Bridge by Michael Cross
I want my thesis to read like this feels...
10/21/09
10/5/09
Decay
definition of decay:
(under construction)
... just trying something out here guys - I'd like to make a glossary of terms within my blog to define words that hold prominence in my thesis work. I'm trying to figure out a good way of accomplishing this in an organised fashion...
hang tight!!!
(under construction)
... just trying something out here guys - I'd like to make a glossary of terms within my blog to define words that hold prominence in my thesis work. I'm trying to figure out a good way of accomplishing this in an organised fashion...
hang tight!!!
8/5/09
8/3/09
Yet To Be Defined...
This post is a default for words in the Glossary of Terms that have yet to be defined...
... don't worry - it's on my list!
... don't worry - it's on my list!
8/1/09
An Essay of Temporality: Grappling With Theory
So...here is my first stab at a paper which situates my thesis in its contextual discourses. I had hoped to create an essay which flows in a rolling and gentle way - a series of thoughts strung together by a series of thresholds woven into one another...
... I still have some work to do, and the ending has yet to be written...but without further ado:
Facing Temporality:
The Fragility of Decay, the Atmosphere of the Uncanny, and the Bed
I should like to begin with the idea of the bed; The bed intrigues me in its intimacy, and in the fragility that it signifies. It is a place – a space of memory, identity, and meaning; A place resonates with one’s experiential past, and therein finds its own identity. Marc Auge, in his essay From Places to Non-Places, describes place as something stable, intimate, and rooted in the familiar. The bed is dear to us as a place of refuge, and a source of comfort. It is the place where we submit ourselves, after to toils of the day, to utter vulnerability – trusting in its guardianship in the hours of sleep. In sleep, we relinquish all control to the raveling landscape of the subconscious. This is an enchanting idea; The bed as the steward of the body, a house of safe-keeping, as the mind sinks away into the pools of the imaginary. Gaston Bachelard refers to the house as a cradle, a refuge that appeals to our primitive need to enclose and protect ourselves. The bed then takes up, where the house leaves off in the transition into sleep. The bed is a threshold, an architecture of dreams, by which we happily succumb to the vastness beyond – but more on this later.
Let us return to the theme of intimacy; The bed knows the body. Jules Michelet writes, of the building of a bird’s nest, that this home is formed so intimately, by and for the body, that it is an extension of the bird itself.
“…the bird’s tool is its own body…th house is a bird’s very person; it is its form and its most immediate effort.”
The bed is etched with the identity of the body. Georges Perec writes, in his Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, that the bed becomes so immersed in the space of the body that it becomes singular to the individual; “…we have only one bed, which is our bed.” Michel Leivis describes the bed as an island, upon which we find comfort in solitude. We turn, scrunch, flatten, plump, twist, wrench, and kick to make the bed our own. It is often times such an intimate, and telling portrayal of its user, that it can expose our most vulnerable of secrets, and strip us bare to reveal the raw truths of our lives. It can be the picture of vulnerability.
Because the bed is of a nature so universal in its representation, it behaves in much the same manner as an architectural place; Indeed it is a repository of memory, and a framework upon which identities may be strung. That is to say, it is an object upon which we project past experience. Changes in the projected meaning can be understood in great emotional poignancy, without any regard for intellectual comprehension. If the bed appears in the guise of the unfamiliar, its meaning fluctuates. In Edouard Manet’s Olympia the bed becomes confrontational – a podium from which a challenge is cast, a stage upon which defiance is cultivated. The bed is a protagonist not often credited for its voice in the literature of the ages. In Homer’s Odyssey for example, the bed appears as a destination, representing the solidarity of the home as an anchor enduring the weathers of Odysseus’ epic journey, and the unwavering fidelity of his wife Penelope, in the face of an unrelenting wave of suitors. But I digress. The distilled sense of place that appeals to me predominantly, is its chameleon-like qualities – the ability of the bed to shift identities, to shed meanings, and the subsequent atmospheres therein created.
