question raised by Roger Rothman concerning Object-Oriented Idealism in Dalí’s work by showing pivotal changes to Dalí’s ontological outlook, from Idealism to Realism, across the aforementioned period, positing the Ontographic intentionality of Dalí’s ontological project in Surrealist art.

Senzacornice - Rivista online di arte contemporanea e critica, 2020

Open Philosophy, 2020

Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology has employed a variant of occasionalist causation since ... more Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology has employed a variant of occasionalist causation since 2002, with sensual objects acting as the mediators of causation between real objects. While the mechanism for living beings creating sensual objects is clear, how nonliving objects generate sensual objects is not. This essay sets out an interpretation of occasionalism where the mediating agency of nonliving contact is the virtual particles of nominally empty space. Since living, conscious, real objects need to hold sensual objects as sub-components, but nonliving objects do not, this leads to an explanation of why consciousness, in Object-Oriented Ontology, might be described as doubly withdrawn: a sensual sub-component of a withdrawn real object.

Surrealism in Art and Architecture by Simon Weir

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, 2022

Exhibits at mid-century conventions of the American Medical Association were usually sober affair... more Exhibits at mid-century conventions of the American Medical Association were usually sober affairs. Besuited physicians browsed hand-painted illustrations of body parts and watched demonstrations of medical devices. Occasionally medical supplies companies invested in more spectacular displays: a highlight of the 1958 convention was a translucent domed pavilion, a walk-in scale model of a human cell. Amidst the 285 didactic, commercially sponsored displays that year was a most extraordinary exhibit: a sixty-foot long chrysalis lying in an elevated corner of the convention hall. If you paused to look, you would notice that it was slowly breathing, sleepily inhaling and exhaling a few times each minute. The translucent white, silken cocoon revealed hints of a brightly colored pupae writhing through the growing pains of a massive metamorphosis. As you approached the cocoon, you would see security guards and smiling hosts who would invite you to approach the pupae cautiously from the rear. What was it doing here? The monstrous creature should surely be in a zoo, the cocoon in a museum of natural history. If this were the first act of a Steven Spielberg movie, we would expect the creature to raucously tear out of its cocoon and wreak havoc as it careened into nearby San Francisco. The gothic horror of the imminent emergence of the winged megafauna was indeed part of the intended effect. Change, even change from a wriggling caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly, can be painful and frightening. The exhibited chrysalis was no jurassic wonder, but the single completed architectural commission of Salvador Dalí, fabricated under the direction of René d'Aurisc and Viktor Harasty. Twenty-four air blowers hidden under the floor inflated and deflated two layers of parachute silk giving the impression of breath, though one reporter wrote that it "undulated like the pickup bag of mother's old-fashioned vacuum cleaner."

Academic conference paper 11th Congress, of the International Colour Association, University of NSW

Radio interview, Paperweight Radio: Explorations in Visual and Material Culture, London, UK.

38th Annual ICOHTEC Conference, ETSEIB, Barcelona Academic conference presentation

24th International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zeala... more 24th International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, University of Adelaide
Academic conference

Horizonte 5 - Fetisch, University of Weimar, 2012

Journal article.

Youtopia - A Passion for the Dark, 2012

Edible architecture may sound like an over-reaching expectation but surely I am not the only one ... more Edible architecture may sound like an over-reaching expectation but surely I am not the only one who has sat through a long lecture or theatre performance and wished the chair's armrest was a long loaf of fresh bread stuffed with blueberries, chocolate and hard boiled eggs. And I don't know how many of you have sat in front of a fire on a cold winter's night in a chair made of bread, wearing slippers made of bread, but trust me, it's toasty. Edible architecture is deliriously pleasurable, but the decadence, the morning after, can be rather messy.
The poorest among us will eat their own homes either out of necessity or lack of self control , and then enjoy the displeasure of sleeping outdoors on rainy winter nights . And no one will ever succeed in restraining random birds, possums, rodents, insects and probably even family pets and errant children from chewing through structural members. Perhaps the project would succeed if the edible parts of the architecture were alive, and the partially eaten building would regrow. Following the rhythm of the sun, a family could enjoy a large and spacious house at the end of summer and eat it down to a few rooms in winter while waiting for the regrowth and expansion of spring.

