Flux: The Ontological Status of Inflatable Forms (original) (raw)
Related papers
Architectural Affordances: The Atmospheric Authority of Spaces
in P. Tidwell (ed. by), Architecture and Atmosphere, Tapio Wirkkala-Rut Bryk Foundation, Espoo 2014, pp. 15-47
Having in mind a quite fictional primitive man, for Koffka «each thing says what it is and what [we] ought to do with it: a fruit says, "Eat me"; water says, "Drink me"; thunder says, "Fear me", and woman says, "Love me" 1 . This is the so-called "demand character", or "invitation character" and "valence", of our environment, a character that doesn't completely change according to the need or the intention of the actor and exists sometimes even if it is not perceived. But couldn't this be applied more generally, and a fortiori especially in an architectural environment, conceived not as a collection of causes but as an emotional manifold of action possibilities?
From Atmospheric Awareness to Active Materiality ((2013) 2015)
Practising Aesthetics, edited by Lilianna Bieszczad. 155-164. ISBN:978-83-65148-42-1, 2015
‘Atmosphere’ has recently claimed more attention in architectural discourse and practice leading to the revaluation of embodiment as a basis for the interaction with an environment. In this context, architectural space is understood as a space of engagement that ‘appears’ to us as a result of continuous and complex interferences revealed through our perception. Therefore, to design considering an atmospheric approach means to focus on how the space is going to appear, to be experienced or to be felt. What immediately follows this assumption is, then, the exploration of works and design processes with an attempt to trace associations and draw out design protocols, focusing on ways in which atmosphere can be consciously generated or manipulated. The aim is thus to examine ‘the atmospheric’ as a spatial quality, an experiential property as well as a sensory background and materiality as one of the generative drivers of atmosphere. However, the atmospheric turn calls for a specific manner of understanding materiality. The atmosphere is not defined through the isolated entities. It is rather a sum of effects – an ephemeral occurrence – that leads to an integral and synesthetic perception of our surroundings, where the environmental qualities are implicit and conditions and phenomena are bound together in a reciprocal dependence. Therefore, material is neither seen as an isolated element, nor as mere substance expressing tectonic character. Transcending its tectonic potential and focusing on its performative significance, the material is to be understood rather as an entirely dynamic category, a complex and active system of fields, including the intangible ones – such as light, air, sound, temperature – and conditions: environmental, meteorological, technical, social or historical. In this multifaceted relationship materials are: carriers of effects and phenomena, encoders of our reminiscences and memories, detonators of physical, physiological and emotional contingencies, activators of the aesthetic occurrence. This reading defines materiality as an active and operative force – as a means of an aesthetic engagement and a phenomenological manifestation. The enduring need to interact with the body and the surroundings through experience has nourished a wide range of design techniques and material experimentation that identify the inherent conditions of materials and constantly changing environmental parameters as a data upon which projects develop. Thus, the aim is to illustrate this particular projective genealogy, one that builds upon ‘atmospheric awareness’ where seeking an effect and affect is implicit and foregrounding perceptual and emotional engagement is conscious – i.e. one that defines so called ‘active materiality’.
Envisioning the atmospheric effect through (im)materiality
14th European Architecture Envisioning Conference (EAEA14 2019), 2019
Nilay Ünsal Gülmez, Dürnev Atılgan Yagan, Murat Şahin, Efsun Ekenyazıcı Güney, Hande Tulum In an attempt to bridge the gap between architectural/interior design practice and education, 'atmosphere' as a prolific contemporary architectural debate in practice and theory is covered by the experiment of 'Staging Poe' carried out as a first year Design Studio through the study of Edgar Allen Poe's selected poems. Poe's 1846 text of 'The Philosophy of Composition', unfolding his analytical method of writing and emphasis on "effect" in poetry, provides a ground for experimenting with facets of materiality and structuring the studio. Aiming to cultivate intuitive design experiments of students into informed processes in hybridizing conceptual/textual and material/sensual aspects, studio is structured in two phases. In the first phase, "materialization", idiosyncratic interpretations of students from words to materials with a focus on tectonic experiments and haptic experiences are sought in between materializing and dematerializing processes. In the second phase, the "atmospheric", emphasis on dematerialization of the perception of materials through tools, such as light, color and sound is exercised to transform the object into a performance stage. Outcomes of the studio on aspects pertaining to material and materialities in creation of the immaterial that is the atmosphere is followed and evaluated through responses of students' weekly reports.
NCBDS 36: After Form, 2020
In his writings The Life of Lines, anthropologist Tim Ingold proposes a theoretical approach to studying life’s processes and relationships by suggesting that we view the world as an entanglement of persuasive and interacting lines. For Ingold, imagining a world composed of lines allows us to comprehend and appreciate these processes. The consequences of how things meet, behave, and relate to one another can be studied and scrutinized through four distinct categorical models: the building block, the chain, the container, and the knot. Each of these models are identifiably distinct in their compositional formation as a whole and further defined by how their component parts are potentially encouraged and permitted to interact and affect one another. Marco Frascari expands on this principle to suggest that: “The conception of the architectural space achieved...is the result of the association of the visual images of details. gained through the phenomenon of indirect vision, with the geometrical proposition embodied in forms, dimensions, and location, developed by touching and by walking through buildings.” Form is therefore not a guaranteed result, but instead an evolving dialogue of sensory elements throughout the design process. The relationship of elements, at times disparate, creates the basis for the generation of form through processes of iterative design, helping to initiate a design process. Addressing and enhancing the process of design as generative in itself is significant for the development and understanding of beginning designers, as the idea of “process” provides a conceptual basis for developing a design, without the necessity of scale, typology, or form from the onset. This paper examines two projects that begin with an analysis of the joint, composed of two disparate conditions, properties, or materials, and then evolves to address the interpretive performance of these systems and how can strategically generate form.
Magic Materialism: From Atmospheric Technologies to Architectures of Affect.
Magic Materialism: From Atmospheric Technologies to Architectures of Affect, 2023
Along with technologically advanced contemporary reality, there has been a renaissance in the study of affect and atmospheres. Despite the critique of atmospheres as a diffuse and "groundless" theory, this investigation shows it to be a promising concept for a variety of fields, including science, art, and technology. Of strongest interest to this paper is the field of spatial arts, with a special focus on the affective dimensions of sound and light. Aside from emphasizing the material qualities of the latter along with feelings and affects, the correlation between these "atmospheric" components will be traced in the current research with relation to volume and intensity. Along with affording a critique of dominant theoretical approaches such as the new materialism, atmospheres are considered affective qualities that can be reproduced and mediated by technologies. Accordingly, the notion of "atmosphere" serves not only to "set" a territorial climate but also as a scaffold for the atmospheric architecture composed of sound and feelings: vibrant, fluid, and poetic, yet material.
Forms and Objects: An Inventory of Effects
The Event of Art , 2000
Form, not surfaces, not form factors as in industrial design, not formats, but volume, mass, perhaps even ideal forms. What might this be? And what of Morphologies, Geologies, Topographies? Not the exhibition as a script, as notional, as instructions, as Eternal Sunshine, as instructing bodies of architecture, as formatting, no, forms in side forms, things, stuff, space, forms, monoliths, objects. object figure space bodies objecthood just what kind of object what kind of material material itself what does this itself mean? vitrine, shrine, monolith, serial structure tactility and shapes shaping light, shaping material shaping the viewer “display” to distinguished from a putative tradition or genre of “installation” ala hirschhorn