Segue to the deathbed. To be sure, there are many doors that are opened by this, most sacred of thresholds, however I propose to open only those that speak of human fragility, and the atmosphere of absence. The vulnerability of the bed in life, is emphasized in quite a different way in death. I have spoken of the memory of the bed as place, and its intimacy with the body – it follows then that the deathbed, imbued with the identity and the traces of the life that it has served, becomes unfamiliar in its lifelessness, as though it were an amputated limb. That is to say that one can sense the loss and the vacancy of the bed that was once to intimately connected to the body. Sigmund Freud describes the uncanny as that which is homely becoming unhomely or, the threat of the Other emerging from the woodwork of our most vulnerable of strong-holds, unbeknownst to us. We become repulsed by the Other before we can even fully recognize it as such. We understand it first sensorily, before we can comprehend it intellectually. It is this human fragility that interests me. How is it that vulnerability can take such a hold of our senses? How can it seep from the pooled shadows of the subconscious and grip us in fear before we even have the chance to recognize it? It is this element of the uncanny that addresses temporality – that emerges to converse directly with the intimacy of the bed and the human fragility it portrays. It is the emptiness of the deathbed that is so Other to us, but what of accepting our temporality as fact, and welcoming it therein? It is this surrender to the tides of time, and the acceptance of the Other that I find so fascinating in its defiance of the natural human instinct. Is it possible to play amidst decay? Be at home with desolation? Embrace the uncanny? Anthony Vidler describes the architectural uncanny, and the places of decay as a disfiguration, terrible in the thoughts it brings forth from the depths of the onlooker. He references Victor Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la Mer, who speaks eloquently of the uncanny of decay, as something that emerges from within ourselves.
“ The house, like man, can become a skeleton. A superstition is enough to kill it. Then it is terrible.” p51
It is the violence of the uncanny that possesses the majority of its disturbing nature, but what is of greater discomfort is the juxtaposition of the fragile and the treacherous that sinks cold into the bones.
The deathbed stands now as the story teller of the unknown, a liminal space, an edge condition – both terrifying and seductive in its vertigo, a sentinel, leading into the dark. E. A. Poe describes this unnerving sensory perception of the architectural uncanny in his story The Fall of the House of Usher, in which the house becomes the tomb.
“ I know not how it was – but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit…the feeling was unrelieved by an of the half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible…bleak walls…vacant eye-like windows…white trunks of decayed trees…an utter depression of the soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation…there was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart…” p88
The atmosphere of decay is valuable for facing Otherness, and becoming one with the edge condition. Although it is sometimes fearsome (in a similar vein to the Sublime), there is beauty in the natural process of decay, and the presence of the inevitable therein. These atmospheres churn the corners of one’s soul, demanding an emotional understanding of place. They are, by this nature, elusive and resistant to definition.
The sensation of the uncanny in these spaces, is often amplified by the traces of human life that stand testament to the passing of time and the architecture’s memory – palimpsests of collapsed eras. Perec, speaks of these objects of memory as a residue that has accumulated over the history of a life.
" The passage of time (my History) leaves behind a residue that accumulates: photographs, drawings, the corpses of long since dried-up felt pens, shirts, non-returnable glasses and returnable glasses, cigar wrappers, tins, erasers, postcards, books, dust and knickknacks: this is what I call my fortune." p24-25
These objects take on identity, just as the bed becomes an extension of the body, and a witness to intimacy.
By enveloping this emblem of human fragility within the landscape of collapse and desolation, the bed becomes charged with the atmosphere created in this juxtaposition. In contrasting the clean, the comforting, the safe, the vulnerable, and the familiar with the dirty, the threatening, the fearsome, the dark, and the unfamiliar, we can know the uncanny through the medium of experience. What is the emotional understanding of the uncanny, of the atmosphere of decay, and how can we describe it? How can we comfortably step off the edge? How do we welcome the chilling expanse?
The bed; A place we trust as a gateway into the realm of sleep, a threshold to the vastness of dreams, and the sheer immensity of death. A place to pass into what is beyond our control or understanding, and the accompanying fear that surrounds the unknown. To face our temporality, and to embrace desolation is to have an intimate and accepting understanding of fear, and in so doing dissolve the boundaries of fear itself.