IDEA Journal 2012, Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association , 2012

Salvador Dalí’s surrealist process, which he named the paranoiac critical method, is a method of ... more Salvador Dalí’s surrealist process, which he named the paranoiac critical method, is a method of generating irrational knowledge through the associative mechanisms of delirious phenomena. Drawing together the story of Odysseus and the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey and K. Michael Hay’s essay on the modernist dematerialisations of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958) in New York, the paranoiac critical method is employed in an exegesis of Buckminster Fuller’s giant geodesic domes as a continuation of the transformative power of Odysseus’s legendary journey of interiorisation.

Interior Architecture Theory Reader, 2018

Salvador Dalf's sweeping surrealist essay, The Conquest of the Irrational, was a summation of hi... more Salvador Dalf's sweeping surrealist essay, The Conquest of the Irrational, was
a summation of his theoretical and representational aims during his engagement
with Andre Breton's Parisian Surrealist movement. 1 The fourth and final
section of the essay was curiously subtitled "The Tears of Heraclitus." Living in
Ionia (now part of Turkey) some 2,500 years ago, Heraclitus produced a written
legacy that has long been little more than a collection of aphorisms, fragments,
and second-hand quotations; nonetheless, they have been the subject
of perennial study. Around 45 BCE, the great Latin orator and statesman Marcus
Tullius Cicero described him as obscure by inserting a Greek word into his
Latin text, σκοτεινός, (dark).

Stereotomy Research by Simon Weir

Tracing the trajectory of stereotomy through millennia of practice, an extrapolation is presented... more Tracing the trajectory of stereotomy through millennia of practice, an extrapolation is presented that stereotomy will serve increased formal and structural complexity. The addition of robotic carving to stereotomy also removes the ethical-aesthetic connection between the carver's effort and the visual attention given to the object. This leads to the design of a wave jointed block capable of an extended structural ability, concealing the majority of the cutting effort inside the joined blocks. The proposed fabrication system uses a wire cutter end effector following a toolpath generated from quad based mesh topologies. This single tool cutting system maximises the efficiency of the cutting process and returns the once technical aspects of robotic construction back to the designer.

A Comparison study of Interlocking Wave Jointed Geometry using Finite Element and Physical Modell... more A Comparison study of Interlocking Wave Jointed Geometry using Finite
Element and Physical Modelling Methods

Open Philosophy, 2023

The domestic spaces of the built environment are traditionally associated with residential archit... more The domestic spaces of the built environment are traditionally associated with residential architecture. But the domestic spaces can also extend out, metaphorically, into familiar public spaces in which one may feel at home, and also extend inwards into self-perception, insofar as you may say that you dwell within yourself. This article begins by recalling Vitruvius' fundamental notion of architectural utilitas concerns accommodating not a building's owners but foreigners and strange outsiders. Vitruvius' view on utility heavily favoured architecture's socio-political function, and the guests he believed that architecture ought to accommodate were not merely a home's owners or their visiting friends, but those people who are more distant from a home's owners: those who are stranger and less well understood, known as xenos and who ought to be respected under the Ancient Greek religious and ethical principle of xenia. It is on these grounds that Vitruvius makes an ethical critique of residential architecture in favour of the virtue of public architecture. Next the reach of xenia is proposed to extend towards those who are different not merely because of ethnic differences but cognitive and sensory differences. Such accommodations are today accounted for as part of accessibility design and salutogenic design. Similar conceptions are noted in Nietzsche's notion of an "architecture for the perceptive" and the surrealist's interpretation of the minotaur as a hybrid not only of animal and human but a hybrid of civilised citizen and barbarian outsider. Together these sketch out an expanded sense of the domestic that includes public spaces designed to accommodate strange outsiders and the hybrid forms used to signify them.

Odyssey, 2021

The Lotus Conceals At the southern end of Tokyo's Ueno Park is Shinobazu Lotus Pond, 55 000m2 of ... more The Lotus Conceals At the southern end of Tokyo's Ueno Park is Shinobazu Lotus Pond, 55 000m2 of lotus flowers. The lotuses completely cover the pond, you don't see any water, only their light pink flowers set against wide, dark green leaves. It is uncanny to come to a pond and not see water. You imagine it's there, concealed beneath the surface. Without the surface reflections that you always see in bodies of water, at night it is an unusually dark object. In the metropolis' shining night, a pool of genuine darkness.

