Place and placelessness, Collegium Budapest, 2002 (original) (raw)
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"keywords: place memory, narrative, trace and aura, Văcăreşti Monastery, Andrei Tarkovsky With the aid of a theoretical framework borrowed from phenomenology and film theory – focusing on the creative principles of Andrei Tarkovsky – the paper builds its dialectical scaffoldings upon the case of a known loss in Romanian architectural heritage: the absence of Văcăreşti Monastery from Bucharest, built in 1772, turned into a prison in 1864 and demolished in the winter of 1986. Resembling memory mechanisms, the narratives of absence triggered by its demolition deconstruct the object into fragments and atmospheres and interweave them within the broader theoretical background. Glimpses into Tarkovsky’s recollections of having witnessed the demolition of a church and the visual instances of similar events in his films help deconstruct the immaterial wounds imprinted in the place memory by such an erasure, while his texts on spatial recollections and reconstructing atmospheres appear as a recurring key that permeates and sutures the text. Within this context, the metamorphosis of the ineffable essence of place is followed in three distinct stages: from perceiving the material presence and capturing its hidden layers; to ‘constructing’ and storing the immateriality of its memory after it has been physically erased; and finally to representing the essence of place once the built object has moved into absence, by ‘reconstructing’ its atmosphere. This imaginary ‘reconstruction’ is at work in architectural history discourse, all the more present when the architecture discussed has been demolished: faced with the tangible absence of the built object, the architectural historian is called upon to reconstruct it by means of descriptions and narratives. These texts build an imaginary object and move through it as if palpable, following an act in reverse – but essentially similar – to the mental edifications of the ‘art of memory’, which the orators of Antiquity would ‘build’ and ‘traverse’ in order to remember texts. Writings on phenomenology, psychology and even architectural theory focus on the notion of embodiment as a key factor in remembering a place, i.e. the place is recalled by re-enacting mentally the experiential movement of the lived body through it. The reverse process, however, that of the place collecting and storing memories, beyond all layers of history that construct and deconstruct its physical shape, which transcend the sphere of direct experience, implies a way to relate to a space in which the dominant factor in remembering or grasping these hidden and extra-subjective memories is that of emplacement and immersion in the atmosphere of place. The act of perceiving and expressing place albeit its absence bridges the gap between the two distinct notions that are called upon when discussing place memory – the body and the space – by relating memory to atmosphere, as an immaterial mediation between the former two. Since cinema has the potential to capture and represent this mediation, glimpses into how Tarkovsky’s films can, in turn, mediate between presence and absence, body and space, experience and memory, could assemble into a more sensible narrative approach that might enrich the architectural history discourse in places such as Văcăreşti Monastery. The paper follows the three stages of the above mentioned metamorphosis: capturing place – encountering absence – representing atmospheres. The third stage is visual and will be portrayed in a video collage presented at the conference. "
On the experience of temporality: existential issues in the conservation of architectural places
Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 2016
In discussions of the conservation of culturally significant architecture, awareness about issues of temporality and its theoretical import has been approached from varied, partial, perspectives. These perspectives have usually focused on accounts of temporality that focus on the past and the present-and more rarely the future-without considering either the complete spectrum of human temporality or its ontological bases. This article addresses this shortcoming with a phenomenology of conservation grounded on the fundamental attitudes of cultivation and care. After a phenomenological and existentialist analysis of Cesare Brandi's thought-focusing on his paradigmatic Theory of Restoration-his attitude comes forth as a limited instance of the modern conservation attitude that is concerned exclusively with architecture as art. This attitude results in a limited temporal intentionality. Following Ingarden and Ricoeur, the existential approach is here applied to the deduced dimensions of the space and time of Dasein-in Heidegger's terms-outlining the grounding of conservation on an existential interpretation of the more fundamental notions of cultivation and care. This interpretation suggests a solution for the modern impasse with an existential account of both the artistic grounding of architecture and its characterisation as the place that temporally accompanies Dasein. Architecture thus emerges as a manifold being, constituting existentially the space for the authentic human being, whose temporal consciousness compels it to cultivate and care about that space, thus enriching the possible approaches to conservation as a collective endeavour.
