Nothing Beside Remains: Thesis 2018-2019 by Callum Ireland

CALLUM IRELAND

NOTHING BESIDE REMAINS

NOTHING BESIDE REMAINS CALLUM IRELAND

Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Master of Architecture (Professional) degree, The University of Auckland, 2019.

ABSTRACT

Today architecture bares a metaphysical hollowness. Devoid of any true meaning it is decadent, disguised behind shiny facades and the sickly comfortable interior furnishings of a complacent bourgeoisie who are sedated and nihilistic. In this crisis of purpose, the thesis seeks to find existential meaning for the author and for contemporary architecture, exploring the theory of Renato Rizzi to rebuild architectural practice from its etymological roots while reflecting on the core values that establish ones identity in a globalized world. The question central to this investigation is: what potential does architecture have to be a vessel of experimentation towards the rediscovery of meaning in this world? The findings of this research are critical of the postmoderncontemporary condition that architecture manifests, setting the world adrift within the simulacrum of existential meaning which is subverted by the ocularcentric worldview of Western culture and Metaphysics of Presence. Challenging this perspective through notions of the contemporary sublime and design methodologies which revitalise materiality with agency, namely imprinting, model making, and the casting of plaster; the thesis establishes the possibility for architectural practice to endeavour in the establishment of a new ontology which privileges the ground in terms of both absence and presence. It suggests the possibility to imagine a world in which nihilism might be replaced by an authentic being in the present, and the phenomena of human experience.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to my supervisors Sue Hillery and Dominic Glamuzina, Thanks to the technicians Joe, Steve, Franca, and Zane, Thanks to my parents. For everything. Thanks for the studio laughs, critiques, technical advice, and midnight lifts home: Amanda, Annie, Matthew, Eddy, Vini, Damien, and Bree. Thanks to Cara for never censoring her opinions, Thanks to Angela, Ben, Debbie, Jazz, John, and Mac for Fridays, To Andre for helping me out of a tricky spot, (Other) Ben for the last minute 3D printing saves, And Auntie Elsie for the motivational kick.

In memory of your kindness and generosity Beloved Nan Nan

TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract............................................................................................ Acknowledgements......................................................................... Dedication........................................................................................ Table of Contents.............................................................................

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012 / 013 014 / 015 020 / 021 024 / 025

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042 / 043 044 / 045 046 / 047 048 / 049 050 / 051 052 / 053

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INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................Preamble ..........................................................................The Abandonments CHAPTER I: THE WORLD ADRIFT ..........................................A Theory of Architecture in Etymology .................................................................That which Fills the Void .................................................Modern Art & the turn to Nihilism .....................................................................Meaning in the ArchÄ&#x201C; CHAPTER II: THE INDOMITABLE LANDSCAPE .............................Towards Ground & the Contemporary Sublime .......................................................................................Inbetween CHAPTER III: ARCHITECTURE OF THE SUBLIME .............................................................................Double Negative ...................................................................................Valley Curtain ................................................................Bruder Klaus Feldkapelle ........................................................Disappearing Bodies of Water ..........................................................................................Riverbed ...........................................................................Further Influences CHAPTER IV: IL FINALE ........................................................................A Library for Ground .........................................................................A Ritual of the Void ..........................................................A Journey Towards Interiority

110 / 111 114 / 115 122 / 123 124 / 125 128 / 129 130 / 131

CHAPTER V: ENCOUNTERS OF MATTER AND THE IMMATERIAL .....................................................................A Question of Ground ......................................................................Representing Ground ........................................................................................Imprinting ..................................................................The Alchemical Sublime ........................................................Figure Ground: Ground Figure .............................................................Apparition and Abstraction

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CHAPTER VI: MODELS OF EPISTEME ................................................................The Ritual of Renato Rizzi .....................................................................................The Method .....................................................................Reflections on Making

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CHAPTER VII: CONCLUSION .....................................................Towards a Virtue of Architecture

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156 / 157 158 / 159 228 / 229 232 / 233

CHAPTER VIII: END NOTES ...................................................................Contents of Appendices ......................................................................................Appendices ...................................................................................List of Figures .....................................................................................Bibliography

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PREAMBLE

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I am a nihilist.â&#x20AC;? The words of Jean Baudrillard echo throughout this thesis as the bleak tale of a philosopher who was unable to find beauty and meaning in the world. Becoming aware of my own tendencies towards nihilism, Baudrillards presence is felt as a caution; a figure who represents the manifestation of my niggling doubts developed to their unchecked conclusion. Relentlessly shifting from one idea to another and then back again in an effort find some kind of stable ground to stand upon, I have come to the realisation that the search for a purpose to this thesis has out of necessity become its purpose. The project occurs at a time in my life which cannot help but be integral to it. Burdened with the responsibility of concluding more than five years of academic study, this work is somehow meant to equip me with the skills to go out into the world and begin forging my own practice. Despite attempting to avoid my own doubts I find that the pages in front of you possess an overwhelming anxiety in the face of their ambition: I must find something worth dying for.

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Fig 001. Onewhereo Landscape.(1) Fig 002. Onewhereo Landscape.(2) Fig 003. Onewhereo Landscape.(3)

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Introduction

THE ABANDONMENTS

1. Baudrillard, “On Nihilism,” 105.

“We are in a new position in relation to prior forms of nihilism: Romanticism is its first great manifestation: it, along with the Enlightenment’s Revolution, corresponds to the destruction of the order of appearances. Surrealism, dada, the absurd, and political nihilism are the second great manifestation, which corresponds to the destruction of the order of meaning. The first is still an aesthetic form of nihilism (dandyism), the second, a political, historical, and metaphysical form (terrorism). These two forms no longer concern us except in part, or not at all. The nihilism of transparency is no longer either aesthetic or political, no longer borrows from either the extermination of appearances, nor from extinguishing the embers of meaning, nor from the last nuances of an apocalypse. … I am a nihilist.” 1

With this distruction of the ideals for appearance and meaning Jean Baudrillard sets the tone for postmodern life as being without the possibility for enchantment. His assumptions are absolute that the revolutions of Enlightenment and Modernity left the world without the possibility for humanistic passions, that they were able to deconstruct the very essence of objectivity in aesthetics. Yet aesthetics (appearance and meaning) never were objective and have always lied in the encounter between matter and mind. Baudrillard simply abandons appearance and meaning as part of the rational human experience. Abandonment I find to be a more appropriate term than destruction, for it lacks the energy and absolution of the former, more in line with the exhaustion of ideas which possess none of their former life and optimistic in the face of an absolute nihilism. It is time we abandon nihilism. The paradigm of Baudrillard’s nihilism traces its roots back to Ancient Greece, and is based on an ocular-centric view of the world where vision is privileged above the other senses. Both Plato and Aristotle regarded vision as the highest form of sense.2 This tendency to base our knowledge on the exterior appearance fails to take into account the interiority of a thing which might yield a deeper understanding of knowledge, truth, and reality. The hegemony of vision provokes the measurable over the qualitative.3 We conduct our measuring of objects through their height, width, and depth. While it is also possible to measure certain dimensional aspects of our other senses what is completely immeasurable is their effect on the soul. How do we measure pain, happiness, excitement, love? We can’t. Descartes advanced upon the Greek philosophy and affirmed matter as “intrinsically empty of metaphysical purposes,”4 setting the stage for modernity’s blatant disregard of the natural. Under this principle, matter is passive and unaffected by time since it

2. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, 15. 3. Rizzi, “Rebellion of the Invisible.” 4. Coole and Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, 96.

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5. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, 19. 6. Rajchman, Philosophical Events: Essays of the ‘80s, 131. 7. Rizzi “Lonely Architecture: Soul, Matter.”

lacks an intelligence and is therefor subject to the whims of man. The environments of humanity now take on the form of grids, most notably New York, where the physical environment is conceptually stripped of its rich meaning in favour for a quantitative and co-ordinated world. If Corbusier’s ‘house is a machine for living in,’ then there is no greater machine in the history of mankind than our cities. Basing our understanding of the world in such numerical abstractions is inherently inhumane and negligent of our bodily senses and corresponds to the lack of humanity in modern and contemporary architecture and society which is based in an ontology which lacks human experience. To live in this way is to live in “alienation, detachment, and solitude.“5 “To abandon an idea … is to open up the possibility of another.”6 In the search for a new philosophy for how we might view the world for the human experience of being this thesis cites Italian Architect and Academic Renato Rizzi whose theory on architecture in contemporary society reveals a disconnection between the architecture we produce and the fundamental capabilities of the disciple. His theory rebuilds the term architecture from the ground up, calling for a radical shift in ontology based on the discipline’s etymological roots in Ancient Greek which emphasise two fundamental paradigms of our knowledge, ‘Archē’ and ‘Technē.’7 He practices as both an academic and as an architect, currently at the Università Iuav di Venezia in Venice though he has also worked under esteemed architect Peter Eisenman, during which time important works such as the Wexner Centre for the Arts and the Parc de La Vilette with Bernard Tschumi and Jacque Derrida were realised. Rizzi’s approach to design theory overlaps a similar territory to these intellectual heavyweights, yet in comparison his work is rarely cited or translated into English. His influence is felt all throughout this body of work which applies the critical, theoretical, and methodological strategies of Rizzi as I have interpreted them and in relation to other theorists whom I have

found to offer richness and understanding of different ideas he explores. In particular Rem Koolhaasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s view of our society in regard to the countryside and globalism as well as Jean Baudrillardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s seminal treatise Simulaca and Simulation offer an insight to the contemporary condition which is at the centre of criticism for Rizzi, Baudrillard, and myself.

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CHAPTER I

THE WORLD ADRIFT

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The World Adrift

A THEORY OF ARCHITECTURE IN ETYMOLOGY 1. Rizzi, “The End of Becoming,” 250. 2. Rizzi, “Lonely Architecture: Soul, Matter.” 3. Rizzi, “The Rebellion of the Invisible.” 4. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 13.

The importance of Renato Rizzi to this work begins with our shared dissatisfaction towards the architecture of today. This dissatisfaction is grounded deeply in philosophical issues of our culture which has been set adrift into a state of decadence, unable to produce anything of real value against the prevailing mentality of our time: relentless existential nihilism.1 In the face of neoliberal politics, culture of commodification, and abandonment of purpose, the question at my heart is what potential architecture might have to be a vessel of experimentation towards the rediscovery of meaning in this world? As architects we can no longer stand by and be complacent to a system which sedates every aspect of our experience. Architecture is at the very crux of this issue here as one of the fundamental disciplines of humanity. It embodies the coming together of our two principle paradigms of knowledge, ‘Archē’ and ‘Technē,’ which form the etymological base of ‘archi-tecture’ in Ancient Greek. Arche translates to ‘beginning’ or ‘origin,’ and technē to a kind of ‘knowing’ in the revelation of what is present. Thus the episteme of architecture is to produce from an understanding of our world.2 In the paradigm of technē we read the world as domitable; that is to say measureable, quantifiable, calculable. It is concerned with the idea of exteriority, that which is present.3 It dominates the Western conception of metaphysics is based in the very presence of what we can observe.4 It obliges us to think and see the world in a specific way: without, emotion, without soul, without meaning. With archē however, we concern ourselves with the indomitable. It is those things which we do not understand, yet we have a certain recognition of, eluding our ability to measure

and quantify by logical means. Archē is the most original or fundamental nature of something. We know it as that which was there in the beginning, just beyond the horizon of that which we can perceive. All things are connected in the paradigm of archē for they share in an absolute origin that constitutes the nature of being.5 It is that which is inside the very essence of our world, an interiority which we can only contemplate within the mind. It is that which is fundamentally absent when we conceive of presence.6

5. Rizzi, “The Rebellion of the Invisible.” 6. Ibid.

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The World Adrift

THAT WHICH FILLS THE VOID 7. Rizzi, “Architecture Today: A conversation with Renato Rizzi.” 8. Coole and Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, 93. 9. Ibid., 95. 10. Rizzi, “Contemplation: The Appearance of the Immutable,” 101. 11. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, 68.