Architecture Philosophy, 2021

Simon Weir in conversation with Graham Harman about OOO and Architetcure

Make Sense - 2020, 2020

Ambitious designers everywhere still ask about the Corinthian column: how can we design such endu... more Ambitious designers everywhere still ask about the Corinthian column: how can we design such enduringly alluring, idiosyncratic, irrational objects? Within the context of Object Oriented Ontology, this short paper presents a unique interpretation of the Cornthian Capital as an examplar of a new tectonic theory: "Occasionalist Tectonics".

Open Philosophy, 2020

Graham Harman describes the allure of art as the tension and fusion of a real object to sensual q... more Graham Harman describes the allure of art as the tension and fusion of a real object to sensual qualities so that it makes it seem that the inwardness of reality is opened to us. Yet real objects are withdrawn; how are we aware of their fusion? Since Harman’s ontology mandates that contact between real objects occurs only through sensual objects, this essay explores the idea that art’s allure must be a tension between sensual objects that draw the experiencer to believe, or alieve, they are in contact with the withdrawn real. By looking at the examples in representational painting and sleight of hand magic, we see that ontographic art objects use at least four, carefully separated sensual objects to produce their aesthetic effect. The conclusion summarises allure as a sensual object process, speculates on art’s dialetheic confusion of sensual and real objects giving an enduring allure to idealism, and notes potential motifs of an infrarealist resistance.

Open Philosophy, 2019

The practice of Ontography deployed by OOO, clarified and expanded in this essay, produces a high... more The practice of Ontography deployed by OOO, clarified and expanded in this essay, produces a highly productive framework for analyzing Salvador Dalí’s ontological project between 1928 and 1935. Through the careful analysis of paintings and original texts from this period, we establish the antecedents for Dalí’s theorization of Surrealist objects in Cubism and Italian Metaphysical art, which we collectively refer to as ‘Ontographic art,’ drawing parallels with the tenets of Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented philosophical programmes. We respond to the question raised by Roger Rothman concerning Object-Oriented Idealism in Dalí’s work by showing pivotal changes to Dalí’s ontological outlook, from Idealism to Realism, across the aforementioned period, positing the Ontographic intentionality of Dalí’s ontological project in Surrealist art.

Senzacornice - Rivista online di arte contemporanea e critica, 2020

Open Philosophy, 2020

Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology has employed a variant of occasionalist causation since ... more Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology has employed a variant of occasionalist causation since 2002, with sensual objects acting as the mediators of causation between real objects. While the mechanism for living beings creating sensual objects is clear, how nonliving objects generate sensual objects is not. This essay sets out an interpretation of occasionalism where the mediating agency of nonliving contact is the virtual particles of nominally empty space. Since living, conscious, real objects need to hold sensual objects as sub-components, but nonliving objects do not, this leads to an explanation of why consciousness, in Object-Oriented Ontology, might be described as doubly withdrawn: a sensual sub-component of a withdrawn real object.

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, 2022

Exhibits at mid-century conventions of the American Medical Association were usually sober affair... more Exhibits at mid-century conventions of the American Medical Association were usually sober affairs. Besuited physicians browsed hand-painted illustrations of body parts and watched demonstrations of medical devices. Occasionally medical supplies companies invested in more spectacular displays: a highlight of the 1958 convention was a translucent domed pavilion, a walk-in scale model of a human cell. Amidst the 285 didactic, commercially sponsored displays that year was a most extraordinary exhibit: a sixty-foot long chrysalis lying in an elevated corner of the convention hall. If you paused to look, you would notice that it was slowly breathing, sleepily inhaling and exhaling a few times each minute. The translucent white, silken cocoon revealed hints of a brightly colored pupae writhing through the growing pains of a massive metamorphosis. As you approached the cocoon, you would see security guards and smiling hosts who would invite you to approach the pupae cautiously from the rear. What was it doing here? The monstrous creature should surely be in a zoo, the cocoon in a museum of natural history. If this were the first act of a Steven Spielberg movie, we would expect the creature to raucously tear out of its cocoon and wreak havoc as it careened into nearby San Francisco. The gothic horror of the imminent emergence of the winged megafauna was indeed part of the intended effect. Change, even change from a wriggling caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly, can be painful and frightening. The exhibited chrysalis was no jurassic wonder, but the single completed architectural commission of Salvador Dalí, fabricated under the direction of René d'Aurisc and Viktor Harasty. Twenty-four air blowers hidden under the floor inflated and deflated two layers of parachute silk giving the impression of breath, though one reporter wrote that it "undulated like the pickup bag of mother's old-fashioned vacuum cleaner."

