Material Agency and Physical Boundaries (original) (raw)
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Synergistic Space Potentials: Technology, Humans and Responsive Materials in the Design Process
– The European Conference on Arts & Humanities 2020: Official Conference Proceedings, 2020
This project investigates the role technology and neuroscience play in making meaningful connections between people, architectural space and furniture. It discusses why it is important to focus on designing with more significant impact, focusing on the quality of experience rather than quantity of objects. It moves on to indicate that design can harness this power for social changes and discusses how technological relationships with humans can be the center of the design conversation. To interrogate this further, we have created a series of simulations, based on a piece of interactive, intelligent furniture as the centerpiece to an architectural space. It utilizes a computational pattern that is coded to respond to human activity. It is subsequently materialized with temperature responsive bi-materials, which are coated thermochromically, and electrically programmed with micro-controllers, and then connected to a computer code that makes readings based upon human interaction. Through this process, it manifests a methodology that categorizes the test results into: Static, Repetitive, and Non-static morphologies. These question the potential of the prototype, making certain that no elements other than the furniture and its integral parts are used to investigate a series of outcomes. The paper offers definitions of the process in the following terms: Repetitive Morphologies = consistent basis actions; Non-static Morphologies = non repetitive actions based on input variables; Static Morphologies = actions that don't change, or are considered unsuccessful. As the computational patterns and colors change, we are made aware of the relationships between space, technology, and the human sensorium.
2015
I enter a building, see a room, and…" Peter Zumthor writes, "in a fraction of a second I have this feeling about it" (Zumthor 2006: 13). As an immediately grasped judgment of environmental character, atmosphere has been described as a collaboration of an infinite number of multisensory factors: a non-material experience, contrasting centuries of tradition understanding architecture as material artefact experienced through the limitation of vision (Pallasmaa 2014: 20).
SENSUAL SPACES THROUGH MATERIAL ABSTRACTION
In an attempt to try to understand the notion "why we do interiors", this paper will draw to the forefront an alternative viewpoint of designing interior spaces. An architectural enclosure captures a volume of material matter within a spatial condition that is called an interior. This should not restrict the practice of interior design to just the tectonic construction of forms to occupy the interior of a building. The key factor in designing interior spaces is understanding the needs of the users and the application of designed entities to facilitate certain behaviour of these users. Despite user-centered design being crucial, a different tack is now needed and is emerging in practice. New materiality is an evolving source of fascination: intellectually, sensually, and emotionally; and, with this fascination by designers and clients, a paradigmatic shift is occurring in which materiality drives the end result of the spatial outcome.
Is it immaterial? Matters of architectural matter : research article
South African Journal of Art History, 2013
As a starting point of consideration, this enquiry briefly weighs up the Pre-Socratic (materialists) position of 'the primary stuff of the universe' with the trio Socrates-Plato-Aristotle's differentiation between Form (morphe) and Matter (hyle). The purpose of this initial exercise is to highlight, as suggested by Vitruvian myths and revisited in recent architectural discourse by Joseph Rykwert and Aaron Betsky, the differentiation between architecture (event, notion) and building (scenography, thing). Reinforced by the essays of Jonathan Hill (Immaterial Architecture) that suggests a fusion of the immaterial and material in architecture and Katie Lloyd Thomas (Material Matters) who shifts the focus towards the material over the form, this endeavour exposes the blurred boundary between the visible material of building and the invisible immateriality of event-architecture. With the aforementioned in mind, the Dematerialisation of Mies Van der Rohe, Immaterial Material of...
Moving (in) space : the role of the body in architectural experience
2020
Space, being omnipresent, is as much taken for granted as it is formative for the experience of everyday life. Acknowledging the experiential dimension of space, architecture has seen an increased interest in its lived quality, as opposed to pure formalism or functionalism. The phenomenological critique of architecture in particular, with its beginnings in the 1950s, has called for a commitment to the aspect of human experience, emphasising the role of the body. In this view, the question of the role of the body in how we experience architectural space arises. Any thinking about the experience of space is necessarily informed by how space itself is understood. Indeed, the conception of space has seen a significant shift within both culture and science since around the middle of the last century, and with it the way in which architects and artists deal with spatial relations. Based on the research combining a theoretical investigation with interviews and a central case study, it will...
Feeling Spaces: Grounding the Body in Architectural Atmosphere
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How do atmospheres ground the subject through embodied experiences of space? This thesis is an argument for embodiment and duration in architectural space, a theory of spatial hospitality that attempts to make some room for the subject as a spatial being. My research has proceeded over two lines of inquiry: on the one hand a dissertation forming a phenomenological study of contemporary atmospheric spatial practices, and on the other a practice-led studio investigation exploring perception, duration and the unfolded embodied experience of atmospheric spaces. By its very nature the concept of atmosphere is vague and diffuse. In these spaces, the felt experience of atmosphere acts upon individuals within their surroundings, which in turn are being co-constituted by that subject. At its core, this dissertation is an ontological study of subjectivity and atmosphere in the perceptual environments and spaces produced by artists Robert Irwin (1928 - ), James Turrell (1943 - ) and Olafur Eli...
Materiality, Movement & Meaning: Architecture and the Embodied Mind
This paper was presented as a keynote lecture at the international conference Designing and Planning the Built Environment for Human Well-Being, held at the University of Oulu in Finland, 23-25 October 2014. It is an expanded version of a paper first given at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in November 2012, and published as a chapter in the book Towards an Ecology of Tectonics: Rethinking Construction in Architecture, edited by Anne Beim and Ulrik Stylsvig Madsen (Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2014). The paper also builds on the arguments first presented in the book chapter Architecture, Technology and the Body: From the Prehuman to the Posthuman (2012), which set out a new theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between architecture and embodiment by questioning the now commonplace view of the body’s prosthetic relationship with technology. Drawing on the work of contemporary thinkers such as Bernard Stiegler, Raymond Tallis, and Tim Ingold, it argues that rather than treating new technological extensions of the body as in some way threatening to our sense of self, we should instead see them in a more positive way as part of a longer developmental trajectory in which ‘the human’ and ‘the technological’ are in fact mutually co-constitutive. By considering these issues within the framework of recent advances in evolutionary, cognitive and neuroscientific theory, the paper tries to draw out some of the more significant implications of both human and technological embodiment for designing, making and thinking about architecture today.