... I still have some work to do, and the ending has yet to be written...but without further ado:
Facing Temporality:
The Fragility of Decay, the Atmosphere of the Uncanny, and the Bed
I should like to begin with the idea of the bed; The bed intrigues me in its intimacy, and in the fragility that it signifies. It is a place – a space of memory, identity, and meaning; A place resonates with one’s experiential past, and therein finds its own identity. Marc Auge, in his essay From Places to Non-Places, describes place as something stable, intimate, and rooted in the familiar. The bed is dear to us as a place of refuge, and a source of comfort. It is the place where we submit ourselves, after to toils of the day, to utter vulnerability – trusting in its guardianship in the hours of sleep. In sleep, we relinquish all control to the raveling landscape of the subconscious. This is an enchanting idea; The bed as the steward of the body, a house of safe-keeping, as the mind sinks away into the pools of the imaginary. Gaston Bachelard refers to the house as a cradle, a refuge that appeals to our primitive need to enclose and protect ourselves. The bed then takes up, where the house leaves off in the transition into sleep. The bed is a threshold, an architecture of dreams, by which we happily succumb to the vastness beyond – but more on this later.
Let us return to the theme of intimacy; The bed knows the body. Jules Michelet writes, of the building of a bird’s nest, that this home is formed so intimately, by and for the body, that it is an extension of the bird itself.
“…the bird’s tool is its own body…th house is a bird’s very person; it is its form and its most immediate effort.”
The bed is etched with the identity of the body. Georges Perec writes, in his Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, that the bed becomes so immersed in the space of the body that it becomes singular to the individual; “…we have only one bed, which is our bed.” Michel Leivis describes the bed as an island, upon which we find comfort in solitude. We turn, scrunch, flatten, plump, twist, wrench, and kick to make the bed our own. It is often times such an intimate, and telling portrayal of its user, that it can expose our most vulnerable of secrets, and strip us bare to reveal the raw truths of our lives. It can be the picture of vulnerability.
Because the bed is of a nature so universal in its representation, it behaves in much the same manner as an architectural place; Indeed it is a repository of memory, and a framework upon which identities may be strung. That is to say, it is an object upon which we project past experience. Changes in the projected meaning can be understood in great emotional poignancy, without any regard for intellectual comprehension. If the bed appears in the guise of the unfamiliar, its meaning fluctuates. In Edouard Manet’s Olympia the bed becomes confrontational – a podium from which a challenge is cast, a stage upon which defiance is cultivated. The bed is a protagonist not often credited for its voice in the literature of the ages. In Homer’s Odyssey for example, the bed appears as a destination, representing the solidarity of the home as an anchor enduring the weathers of Odysseus’ epic journey, and the unwavering fidelity of his wife Penelope, in the face of an unrelenting wave of suitors. But I digress. The distilled sense of place that appeals to me predominantly, is its chameleon-like qualities – the ability of the bed to shift identities, to shed meanings, and the subsequent atmospheres therein created.
Segue to the deathbed. To be sure, there are many doors that are opened by this, most sacred of thresholds, however I propose to open only those that speak of human fragility, and the atmosphere of absence. The vulnerability of the bed in life, is emphasized in quite a different way in death. I have spoken of the memory of the bed as place, and its intimacy with the body – it follows then that the deathbed, imbued with the identity and the traces of the life that it has served, becomes unfamiliar in its lifelessness, as though it were an amputated limb. That is to say that one can sense the loss and the vacancy of the bed that was once to intimately connected to the body. Sigmund Freud describes the uncanny as that which is homely becoming unhomely or, the threat of the Other emerging from the woodwork of our most vulnerable of strong-holds, unbeknownst to us. We become repulsed by the Other before we can even fully recognize it as such. We understand it first sensorily, before we can comprehend it intellectually. It is this human fragility that interests me. How is it that vulnerability can take such a hold of our senses? How can it seep from the pooled shadows of the subconscious and grip us in fear before we even have the chance to recognize it? It is this element of the uncanny that addresses temporality – that emerges to converse directly with the intimacy of the bed and the human fragility it portrays. It is the emptiness of the deathbed that is so Other to us, but what of accepting our temporality as fact, and welcoming it therein? It is this surrender to the tides of time, and the acceptance of the Other that I find so fascinating in its defiance of the natural human instinct. Is it possible to play amidst decay? Be at home with desolation? Embrace the uncanny? Anthony Vidler describes the architectural uncanny, and the places of decay as a disfiguration, terrible in the thoughts it brings forth from the depths of the onlooker. He references Victor Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la Mer, who speaks eloquently of the uncanny of decay, as something that emerges from within ourselves.