Academic conference paper 11th Congress, of the International Colour Association, University of NSW

Radio interview, Paperweight Radio: Explorations in Visual and Material Culture, London, UK.

38th Annual ICOHTEC Conference, ETSEIB, Barcelona Academic conference presentation

24th International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zeala... more 24th International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, University of Adelaide
Academic conference

Horizonte 5 - Fetisch, University of Weimar, 2012

Journal article.

Youtopia - A Passion for the Dark, 2012

Edible architecture may sound like an over-reaching expectation but surely I am not the only one ... more Edible architecture may sound like an over-reaching expectation but surely I am not the only one who has sat through a long lecture or theatre performance and wished the chair's armrest was a long loaf of fresh bread stuffed with blueberries, chocolate and hard boiled eggs. And I don't know how many of you have sat in front of a fire on a cold winter's night in a chair made of bread, wearing slippers made of bread, but trust me, it's toasty. Edible architecture is deliriously pleasurable, but the decadence, the morning after, can be rather messy.
The poorest among us will eat their own homes either out of necessity or lack of self control , and then enjoy the displeasure of sleeping outdoors on rainy winter nights . And no one will ever succeed in restraining random birds, possums, rodents, insects and probably even family pets and errant children from chewing through structural members. Perhaps the project would succeed if the edible parts of the architecture were alive, and the partially eaten building would regrow. Following the rhythm of the sun, a family could enjoy a large and spacious house at the end of summer and eat it down to a few rooms in winter while waiting for the regrowth and expansion of spring.

IDEA Journal 2012, Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association , 2012

Salvador Dalí’s surrealist process, which he named the paranoiac critical method, is a method of ... more Salvador Dalí’s surrealist process, which he named the paranoiac critical method, is a method of generating irrational knowledge through the associative mechanisms of delirious phenomena. Drawing together the story of Odysseus and the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey and K. Michael Hay’s essay on the modernist dematerialisations of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958) in New York, the paranoiac critical method is employed in an exegesis of Buckminster Fuller’s giant geodesic domes as a continuation of the transformative power of Odysseus’s legendary journey of interiorisation.

Interior Architecture Theory Reader, 2018

Salvador Dalf's sweeping surrealist essay, The Conquest of the Irrational, was a summation of hi... more Salvador Dalf's sweeping surrealist essay, The Conquest of the Irrational, was
a summation of his theoretical and representational aims during his engagement
with Andre Breton's Parisian Surrealist movement. 1 The fourth and final
section of the essay was curiously subtitled "The Tears of Heraclitus." Living in
Ionia (now part of Turkey) some 2,500 years ago, Heraclitus produced a written
legacy that has long been little more than a collection of aphorisms, fragments,
and second-hand quotations; nonetheless, they have been the subject
of perennial study. Around 45 BCE, the great Latin orator and statesman Marcus
Tullius Cicero described him as obscure by inserting a Greek word into his
Latin text, σκοτεινός, (dark).

Tracing the trajectory of stereotomy through millennia of practice, an extrapolation is presented... more Tracing the trajectory of stereotomy through millennia of practice, an extrapolation is presented that stereotomy will serve increased formal and structural complexity. The addition of robotic carving to stereotomy also removes the ethical-aesthetic connection between the carver's effort and the visual attention given to the object. This leads to the design of a wave jointed block capable of an extended structural ability, concealing the majority of the cutting effort inside the joined blocks. The proposed fabrication system uses a wire cutter end effector following a toolpath generated from quad based mesh topologies. This single tool cutting system maximises the efficiency of the cutting process and returns the once technical aspects of robotic construction back to the designer.

A Comparison study of Interlocking Wave Jointed Geometry using Finite Element and Physical Modell... more A Comparison study of Interlocking Wave Jointed Geometry using Finite
Element and Physical Modelling Methods

Architecture Research Centre Consortium (ARCC) Conference Chicago, USA. April6-9 2015

CAADRIA 2017 The 22nd International Conference on Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia Protocols, Flows and Glitches, 2017