In our contemporary culture Rizzi argues that we are completely denied of archē, which is supressed by the Western metaphysics of presence.7 Since the Age of Enlightenment, Cartesian philosophy has pushed our understanding of the world into the rational at the expense of our humanistic values.8 Today we perceive the world through the use of logic, analysis, and rationalism: through the eyes of technē. The world exists in separate pieces, spread apart and within the authority of ‘man’-kind, as what was established to be the natural order of all things.9 Today, what we would suppose to call meaning in our culture is based almost entirely in an unshakeable belief in quantifiable, measured knowledge which offers no value in the ‘aesthetic’ experience – or the experience of how we see the world through the eyes of our soul. Colloquially, ‘aesthetic’ has become a kind of dirty or derogatory term, typically applied to those things which we see as ‘style over substance’ and feeding into a nihilistic bourgeois idealism which is sustained by substituting existential meaning with the purchasing of commodities, covering up an underlying pain of not fitting into the world or being able to express our individuality. Architecture’s role in all this has been a self-fulfilment of production between an idea of how we might live, based upon how we do. It manifests in the greatest architectural endeavour that has ever been attempted: the city.10 While Architecture has the capacity to engage with a more spiritual, sensual and meaningful dimension, it has submitted to the hegemony of a disenchanted and quantifiable world.11 That is to say, in building from the idea of how we would imagine a rational society to be we have come to the brink of successfully annihilating the humanistic component of the city’s theoretical and physical territories. Today’s rules, social structures, politics, codes of how to con-

struct, what to construct; categories of what is possible, all impose isolation and make it impossible to take risks.12 In particular for the architect, we merely apply what is known from technē and do not really create.13 Society is adrift in this paradigm, unable to find new ideas on how we might move forward as a civilization. We have constructed a metaphysics which does not allow for new thought, for originality, for that which comes forth from the origin: for archē. Architecture is about more than just building ‘buildings,’ but creation of environments which support civilization, and civilization cannot depend completely on numerical knowledge.14 Data is Dada. Civilization is built by putting us all in relation with one another. It is rhizomic and complex.15 To be an architect is not to build, but to design spaces for people to live in. This is the true potential of the discipline; to reimagine how we might go about our lives. But today, architects just design products.16 The authority of deciding how we should live has fallen upon the consumer who frankly has very little interest in how they or we might be able to live, acting rather from a natural self-interest which is subjected to the complicated forces of finding happiness in the world before us. More frightening perhaps is our increasing faith in technology, partially the digital, which is replacing our capacity for human choice. We are taught primarily how to apply software, to input and output without having to use our brains.17 In the case of the architect, it is our role to think about poetry, philosophy, language; all of the internal forces which give the building its shape. But how is this possible in a society which does not care about how we think?18 Simply put, in our present moment society really just does not care for architecture – real architecture. Most of the important buildings from the past 100 years only came to be because their architects are very good at understanding the market system and delivering consumable products. You are required to have incredible PR and good market skills to become a ‘successful’ architect. That is not to say there are not very good products occasionally,

12. Rizzi, “Architecture Today: A conversation with Renato Rizzi.” 13. Ibid. 14. Rizzi, “Contemplation: The Appearance of the Immutable,” 100. 15. Hélène and Loo, Deleuze Connotations : Deleuze and Architecture, 112. 16. Koolhaas, “Navigating Modernization.” 17. Rizzi, “Architecture Today: A conversation with Renato Rizzi.” 18. Ibid.

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19. Ibid. 20. Rajchman Philosophical Events: Essays of the ‘80s, 130. 21. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, 258. 22. Ibid. 23. Rosefeldt, Manifesto. 24. Koolhaas, “Navigating Modernization.” 25. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, 259. 26. Koolhaas, “Navigating Modernization.

but that they don’t ask or offer anything new and just pander to what is required by private companies, organisations, or governments. If you don’t play following the rules of the market your work does not get built.19 While modernism maintained in its psyche a fundamental ordering of the world in relation to mankind as the highest form of rational being, postmodernism in its entirety left this notion deconstructed and abandoned as once ‘pure’ aesthetics became mixed eclectically and without stylistic integrity.20 These aesthetics are particularly evident in architecture of the period such as Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building which contains references to the neoclassical, the modern, and eighteenth century cabinetry.21 It exemplifies the “messy vitality”22 postmodernists sought in their work, a complex reshuffling of the modernist playing cards which he termed as a “richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning.”23 Yet for all this supposed meaning, the postmodern influence has left more a sense of confusion and ambiguity. This breaking down of boundaries as to what is real or true over the past century has driven architecture away from the vernacular, or else trivialised it as a façade. The culture of commodity fetishism dissolves once localised architectural customs such as form, ornamentation, structure, materiality, and building techniques within the global context24 where a now fundamental slipperiness between image and meaning promoting nihilistic values in what was once a rich artistic language. The deconstructivist facet of postmodern architecture in particular goes so far as to create a complex conceptual puzzle of what might be a building which citing the works of Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman at the time outright deconstruct the very structures of their buildings to appear internally collapsing in both the disciplinary and physical sense.25 In his lecture Navigating Modernism, Koolhaas implicates the shift in the funding of architecture “from the public to the private sector,”26 simultaneous to the emergence of neoliberal capitalism and the global market. From this observation he theorises what

has been the agenda for our architecture. This “absurdist,”27 style which reflects the new era of globalization is a representation of the modern philosophical values of standardization and pragmatism that result of rapid digital and technological advances, compounded with the postmodern disregard for anything that could possibly suggest any rational meaning. Our architecture he surmises is reflective of individualism and ego on the part of both the designer and client rather than a sense of existential identity or civil obligation.28 This architecture profits in the manipulation and sedation of the absence of meaning at the heart of contemporary culture, drip feeding us a religion of commodities to simulate a face of self-fulfilment and individuality. Despite the gnawing hole at the heart of our existence how could one not buy into the feeling that our purchases are something to live for, and at least pretend that our lives have meaning. In this simulation of culture exists a new “hyperreality”29 in which images become non-representational, unable to refer to any context beyond themselves. The image becomes the reality and there is no means to differentiate between what is real and what is not. The simulacrum is the only truth left.30 Koolhaas uses the term “starchitect”31 derogatively in describing the mental attitudes of today’s foremost international designers where technological flamboyance and iconic approach to architecture speak more as a representation of monetary power and competitive fashion anxiety resonating from the private sector, subverting the culture and heritage of local peoples. Furthermore if localised significance to architectural traditions has truly been disbanded then collective meaning defaults towards the technologies and culture of now, putting the past under erasure. Fortunately we have not progressed to the point where this theory is a total actuality. While it has certainly developed as a prolific mentality, much of our culture is still bound by local identities which provoke more subjective criticisms of this emerging homogenous approach. One certainty cannot help but

27. Koolhaas, “Navigating Modernization.” 28. Ibid. 29. Baudrillard, “The Procession of Simulacra,” 17. 30. Ibid., 3. 31. Koolhaas, “Navigating Modernization.”

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Fig 004. The Skyline of Contemporary Architecture. (Koolhaas, 2010.)

wonder how many generations might be accounted before tradition is totally erased. Architecture has become constricted by this system of pure quantification. Quantification of time, quantification of space, quantification of value, all defined by the system which everything is measured in; the global market. But what authority does such an abstract concept â&#x20AC;&#x201C;a market, have to determine what we should and should not do as a society? It does not care if we are happy, sad, or so forth - things which are essential to being human. It does not care for anything at all because care implies it has some stake in what is to be. The market is simply a technological conduit for systematic modern living. It is incapable to thought and reflection. Just aimless drift.

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The World Adrift

MODERN ART & THE TURN TO NIHILISM Fig 005. Fountain. (Duchamp, 1917.) 32. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, 248. 33. Rajchman, Philosophical Events : Essays of the 80’s, 130.

Many disciplinary studies on the culture of Western Enlightenment depict an underlying spirit of optimism whereby technological and urban development were motivated by a metanarrative of natural order within the domain of man. However, the history of art throughout this time manifests another narrative of cultural anxiety that would later develop into fully fledged nihilism. In particular the period of Modern Art exemplify the turning point in socio-philosophical ideas which moved from dealing with beauty, to the abstract, and then the absurd through an increasing rationalisation of the world. Art in and of itself is crucial to the discussion here because unlike other disciplines – science, mathematics, history, politics, and even architecture, art deals explicitly and specifically with our emotional responses without an obligation to necessarily indulge rational criticality. The following essay depicts the emotional grounds for postmodernism and contemporary culture to develop their infatuation with “cynicism, ugliness, and self-proclaimed meaninglessness.”32 This break from aesthetics concerned with romanticist-naturalistic parallels the emergence of new technologies and the systematic isolation of elements, beginning with the pursuit for universal meaning, or truth within the rational. Spurred by the congruent revolutions of technology, science, and capitalism, faith in religion began drifting towards pessimism, based on a lack of rationality and quantifiable proof.33 The period from Descartes until the late nineteenth century exists largely on the notion of an existential meaning to life found within the rationality of the mind, unshackled from the deception of eyes which saw with the heart. Under this model science and philosophy exist on the basis of searching for ‘truths’ in the world. Also under this pressure to search for truth the arts can be seen

to reflect the implications of this search with anxiety as we abandoned of a world that was filled with beauty and optimism – subjective notions of the human heart, in the pursuit of objective rational truth. If the new theme being depicted was “art must be a quest for the truth,”34 and by extension, “what is the truth of art?”35 then the greater narrative at play throughout society was what is the truth of reality?36 With the institutionalisation of this new questioning, the subsequent “frantic production of theories, manifestos, pedagogical programs and philosophical constructions … turned the question of what it is to classify a given thing [such] as a painting into a tumultuous social drama.”37 Authentic truth emerged in the attitude of ‘form follows function,’ and thus the aesthetics of rationality, functionalism, and anxiety emerged across the creative disciplines. Painting and the visual arts gave way to impressionism, expressionism, cubism, surrealism, and so forth as it increasingly erased and idea of beauty in favour of purity between artist, tool, subject, and outcome.38 This collected reductivist movement progressed towards the abstract as it tried to pursue the essential truth of painting, eliminating various notions of historic art which were deemed inessential. In this elimination the arts often feel more akin to scientific-philosophical investigations into the nature of what a painting is, than a personal and humanistic exploration into the emotional. Yet under this doctrine of systematic elimination, modern art was unable to come to a conclusive truth or definition of art. Its subsequent failure and abandonments of modern art ‘isms’ epitomised a greater social frustration with the reality of the world:39 the ground had been paved for a new paradigm without meaning, sensuousness, and passion. A world in which the exhaustion of aesthetic forms of questioning abandoned not only beauty and originality, but in subsequent fashion abandoned truth as well. Of all the reductivist art movements, the most significant is perhaps Dada which fully embraces the most radical forms of scep-

34. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, 250. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Rajchman, Philosophical Events : Essays of the 80’s, 133. 38. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, 249. 39. Rajchman, Philosophical Events : Essays of the 80’s, 132.

