Stones, architecture and philosophy From heaviness to lightness
Material Assemblages and Affective Atmospheres color_in book, HAva RAhimi,2012
INTRODUCTION These few texts were written after philosphical reading about materials and atmosphere. The material I talked about is stone. During the reading the common thread fade away slowly. My interest was to see how stone has been replaced with industrialisation and how in a sustainable thinking you are obliged as and architect to rethink about landscaping matter. In another part I was interested in the other discipline that can affect us: dance, theatre can teach us a lot about light , shadow, color and affect. I tried to link this text with architecture and to create a reflection about the architect role nowadays.
CONTENTS Part One: New Materialism or Material Assemblages Vernacular Materials p.4 How many stories? p.6 Pebble / Stratum p.8 Freedom is choices p.10
Part Two: Affective Atmospheres Body language p.12 Time and space, links and connections. p.14 Psychic urban planning p.16
Bibliography
Vernacular Materials October 11, 2012
“Architecture must explore materials in this way if it is to use them responsibly, to open itself to the potentiality of new and “old” materials and to reach and understanding of how materials may be productive of effects, both experiential and political, as it already has some extent in relation of space.” K. L. Thomas Whilst reading this text I thought that the problem is as an architecture student, we don´t know much about materiality. In the history of building first comes the mason, who knows about his material. Architects arrive with the idea of form first instead of matter; Alberti inserts this knowledge of idea and theory. In recent times theory has become more important and architects have lost the knowledge of materials. To speak about sustainability is nowadays impossible without speaking of materiality. You have to know where the material comes from and how to use it: you have to know it´s qualities in terms of thermal and acoustic etc. The emerging role of materials may change the process of architecture. Firstly you have to analyse your site and see what materials you can manipulate locally. Then try to design the building with the material and not against. The materiality of architecture comes with this knowledge. You can´t design a steel and concrete building and add 5 mm of stone in the façade to pretend that it´s a stone building: it will not have the same thermal qualities. I think that to learn more about the materials we have to look back to the lessons of the past like the vernacular housing around the world. The continuity between landscape and urban is made by the use of material having a connection to its locality. Vernacular building forms differs in consequence to the material from which they are made and their surroundings. Only rich palaces could afford foreign building materials. Material Matters, Architecture and Material Practice, Katie LLoyd Thomas
How many stories? October 11, 2012
“Nonidentity resides in those denied possibilities, in the invisible field that surrounds and infuses the world of object.” J. Benett In history of human beings there has always been some part we don´t understand or part that afraid us: night, death, month and years etc. The Human response was to invent stories: gods, legends etc. I think that this unknown quality is what Benett call things-power. In the time of scientific knowledge this has become what people believe, things that are without explanation are not true. Maybe Benett tries to make us understand that we can still believe in something else, that things have the power to create stories. The gods and actors of the religious stories [except in Islam] were most often made of stone- Greek statues, Buddha, Mayans, Incas, etc. All over the world the symbolism is made in stone to fix it into the people’s life. Stone makes the stories become real. Do the objects have a power of life or just different significance? The stone could be a mountain, or you could extract it and change it to build a house, or maybe in an Italian park you will cross paths with a white statue waiting for you. If the stone making up the mountain, house or statue comes from the same source. … does it make you feel the same? Shaping the stone connects it to human emotion whilst its permanence in comparison to human life expresses history and age that we cannot experience. To imagine the story of a building through it’s stone for example: how many hands touch this wall? Who built this wall? Who sculpted this window? This history could be the vibrant matter or the vitality of the material. The Force Of Things, Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett, London 2010