The Journal of Architecture, 2015

Vitruvius' de Architectura uses the Latin word ‘xenia’ once, in the chapter on the Greek house, i... more Vitruvius' de Architectura uses the Latin word ‘xenia’ once, in the chapter on the Greek house, in a seemingly casual note about decorative painting. Yet the Greek homophone denotes a long-esteemed ethical principle permeating Athenian culture and Homeric legend. Greek-speaking readers of de Architectura cannot have missed the reference. Roughly translated as hospitality to strangers, the Greek xenia (ξείνία) referred to both a set of ritualised practices and a socio-political disposition.
Vitruvius mentions xenia while explaining another word that also passed from Greek to Latin, ‘andron'. Once referring to a man-making leader, the word andron next referred to a men's dining room, and finally, for Vitruvius, a hallway connecting guests' apartments; it is here that Vitruvius tells us ‘this is why artists called pictures representing the things which were sent to guests “xenia”’.
Drawing together the early history of xenia and andron in Latin and Greek, and Vitruvius' opening sentence in ‘The Greek house', that Greeks did not use atria, this unique instance of xenia will be explained as a politically sensitive commentary on the Greek and Roman history of xenia, its representation and architectural expression.

Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, 2017

Ubiquitous in ancient Greek culture, the ethical principle of xenía may broadly translate as hosp... more Ubiquitous in ancient Greek culture, the ethical principle of xenía may broadly translate as hospitality to strangers, doing so through taking interpersonal, political, and architectural form. Since xenía includes the accommodation of foreign guests, some evidence of xenía in architecture is logically found in houses and hostels, but surprisingly more evidence surrounds Athens’ Theatre of Dionysus, on stage in Aristophanes’ Peace and Euripides’ Cyclops, and off stage through the architects elected to look after the sanctuary of the theatre.

This paper reveals the principle of xenía permeating the professional work of the architect to such a degree that Vitruvius and Demosthenes would reproach even slight digressions from the principle, and Vitruvius would call the education of xenía the most valuable thing to outlast a shipwreck.

Approaching Arata Isozaki, 2019

Review of the work of Japanese architect Arata Isozaki in light of his Pritzker Prize win.

7th International Conference of the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia, Monash ... more 7th International Conference of the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia,
Monash University, RMIT University and University of Melbourne.
Academic conference paper

2nd International Architecture and Phenomenology Conference, Kyoto Seika University, Japan Acade... more 2nd International Architecture and Phenomenology Conference, Kyoto Seika University, Japan
Academic conference

Venice Architectural Biennale with Prof Tom Heneghan, Shoko Seyama & Haris Dzonlagic Section i... more Venice Architectural Biennale
with Prof Tom Heneghan, Shoko Seyama & Haris Dzonlagic
Section in exhibition catalogue: Durbach, Frost, et.al., Abundant (AIA, Barton ACT).

The Conversation (online), Oct 16, 2014

Architecture And Design (online), Oct 20, 2014

Sydney University, Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning Ethel Chettle Postgraduate Rese... more Sydney University, Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning
Ethel Chettle Postgraduate Research Scholar, 2009-06
Dissertation: “The Discontinuity of Matter: Salvador Dalí, Painting and Architecture”

Sydney University, Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning

Open Philosophy

Graham Harman describes the allure of art as the tension and fusion of a real object to sensual q... more Graham Harman describes the allure of art as the tension and fusion of a real object to sensual qualities so that it makes it seem that the inwardness of reality is opened to us. Yet real objects are withdrawn; how are we aware of their fusion? Since Harman’s ontology mandates that contact between real objects occurs only through sensual objects, this essay explores the idea that art’s allure must be a tension between sensual objects that draw the experiencer to believe, or alieve, they are in contact with the withdrawn real. By looking at the examples in representational painting and sleight of hand magic, we see that ontographic art objects use at least four, carefully separated sensual objects to produce their aesthetic effect. The conclusion summarises allure as a sensual object process, speculates on art’s dialetheic confusion of sensual and real objects giving an enduring allure to idealism, and notes potential motifs of an infra-realist resistance.

Open Philosophy

Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology has employed a variant of occasionalist causation since ... more Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology has employed a variant of occasionalist causation since 2002, with sensual objects acting as the mediators of causation between real objects. While the mechanism for living beings creating sensual objects is clear, how nonliving objects generate sensual objects is not. This essay sets out an interpretation of occasionalism where the mediating agency of nonliving contact is the virtual particles of nominally empty space. Since living, conscious, real objects need to hold sensual objects as sub-components, but nonliving objects do not, this leads to an explanation of why consciousness, in Object-Oriented Ontology, might be described as doubly withdrawn: a sensual sub-component of a withdrawn real object.