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40. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, 248. 41. Rosefeldt, Manifesto. 42. Rajchman, Philosophical Events : Essays of the 80’s, 131 43. Ibid., 138. 44. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, 255.

ticism and nihilism. Yet its movement away from the retinal in art does little to distance itself from the Cartesian rationality where we might rediscover a truth in the potential to experience beauty, rather it advances rationalism into a new evolution.40 Duchamp and the Dada’s it would seem had a basis for their nihilism and absurdity in a belief that nothing in this world mattered because it lacked intelligent, rational design.41 That is to say Dada’s view was that the only rational thing to do was to be irrational. Furthermore, Dada is impossible to mention without bringing up the horror of mechanised warfare which embodiment of ugliness and meaningless destruction of life. Perhaps then it is no surprise that the cultural shift in art turned towards questioning, absurdum and the ‘destruction of knowledge’ during the time of The Great War. In an analysis of Marcel Duchamp whose abandonment of painting and subsequent pursuit of new possibilities in art, namely the ‘readymade,’ resonated throughout society as exemplary of what was being abandoning at the time.42 It was not so much the possibility of painting, rather the abandoning of a certain idea of art, its place in society, politics and the forms of critical thought it afforded us. The abandonment of this “retinal art”43 to stimulate the eyes and the heart opens up a new kind of art which advanced into new Cartesian principles of a rational irrationalism. And thus we see the first glimpse of what would become the postmodern condition, the birth of inescapable, self-referential irony. His work ‘Fountain’ (1917) landmarks a particular moment in the artistic avant-garde which “made the quintessential statement about the history and future of art.”44 His nomination of a particularly un-particular urinal to the status of art offers a precise statement about art and artists and the world: to be pissed on.

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The World Adrift

MEANING IN THE ARCHĒ

45. Rizzi, “Lonely Architecture: Soul, Matter.” 46. Rizzi, “The Rebellion of the Invisible.” 47. Rizzi, “Lonely Architecture: Soul, Matter.” 48. Ibid.

Despite the hegemony of regulations imposed on architectural creativity in the twenty-first century it is still possible to at least imagine what might result in an alternative paradigm, and perhaps occasionally weave this image into the fabric of our own work. There are a few very real instances of this occurring in contemporary practice which the thesis will later document in its chapter ‘Architecture of the Sublime,’ requiring only a subtle repositioning on our most restrictive definition of Architecture and delving into the expanded field of praxis. For now though, if architecture is to return agency to the experience of being human we must find a way to reintroduce archē back into our work,45 but how can we even grasp such an abstract concept and what might it look like? Here, we turn again to the etymology of architecture which is the convergence of our two knowledge paradigms. To understand how we might characterise and thus pursue in particular the archē first we must understand our knowledge comes from. While the two fields could be understood as polarities in how we think it is perhaps more useful to consider them using the cause-effect relationship. In technē we have more the production side of knowledge based on relating between discrete known things, but this comes first from an encounter with the physical object that then becomes an image.46 As babies when we first see the world there is ‘the appear;’47 the encounter of alien. That which we see with the eyes of our body, we then see with the eyes of our mind and produce the fundamental image.48 Image… Imagine… To imagine. Our knowledge of all things comes first from interpreting ‘the appear,’ that is to say the first level of being on this earth we

have ‘the shape’ from which we produce ‘the image’ – which is the knowledge of the shape in relation to other shapes and their images which we see.49 This relationship is similar to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in which form and projection correspond to archē and technē respectively. Unlike Plato’s forms, however, the shapes of archē offer a less typological understanding of the world and account for subjectivity. Instead of existing outside the perspective of the shadowviewers who cannot see beyond the image the archē is completely before us and it is the image which exists in our mind. So to say, the episteme resides in the physical world, not an ideal of it. For Jean Baudrillard, this can be helpful for understanding the relationship between simulation, simulacrum, and nihilism. With our technological sophistication and ability to produce real images, that is to say images beyond the imagination, and the mass saturation of these images in contemporary culture, we have become conditioned to see image without shape – simulation, or image as shape – simulacrum.50 The shape, the archē, the authentic nature, has become pushed outside the scope of our vision leaving in its place the void of nihilism, for there is no meaning to what we see. What this all suggests is that an architecture of the archē manifests without representation. Upon this hypothesis we can build notions of a philosophy where meaning and authenticity reside in the essential material nature from which we construct. It goes beyond the easily manipulated sensory-phenomenology that is emerging with popularity into the contemporary scene,51 which confuses symbolic material properties as being under our domain when in the paradigm of archē they are indomitable.52 The tendency to wrap, cover, and engineer surfaces while simulating environments with air conditioning, illumination, and projection53 in the name of reasonable comfort need to be reconciled. It is not enough to imitate and substitute for materiality with artificial and technological, ‘technē-logical,’ constructions which optimise performance with the style of the as-is. That is to say

49. Ibid. 50. Baudrillard, “The Procession of Simulacra,” 4. 51. Eisenman and Wigley, “Wobble: The Cat has Nine Lives.” 52. Rizzi, “The Rebellion of the Invisible.” 53. Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” 175.

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Fig 006. Platoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Allegory of the Cave. (Wilson Hill Academy, 2018.)

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Fig 007. The sky of Gdansk. (Rizzi 2014.) 54. Rizzi, “Lonely Architecture: Soul, Matter.” 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid.

the irreverent stone clad wall of Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vals do not perform in the same way that a wall of the same stone does, they merely produce a beautifully designed image which we have a tendency to substitute for the pure appearance of the stone. Yet to reconcile does not mean we have to sacrifice performance and comfort. One option is to simply use the as-is appropriate to the desired conditions without substitution; however the more endearing approach I believe is to incorporate aspects of the archē into our current model. Rizzi’s Shakespearean Theatre in Gedansk serves as a prime example of how this can be done. Designed in 2004 and opening ten years later,54 the theatre masterfully crafts together historic narratives, typologies, contemporary technology and the aesthetics of first principles. It stands of the site of what was once Poland’s historic roofless Elizabethan theatre,55 but the challenge of paying respect to what is today an important invisible presence is resolved without the need to represent or imitate the original. The invention of a roof which can be both open and closed to the sky defines a new typology which speaks to the open roof while existing respectfully in its own right. This refusal to imitate speaks not only of a respect for the as-is to refuse simulating an image, but is masterfully crafted to introduce not only theoretical virtues of the archē, but a monumental and elementary as-in into the work: the sky. Heavily butriced by the sarcophagus-like walls56 which enclose the theatre, the structure contains not only the immense weight of the open roof, but the weight of the void. It announces the invisible presence of the historic theatre which lies at the heart of the one in this, its most important space. The presense of the absence gives stage to the invisible world with its audience being the sky which watches on from above. Shakespears famous and perhaps inevitable quote in this context, ‘all the world’s a stage,’is poetically realised to be the conflux between past and present – the archē to this architecture which redefines how we could be designining today.

CHAPTER II

THE INDOMITABLE LANDSCAPE

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The Indomitable Landscape

TOWARDS GROUND & THE CONTEMPORARY SUBLIME 1. Nesbitt, “The Sublime and Modern Architecture : Unmasking (An Aesthetic of) Abstraction,” 100. 2. Dictionary.com, “Sublime.” 3. Nesbitt, “The Sublime and Modern Architecture : Unmasking (An Aesthetic of) Abstraction,” 101.

One of the key hypotheses of this thesis is that the sublime more so than any other branch of aesthetics offers the potential to reintroduce archē to practice. It is an aesthetic central to the work of Renato Rizzi and adheres to both historic notions of the magnificent, vast, and threatening, as well as the contemporary sublime which this essay will establish as the ‘uncanny other.’ In the word of Kant, “the sublime moves, [while] the beautiful charms.”1 It is this particular moving quality in which the sublime transcends from essentially recognising the invisible into the visceral experience of beholding the indomitable. This translates into a more practical challenge for architecture which can build upon traditions and historical precedence which have the effect to inspire awe. The word ‘sublime’ etymologises to the Latin term ‘sub-limis’ meaning high, lofty, or elevated. The prefix ‘sub’ we normally think of as meaning under or below, while its second part ‘lime,’ come from the term ‘limus,’ ‘limen,’ or ‘limes,’ meaning sidelong, threshold, and boundary respectively. All three suffixes are of similar origin to the term ‘lintel’ which sits atop a door or window; an opening through a boundary.2 Thus, the sublime can be understood as that which is above us, or beyond the threshold of our highest understanding. Distinct from similar notions such as the beautiful or the picturesque, Edmund Burke sets out a concise definition of the Sublime in his 1757 treatise A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. His definition distinguishes between the different roots we have for experiencing pleasure in these ideas, mainly that the sublime can be linked with a certain cathartic experience in the “suspension of threat”3 which releas-

es certain endorphins and adrenaline in a kind of exciting and awe inspiring effect. It is the sensing of power found in sources of the infinite, vast, magnificent, and obscure.4 Historically, this idea of the sublime is based in Romantic painting, being culturally linked to a particular fashioning of landscape which offers its most culturally accessible point of reference. This style drew upon certain scenes that match Burke’s descriptions of the magnificent, vast, and threatening; typically stormy seas crashing terrific waves on rocky shores and brave sailors or vast mountains at the edge of civilization where one might become lost in the howling wilderness. It is central to our cultural descent into the rational through Enlightenmentand rejection of natural order5 as well as fundamental views establishing the ideal New Zealand image explored in the following essay. Building upon the enlightenment, modern aesthetics subvert ideas about the sublime and the beautiful calling forth for a new paradigm, rejecting “the idea of mimetic representation … in favour of the autonomy of form and an internal, self-referential discourse.”6 Yet despite this, Anthony Vidler and Peter Eisenman argue that under this condition the sublime has managed to transcend disciplinary fields and historical classifications, re-emerging in the contemporary as the uncanny and the grotesque.7 While it is obvious that architecture possesses the principle elements of scale, monumentality, and light which can be manipulated to coheres a historically sublime experience, a more complex and resonant form of the sublime can be found in architectures ability to manifest a new conditioning of ‘the other,’ as aside from the natural landscape; that which in the contemporary condition inspires real terror. Eisenman argues that this potential lies in what he describes as analogous to the arché, “that is the very nature of ground, [or] pure presence, which is in fact the basis of the metaphysics of presence as it is constituted in architecture.”8 Provoking anxiety between object and subject, he references Freud’s description of the uncanny as “the rediscovery of

4. Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful with Several Other Additions, 47. 5. Newman, “The Sublime is Now,” 581. 6. Nesbitt, “The Sublime and Modern Architecture : Unmasking (An Aesthetic of) Abstraction,” 99. 7. Ibid., 105. 8. Eisenman and Wigley, “Wobble: The Cat has Nine Lives.”

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9. Nesbitt, “The Sublime and Modern Architecture : Unmasking (An Aesthetic of) Abstraction,” 106. 10. Ibid. 11. Baudrillard, “The Procession of Simulacra,” 3. Fig 008. Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth. (Turner, 1842.)

something familiar which had been previously repressed; it is the uneasy feeling of a presence of an absence,”9 and production of modern estrangement and alienation.10 A reconciliation between Romanticist and contemporary ideas of the sublime with architecture strives to be the modus operandi for this thesis, working between boundaries of artwork, architecture, and landscape to produce new aesthetics which enchant in the face of nihilism. The challenge then for the contemporary architect is to devise how we might reintroduce conditions of the ground and our very being in the world which are being supressed by the hyperreality rampant in postmodernism;11 acknowledging that our oversaturation with unreal realities denies us the most sublime of all concepts: death.

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The Indomitable Landscape

INBETWEEN

Fig 009. Pokeno from Above. (Waikato Distric Council, 2017.) 12. Pawson, “On the Edge : Making Urban Places,” 226. 13. Ibid., 228.