pebble / stratum November 18, 2012
In the text of Delanda we can see that one of the most important example he gives is about sedimentary rock. We will look closer to see how it could be helpful for the architecture projects. “In geological stratum, for example, the first articulation is the process of ‘sedimentation’ which deposits units of cyclic sediment according to a statistical order: flysch, with its succession of sandstone and schist. The second articulation is the ‘folding’ that sets up a stable and functional structure and effects the passage from sediment to sedimentary rock.” Deleuze and Guattari 1987, Enphasis in the original. “Folding is, indeed, a second articulation but one operating at different scale, that of folded mountain ranges (like the Himalayas), in which the first articulation is the statistical accumulation of many layers of sedimentary rock.” Delanda P.163 Folding as an accumulation of layers is what you can see when you look to mountain from the sky. In that way you can observe the history of the geological form. When you work with the project in the analysis of the city for example you are looking to explode the city in different layers. Tracing paper is one of most important tools for the architect. Layers help you to organize the project and make a trace of the history of the project, from the concept to the changes. With the tracing paper or layers you can dissect the project and have a clear idea of the way you think the project. Looking back to the first idea, the first layer makes the concept stronger and the project better. “In its simplest form double articulation involves a relation between spatial scales: sedimentary rock, the final product in the example given above, has clearly a greater extension than the pebbles that serve as raw materials for its synthesis.”Delanda P.165 We can say that the pebble can be the architectural concept, pure idea, strong and indivisible. In the contrary sedimentary rocks are deposited in layers as strata . The study of sedimentary rocks and rock strata provides information about the subsurface that is useful for civil engineering , for example in the construction of roads, houses, tunnels, canals or other constructions. Sedimentary rocks are also important sources of natural resources like coals, fossils fuels,drinking water or ores. Sedimentary rock is useful as it is for architects. We can also see it as a metaphor of the end of a project : a complex mix of material, in space and time. Manuel DeLanda, ‘Deleuze, Materialism and Politics ’, in Ian Buchanan and N. Thoburn, eds, Deleuze and Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
Freedom is choices November 19, 2012
Freedom can be perceived in many ways, freedom of thinking, freedom of actions… In the analysis of the role of the architect what is interesting us is the “zone of indetermination”. In the project, program, site or square meters can be provided by the client. The freedom we have is what gives the figure of the project, the concept the idea, the form. Freedom is the part you give to architecture. That is your way of doing architecture, the artistic part of the architecture. It is in this way that architecture can always be different depending on the architect, space and time. “In this understanding, the question whether the subject would or would not make the same choice again is ill posed: such a situation is unrealistic and impossible. The precise circumstances cannot be repeated, at the very least, because the subject is not the same: the subject has inevitably changed, grown older, been affected by earlier decisions, is aware of previous choices, and so on.” E.Grosz, p 144 In architecture freedom is choices, and choices are a long road making the history of the project, layers by layers. I think that in the early architecture construction, people where oblige to build with the landscape matter, depending of the geographical place you build the material is changing. In this time of industrialisation we can choose whatever we want: the stone i like from south of France can be brought to any place if i choose it. The question of price make it possible or not. The sustainable aproaches we have now remind us to look to the geographical matter. We have the choice to practice architecture in a sustainable way or not. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom’, in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds, New Materialisms: Ontology,Agency, and Politics, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010.
