A flight of no substance, collapsing space in its wake

This article looks at ways in which architecture can be articulated as a sensation within the drawing. The subject of occupying drawings is considered here as a result of entering the drawing, an action John Hejduk describes ‘as a flight of no substance’, collapsing space between the observer and the artefact in its wake. Entering the drawing and subsequently occupying the drawing is considered here as a phenomenon that enables experiential and observational proximity to an artefact and its embedded subject. The collapsing mechanism enforces thinking about the observational intent of this type of entering, its relationship with immediacy and with aspects of the non-representational. Furthermore, the act of entering the drawing is viewed as a technique for mediating and bringing forth subject matter in the drawing. This technique of augmented observation and mediation is in service of the quest for subject presence in the drawing, as opposed to subject representation in the drawing – allowing a residence in close encounter by the maker during production and later by the observer of the resulting artefact. The article is accompanied by a set of drawings from the Drawing Out Gehry series. The drawings are driven by an interest in relational encounters and space they take in. Away from an object or component-directed perception of space and towards the understanding of space as the relationship between elements, this set of drawings is in search of the quality and intrigue raised by the architectural event as the encounter of spatial circumstances.

The sculptor-architect: In rêverie

As an architectural designer who has also worked as a figurative sculptor, my practice-led research sees the bringing together of sculptural modelling techniques with the sculpting of architectural drawings. Taking a singular reference to a lost architectural treatise by Michelangelo as its prompt, this article considers Renaissance sculptural practice as offering an alternate disciplinary footing to the norms that developed around Alberti; to which the development of contemporary architectural practice can be attributed. Through a process that moves towards drawing by way of a historically informed adoption of clay sketching, which is used to develop and inform an experimental polychromatic ceramic practice and virtual reality modelling techniques, my activities as a sculptor-architect critique the corporeal dismissals that marked the codifications of the Renaissance. Central to this is the capacity of disegno, which as a term was paramount for the era’s repositioning of architecture, painting and sculpture as liberal arts, to suggest broader approaches to design than an immediate reliance on drawing.

‘Soft, Wild and Free’: A magical realist fairytale

‘Soft, Wild and Free’ is a magical realist fairytale about a creature that was soft and wild. It is also a magical realist fairytale about the courage of a guerilla princess who freed this creature from its foundations. With my research on magical realism, fairytales and the combination of the two, I am looking into fictional narratives that have the potential for the creation of spaces which are magical and critical. These fictional narratives exist in words and images that are constructed with a sensitivity to ideas of place and a place’s spirit and character. Through the writing I bring together elements from magical realist literature and the classic magical fairytale, into a hybrid style, which then translates into drawings that I make physically and digitally. Clay, wood, card models, as well as sketches, orthographic drawings and paintings of buildings weave into a series of drawings whose scope is to suggest a version of architecture with a critical and poetic stance to the world. These drawings propose buildings as characters and characters as places that talk about the past and the present while imagining a poetic and critical future. In my work there are three types of processes, which are based on translations; two intersemiotic and one interlingual. The two intersemiotic translations are from writing to drawings and models and from drawings to writing; the interlingual translation is from modern Greek to English. These processes become spatial acts, as they allow for a perpetual generation of fictional and factual stories in words and images. My research is rooted in an inherent understanding of architecture through a literature that is critical and magical, an existential potion for our allegedly normal and normative world, which is really a wondrous, magical realist dream.

The innovations of distortion

The following article looks at the concept of distortion in technologies of mediation. Distortion is considered a by-product of all media, but its assignation of value reflects cultural assumptions as opposed to objective standards. The two primary conditions looked in this article are anamorphosis and photogrammetry, which are discussed in both historical terms and within contemporary practices. The author includes a few examples of his own work with photogrammetry. In conclusion, the article argues that the qualities of distortion are part of how artists begin to misuse technologies towards aesthetic effects not intended by the original purposes of the media and that this can include any technology of mediation, including the developments of artificial perspective in the Renaissance.

Abducted ground: The ineffaceable Beaduric’s Island

This article illustrates some typical occupational modalities of drawing by abductive processes, involving the design of ecologies through chance and discovery – perhaps through radical innovations – in architecture. First described by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, abductive processes start with an observation or set of observations, then seek to reach the simplest and most likely conclusion from those observations. To design an ecology is to design a system of parts from things, creating a new kind of contextualism. This may not seem radical nor innovative, but the principle of symbiotically designing an ecology for a range of scaled interventions over time using the same context starts to become interesting. From drawing and sketching what you can see in the actual context for a design proposal, to then redrawing and composing the observational drawing in a studio, to the time taken to experience and reflect on the spaces drawn towards making physical objects from the forms resonating as the drawing develops, many modalities occupy a drawing as architecture. These could be viewed as a form of ‘possible worlds’, anticipations, opportunities to shape the drawing world and act in it. It could be of help in prefiguring the risks, possibilities and effects of the architect as the editor of situations in the architectural drawing, and in promoting or preventing broad rules of translation. Creating ethics means creating the world and acting in it, in different (real or abstract) situations and problems. In this way, events and situations can be reinvented, either as opportunities or as risks that lead in new directions. The second part of the article describes some of the ‘26 rules for translation’ through drawing related to the design of ecologies through chance and discovery.