In an effort to understand our cultural fascination with the sublime experience in light of the nihilistic contemporary paradigm which permeates our everyday lives, we must deconstruct the relationship between the New Zealand landscape and its projected image. My intention is not so much to take a stance regarding the discrepancies which exist between said image which brands and commodifies the landscape (which is problematic at best and worthy of an entire other thesis in and of itself.) Rather, my work is aimed at a more fundamental why this image exists and its implications on architectural theory in this country at present. According to Eric Pawson, “urban histories of colonial settler societies provide a long tradition of valuable research that situates the town functionally and politically in relation to the country,”12 identifying the in between condition of industrial urban centres and the untamed wilderness as somewhere that we “believe to embody high levels of environmental amenity,”13 resolving the congruent polarities of perilous untamed nature and mechanised urban decay. Acknowledging this as a point of tension within my work reveals what I believe to be a complex introspection into my own relationship with the landscape which is embodied throughout the design process and three resulting proposals. The logical recognition to make is that the cathartic or sublime landscape is perhaps a predisposed ideology for both myself and many others who share in their identity of European New Zealanders. Exploring into territories of the sublime in this context therefor caries with it a caution to avoid the nostalgic, the picturesque, and the mimetic. Such themes, compounded with neoliberal commodity culture, are what deliver to us the kind of urban developments in places such as Pokeno which I do not hesitate to say constitute as my definition of hell on earth. These developments offer no connection to the supposedly idyllic country lifestyle, but rather

cater to a specific social class which cannot afford city real estate and would rather spend their lives in delusion while commuting for hours every day, perpetuating congestion and pretending climate change is a hoax while they wonder why fuel prices continuing to rise. They can ultimately be understood as buying into a particular simulacrum of what the New Zealand lifestyle ‘should’ look like. In the words of Rem Koolhaas you only need to look at the kind of architecture we are producing in the countryside to see that authenticity has been “replaced by a particular style … very discrete and minimalistic, where simply the amount of cushions indicate perhaps a hidden agony.”14 “The taming of the ‘howling wilderness,’”15 whereby colonial towns at the edge of urbanisation are the agents through which modernisation proceeds in this country is central to Pawson’s understanding of a constructed image of the New Zealand landscape in the Pakeha perspective. “Indeed, wilderness was often represented as an empty stage, benignly awaiting the imprint of the European.”16 Our history of colonial settlement beginning in the late 1700’s corresponds to the order of enlightenment thinking and the rationalisation over the natural, in which the European narrative encouraged the forging of new lives. The New Zealand landscape was considered as an escape from the development of industrial society in Europe which disenchanted the people with paved streets and sooty grey skies.17 This combination of the rationalist triumphing over nature and the dreadful conditions of habitation that came with it set the scene for colonialisms viral sprawl out into unchartered lands. This idealisation of the cathartic landscape is thus fundamental to understanding the cultural perspective of post-colonial New Zealand which as a relatively young nation has scarcely begun to develop beyond its historic foundations. This presents the notion of landscape as fetish in our context; an idea towards which precautions must be taken throughout the thesis for the possibility that the work become detached from an objective inquiry. Jock Phillips argued that in the construction of

14. Koolhaas, “Countryside.” 15. Pawson, “On the Edge : Making Urban Places,”227. 16. Ibid. 17. Brown, “Meeting Places and Spaces.”

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18. Pawson, “On the Edge : Making Urban Places,” 226. 19. Ibid. 20. Koolhaas, “Countryside.”

a male mythology, “the most distinctive aspect of Pakeha society,”18 the frontier experience of rural townships was universalised at the expense of ignoring the urban condition.19 The construction of a very specific ‘social ideal’ around these particular landscapes is exemplified in our characterisation of masculinity; the typical ‘Kiwi guy’ who is supposedly connected to our unique New Zealand-ness because he has a number 8-wire mentality, enjoys going for a hike, and once drove a motorcycle on his uncle’s farm. While I stereotype here, I find it to be an ideology which plays out beneath any socio-political discussion in this country, and constitutes an identity which I find difficult in separating myself from. While I would draw a distinction here between branches of more problematic concerns in a patriarchal theory of Western society, my motivation is to identify that such widespread cultural ideologies tend to go unquestioned if they are simply taken for granted as being without fault. It plays into our widespread narrative of global nihilism which promotes a kind of superficial preservation of local ideas as to define ones way of living which, as I have suggested in That Which Fills the Void, manifests in certain contemporary (faux) vernacular architectures, but also I would like to add here in character-types of local inhabitants. It is this very essence of nostalgia for something which isn’t real that is the crux of my frustration here. The only choice is to whether or not to embrace this simulacrum, which manifests as a kind of rural gentrification outside of the city and rural appropriation inside. Quite simply put we have advanced beyond living with nature the same way generations before us20 did and need to stop objectifying it. Yet we are encouraged not to question our reality because doing so immediately reveals inauthenticity to our lives and there is little choice but to turn towards the abyss of existential nihilism which is all too ready to accept us.

Chapter III

ARCHITECTURE OF THE SUBLIME

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Architecture of the Sublime

DOUBLE NEGATIVE MICHAEL HEIZER 1969-1970 Fig 010. Double Negative. (Heizer, 1969-1970.) 1. Eisenman and Wigley, “Wobble: The Cat has Nine Lives.” 2. Heizer and Taylor, Michael heizer: Double Negative, 13.

Michael Heizers monumental tear in the earth of Nevada’s Mormon Mesa triumphs as a deconstruction of the historical boundaries between sculpture, architecture, monument, archaeology, and landscape, evoking a sublime experience rooted in its perplexing scale which grasps at concepts of the infinite in time, space, and matter. It erases the ground, both in the literal material sense, and the figurative sense of “that which it stands on.”1 It exemplifies the beginning of the poststructuralist movement and at the time of its creation revolutionised the way in which a work of art might be experienced. In an act of pure stereotomy, 240, 000 tons of desert sandstone are displaced into a 1,500 foot long void, 30 feet wide and 50 feet deep, yet its reach is far beyond the magnitude of this hollow. The work is inseparable from its site, for it produces the site which produces it in turn, a literal ‘double negation’ in that it is really not real, perhaps better described as a ‘nonwork’ of art for it has no subject matter but rather implies a something which is not there. As one delves into the depths of if its tear the strata upon its surface reveal “an archē that is, perhaps, older than the beginning of our world, the world, any world.”2 The Double Negative is a weightless weight, a figure without figure, a being without being. It is decaying, eroding, and silent, subject to the entropy of time. It sublimates presence for absence and questions how contemporary culture might reconcieve its very ontogenisis.

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Architecture of the Sublime

VALLEY CURTAIN CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE 1970-1972 Fig 011. Valley Curtain. (Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 1970-1972.) 3. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, “Valley Curtain.”

Hanging between two slopes in the Colorado Grand Hogback Mountain Range, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s vast orange curtain is a temporal installation of architectural significance playing both the roles of both figure and ground in the composition of the landscape. Its immense scale speaks to Burke’s ideas of the sublime in its vast and overwhelming presence. The work contrasts dynamically with the existing landscape and in doing so, like much of their work, reveals essential forms that might otherwise be beneath the threshold of our attention. Its surreal and ephemeral nature call attention to the real; the slope and scale of the hills, their jagged, rocky surface, and the valleys ebbing flow towards the horizon. It suggests architectures potential to enhance the inherent nature of its environment through a more conceptual framework than a typical materialist approach. The work reveals the site. It does not draw from it and re-present, but rather frames, allowing new views to incept a certain material ontology in the viewer. It speaks to the division between two spaces, our organisation of the landscape and the sense of boundaries marked out upon natural territories, or perhaps the certain way we occupy around geographic, political, or ideological boundaries. Though Christo and Jeanne-Claude are typically considered artists, their large scale projects such as the Valley Curtain are more akin to architecture then art.3 The works are planned, drawn in detail and must pass council regulation of safety and so forth as well as find funding before being constructed in the real.

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Architecture of the Sublime

BRUDER KLAUS FELDKAPELLE PETER ZUMTHOR 2007 Fig 012. Bruder Klaus Feldkapelle Skylight. (Zumthor, 2007.) 4. Pallister, “Sacred Stories - Bruder Klaus Field Chapel.” 5. Watson, Building in the New Millennium, 139. 6. Jenner, “Production of Site and Site of Production: Herzog & de Meuron’s Schaulager and Zumthor’s Feldkapelle,” 317. 7. Ibid. 320.

Despite this small chapel standing rather quietly at the edge of its field, it speaks volumes for the potential of architecture to articulate meaning through the production of traces moulded onto its material surface and very essence. The Feldkapelle is evocative of the spiritual and the sensual beyond simply the pictorial metaphor of a divine vision within the womb, which in part inspires the project.4 Rather, it locates these qualities in phenomenology, or the conscious experience as apparent through being in the world; cogito, ergo sum. From the 112 tree trunks stacked and then burnt away to form its core, to the individual striated layers of trampled gravel and cement which each mark one days worth or work between their subsequent pours,5 all of the autonomous processes used in the construction of the Feldkapelle are intrinsically linked to the building which is produced. It challenges the Ancient Greek idea of hylomorphism – the notion that physical objects result from the combination of matter and form, which is fundamental to philosophy of how objects acquire meaning in western culture.6 Instead the chapel speaks to notions of becoming. In its material plasticity the concrete manifests an implicit energy as it is poured, giving shape to its formless mass in the traces of striation and hollowed absence of tree trunks which scar its inner surface with a sooty stain. The chapel “surrenders to the material at hand, following where it leads, and drawing or bringing out potentials immanent … rather than imposing a preconceived form upon raw matter.”7

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Architecture of the Sublime

DISAPPEARING BODIES OF WATER MAYA LIN 2012 Fig 013. Pin River of the Hurricane Sandy Flood Zone. (Lin, 2012.) 8. Lin, Boundaries, 4:02. 9. Lin, “Disappearing Bodies of Water,” Art21: Extended Play. 10. Lin, “New York,” Art21: Extended Play. 11. Ibid.

The work of Maya Lin suggests how architectural design might draw its strength from the natural world without depending on it in a vernacular or allegorical sense. Her expertise in designing for multiple disciplines, artwork, architecture, and memorials (which she locates somewhere between the two,)8 make her an important precedent for dissolving the boundary between aesthetic and scientific fields of knowledge in our current age. Disappearing Bodies of Water is a political work, dealing with environmental concerns in regard to climate change and how much damage we are doing as a species to the planet.9 Her mapping of flood zones in fragile pins on a wall, river systems cast in precious metal, and changing ice shelves milled from marble identify these aspects of the natural world in a certain bodily way as to presents the facts then stands back and asks us to contemplate what we are shown.10 These sculptural topographic studies utilise a combination of digital and mechanical technology together with hands on processes in the same ways an architect might create a site model, though with a high level of theoretical and practical skill which elevates the work in status. In doing so she unifies the two paradigms of arché and téchne, using modern technology to reimagine natural phenomena which would otherwise be outside our field of view.11 Her work redefines the model as a complex gathering point which can capture the immense, the unseen, and the ephemeral, revealing new understandings and inspiring meaning. It becomes the architects challenge and expertise to take information gathered from the site and make it into something; to understand the limitation of tools, software, the body, materials, and how they might combine to craft an understanding of the physical world in a new abstracted form.

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Architecture of the Sublime

RIVERBED OLAFUR ELIASSON 2014-2015 Fig 014. Riverbed. (Eliason, 2014-2015.) 12. Baudrillard, “Procession of the Simulacra,” 3. 13. Eliasson, “Olafur Eliasson Interview: A Riverbed Inside the Museum,” Lousiana Channel, Lousiana Museum of Modern Art.