Open Philosophy

The practice of Ontography deployed by OOO, clarified and expanded in this essay, produces a high... more The practice of Ontography deployed by OOO, clarified and expanded in this essay, produces a highly productive framework for analyzing Salvador Dalí’s ontological project between 1928 and 1935. Through the careful analysis of paintings and original texts from this period, we establish the antecedents for Dalí’s theorization of Surrealist objects in Cubism and Italian Metaphysical art, which we collectively refer to as ‘Ontographic art,’ drawing parallels with the tenets of Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented philosophical programmes. We respond to the question raised by Roger Rothman concerning Object-Oriented Idealism in Dalí’s work by showing pivotal changes to Dalí’s ontological outlook, from Idealism to Realism, across the aforementioned period, positing the Ontographic intentionality of Dalí’s ontological project in Surrealist art.

http://artdes.monash.edu/docs/aasa2013-proceedings.pdf

38th Annual ICOHTEC Conference, ETSEIB, Barcelona Academic conference presentation

IDEA Journal 2012, Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association, 2012

Salvador Dalí’s surrealist process, which he named the paranoiac critical method, is a method of ... more Salvador Dalí’s surrealist process, which he named the paranoiac critical method, is a method of generating irrational knowledge through the associative mechanisms of delirious phenomena. Drawing together the story of Odysseus and the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey and K. Michael Hay’s essay on the modernist dematerialisations of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958) in New York, the paranoiac critical method is employed in an exegesis of Buckminster Fuller’s giant geodesic domes as a continuation of the transformative power of Odysseus’s legendary journey of interiorisation.

7th International Conference of the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia, Monash Un... more 7th International Conference of the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia, Monash University, RMIT University and University of Melbourne. Academic conference paper

24th International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zeala... more 24th International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, University of Adelaide Academic conference

Edible architecture may sound like an over-reaching expectation but surely I am not the only one ... more Edible architecture may sound like an over-reaching expectation but surely I am not the only one who has sat through a long lecture or theatre performance and wished the chair's armrest was a long loaf of fresh bread stuffed with blueberries, chocolate and hard boiled eggs. And I don't know how many of you have sat in front of a fire on a cold winter's night in a chair made of bread, wearing slippers made of bread, but trust me, it's toasty. Edible architecture is deliriously pleasurable, but the decadence, the morning after, can be rather messy. The poorest among us will eat their own homes either out of necessity or lack of self control , and then enjoy the displeasure of sleeping outdoors on rainy winter nights . And no one will ever succeed in restraining random birds, possums, rodents, insects and probably even family pets and errant children from chewing through structural members. Perhaps the project would succeed if the edible parts of the architecture were alive, and the partially eaten building would regrow. Following the rhythm of the sun, a family could enjoy a large and spacious house at the end of summer and eat it down to a few rooms in winter while waiting for the regrowth and expansion of spring.

In the context of stereotomic practice, advanced fabrication with waterjet and wire-cutting of in... more In the context of stereotomic practice, advanced fabrication with waterjet and wire-cutting of interlocking wave geometry has opened up new possibilities for crafting stone modules with precision and efficiency. This paper discusses the utilization of machined cutting techniques, the processes and workflows of fabricating joint systems for arched and vaulted surface geometries. It presents a comparative study with multiple criteria; such as geometry, method, material, machine and workflow. Furthermore, this paper presents research into the comparison between abrasive waterjet cutting and wire cutting of modules in stone and foam.

Self-supporting modular block systems of stone or masonry architecture are amongst ancient buildi... more Self-supporting modular block systems of stone or masonry architecture are amongst ancient building techniques that survived unchanged for centuries. The control over geometry and structural performance of arches, domes and vaults continues to be exemplary and structural integrity is analysed through analogue and virtual simulation methods. With the advancement of computational tools and software development, finite and discrete element modeling have become efficient practices for analysing aspects for economy, tolerances and safety of stone masonry structures. This paper compares methods of structural simulation and analysis of an arch based on an interlocking wave joint assembly. As an extension of standard planar brick or stone modules, two specific geometry variations of catenary and sinusoidal curvature are investigated and simulated in a comparison of physical compression tests and finite element analysis methods. This is in order to test the stress performance and resilience ...