Tin City: Nomadic occupation, colonization and resistance in the sand dunes of Stockton Bight, Australia

This article explores nomadic site occupation as a form of planetary colonization involving both human and non-human agents. Conventional understandings of temporary occupation are often humancentric with little attention paid to the disruption of extant site ecologies and processes. The latter are particularly pressing concerns in nomadic settlements located in precarious landscapes. Taking the latter as its focus, this article engages the earth as an agent resisting its own colonization in the Australian-licensed squatter settlement known colloquially as Tin City. Located within the largest mobile sand dune structure in New South Wales, Tin City is an assemblage of several self-built fishing shacks accommodating a nomadic population. Its occupants engage in a daily battle against the shifting sands that threaten to subsume their temporary homes. Located in an area of significant indigenous heritage, the Tin City settlement has become a tourist attraction shrouded in local lore. Current discourses about it and its architectures generally focus on its unusual aesthetics, its contested sociopolitical histories and its ecology, with some discussion on the impacts of European colonization on the sand dune’s dynamic geomorphology. To concentrate on the latter, the article develops and deploys the posthumanist conceptualization of the earth posited by Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani in his ficto-critical text Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Negarestani ascribes the earth with sentient and agentic capacity, whilst the nomads who traverse its surfaces become the penultimate planetary colonizers. Tin City’s occupation thus becomes a story of colonization and resistance narrated by the earth itself, and a reminder that the production and consumption of architectural forms does not need to be confined to that which is conventionally human.

Colonizing islands

When Edward Said spoke of an ‘imaginative geography’, it was both to question the geographic positions adopted as part of colonial accounts and to posit the role of imagination itself in the construction of geographies. For Said, the ‘dramatic boundaries’ of imaginative geography are at once abstract and mobile, and yet might constitute ‘a form of radical realism’. The discourse is thus at once about perspective, position and the empirical (and imperial) imposition of that which is speculative, literary and fluid. But it is also about the unmediated engagements of radical realism and a form of geography we can only imagine. This article turns to the imaginative geography of islands and takes three islands as its departure point. The first is the island of Gilles Deleuze’s article ‘Desert islands’ (2004), an island ‘toward which one drifts’. The second is the island of absent subjectivity that is explored in Jean Baudrillard’s extended essay Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (2009). The third island upon which this article fixates is perhaps more archipelago than island. It is the spomeniki that are dotted over the landscape of the former Yugoslavia. These monuments were largely commissioned by Josip Broz Tito and built across the 1960s and 1970s and into the early 1980s to mark the places where the battles of the National Liberation War (Second World War) had occurred and where concentration camps had once stood. These monuments sit as odd and haunting gestures. Many sculptors and architects were involved. Some spomeniki are anchored and sit heavy on the landscape, as one might expect of memorials, and others appear to launch themselves towards elsewhere. Some are small and unimposing, and others at a scale well beyond the human body. Some are well tended, and others have faded into oblivion. This article turns specifically to the spomenik at the Valley of Heroes, Tjentište, designed by the sculptor Miodrag Živović and completed in 1971. Like all the spomeniki, this monument has endured further war since its erection. This magnificent fractal concrete form marks the Battle of Sutjeska, but rather than fixate upon a singular geo-historical moment, it appears more likely to take flight. I will argue that this magnificent sculpture is perhaps engaged in what Baudrillard calls ‘the art of disappearance’.

Losing place: Urban Islands and the practices of unsettlement on Cockatoo Island

Contemporary architectural practice posits the City as an agglomeration of built fabric and its resultant spaces; congruent theories of place attempt to discern opportunities and create methodologies to engage with and inhabit this fabric. These theories of urbanism are reacting to a socio-economic culture that demands precision, rationality and above all clarity, producing a spatial realm increasingly branded, deracinated and politically circumscribed – clearly defined, delineated and described. Architectural pedagogy is often troubled because of its service to colonization: form serving image, function slaved to economics, space subsumed into spectacle. The City, though, is fluctuating, multifunctional and elusive – demanding a conceptual entanglement of impermanence and incompletion. To explore the gap between professional practice and intuitive inhabitation, the Urban Islands project was developed. Urban Islands is an independent intensive studio programme run for two weeks each July on Sydney’s Cockatoo Island. The studios are run by emerging architects selected from around the world, and engage master’s students from six different Australian universities, in an environment meant to unsettle, unmoor and ultimately, enlighten. Deliberately eschewing linear and hermetic modes of studio discourse and instruction, the programme instead adopts strategies of wandering and migration to create an immersive investigative environment. Urban Islands utilizes narrative, fiction and a hermeneutical approach to education to re-theorize the studio. Subsequent re-readings and misreadings of place offer its participants agency in determining their roles in that space, as well as allowing for new ways to both measure and mark the earth. This article outlines the constituent conceptual concerns informing the programme, illustrated by select examples of work that enmesh analytical theory and creative design practice to propose an expanded geography of the city, one of excisions and allegory and, most importantly, one wide open to interpretation.