What is the sublime in contemporary culture, and how might a built environment produce an experience of it are some of the many questions raised by Olafur Eliasson’s Riverbed. It is a landscape which appears natural and is yet artificial, as if a landslide has washed through the gallery in a great catastrophe and could easily do so again. No plant life grows here; it is a desolate place devoid of life save the simple river which trickles perpetually down through the work. It asks as what is real and what is not. Of course it is an artificial landscape but does that matter? Our senses tell us this is a riverbed not some pile of rocks in a museum. The landscape has become simulacrum, it is not that which conceals the truth but a truth which conceals there is none.12 This is an artificial real. It manifests our doubt and uncertainty. The way we interact with the world is actually a social construct. It is based on our model, not on truth. There are no false or real things, only reality, and our reality is a model.13 In Riverbed we take it for granted that the way that our senses show us our surroundings is natural, but rather it is a socio-cultural construct based on the way in which the world has organised the viewer into a particular experience. It is that deep unsettling doubt which epitomises the sublime in Riverbed which exists at the threshold of what is real.

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Architecture of the Sublime

FURTHER INFLUENCES

Much of design research is conducted through the method of browsing imagery, be that in books, journals, online sources, or simply what we experience in the environment around us. Such inspirations are studied with a judgemental eye, observed briefly and catalogued by the designerly mind playing to an aesthetic level of understanding. The following pages exist to identify specific projects which had a effect on my own process. They often speak towards a kind of expanded notion of architecture beyond what typifiesa building, establishing a kind of visual palette information which influences the thesis. Albeit their brief mentioning here each of these works are worthy of further investigation in relation to the themes of this thesis.

Fig 015. Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. (Eisenman, 2008.)

Fig 016. Ruakuri Cave Entrance. (Leuschke Group, 2005.)

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Fig 017. Ceremonial Space. (Insley, 1971.)

Fig 018. Cenotaph for Newton. (BoullĂŠe, 1784.)

Fig 019. Facade of the American Folk Art Museum. (Williams and Tsien, 2001.)

Fig 020. Tindaya Cavern. (Chillida, 1994.)

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Fig 021. Vietnam Veterans Memorial. (Lin, 1982.)

Fig 022. Schaulager. (Herzog & de Meuron, 2003.)

Fig 023. Pyramid. (Lewitt, 1997.)

Fig 024. Grotto. (Demand, 2007.)

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Chapter IV

IL FINALE

Il Finale

A LIBRARY FOR GROUND

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A LIBRARY FOR GROUND Fig 025. A Library for Ground. Fig 026. Preliminary Sketch.(1)

In the distant karst landscape of the Waikato hill-country, a wall of peculiar matter faces out towards the setting sun. It sits curiously with its site, neither figure nor ground but a kind of surface that is revealed from tearing out a void from the landscape. The void wraps around and reaches behind the wall, engulfing and sustaining its presence. This strange being is a library. This library collects and documents the ground. It is formed by the stacking of irregular concrete panels made both of and on the site. They are a mixture of ingredients which are all available at hand; soil and gravel are harvested from the excavation of the void, along with lime, the primary ingredient of archaic Roman concrete which is produced from heating limestone. These three materials are mixed with fourth, water from below which bubbles up into spring just down the valley. It hydrates the mixture and forms a chemical reaction with the lime, binding the materials together as they harden into concrete. The panels cast upon the ground, picking up traces from its rough and barren surface in inverse. When assembled the library reads as a collection of ephemera, capturing a particular fleeting moment in the becoming of a world. Trembling in a state of almost frozen entropy, the libraryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s surface will age away with the relentless trickling of water which seeps down its surface to pool in a trough carved into the void, reflecting the heavens upon the earth. Over time, so too will these unique documentations of the ground wear away under the sun wind and rain, but they will endure well beyond the civilization of today in

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A LIBRARY FOR GROUND Fig 025. A Library for Ground. Fig 026. Preliminary Sketch.(1)

the form of a monumental artefact dedicated to a now absent present. Visitors are invited to read from the library by a pathway which crosses the space of reflections, connecting two surfaces, the wall of traced ground and the raw face of another ground revealed in the cliff like faces of the void. The experience is anticlimactic, yet cathartic, speaking to the nature of matter as that which can be neither creates or destroyed, only transformed. One day we too will be part of another sort of library; the story of our lives as will be passed on through history when the fleeting existence of our souls comes to pass, leaving behind our material body which will transform and return to the ground.

Fig 027. Traces of the ground illuminated by the setting sun

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Fig 028. Aerial view of the Library. Fig 029. Surface of the Wall.

Fig 030. The void which engulfs and sustains. Fig 031. Crossing the reflection pool to a hollow carved in the cliff.

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Fig 032. Floor plan of the Library. Fig 033. Elevation of the Library.

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Fig 034. Looking outward from the void. Fig 035. Cross section through the void and reflection pond.

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Il Finale

A RITUAL OF THE VOID

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A RITUAL OF THE VOID Fig 036. A Ritual of the Void. Fig 037. Preliminary Sketch. (2)

A hollowing and displacing of the hillside reimagines the archetype of a balneary to occupy a lengthy cut through the ground. It suspends the quantifiable experience of time through the ritualistic experience of bathing inside the viscous darkness of a void, and embodies the clearing of a stage for the performance of human activity. Various pools step up and down in level forming props to endear the rituals actions: immersion, cleansing, contemplation and re-emergence. The matter which protrudes as the form is produced from the hollowing which reveals the void. It is stacked and bound by mortar produced from the sites limestone, exhibiting a singular material consistency of ground throughout the scheme. Its masonry walls, perforated with small gaps cast delicate speckles of light which dance within the darkness of the void. They allow a gradual transition from the solid cut limestone blocks toward the vast opening which occurs at the far edge condition. The baths which augment this space are carved into the surface of the ground. Left rough and unadorned they are filled with water drawn directly from springs within the surrounding landscape. Offering a certain therapeutic engagement with the haptic essence of the site, bathers must pass through the water to progress to the climactic edge, suspended out beyond the hill and observing a displaced mass of stone which anchors the void to the landscape. The thick presence of water which floods the space impedes the

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A RITUAL OF THE VOID Fig 036. A Ritual of the Void. Fig 037. Preliminary Sketch. (2)

potential for brisk motion, bringing with it a literal slowing of bodily movements, and thus the relativity of time; cating a heightened experience of the space and its atmosphere which must be traversed to reach the horizon. Here, the anchoring figure is presented as solid, impenetrable, and the counterpoint to announce an absence. It is a revelation, excavated from the void and placed perfectly in line with it on the other side of the valley which reciprocates the hollowed hill. The tension between mass and void is suspended in the valley as an absence of presence, in contract to the presence of the absence which the bathers inhabit. In an allegory for the longing of reconciliation between these states; the soul itself and the image of the soul beyond the horizon is revealed to be of singularity, to which the ritual of being is an annunciation. We may thus position the human experience of performing our being as punctuating notes of music to the silencing of the void.

Fig 038. Edge of the void.

Fig 039. The absence of a presence and the presence of an absence. Fig 040. Spaces for bathing.

Fig 041. The anchoring mass. Fig 042. Cross sectional view.

Fig 043. Entry into the Balneary. Fig 044. Stage for the performance of ritual.

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Fig 045. Floor Plan of A Ritual of the Void. Fig 046. Cross Section of A Ritual of the Void.

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Il Finale

A JOURNEY TOWARDS INTERIORITY

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A JOURNY TOWARDS INTERIORITY Fig 047. A Journey towards Interiority. Fig 048. Preliminary Sketch. (3)

In the upper reaches of the valley, the ground almost seems to flatten out, only to be contorted by the emergence of a labyrinth which both emerges from and hollows out its presence from the gentle slope. The result is an assortment of planes about the buildings more external layers which both recede and protrude from the surface of the landscape according to the intersection between the architectural ground level and topographical datum planes. At this point the ground becomes both a plinth and a clearing, accentuating the spaces within. It creates a curious tension between the sculpted and organic forms of the resulting landscape that will only continue to blur as erosion takes is course; one could almost say it appears to be an uncovering from some ancient buried civilization. Programmatically, the design reinterprets the processional journey used by the mortuary temples of Ancient Egypt, inverting their typical ascent towards the shrine, and mirroring this procession in plan, such that the most sacred of spaces occurs at the labyrinths core rather than at a terminating destination. As one proceeds down the levels, each new layer offers an increased removal from the outside world as the ground reaches up and envelops the wary visitor. The decent becomes a ritual as step by step, one after the other, turn by turn the ground seems to swallow the individual whole. Entry into the final courtyard is marked by the most controlled of these spaces â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a thick towering wall where the visitor must squeeze horizontally through a narrow passage, barely large enough for the human body. The resulting effect designates the courtyard within as a space for

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A JOURNY TOWARDS INTERIORITY Fig 047. A Journey towards Interiority. Fig 048. Preliminary Sketch. (3)

intense contemplation and cathartic relief from the claustrophobic decent inwards. It focuses ones attention on the monument at its centre which resembles the archetype of a tetrapylon: the four sided gate of Greek antiquity which marks a crossroad. Carved as a singular stone mass from the ground, the crossroad occurs both in its own right and as an unexpected continuation of the labyrinth as a whole. The void it frames is intended to be as disorienting as possible using symmetry in 4 different axis, plus a pool of water to provide additional vertical reflection. When present in the core of this space the crossroad removes all sense of bodily relations to the outside world, save for an awareness of the descending journey, and its corresponding anticipated ascent back out. As such it creates in this moment an unavoidable encounter between the individual and the present, marking the crossing of an invisible future and past. With all other context having been erased, what remains is pure interiority; interiority of form, space, and self.

Fig 049. Cross section through the courtyard andinner most wall.

Fig 050. Beginning the descent. Fig 051. External plinth protruding from the ground.

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Fig 052. Pushing and pulling at the intersection between ground and form. Fig 053. Areal view of the Labyrinth.

Fig 054. Development model with alternative core design colapsing at its centre. Fig 056. Ruin of the model upon first cast, revealing the decent inward.

Fig 057. Floor plan of A Journey Towards Interiority. Fig 058. Cross Section of A Journey Towards Interiority.

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CHAPTER V

ENCOUNTERS OF MATTER & THE IMMATERIAL

The following chapter is about design. It describes the journey from landscape to proposition as it was developed through strategies of mapping, imprinting, drawing, casting, and abstraction which are presented more or less in the same order which they were originally produced, albeit with a reflective approach to theory and analysis. Here, design becomes a tool not only for research but one of self-discovery where through the process of simultaneous making, researching, and reflecting the thesis took shape over several months.

Fig 059. Onewhero Landscape. (4)

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Encounters of Matter & the Immaterial

A QUESTION OF GROUND Fig 060. Limestone Sample from Onewhero.

The ground of this work is selected before determining anything else. It was found in the summer of 2017, happened upon when looking through a collection of hand-made maps which caught my attention on an aesthetic level as a place which might yield interesting results for an architectural project. This thesis therefore does not originate to a particular question which fundamentally determines the project; rather it belongs to the notion of a place. This is an important distinction to make because it establishes a major conflict of interests which carry throughout this body of work. Beginning with a ground as opposed to a question biases the work towards a ‘what should be here?’ rather than a ‘how do I implement a particular idea here?’ At the very forefront of this thesis this very ‘should-ness’ drives the work in pursuit of social and intrapersonal critiques as to what defines value and our responses from a broad, macroscopic view. It was at times very difficult to deal with as it destabilised my own assurance in any particular ‘how-do-I…’ style question, of which there were multiple, versions which were proposed and dismissed from the very beginning until stressfully late into the process. Nihilism became both the critique and feeling associated with the various pursuits which attempted to reconcile certain programmes or strategies to the landscape, sensing that none of them ‘really mattered’ and were not what the ground was seemingly trying to suggest me to do Design became a tool which thus produced the question of how one might rediscover meaning to combat this nihilism within the context of the thesis; my own personal architectural response to a landscape, and the condition of contemporary society. The method documented throughout this chapter must also be taken into account when bracketing the specifications of this question; though it is not something which can be hastefully condensed

into a nominal â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;typeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of methodology. It is something which is flawed and imperfect, finding moments of success and failure which in equal parts inform its continual development. What arises at the end of the process, more so than an architecture is a particular philosophy inspired by the process, and definitely not the process itself, rather a discovery of certain philosophies, actions, and ways of moving design forward which yielded a robust sense of purpose in moving forward.