Body language November 21, 2012
AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattai). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affection) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body … (Massumi, Plateaus xvi) An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity: as I understand, affects can be shared, contrary to feeling or emotions which are personal. Affect is what can be produced by music, dance or architecture. “The body as a grammar of its own that cannot be fully captured in language because it “doesn’t just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations; it enfolded contexts…” E.Shouse Dance show the body as a new language and express feeling as a story. Spectators feels the effect of the intensity of the body language. Dance is tension, torsion, jumping and moving in the music shows all the complexity of saying what cannot be said. Architecture is a way of expression which can be view as artistic. It shows a concept, or sensations. In this way it could produce affects. What is the function of the architect? How and how much affects should he produce? Eric Shouse, ‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect’, in Melissa Gregg, ed. ‘Affect.’ M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). 25 Nov. 2011. http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php
Time and space, links and connections. December 3, 2012
“the atmosphere has long been associated with the uncertain, disordered, shifting and contingent – that which never quite achieves the stability of form.” B.Anderson In this description, atmosphere is what cannot be said. I think that the form as something visible and concrete may spread on another kind of atmosphere. Interior, as much as the weather or natural spaces, gives a certain sensation. The architecture form is a stable and real object. It’s something that you should go through that is why architecture create atmosphere. The form is what provides the sense and the qualities of the architecture. Form is a part of the atmosphere of architectural spaces. In the Stockholm public library, Asplund create a round space as the center of knowledge. In addition to the theoretical aspect of the circular form, the space is peaceful, quiet, and impressive. “Dufrenne’s emphasis is on the affective quality of aesthetic objects. However, it is not clear why we should restrict the production of singular affective qualities to sculpture, music, architecture or other self-enclosed aesthetic works. Epochs, societies, seasons, couples, places, buildings and much more can be said to be atmospheric, in the sense that they are animated by singular affective qualities (and the resonances, interferences, and tensions between different affective qualities).” B.Anderson In theatre, atmosphere is the relationship between light, sound, bodies, voices, smoke, spectators and actors. The play is a time space creating for a specific time in a specific place. It is a most control atmosphere. The producer chooses all details to create an image. In this control atmosphere you can analyze what make the effect to spectators. In life, Atmosphere is all the coincidences of light, weather, people, places spaces, societies and seasons, but also materiality. Atmosphere is the link between bodies, mind and spaces. Atmosphere is the shared part of the time-space you are evolving into. Architecture is supposed to stay: the atmosphere of architetcure change with time. We cannot forsee every atmosphere. David Gissen, ‘Part One: Atmosphere’, in Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009. Ben Anderson, ‘Affective Atmospheres’, in Emotion, Space and Society 2, 2009, pp. 77-81.
Psychic urban planning December 5, 2012
“The city is a form of life always stood out like a social wonder of the world against the background of pre urban conditions.” P. Sloterdijk As we said before, atmosphere is the shared part of what we are living. The city public space is made for this shared time: Peter Sloterdijk, in ‘Atmospheres of Democracy’ start with the antiquity Greek city. His analyze show that the city plan contains a certain part of what generate democracy. Urban planning is necessary on two levels. As long as the two architects talk about the walls and gates, the piazzas, the temples and the building for the magistrates, the idea of these first explicit city-makers remains more or less conventional in thrust; the same is true when they tackle war, institutions and civil ethical behavior. By contrast, the references to psychic urban planning are striking: instructions on the rituals that need to be established in order to generate or strengthen the citizens’ sense of commonality. Cities are first thought as an assemblage of houses, structured by an cycle ecosystem of politics, architecture, human affect …etc. As the architect think the aspect of the city, politicians rules the city. “No open community can be constructed on basis of a single affect.” P. Sloterdijks The everyday feelings and event of the cities are contains in order to calm the community. Citizens are actor and spectator of the city history. What is the architect part in the city development? I guess the acting part is how much shared space we provide the city as well as what are the materials of the city. In the 70’s all the cities turn into a concrete new aspect: nowadays, everybody critics this unchanging aspect between all new-cities of the world. The modernists forgot that the identity of cities is also made by the atmospheric environment and materials. “The atmospheric premises of liberty include the athletic love of effort, and it is what the polis culture of a classical antiquity that offered it it’s the first platform on which to practice.” Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Atmospheres of Democracy’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005.
Bibliography Material Matters, Architecture and Material Practice, Katie LLoyd Thomas The Force Of Things, Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett, London 2010 Manuel DeLanda, ‘Deleuze, Materialism and Politics ’, in Ian Buchanan and N. Thoburn, eds, Deleuze and Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom’, in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds, New Materialisms: Ontology,Agency, and Politics, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Eric Shouse, ‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect’, in Melissa Gregg, ed. ‘Affect.’ M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). 25 Nov. 2011. http://journal.media-culture. org.au/0512/03-shouse.php David Gissen, ‘Part One: Atmosphere’, in Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009. Ben Anderson, ‘Affective Atmospheres’, in Emotion, Space and Society 2, 2009, pp. 77-81. Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Atmospheres of Democracy’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005.