"A Cartography of Discourses on Architectures of Life and/or Death"
pp. 103–129, in: Architectures of Life and Death, edited by Andrej Radman and Stavros Kousoulas. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.., 2021
The built environment exerts an essential effect on life. Over the past decades, it has been greatly reconceptualised through various posthuman, ecosystemic, new materialist, material-discursive approaches, which explored the socio-spatial, technological, cognitive, relational, and affective relations that material arrangements, such as architectural ones, shape. As technē, architecture is intricately intertwined not only with processes of easing and facilitating (human) life, but also the management of dynamic processes involving both living and non-living matters. In view of the latter, architecture is ‘life by means other than life’ (Stiegler), shaping living matters by means of non-living matters. The chapter respectively surveys several streams of recent theoretical discourse that developed from Deleuze and Guattari’s as well as Foucault’s thoroughgoing reframing of the agency of matter on life-constituting processes. In the aim of reconsidering and repositioning architecture as a posthuman technique of existence, this cartography charts – with the help of a central navigational diagram – these co-evolving discursive streams in their differing topical-conceptual starting points, and their various converging and bifurcating lines of thinking, in the aim to elaborate on the novel conceptions they have helped distil in the pursuit of a fuller understanding of those material-discursive practices within the relational ecologies of architecture. (First presented at "Architectures of Life and Death'-conference, May 21 2019, TU Delft)
The crisis of space in the post-concept city and the derivé as a practice-centric research tool
The modern concept city is a problematic and complex space which reveals a wealth of practices hidden from view by social norms, regulations and surveillance away from the public into private and 'between' spaces. The tension between the public and the private space is an interesting space for design; in this case through the use of the Situationist-inspired derivé in the city streets.
Black Dog Publishing, 2007
Underlying the many and disparate claims of contemporary architecture is the enduring problem of how locality informs building work. Raised as an urgent concern in critical regionalist theories, and dismissed as retrogressive by some architectural and urban theorists, locality continues to be a contentious issue in contemporary architectural discourse. 1 The evident lack of consensus is perhaps not surprising in our global culture where our sense of geographical distance has become distorted by the effects of instant communication and the personalizing of experience through technology. At its extreme, the drift of contemporary culture towards maximum portability and transience -with the implications of 'trans-culturalization' and hybridization -has reduced locality to little more than an 'interlude' in the relentless quest for unhindered freedom.
The city and the philosopher: on the urbanism of phenomenology
Philosophy & Geography, 2001
Philosophy projects a certain understanding of reason that is related to the ways in which the city gures in its imaginary. Conversely, the city is a practice of spatialization that determines the ways in which agents are able, or unable, to live out their social agency. This essay focuses on the ways in which philosophy and the city's spatializing practices and imaginaries inform differential ways of living out social agency. The thrust of the investigation is to discern the ways in which sexism-differential engendering-results from the relationship that exists between philosophy and the city. To illustrate this link between philosophy, the city, and differential engendering, the work turns to a consideration of Jean-Paul Sartre's phenomenology, which is taken as an exemplary illustration of the entwinement between the philosophical imaginary, and the perception and reception of the city. E. MENDIETA not been undertaken. The links between thought and place, thinking and space, remain elusive, if not mutually exclusionary. To think is to be where one is not, and to be, in body and soul, is to focus on the moment, on what is present at hand. Yet, thinking is conditioned by space, just as how a space, a place, in turn, is made accessible by a way of thinking. 3 This paper is about how philosophy thinks, images, and projects space, thus contributing to the consolidation, legitimation, and normalization of certain spatial practices. At the same time, it is also about how certain social practices, once solidi ed and coagulated into topographies and geographies that map social relations, in turn condition the ways space is to be represented, experienced, and lived, i.e., to be thought by philosophy. The central claim of this essay is that philosophy has been most fundamentally determined by the city, and conversely, that the city is related to the project, or production, of philosophy.
EXPERIENCING ABSENCE: Eisenman and Derrida, Benjamin and Schwitters (1993)
He wants architecture to stand still and be what he assumes it appropriately should be in order that philosophy can be free to move and speculate. In other words, that architecture is real, is grounded, is solid, doesn’t move around - is precisely what Jacques wants. And so when I made the first crack at a project we were doing together - which was a public garden in Paris - he said things to me that filled me with horror like, “How can it be a garden without plants?” or “Where are the trees?” or Where are the benches for people to sit on?” This is what you philosophers want, you want to know where the benches are... Peter Eisenman, in conversation about his collaboration with Jacques Derrida, at the ACSA Forum “Architecture and Deconstruction”, Chicago 19871 A certain evinced anti-humanism distinguishes the emerging orthodoxy in architectural theory. While I have no problems with a theory of subjectivity which is not humanist, or which stands in critique of humanist concepts of the subject, I find statements such as Eisenman’s complaints about Jacques Derrida bizarre. To speak of sitting, of shade, of genre; is not necessarily to assume the existence of some general space of correspondence between things architectural and things human. I do not believe that it can be shown that an account of the experience of buildings is impossible because of a history of relatively diverse theories of anthropomorphism with relatively similar metaphysical pretensions. I cannot imagine, and Eisenman’s projects are no help here, what architecture which eschewed predicating an experience of itself would be like. But such an argument about how to think of the experience of buildings without supposing a nature of such experiences has not really been made. The metaphorical death of a concept, the humanist body, has been reified, historicized as the symptom of our contemporaneity. We already live with its ghost, the absence of which can be felt in any “theoretical” architectural project as a moment of reversed apotheosis.