“ The house, like man, can become a skeleton. A superstition is enough to kill it. Then it is terrible.” p51
It is the violence of the uncanny that possesses the majority of its disturbing nature, but what is of greater discomfort is the juxtaposition of the fragile and the treacherous that sinks cold into the bones.
The deathbed stands now as the story teller of the unknown, a liminal space, an edge condition – both terrifying and seductive in its vertigo, a sentinel, leading into the dark. E. A. Poe describes this unnerving sensory perception of the architectural uncanny in his story The Fall of the House of Usher, in which the house becomes the tomb.
“ I know not how it was – but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit…the feeling was unrelieved by an of the half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible…bleak walls…vacant eye-like windows…white trunks of decayed trees…an utter depression of the soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation…there was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart…” p88
The atmosphere of decay is valuable for facing Otherness, and becoming one with the edge condition. Although it is sometimes fearsome (in a similar vein to the Sublime), there is beauty in the natural process of decay, and the presence of the inevitable therein. These atmospheres churn the corners of one’s soul, demanding an emotional understanding of place. They are, by this nature, elusive and resistant to definition.
The sensation of the uncanny in these spaces, is often amplified by the traces of human life that stand testament to the passing of time and the architecture’s memory – palimpsests of collapsed eras. Perec, speaks of these objects of memory as a residue that has accumulated over the history of a life.
" The passage of time (my History) leaves behind a residue that accumulates: photographs, drawings, the corpses of long since dried-up felt pens, shirts, non-returnable glasses and returnable glasses, cigar wrappers, tins, erasers, postcards, books, dust and knickknacks: this is what I call my fortune." p24-25
These objects take on identity, just as the bed becomes an extension of the body, and a witness to intimacy.
By enveloping this emblem of human fragility within the landscape of collapse and desolation, the bed becomes charged with the atmosphere created in this juxtaposition. In contrasting the clean, the comforting, the safe, the vulnerable, and the familiar with the dirty, the threatening, the fearsome, the dark, and the unfamiliar, we can know the uncanny through the medium of experience. What is the emotional understanding of the uncanny, of the atmosphere of decay, and how can we describe it? How can we comfortably step off the edge? How do we welcome the chilling expanse?
The bed; A place we trust as a gateway into the realm of sleep, a threshold to the vastness of dreams, and the sheer immensity of death. A place to pass into what is beyond our control or understanding, and the accompanying fear that surrounds the unknown. To face our temporality, and to embrace desolation is to have an intimate and accepting understanding of fear, and in so doing dissolve the boundaries of fear itself.
7/28/09
Tracey Emin: My Bed
"Tracey Emin shows us her own bed, in all its embarrassing glory. Empty booze bottles, fag butts, stained sheets, worn panties: the bloody aftermath of a nervous breakdown. By presenting her bed as art, Tracey Emin shares her most personal space, revealing she’s as insecure and imperfect as the rest of the world."
The Saatchi Gallery website
7/27/09
Georges Perec: Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
" The passage of time (my History) leaves behind a residue that accumulates: photographs, drawings, the corpses of long since dried-up felt pens, shirts, non-returnable glasses and returnable glasses, cigar wrappers, tins, erasers, postcards, books, dust and knickknacks: this is what I call my fortune."
Thesis Abstract 03: Round One!
The Bed Fables: Intimate Expanse
Place has the ability to move us. Its presence stirs deep within the constructs of memory; Ever shifting, it will not confine itself to form, but traverses all spatial boundaries, requires no language, and collapses all time; thus it is, by this nature, elusive and difficult to define. Settling itself in the identity of the individual, it resonates with one's experiential past, and therein finds its own identity. Place finds its roots within us; Place is a sense.