This paper explores four factors contributing to the revival of stone masonry; aesthetics, extern... more This paper explores four factors contributing to the revival of stone masonry; aesthetics, externalities, representational tools and cutting technologies. The ongoing desirability of stone for architects and designers for aesthetic reasons; sustainability benefits of stone due to its potentially reducing hidden externalities of production and transportation; the development of representational tools in terms of advances in computer aided design, simulation, analysis and manufacturing; and advances in production technologies. This paper focuses on how digital technologies are making stone a viable material for architects and designers.

Architectural Research Quarterly, 2021

Scholarly analysis of the writings on architecture of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)... more Scholarly analysis of the writings on architecture of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) has largely focused on passages in Twilight of the Idols where he claims that ‘Architecture is a kind of eloquence of power in forms – now persuading, even flattering, now only commanding.’1 Yet, considering Nietzsche’s theory of the will-to-power – that an innate drive towards power, might, and self-overcoming is the dominant force of existence – architecture gets interpreted in this passage as he would likely have interpreted sculpture. Any recognition of the social, political, physical, and psychological accommodations of architecture are absent. However, in a passage in Joyful Wisdom entitled ‘Architecture for the Perceptive’, Nietzsche wrote of architecture as a carefully crafted space to inhabit. This discussion of architecture as a lived space has received considerably less attention.

The Journal of Architecture, 2015

Vitruvius' de Architectura uses the Latin word ‘xenia’ once, in the chapter on the Greek hous... more Vitruvius' de Architectura uses the Latin word ‘xenia’ once, in the chapter on the Greek house, in a seemingly casual note about decorative painting. Yet the Greek homophone denotes a long-esteemed ethical principle permeating Athenian culture and Homeric legend. Greek-speaking readers of de Architectura cannot have missed the reference. Roughly translated as hospitality to strangers, the Greek xenia (ξείνία) referred to both a set of ritualised practices and a socio-political disposition. Vitruvius mentions xenia while explaining another word that also passed from Greek to Latin, ‘andron'. Once referring to a man-making leader, the word andron next referred to a men's dining room, and finally, for Vitruvius, a hallway connecting guests' apartments; it is here that Vitruvius tells us ‘this is why artists called pictures representing the things which were sent to guests “xenia”’. Drawing together the early history of xenia and andron in Latin and Greek, and Vitruvius&...

http://www.coloursociety.org.au/csa/aic/papers/0909015Final00510.pdf

IDEA JOURNAL

Salvador Dalí’s surrealist process, which he named the paranoiac critical method, is a method of... more Salvador Dalí’s surrealist process, which he named the paranoiac critical method, is a method of generating irrational knowledge through the associative mechanisms of delirious phenomena. Drawing together the story of Odysseus and the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey and K. Michael Hay’s essay on the modernist dematerialisations of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958) in New York, the paranoiac critical method is employed in an exegesis of Buckminster Fuller’s giant geodesic domes as a continuation of the transformative power of Odysseus’s legendary journey of interiorisation.

Journal of Computational Design and Engineering

In a context of stereotomy, robotic subtractive cutting enables design-to-production processes th... more In a context of stereotomy, robotic subtractive cutting enables design-to-production processes that integrate craftsmanship with advanced manufacturing technology. This paper discusses empirical research into the fabrication of complex and custom-designed geometries by means of robotic subtractive cutting, with a specific focus on modular elements and joint typologies that form an essential condition for self-supporting stone structures. The paper presents research findings in two parts. In the first part, four case studies for jointing techniques and a cross-comparison between these are introduced to derive strategies for multiple criteria, including macro-and-micro geometries, modules and joints, structural performance, material variations, machine cutting methods and end-effectors, and robotic workspace. In the second part, the paper focuses on the structural performance of the joint geometry typologies, expanded towards material constraints and robotic fabrication process. The p...

Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts

Ubiquitous in ancient Greek culture, the ethical principle of xenía may broadly translate as hosp... more Ubiquitous in ancient Greek culture, the ethical principle of xenía may broadly translate as hospitality to strangers, doing so through taking interpersonal, political, and architectural form. Since xenía includes the accommodation of foreign guests, some evidence of xenía in architecture is logically found in houses and hostels, but surprisingly more evidence surrounds Athens’ Theatre of Dionysus, on stage in Aristophanes’ Peace and Euripides’ Cyclops, and off stage through the architects elected to look after the sanctuary of the theatre. This paper reveals the principle of xenía permeating the professional work of the architect to such a degree that Vitruvius and Demosthenes would reproach even slight digressions from the principle, and Vitruvius would call the education of xenía the most valuable thing to outlast a shipwreck.