Fig 061. Onewhero Landscape. (5)

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REPRESENTING GROUND

Fig 062. Catographers Notes. (Ireland, Paul, 2017.) 1. Eisenman and Wigley, “Wobble, the Cat has Nine Lives.” 2. Ibid. 3. Koolhaas, “Navigating Modernization.” 4. Morris, Models: Architecture and the Miniature, 65.

‘Ground’ emerges as a critical point of inquiry within this study as it manifests the very essence of the perhaps architectures main challenge.1 All built architecture must deal with the ground, and without it, unbuilt architecture drifts into lofty territories unconcerned with an archē that exists in the physical world, as pure fantastical speculation. Despite the lack of ‘reality’ in (the majority of) academic work, even these projects tend towards being based on a ‘site’ where the student can learn design skills useful to practice based on the fundamental interaction between a building and its ground. In school we are taught to consider ‘the site’ in the pre-existing sense, to draw upon it and thus produce a design, however “site is the number one thing which is designed,”2 as opposed to the existing condition which relates firmly to the notion of ground. This thesis deals specifically with the relationship between architecture and ground, extrapolating upon it as a vast and rhizomic condition, far more complex than a simple datum plane upon which architecture is to be built. It constitutes of the entirety of forces which converge in a space beyond just physical characteristics.3 However this is a problem in that while we might base our design upon ground we do not actually work with it until the project goes to the site to be built.4 Maintaining virtue to it through the representation necessary to design architecture becomes synonymous to the pursuit of meaningfulness essential to this thesis. The following essay will explore the potential and limitations of mapping to do just that. The cartographic notes which inspired this work depict a rural landscape in Onewhero, located in the north-west hill country of the Waikato. What they represent is a rugged, isolated, and vast landscape which evokes the natural sublime. This mapping information is a large and often unorganised body of data, processed by hand, collecting very specific and often bizarre information

specific to interests of its cartographer. It has architectural implications for the way in which the landscape is simultaneously measured and perceived in the paradigm of technÄ&#x201C;; recognisably transcribing contours, vegetation, fences and trails which are quantifiable; deferring any of the humanistic qualities that would represent the place as opposed to space.

My investigation sets off with a visit to the ground which produces two further maps, one objective and the other subjective. The objective map was produced using a drone to survey the landscape and produce a highly accurate photogrammetric map which is then overlaid to The Cartographerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work. This comparison reveals massive discrepancies between the objective accuracy of the drone and The Cartographer who is trying to be objective despite his nature. It reveals the surprising amount of humanistic knowledge that is suppressed by The Cartographer, which can now be seen to overemphasise particular lays and figures which were of more or less importance to the subjective gaze.

Fig 063. Surveying the Landscape via Drone.

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5. Irwin, Notes Toward a Conditional Art, 70. 6. Rizzi, “The Rebellion of the Invisible.” Fig 064. Wandering the Landscape with The Cartographer.

The second map requires a more speculative and fundamentally conceptual approach. I would describe it as formed through an experiential wander around the landscape, collecting photographs and objects, but more importantly haptic memories of the atmosphere, scent, scale, and lighting which occur on that particular day without drawing anything down. Essentially this map exists within my own mind, based on the phenomenology of the ground and my own metaphysics constituting the matrix through which it is read.5 Note here the specification of this map not being translated into some physical medium, no sketch, model, or otherwise abstract interpretation is given to it as it was not recognised until after the designs where produced, maintaining its position within my own interiority. Without realising at the time, I too had fallen into the trap of our Cartographer, privileging the objective mapping of presence above an archē which was felt through absence, or the invisible ground.6 The tension that ensues between these two maps, the digital and metaphysical, is never fully resolved within the work of this thesis and emerges turbulently at all stages. None the less though, this subjective ‘map’ is finally acknowledged here, and is of the utmost importance in reflecting on the process as a manifestation of clash against the oppression of the objective map which was driving a quantitative response and my internal yearning for something more.

To manifest a map, Peter Downton suggests a theory that both maps and models are more alike than we might first consider.7 In this case of architectural practice in particular he refers to models as “maps of what might be,”8 projecting into the future of possibilities than back to a certain moment in time. In his theory of the model as a map Downton makes certain of the role of maker; the architect or cartographer, as being inseparably linked to the work, which reveals their particular subjective interpretation of the material. Just as in the work of our cartographer whose drawings are found to be distorted from the actual reality, so too models do not adhere to a so called objective reality but rather the epistemic knowledge of the designer-maker and the subject.9 It is best to understand both these mediums as equal part maps of an external world and a map of their maker’s interior self. What we need to understand the map is a language, key, or annotation which gives us knowledge about how the subject is being represented. In the paradigm of technē these things are simple information; scale, colour guides, symbols for trees, and so on which are representational to what is being mapped. However, and more interestingly, it is the aesthetic connotations of the work which reveal the makers own understanding and bring forth the mapping of immeasurable humanistic qualities. This is especially relevant to the three dimensional map where materials are combined to juxtapose certain characteristics. In the case of plaster models, the plaster itself is embodied with epistemic properties which map between object and project. Its weight, uniformity, fragility, plasticity, and so forth are sought to relate between the ground and the representation. The medium of mapping becomes in itself an annotation which speaks to the viewer’s own archaic, humanistic knowledge,10 channelling it into the model as a dialectic tool between the maker and the viewer, the project and the ground. In the case of architecture, and even more so academic architecture, which necessarily deals with representation to convey

7. Downton, “Maps of What Might Be: a Dozen Works on Ideas and Possibilities.” 329. 8. Ibid., 330. 9. Ibid., 331 10. Rizzi, “Rebellion of the Invisible.”

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Fig 065. Map of the Onewhero Landscape based on The Cartographers notes.

the ground. This demands a certain conscious awareness and understanding of media from the maker if they are to present their intentions with virtue;11 especially in a society which has become fixated on slipperiness of the sign, the signifier and the meaning which is signified.

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11. Irwin, Notes Toward a Conditional Art, 78.

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WAIRAMARAMA FARM SITE PLAN | SCALE 1:5000

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Fig 066. Photogrammetric Model.

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IMPRINTING

Fig 067. Conceptual Imprint. (1) Fig 068. Conceptual Imprint. (2) Fig 069. Conceptual Imprint. (3) Fig 070. Conceptual Imprint. (4) 12. Rizzi, “Lonely Architecture: Soul, Matter.”

Abstract imprints are experimented with to explore aesthetics of the contemporary sublime. The dissonance between mark and instrument is captured in the haptic nature of the prints which announce the absence of a presence which embossed them into the paper. There is an incredible delight and enchantment to them, for with every roll of the printing press each outcome, though based of a single matrix bares unexpected results outside of the maker’s intentions. The essential natures of ink, roller, block, and press all manifest upon the surface of the page while the maker has to allow them to be expressed. While in the paradigm of technē we would describe them as being the same – repetitions of a single image,12 it is apparent that this is not so and there is another way we must view them as being similar but of immeasurable differences. The blocks leave behind traces, white noise from their creation in the form of fuzzy hazes where the roller marked the negative space of the block. An event horizon can be observed to appear at the threshold between positive and negative where the paper bends around the raised positive surface before being softly pressed into the negative, unable to capture either state. It appears as a pure negative outline around the solid figures, a void in which no matter can be deposited. Along with variations in the stickiness of ink applied in subtly different motions or pressures, humidity, thicknesses, and so forth, we can not only observe but sense and feel the effects which speak of a rich and archaic medium.

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IMPRINTING

Fig 067. Conceptual Imprint. (1) Fig 068. Conceptual Imprint. (2) Fig 069. Conceptual Imprint. (3) Fig 070. Conceptual Imprint. (4) 12. Rizzi, “Lonely Architecture: Soul, Matter.”

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THE ALCHEMICAL SUBLIME Fig 071. Conceptual Model of the Alchemical Sublime. 13. Rajchman, Philosophical Events: Essays of the ‘80s, 145. 14. Jenner, “Production of Site and Site of Production: Herzog & de Meuron’s Schaulager and Zumthor’s Feldkapelle,” 320. 15. Edbrooke, Geology of the Auckland Area, 18. 16. Delatte, “Lessons from Roman Cement and Concrete,” 109. (109-115) 17. Ibid., 111.

Thinking beyond romantic notions, it is possible to consider alternative ideas of the contemporary sublime based on its application in different disciplines; namely chemistry, though also in Freudian psychology where it refers to the transformation of a repressed socially unacceptable behaviour into actions of its opposite intent.13 In chemistry it is also used to describe a dramatic change in state, namely the movement from solid to gas, or gas to solid, while bypassing the intermediate state of liquid. It has architectural implications when applied to the notion of material transposition, especially in casting concrete, whereby we can observe a state of change between its original and new solid forms, with a resonating but invisible tension which exists in the space between.14 The model beside attempts to capture a sample of this alchemy, taking soil and aggregate from the ground at site, which are mixed with cement and cast to form a potential detail. To further enrich this process, it is possible to gather all the required substances from the ground at Onewhero,15 making use of the chemical properties of limestone to account for the cement. The raw rock is burned in a kiln at 825 Celsius whereby calcium carbonate (limestone’s chemical composition) is transformed into calcium oxide.16 When mixed with water, ash, and aggregate, primitive Roman concrete is made, named for its origins as the first widespread use of concrete in human history.17 The transformation of ground from one solid to another solid captures the notion of sublimation in which substances change into a gaseous, or atmospheric and back, whereby the original solid seems to disappear into the void, only to reappear deposited nearby in a new solid state.

The plastic qualities of concrete allow this effect to be dramatized, with the processed ground cast to have the shape of the designers intentions. Carving voids from the earth which expose surfaces of raw limestone and then juxtaposing the processed concrete alongside it not only allows for a comparative tension between the different conditions, but a heightening of the space between them where the material transposed through alchemy from one side to the other.

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Encounters of Matter & the Immaterial

FIGURE GROUND: GROUND FIGURE Fig 072. Studies of discepancy between the maps x6.

Reading between the cartographers map and the photogrammetric scan, a series of annotations are produced whilst trying to observe and account for the discrepancies between them. The annotations are made without conscious effect of trying to compose a drawing for design, more so as a side note or afterthought but become important when observed in their own right. Cropping the annotations removes the original intention from the drawing but realises a new potential in the kind of figure ground relationship which emerges between the trace and the underlay, one which through juxtaposing contrasting forms heightens our attention to the differences between them. This inspires the making of models which proceed as a tool to explore design, juxtaposing between highly rationalised and legible geometries and the immeasurable ground to draw attention to this very qualitative nature. The figure in some bizarre turn of events becomes a point of anchorage; a plinth or framing device which elevates the ground to a state of heightened awareness.

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Encounters of Matter & the Immaterial

APPARITION AND ABSTRACTION Fig 073. Casting the Design Models. Fig 074. Demoulding the Design Models. Fig 075. Design Models x9 18. Rizzi, “Rebellion of the Invisible.”

