The Power of Corridors: connecting doors, mobilising materials, plotting openness (original) (raw)
Surfaces and Deep Histories: Critiques, and Practices in Art, Architecture, and Design, 2014
Edge-ness is a description of interrelationships between the physical and metaphysical, and between the animate and inanimate; between people, buildings, landscapes, concepts, and emotions. It is both a descriptor of a condition of physical containment and a meta-physical relationship between object and event, between physical attribute and phenomenological experience. The epistemology of the edge stems from the physical manifestation of intersection: the collision of two sides of a sword's blade at an edge. Edge-ness, therefore, also embeds within it the animate capacity of its intended action: its function and utility is to cut, maim, and kill. In a Deleuzian sense, the edge brings the embedded ritual and amenity of the blade into being, as an incorporeal event and climax of formal and cultural intersection. Edge-ness is thus a non-condition, a space of no space. It is neither the form nor the act: it is the transition between differing states of being. It is in this very transition that the most striking and powerful action of the edge is revealed. Its dynamism as a threshold between varying states makes manifest the embodiment of becoming, and thus denotes the edge as a site of flux and indeterminacy. The edge promotes not just the corning into being of the spatial territory of the in-between, but also the social physiology of addressing its immediate periphery. In architecture, one of the primary means through which this transition is enacted and experienced is through the transition between states of privacy-from the secure and safe inner-sanctum of the domestic interior, to the vulnerability of public exposure in the urban void realm. The activation of this edge/threshold condition in contemporary architecture has been somewhat ignored, repressed by overarching compositional tactics that are more concerned with notions of formalism and generative cleverness. The edge is a circumstance of other overarching compositional concerns, rather than a site of choreographed design strategies in its own right. The chapter, therefore, seeks to consider what is at stake in this edge condition through the analysis of the vernacular architectural edge typology, the verandah. In particular, the chapter will chart the verandah’s application across two geographically and climatically contrasting locations in Australia-semi-tropical Brisbane (Queensland) and arid Adelaide (South Australia). The chapter speculates upon the physical and social characteristics of the verandah's anatomical elements and their physiology in order to reveal the verandah's forgotten role as a social device. In so doing, the chapter asserts that the gradual corrosion of the verandah's conceptual meaning and social application is marked by a simplified and reductive typological condition in order for it to be consumed by contemporary culture as a pictorialized ornamental feature. The chapter will propose that the true power of the verandah lies in its operative social capacity (its physiology) working in tandem with its elemental composition (its anatomy) as an architectural typology.