House as Autobiography: An Architectural (Mis)Translation of My Kitchen

<p><b>This research unravels and reconstructs the all-enveloping, surreal-slowness of my kitchen during Level-4 lockdown; through the intimate familiarity of the line, and the tactility of paper. In a time and place defined by the assimilation of our public and private lives, physical boundaries that ordinarily served to separate and structure, were dissolved. Within this physically smaller world, the kitchen felt relatively larger. </b></p> <p>Architecture and the kitchen (and equally, food and cooking) have long since existed within one another, both physically (in space) and etymologically. Isodore de Seville postulated that architecture first emerged in the dining hall, where the first building was made for eating. Equally, cooking and eating rely on a more-or-less solid and spatial framework.</p> <p>Within the “pseudo-fastness” of the architectural industry, drawing is a comparatively slow and contemplative practice, cultivating an attention to detail, and embodying the capacity to enhance social and historic values. Equally, the generative capacity of drawing makes it uniquely capable of creating something new, from something else. </p> <p>Just as lockdown was a recluse from the pace of everyday life, drawing is a recluse from the pace of normative architectural practice. The outcome of the research is a series of autobiographic houses, equally symptoms of the introspective experience of lockdown, and the introspective practice of drawing. </p> <p>By exploiting the subtle parallels that transcend architectural practice, language, and the kitchen (and cooking); this research makes a sensitive proposition for a design practice deeply implicated by the composition of temporal and spatial conditions from which it is conceived.</p>

House as Autobiography: An Architectural Mis(Translation) of My Kitchen

<p><b>This research unravels and reconstructs the all-enveloping, surreal-slowness of my kitchen during Level-4 lockdown; through the intimate familiarity of the line, and the tactility of paper. In a time and place defined by the assimilation of our public and private lives, physical boundaries that ordinarily served to separate and structure, were dissolved. Within this physically smaller world, the kitchen felt relatively larger. </b></p> <p>Architecture and the kitchen (and equally, food and cooking) have long since existed within one another, both physically (in space) and etymologically. Isodore de Seville postulated that architecture first emerged in the dining hall, where the first building was made for eating. Equally, cooking and eating rely on a more-or-less solid and spatial framework.</p> <p>Within the “pseudo-fastness” of the architectural industry, drawing is a comparatively slow and contemplative practice, cultivating an attention to detail, and embodying the capacity to enhance social and historic values. Equally, the generative capacity of drawing makes it uniquely capable of creating something new, from something else. </p> <p>Just as lockdown was a recluse from the pace of everyday life, drawing is a recluse from the pace of normative architectural practice. The outcome of the research is a series of autobiographic houses, equally symptoms of the introspective experience of lockdown, and the introspective practice of drawing. </p> <p>By exploiting the subtle parallels that transcend architectural practice, language, and the kitchen (and cooking); this research makes a sensitive proposition for a design practice deeply implicated by the composition of temporal and spatial conditions from which it is conceived.</p>

House as Autobiography: An Architectural Mis(Translation) of My Kitchen

<p><b>This research unravels and reconstructs the all-enveloping, surreal-slowness of my kitchen during Level-4 lockdown; through the intimate familiarity of the line, and the tactility of paper. In a time and place defined by the assimilation of our public and private lives, physical boundaries that ordinarily served to separate and structure, were dissolved. Within this physically smaller world, the kitchen felt relatively larger. </b></p> <p>Architecture and the kitchen (and equally, food and cooking) have long since existed within one another, both physically (in space) and etymologically. Isodore de Seville postulated that architecture first emerged in the dining hall, where the first building was made for eating. Equally, cooking and eating rely on a more-or-less solid and spatial framework.</p> <p>Within the “pseudo-fastness” of the architectural industry, drawing is a comparatively slow and contemplative practice, cultivating an attention to detail, and embodying the capacity to enhance social and historic values. Equally, the generative capacity of drawing makes it uniquely capable of creating something new, from something else. </p> <p>Just as lockdown was a recluse from the pace of everyday life, drawing is a recluse from the pace of normative architectural practice. The outcome of the research is a series of autobiographic houses, equally symptoms of the introspective experience of lockdown, and the introspective practice of drawing. </p> <p>By exploiting the subtle parallels that transcend architectural practice, language, and the kitchen (and cooking); this research makes a sensitive proposition for a design practice deeply implicated by the composition of temporal and spatial conditions from which it is conceived.</p>