The first set of design models advance upon the drawings of Figure Ground: Ground Figure, beginning to conceptualise forms of what an architecture might look like, and to identify locations within the landscape of particular topographical interest. At this stage the models are proposed to be clad in concrete sourced from excavations into the site and imprinted with abstract markings of waves which together developed into the proposal of a Library for the Ground. The models are cast against laminated foamboard which is routed away using CNC technology to provide the contours in negative form which a mix of plaster and ink is poured into. They explore notions of solid, void, and stereotomy; carving matter from the ground and displacing or transmuting it into the architectural figures, whereby it is treated with agency, recognising the indomitable. Their ambiguous and monolithic nature is designed to contrast with the topography, forming rigid boundaries which literally draw the lay of the land into legible edge conditions, such as we might envision a section cut or elevation in architectural drawing. While this does provide some counter development as to designing for a qualitative and immeasurable experience which both notions of linearity and comparison go against, that was not the intention here. Rather, what you can see is an investigation into the potential of form to augment the landscape and enhance visions of the romantic sublime which utilises the very notion of the frame or canvas to change what would really be a terrifying reality into the sublime territory of art, which I believe the models successfully achieve. It is also perhaps more in line with the episteme of architecture which integrates both domains of archē and technē together in harmony.18 The models are then taken to the photocopier where they are

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Encounters of Matter & the Immaterial

APPARITION AND ABSTRACTION Fig 073. Casting the Design Models. Fig 074. Demoulding the Design Models. Fig 075. Design Models x9 18. Rizzi, “Rebellion of the Invisible.”

scanned into two dimensional imagery which offers potential for refinement. Details and textures are enlarged and cropped, making use of the contrasting duality between light and dark emphasises the relationship between black and white, solid and void, figure and ground. In particular the photocopier itself is observed as a device which transfers between object and image. The gradation of light which provides depth in the imagery is an account of the distance between the screen and that which is captured, a particular metaphysical ground which is constitutional to the nature of this particular imagery. It presents the models not as domitable, but rather solid and impenetrable, they can be contemplated but their essential nature is fixed. The photocopiers mechanical and impartial gaze offers nothing new to the models but only helps reveal what is already there. The process heightens the texture of the models and their orthogonal form and in particular captures the condition which occurs at the edge, helping evaluate the models and opening up readings with greater clarity which can be developed upon. It lends itself to processes of replication, whereby aspects from the original are repeated in a substantial developed form, rather than grafting or overlaying together old and new. The high contrast allows for the figure-ground relationship to be easily reversed in the mindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eye and is therefore useful for development and form finding. From the imagery captured here the origins of the Labyrinth and Balneary can be seen to emerge, as well as a particular sensing of the atmosphere that might be encountered when similar orthogonal forms contrast with the ground at a monumental scale in would be the hypothetical built form of the proposals. If anything, it is at this moment that the process comes closest to technÄ&#x201C;, where the models exist in quite a rigid and analytical state. This is necessary for objective refinement however which is then pushed back towards the domain of archÄ&#x201C;, pushing between the two fields and walking the boundary between them.

Fig 076. Abstraction of the Design Models x12.

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CHAPTER VI

MODELS OF EPISTEME

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Models of Episteme

THE RITUAL OF RENATO RIZZI

Fig 077. Plaster Model (Rizzi, 2016) 19. Rossetto, “The Model as Experience. Experience with Models,” 105. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Rizzi, “Rebellion of the Invisible.” 23. Ibid.

The plaster models produced in this thesis are a continuation of exploring into the ideas of Renato Rizzi, who produces similar models to study the ground and “decrease … design arbitrariness.”19 Andrea Rosseto who worked with Rizzi on the production of many of these models, including those of the Gdansk Theatre, describes this theoretical apparatus as the outcome of “deep ontological disciplinary reflection.”20 Rosseto describes in broad strokes the methodology used, whereby individual contours of the landscape are hand-cut from card to form a positive which is then moulded in rubber to form a matrix which will yield the final plaster positive. In his practice, the models are used both as a tool to present the design and to develop it, beginning with the production of many, often very large topographic studies at a variety of scales, whereby “slowly, the authentic figures belonging to the site begin to appear” 21 and guide the design out of the dark and towards its image. While there is much less emphasis on this aspect of studying the topography in my version of the process (primarily because it was not until after the initial set of models that I discovered Rizzi’s work,) a similar language can be seen to unfold in the first set of models which interrogate the relationship between forms of the ground and architecture. Yet the complexity of Rizzi’s models go beyond just topographical studies. They are used primarily as a process which brings the archē into the process.22 He describes the process as being more than just a methodology, which would be the objective steps taken towards realising the work in the paradigm of technē, but a combination of method and ritual.23 He breaks this ritual down into four steps which belong to the archē: vision, gaze, pause, and image.

VISION: Vision is the first step in embarking into the ritual. It is that which occurs before the model is set to task; the image or prospect of the outcome in the designers mind. It is a particular goal or destination which one will try to reach.24 GAZE: Our gaze is a recognition of the subjectivity which lies in the every model. It is that which we see beyond just numerical relations such as scale, rather the images or humanistic qualities which it draws forth from within our interiority; how we see the model with the eyes of our soul, not the eyes of our mind.25 In order to implement this humanistic gaze into his models Rizzi manipulates the vertical scale so that it does not fall in line with an objective account of reality but rather a certain heightened version based upon reality. Other notions which I would attribute to the gaze are choices such as the medium, (plaster in this case) which as

Fig 078. Monoliths. (1) 24. Rizzi, “Rebellion of the Invisible.” 25. Rizzi, “Lonely Architecture: Soul, Matter.”

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26. Irwin, Notes Toward a Conditional Art, 70. 27. Jenner, “Production of Site and Site of Production: Herzog & de Meuron’s Schaulager and Zumthor’s Feldkapelle,” 317. 28. Rizzi, “Rebellion of the Invisible.” 29. Rizzi, “Lonely Architecture: Soul, Matter.” 30. Rizzi, “Rebellion of the Invisible.” 31. Ibid.

discussed in the previous essay on Representing Ground carry specific humanistic values which cannot be measured and speak to the relationship between subject and perception.26 PAUSE: At a certain point you need to stop production and wait- to let the agency of the materials take control. This moment in the ritual is particular to plaster, but similar to the process of imprinting discussed prior and also occurs in other materials which can be moulded.27 Here, there is an element of dissonance between the maker and the material where the author has no control. When you pour the liquid plaster into the mould you can never know exactly how it will behave because material is indomitable. While the method of technē domains as much as is possible, it reaches a certain limit where you need to be willing to stop and remove yourself from the work to allow it to reach its final nature, settling in its particular way, picking up inconsistencies, perhaps bubbling, and so forth.28 IMAGE: In the making of a mould you are creating a matrix which will provide the final shape and need to be able to think constantly between positive and negative, absence and presence. But despite all this work the task of the model is to reach one singular ‘image.’29 When the matter reacts inside the mould and takes agency it heats up – ablaze with new vital energy, then when you remove the model from its mould you see for the first time its image, ‘the appear’ of the model and can begin to contemplate it.30 Sometimes the image is similar to your vision and is a success, sometimes there is an error and you have to discard the model, or perhaps it gives an entirely new perspective. But always there is difference between the vision and the image. That is the nature of the plaster model.31 By creating an authentic image of the ground, plaster models engage with the archē and bring it into practice, allowing the architect to form a rich and meaningful dialogue between themselves, the work, and the ground.

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Models of Episteme

THE METHOD

Fig 079. Modelling in the Digital.

While my own final models are largely based within this ritual, the work produced by this thesis adapts upon Rizzi’s method, exploring the possibility to integrate contemporary digital technology. Designed in the digital they make use of Computer Aided Modelling (CAM) technology to help generate work that would otherwise take significantly longer. In particular 3D printing in PLA is selected for several of its properties. Firstly, the designer is able to set the layer height which appears as contours on the models surface – a useful feature for representing scale, but primarily PLA is useful for its ability to be heated and melted away from the cast positive if necessary. Four types of formwork are utilised throughout the creation of twenty-seven ‘monoliths’ which hold the ground of this undertaking. They are a combination of PLA prints with and without MDF support to account for large orthogonal voids, or where the contours are simply too intricate the print is replaced with a silicone counterpart. These silicon types require printing the contours first of all in positive and undergoing an extra casting step whereby the negative is then poured in liquid silicone. Sometimes where the volume of silicone was excessive and became excessively expensive, only a ‘jacket’ was poured over the positive contours with the bulk of the negative being poured in plaster. However I would not recommend this method again as while it saved costs, it took much longer and the negatives were prone to damage and required recasting several times when various pieces failed or broke.

Topography Negative

(PLA 3D print / Silicone / Plaster with Silicone Jacket)

Height Correction Support (Laster Cut 3mm MDF)

Mold Case and Bracing (Laser Cut 3mm MDF)

Fig 080. Typical mould assembly. Fig 081. Four types of mould.

The MDF formwork which encases the more than twenty-seven moulds also gave way to several problems. Despite the square clamps which held the form rigid, many of the final casts were slightly bowed from where the weight of the plaster pushed out upon the thin MDF and required days of sanding in order to stand flat. The amount of MDF required to make the claps was also far in excess of what I had expected and though initially conceived of as a means to save both time and money instead produced the opposite effect. I would recommend, and for future castings myself, to use 9mm plywood which would also lend an interesting timber grain texture to the result. For the proposals themselves which sat inside the monoliths, similar albeit far more complex processes were undertaken. These models required not only a combination of MDF, PLA, and silicone but also wax pieces which could be completely melted out from beneath complex overhangs. Unfortunately this was only realised through trial and error with many different failed results along the way. To give an example of the complexity needed to create some of the minor details in these schemes, often a negative 3d print was required to make a positive silicone mould which would then yield a negative wax piece to be incorporated into the larger negative mould which would yield the final positive. While this process in its entirety was severely underestimated in all possible ways that I could have imagined, it has given me useful skills in being able to effectively move in thought between positive and negative, while also pushing traditional model making methods into contemporary practice with todays technology.

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Models of Episteme

REFLECTIONS ON MAKING Fig 082. Casting the models. 32. Morris, Models: Architecture and the Miniature, 188. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Rizzi, “Architecture Today: A conversation with Renato Rizzi.” 36. Irwin, Notes Toward a Conditional Art, 70.

For Gilles Deleuze, the production of representational models is a force of real creativity, as opposed to using purely digital models.32 For the later, he describes the detailed and accurate simulation of a building to be a vision of it as possible, real in all aspects except that it lacks physical existence.33 It exemplifies the paradigm of technē, with the movement of these models into the present being a mechanical process requiring little human thought, only the capacity to follow instructions given by the simulation. Representational models however, he deems to have great virtue to the image or idea of the building which both model and the real building strive to bring into the actual.34 Being able to hone and craft this virtue is the professional skill of the architect, whose job is not to produce a building, but an image of a way of being in the world.35 There is a reason for the distinction between ‘building’ and ‘architecture’ in society. It is the builders role to build buildings, while the architect deals with drawing forth the idea of a building from the world. This understanding frees design from an obligation to try and account for the project as if it already existed in images such as the computer render or technically accurate models, be they physical or digital. What becomes more important is how to communicate the idea of the project through a qualitative medium which challenges our rationalized, occularcentric, bias towards how we ‘view,’ or interpret what it is that we desire to present. Abstraction here is the critical focus,36 how do we draw upon the ground and re[image]it. In the construction of the map, model, image, whatever you want to call it; it is not the similarities which exist between the presentation and reality that are important (because they are just measures of technē) but rather the differences between the two which reveal the humanistic knowledge which better translates the idea or archē.