This thesis makes reference to the study of Place, as it is seen through the lens of the bed, and the atmosphere created therein. Jules Michelet writes, of the building of a bird’s nest, that this home is formed so intimately, by and for the body, that it is an extension of the bird itself. The bed is a repository of memory - it becomes part of the body, and as such is intrinsically tied to one's intimate identity. Gaston Bachelard refers to the house as a cradle, a refuge that appeals to our primitiveness to enclose and protect ourselves; the bed then, is a respite from the storms of waking life, and in it we find safety in the depths of sleep – it is the architecture of dreams. The bed represents that which is familiar, and comforting, or what Freud would refer to as the homely; on it we project the memories of past encounters. Through this projection of identity, it grows in meaning, and Place is born. In its intimacy, the bed is a palimpsest, a record of the life it has served. Georges Perec speaks of these objects of memory as a residue that has accumulated over the history of a life – the traces of time. The place of rest, however intimate, enclosed, and of the body it is, is also of the mind for it opens itself to the great expansive horizon of the imaginary. This thesis focuses on the Bed as it is seen through various literary voices; among these themes are those of Place, Atmosphere, the Uncanny, and the process of decay.
It is the intention of this thesis to further explore the histories, meanings, purposes, and myths that surround the idea of the Bed as Place. How is Place constructed in the imagination? Can Place be born through the traces of a life? What atmosphere is created when the objects we have such intimacy with, those which have born witness to a life, are left in abandonment, the circumstances of which are unclear? What has been the cultural role of the bed through the ages? How does the idea of the bed situate itself in literature? What are the elements of Place that surround and construct the architecture of the bed? Why can the bed carry such significance, and human identity?
The Bed As Place works both with the intimacy of the body, and with the vastness of imagination. It is a house of dreams. Auge in his essay "From Places to Non-Places" writes that place "...refers to an event (which has taken place), a myth (said to have taken place), or a history (high places)." In an attempt to answer the aforementioned questions, this thesis will put forth a book of fables of the Bed As Place, described in varying media such as essays, poetry, photography, film, and installation work, beginning with the Bed as Event, the Bed as Myth, and the Bed as History. In order to define the Bed As Place it is necessary to employ the medium of atmosphere, so as to convey an emotional understanding of the ideas discussed. It is as yet unclear what precisely this work may entail, however, in the mapping of the themes that surround the thesis, a dialogue will emerge, and with it a further understanding of Place and its role within the field of architecture.
7/9/09
P03 Paradigm Map
par-a-digm (n): 1. a typical pattern or model, an exemplar. 2. a world view underlying the theory and methodology of a particular scientific subject. 3. a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalization and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated; broadly : a philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind
The Tarot Card Deck is a means of flexibly organizing, and cataloguing a set of sources; each card represents the ideas of an artist, writer, poet, or place that pertain to the dominant themes and schools of thought surrounding the thesis. The deck is based on the framework of a traditional Tarot Card deck and consists of four 'Houses' and one set of 'Major Arcana' (historically these are the 'higher secrets'); these are the House of Ravens, the House of Masks, the House of Pentacles, and the House of Stone, representing the themes of Temporality, the Uncanny, Atmospheres, and Place respectively. The Major Arcana cards are thinkers that represent at least two or more of the dominant themes, and are considered to be 'wild cards' that can fluctuate meaning depending on the lens through which they are examined.
Through this framework, one can group the sources in previously conceived relationships, or discover startlingly new conversations between the various schools of thought that might not have otherwise been seen. A methodology for uncovering these hidden relationships is in the art of storytelling through the cards, in much the same way as was traditionally done. In the writings of Italo Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destinies, stories are unfolded by allowing the Tarot cards to speak for the characters of the book. I propose that three cards drawn at random from the Tarot deck can be strung together in a poem, or story, linking the sources that each one represents. This not meant to be an end in itself, but simply a means of playing with the major paradigms of the thesis work - a catalyst for thought.
The deck will expand and shift focus, congruent with the growth of the thesis work; a hierarchy of ideas will emerge in the mapping of this ever-shifting paradigm landscape. Phase One of the Paradigm Map saw the development of the 'Royalty' of the four Houses, and the first five cards of the Major Arcana set. Phase Two of the project edited the first deck, shifting some of the focus on certain ideas, and produced the cards one through ten of the House of Ravens suit. A comprehensive reading list was also developed in this phase. The back of the card was designed to encompass the four Houses of the Tarot deck - Ravens, Masks, Pentacles, and Stones are all represented in a simplified manner, etched into the card in a geometric pattern.
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