“Made Known in the Breaking of the Bread: Accompaniment and the Practice of Medicine”

Accompaniment is a term drawn from Catholic social teaching that is used by secular organizations, such as Partners in Health and Health for Palestine, to frame their work for health justice in solidarity with the world’s poor. Through an exploration of the Emmaus story from Luke’s Gospel, this article seeks to frame medicine itself as a practice of accompaniment of the sick and, in particular, the sick poor. Medicine as accompaniment requires healers to draw near to, walk alongside, and break bread with the sick. This way of practicing medicine has implications for which communities’ clinicians preferentially accompany, where clinicians live, how they spend their time and money, and what rewards they seek from the practice of medicine. Medicine as accompaniment is a contemplative practice, a journey on which one comes to experience authentic communion with both God and neighbor.

Brain Structure and Functional Connectivity Correlate with Psychosocial Development in Contemplative Practitioners and Controls

Jane Loevinger’s theory of adult development, termed ego development (1966) and more recently maturity development, provides a useful framework for understanding the development of the self throughout the lifespan. However, few studies have investigated its neural correlates. In the present study, we use structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to investigate the neural correlates of maturity development in contemplative practitioners and controls. Since traits possessed by individuals with higher levels of maturity development are similar to those attributed to individuals at advanced stages of contemplative practice, we chose to investigate levels of maturity development in meditation practitioners as well as matched controls. We used the Maturity Assessment Profile (MAP) to measure maturity development in a mixed sample of participants composed of 14 long-term meditators, 16 long-term yoga practitioners, and 16 demographically matched controls. We investigated the relationship between contemplative practice and maturity development with behavioral, seed-based resting state functional connectivity, and cortical thickness analyses. The results of this study indicate that contemplative practitioners possess higher maturity development compared to a matched control group, and in addition, maturity development correlates with cortical thickness in the posterior cingulate. Furthermore, we identify a brain network implicated in theory of mind, narrative, and self-referential processing, comprising the posterior cingulate cortex, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction, and inferior frontal cortex, as a primary neural correlate.

Dance as a contemplative practice

This article analyses ethnographic material gathered in Sweden amongst dancers in the Church of Sweden. With the help of the writings of Sarah Coakley and Simone Weil I explore if, and how, dancing could be considered a contemplative practice in the Christian traditions of the Latin West.

Just Sitting and Just Saying: The Hermeneutics of Dōgen’s Realization-Based View of Language

This paper explicates the complex relationship between contemplative practice and enlightened activity conducted both on and off the meditative cushion as demonstrated in the approach of the Sōtō Zen Buddhist founder Dōgen (1200–1253). I examine Dōgen’s intricate views regarding how language, or what I refer to as just saying, can and should be used in creative yet often puzzling and perplexing ways to express the experience of self-realization by reflecting the state of non-thinking that is attained through unremitting seated meditation or just sitting (shikan taza). In light of the sometimes-forbidding obscurity of his writing, as well as his occasional admonitions against a preoccupation with literary pursuits, I show based on a close reading of primary sources that Dōgen’s basic hermeneutic standpoint seeks to overcome conventional sets of binary oppositions involving uses of language. These polarities typically separate the respective roles of teacher and learner by distinguishing sharply between delusion and insight, truth and untruth, right and wrong, or speech and silence, and thereby reinforce a hierarchical, instrumental, and finite view of discourse. Instead, Dōgen inventively develops expressions that emphasize the non-hierarchical, realization–based, and eminently flexible functions of self-extricating rhetoric such that, according to his paradoxical teaching, “entangled vines are disentangled by using nothing other than entwined creepers,” or as a deceptively straightforward example, “the eyes are horizontal, and the nose is vertical.”