BOOK 5
FIVE
the metamorphosis a spatial investigation of Franz Kafka’s acclaimed novel
The Glasgow School of Art | MDes Interior Design 2013-14 | Andriana Themeli
BOOK 5 epilogue 5
section 10
references 13
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“While architects are fascinated by narrative, writers are fascinated by architecture. From Daedalus’ labyrinth to Edgar Alan Poe’s gothic places, and Calvino’s Invisible Cities, architecture has fed the popular imagination with an infinite list of haunted houses and cobblestone passages.” -Sophia Psarra
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epilogue
“like literature, like movies, a fictional architecture can stimulate our thoughts about the world we already occupy by reconfiguring what we already knew”. - Nigel Coates Today, our culture is being characterized as a culture of images. As Italo Calvino writes, ‘’an unending rainfall of images’’ is what we receive. The projected images that we take from either theatre or exhibition speak to us through paths of associations, led by external stimuli and suggestions. “These poetic images open to us streams of associations and affect” (Pallasmaa) and are used for the creation of a postdramatic experiential type of installation. The textual references recede, in order to give space to the spatial experience. As Antonin Artaud describes in his second manifesto of ‘The theatre of cruelty: from the point of view of form”: “So composed and so constructed, the spectacle will be extended, by the elimination of the stage, to the entire hall of the theatre and will scale the walls from the ground up on light catwalks, will physically envelop the spectator and immerse him in constant bath of light, images, movements, and noises.” In my case, the spectator is the main issue. The interior design gives him the tool, describes a story, a rather specific one. But if you give the same scenario to two different people they won’t produce the same images, the story will be changed according to each one of
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them. According to their life, their experiences, their wants and needs, they choose to focus on something different in order to make this experience theirs. Enriched by his imagination, the spectator's mind keeps drawing new traces of the narrative. Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is an outstanding paradigm that highlights the importance of the subjective reader. Not giving an accurate description on the kind of metamorphosis, the author calls the reader to reflect and fill the narrative gap with his own fictional structure. As Juhani Pallasmaa claims in his work “Architecture of the image”: “The reader constructs the spaces and structures … in the cavities of his own mind. These images of places, created by the reader, are not detached pictorial images, they are experiences of embodied and lived space. They are mental and embodied images, not visual pictures.” The spectator builds a new world, even a new storyline of what he feels and imagines in the rooms. He turns from a passive onlooker into an active participant who appears to have a moral allegiance with the story. He establishes a multisensory experience related to the story. As a fictional traveler, he visits the fictional places of the novel, he smells, listens, touches and behaves in the fictional structure, ready to live the story rather than attend it. A direct communication is re-established between the spectator and the spectacle, from the fact that the spectator, placed in the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it. This parallax shift, can be described as mutual. Because both the audience and the book’s narrative, have shifted from their “traditional” place and role into new territories, in order to meet under a new context. At the very end, one may wonder about the scope of the project. What’s the use? And how all this investigation responds and affects the field of Interior Design? It is not about proposing 8
Architecture could be a vehicle for a more personal journey. -Nigel Coates
“We always think of imagination as the faculty that forms images. On the contrary it deforms what we perceive; it is, above all, the faculty that frees us from immediate images and changes them. If there is no change, or unexpected fusion of images, there is no imagination; there is no imaginative act. If the image that is present does not make us think of one that is absent if an image does not determine an abundance and explosion of unusual image, then there is no imagination.� -Gaston Bachelard
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a set design for a theatrical play. Nor has to do with a visual translation of a textual piece of art. The substance of creating a “performative” installation based on a novel, lies in giving space -and thus meaning- to all these things that cannot be said by words, that once described lose their qualitative characteristics. In addition, this research by design project brings the audience to the epicenter of the performative space. Our parallax view towards the spectacle, together with the parallax “gap” that Slavoj Zizek investigates in his homonymous book, set the basis for approaching the spectacle as a broad field, explicitly open to associations and symbolisms that each one of the spectators experiences under his own lens. And it would still be a niche investigation if all the aforementioned weren’t the very basic materials for spatial design. The story, the space, the user, the meaning. All together designed and illustrated in order to predict the sense of the place.
“Experiencing a space is a dialogue, a kind of exchange. I place myself in the space and the space settles in me.” -Juhani Pallasmaa
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Illustration, Judy Horacek
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section
chapter 1 12
chapter 2
chapter 3
REFERENCES Artaud Antonin (1958) The Theatre and its Double, Grove Press, New York Bachelard Gaston (1994) The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Boston Benjamin Walter (1973) Illuminations, Fontana Press, Great Britain Brook Peter (1990) The Empty Space, Penguin Books, London Buchanan Richard (2001) Design Research and the New Learning, Design Issues 17(4) Calvino Italo (1990) Invisible Cities, Vintage Books, London Coates Nigel (2012) Narrative Architecture, John Wiley & Sons, West Sussex Deleuze Gilles and Guattari Felix (1986) Kafka toward a minor literature, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Edward F. Edinger (1973) Ego and Archetype, Pelican Books, Baltimore Holl Steven (2006) Parallax, Princeton Architectural press, New York Holl Steven, Juhani Pallasmaa, Alberto Perez-Gomez (2006) Questions of perception Phenomenology of architecture, William Stout Publishers, San Fransisco Lehmann Hans-Thies (2006) Postdramatic Theatre, Routledge, New York 15
Merleau-Ponty Maurice (1994) Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge && Kegan Paul Ltd, London Oudsten Frank den (2011) space.time.narrative the exhibition as post-spectacular stage, Zurich University of the Arts, Zurich Pallasmaa Juhani (2001) The Architecture of the Image: Existential Space in Cinema, Rakennustieto, Helsinki Psarra Sofia (2009) Architecture and Narrative, Routledge, New York Tschumi Bernard (1981) Manhattan Transcripts, Academy Editions, London Zizek Slavoj (2006) Parallax View, The MIT Press, Cambridge
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http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/29/nyregion/the-essence-of-kafkaesque.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ktpes0qMZ0 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/theshocking-truth-why-jake-and-dinos-chapmans-tactics-are-wearingthin-8976049.html http://jonathangray.org/2011/03/06/architectural-literature-literary-architecture/ http://www.antonygormley.com/sculpture/item-view/id/241 http://www.ricardobofill.com/EN/657/PROJECTS/KAFKA-S-CASTLE-Apartment-building-html http://www.ymag.it/2010/02/19/kafkas-architecture/ http://www.kafka.org/index.php http://popaganda.gr/pouthena-pantou-kimata-tou-papaioannouston-akram-kan-ke-o-sisifos-tou-ston-rompert-gouilson/ http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/performance/vanhaesebrouck.htm http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/staffhome/siryan/academy/theatres/theatre%20of%20cruelty.htm http://urbantick.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/book-literature-architecture-landscape.html
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The end