In my work, while there is an immense effort placed in accurately representing the ground datum to a measured scale, materiality is left almost unaddressed and in this state of abstract representation as raw plaster. While this helps to reveal the shape of the design and underlying principle of contrast bringing awareness to the datum of the ground, it also respects the site. The deliberate defamiliarisation between the model and the image of the building exists to account for a distinction between the two forms. While the model is virtuous to the image it is an artefact in its own right, with its own tactility, flaws, repercussions, and characteristics.37 Emphasising this difference allows us to more readily take the model into a discussion of its own properties as aside from the design and critique on the art of representation in and of itself. I importantly say the material of the models is left ‘almost’ unattended, because despite there being no representation being given to the vitality of elements which make up the real ground, the choice of plaster harkens to an important principle within the design. Refusing allusion to materiality in the actual, the virtue of these models is that the essential matter between ground and architecture is to be harmonious. Not only are the proposals to be created from stone displaced from the ground in the form of original blocks and slabs, or a particular concrete fashioned from the soil and stone, cast upon the datum; they are in a chiasmus between the designed-site and the matter from which they are made. That is to say they both produce the site and are productions of it.38 While the minimal spacings which appear when the individual monoliths are assembled are accepted as the result of limitations in the size available to produce the 3D printed topography, I reflect that the larger shadow gaps which were designed into the models where the buildings sit are counterproductive to my intentions. The subtle floating and suspense created by these markings position the buildings as other from the site in this dimension of presentation, going against my efforts to present the

37. Morris, Models: Architecture and the Miniature, 65. 38. Jenner, “Production of Site and Site of Production: Herzog & de Meuron’s Schaulager and Zumthor’s Feldkapelle,” 313.

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Fig 083. Shadowgap.

building, ground, and site as continuous. While the final effect may look more interesting, it is the kind of oversight which appears when we try to stylise without substantial consideration. In hindsight this detail could easily have been skipped or removed from the process. In the act of making, especially obsessive and ambitious making on the scale of these models, perhaps lies an answer to the sensation of nihilism which propels this thesis. Here, making becomes an escape, enchanting and pulling myself towards the actualisation of something I had conceived within my own mind. It is fortunate then that this is an intrinsic part of an architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s career, and that perhaps the practicing life doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t seem all that bleak after all despite all the regulations and forces which shape our work into a mockery of its true potential. It suggests the architect is still to find meaningful inspiration and purpose so long as there is a challenge to be overcome.

CHAPTER VII

CONCLUSION

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Conclusion

TOWARDS A VIRTUE OF ARCHITECTURE Fig 084. Monoliths. (2) 1. Rizzi, “The End of Becoming,” 249. 2. Rajchman, Philosophical Events: Essays of the ‘80s, 131. 3. Coole and Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, 93. 4. Rizzi, “Lonely Architecture: Soul, Matter.” 5. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, 22.

With the objective of finding my own existential meaning as a young designer emerging into practice this thesis turns outward and observes the historical narrative of Western culture which has arrived at a state of epidemic nihilism.1 It seems that through the abandonment of appearances and meaning, the state of nihilism has emerged as a void which offers the potential to be filled with new virtue.2 In architecture we deal with matter and with space. Space is neutral, endless planes which stretch out in every direction; domitable.3 It is a problem for contemporary architecture because we tend to design only the space on paper or in computer simulations which necessitate the measure and quantification of our world at the expense of humanistic values. But we cannot give shape to space without matter which is indomitable, which is finite.4 We must remember that all things have a soul and stop treating matter as passive stuff.5 We can no longer ignore how much history, how much force has made things into their current shape. There is such an important ‘why’ as to the way that things are. An etymological study into the fundamental nature of architecture by Renato Rizzi suggests the potential for the discipline to establish a new ontological perspective for how we view the world, giving prioritization and agency to matter in the form of both ground and material as which is rich with internal symbolic value. Hereby, we can envision how a reconciliation of both archē and technē knowledge can be used to reimagine our view of the world as full of unquantifiable meaning, sensuality, passion, and enchantment. Though the term phenomenology is used infrequently through-

out this thesis, Rizzi’s theory can be understood as a branch of said philosophy, deriving a vitalistic experience which is still fundamentally based within the notion of presence, and the invisible or archaic essence as a kind of present absence. This view emerges as a doctrine of near religious conviction which I have eagerly perused within this thesis for its offering of graspable meaning in the qualitative human experience, which has become systematically repressed by our desire to understand the world through presence and measurability.6 Although it thus reaches into a field of social theory and criticism the implications for this thesis are highly individual, offering reflection and development on my own personal practice as an architect. In doing so, the importance of studying the ground as both a physical and ideological basis of architecture, and the role of physical model making which retains a degree of abstraction are realised to be essential values which support meaning in the work. Understanding the notion of ground emerges as a primary objective of this thesis because it forms the basis of the Western metaphysics of presence which I have come to be critical of. Accepting Mark Wigley’s definition of ground as “that which a thing stands upon,”7 we can understand it to be both a presence and an absence; the literal material or datum below our feet and also the cultural-historical forces which give shape to reality. However, in light of the findings of this thesis, I would like to propose my own definition which refines upon Wigley’s, taking into account both these notions of absence and presence such that ground as I have come to understand it is ‘that which is essential to something.’ In my eager pursuit of meaning in the phenomena of ground I am aware of the limitations of this thesis, which lacks an investigation into alternative theories. In doing so it struggles to acknowledge the potential of other views, and can be better understood as more of a suggestion as to how architectural practice should develop among many other unexplored possibilities. For further investigation into this territory I would begin with a more thor-

6. Rizzi, “Rebellion of the Invisible.” 7. Eisenman and Wigley, “Wobble, the Cat has Nine Lives.”

152 / 153

8. Ibid. 9. Koolhaas, “Countryside.” 10. Morris, Models: Architecture and the Miniature, 71.

ough look into the work of Peter Eisenman, whose views on the ground and metaphysics of presence are only briefly explored in my essay Towards Ground & the Contemporary Sublime. Eisenman takes issue with the phenomenological argument in this sense is that “it fails to put the ground into question.”8 His philosophical standpoint is deeply tied to his post-structuralist roots but nonetheless makes an important point that if we are in the pursuit of a new ontology then it is not our role to simply accept the ground but to put it into question and explore it from both the paradigms of absence and presence, archē and technē. Furthermore, one critique of the work which I am partial to is that it explores contemporary society by ostensibly removing it from the equation and using the isolated rural site as a space on the furthest edge of our urban territory to avoid the responsibility of having to adapt into our current model. While I would be interested to see how the findings of this thesis might be applied within the urban environment, where the complex programming of our city and daily lives are constantly encountered by architecture, the underlying assumption of this criticism is not entirely true. The rural is a perplexing condition full of subverted meanings, emerging in dichotomy with the urban environment as a territory necessary to sustain production and facilitate the possibility of the city as we know it, which we are all too quick to ignore.9 While my work does not deal directly with the urban environment, the rural is very much an extension of contemporary society and equally if not more so shaped by our problematic privileging of that which is present than its urban counterpart. There is also critique to be mentioned in the final models of this thesis which possess a unique tension between their role to both present and develop knowledge. On one hand they are a statement which reflects the outcome of a year’s worth of work and play into a particular fetishism and excitement we have as architects, which surrounds the ‘final’ exhibition model.10 Yet for myself, these models are more like a kind of punctuation; perhaps a full stop that is used to conclude a sentence which is part of a

much larger discussion. The research into my own design methodology will continue to develop beyond this thesis, reflecting on both its successes and failures. While the models celebrate an important moment within my portfolio of work, it is their very refusal to completely define all aspects of the architectural idea which they embody, and the refusal to come to a singular proposition or conclusion which demonstrates the thesis to be both a continual and continued exploration of practice in which a single statement would be both disingenuous and inhibitive at this point As a statement of this thesis, I have found that architectures emerging role is to conceive of the relationship between matter and experience as vital forces which shape the environment and how we go about our lives. By embracing the humanistic qualities which attention to the archÄ&#x201C; offers us, perhaps meaning might be found not in the current proliferation off decadence, commodification, fetishism, and reason, but rather in the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;groundâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; which is essential to our very existence. It is in the acknowledgement of absence that a stage can be set for the exploration of an architecture based on fundamental qualitivity, and thus it is possible to imagine that nihilism might be replaced by an authentic being in the present and human experience. I am not a nihilist.

154 / 155

Chapter VIII

END NOTES

Fig 085. Presentation for critique.

158 / 159

End Notes

CONTENTS OF APPENDICES

160 / 161 174 / 175 176 / 177 178 / 179 180 / 181 182 / 183 184 / 185 194 / 195 206 / 207 208 / 209 216 / 217 220 / 221

......................................................................................Sketchbook ..........................................................................Imprinted Surfaces ......................................................................Conceptual Drawings ..............................................................Preliminary Digital Models ................................................Negatives of Development Models ...........................................Alchemical Sublimation Surface Detail ..........................................................Design Development Models ...............................................................Photocoppier Abstactions .............................................................................Coded Modelling .........................................................The Digital Making of Models ......................................................................Imprinted Floor Plans ................................................................................Texture Studies

176 / 177

Conceptual Model: Digital counterpart Perimitar condition detail: corner. A combination of the previous stratergies occupying the border between two [undefined] conditions

Conceptual Model: Digital counterpart Perimitar condition eliminated from the site. Grid provides organization for potential libraries where subjects intersect in plan

178 / 179

Conceptual Model: Digital counterpart Programme is organized within the sigular cut according to its relation with the ground: Protruding / Submerged / Suspended / Resting lightly

180 / 181

184 / 185

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G1 X109.985 Y65.570 E30.51057 M104 S205 T0 ; set temperature M6 T0 ; wait for temperature to be G1 X110.490 Y65.570 E30.51567 G1 X102.132 Y73.928 E30.63508 reached G1 X102.132 Y74.433 E30.64018 M73 P0 G1 X110.995 Y65.571 E30.76681 G1 Z0.200 F7800.000 G1 X111.500 Y65.571 E30.77191 G1 E-2.00000 F2400.00000 G1 X102.132 Y74.938 E30.90576 M103 ; extruder off G1 X102.132 Y75.443 E30.91086 G1 X0.956 Y-50.788 F7800.000 G1 X112.005 Y65.571 E31.05192 M101 ; extruder on G1 X112.510 Y65.571 E31.05702 G1 E0.00000 F2400.00000 G1 X102.132 Y75.948 E31.20529 G1 F1800 G1 X102.132 Y76.453 E31.21039 G1 X247.364 Y-47.109 E2.48981 G1 X113.014 Y65.571 E31.36588 G1 X249.569 Y-46.679 E2.51251 G1 X113.519 Y65.571 E31.37098 G1 X251.487 Y-45.509 E2.53520 G1 X102.132 Y76.958 E31.53369 G1 X252.878 Y-43.746 E2.55790 G1 X102.132 Y77.463 E31.53879 G1 X253.622 Y-40.978 E2.58686 G1 X114.024 Y65.571 E31.70871 G1 X257.355 Y64.443 E3.65262 G1 X114.529 Y65.571 E31.71381 G1 X257.355 Y214.442 E5.16810 G1 X102.132 Y77.968 E31.89094 G1 X256.958 Y216.652 E5.19079 G1 X102.132 Y78.473 E31.89605 G1 X255.817 Y218.587 E5.21349 G1 X115.034 Y65.571 E32.08040 G1 X254.075 Y220.005 E5.23618 G1 X115.539 Y65.571 E32.08550 G1 X250.998 Y220.799 E5.26828 G1 X102.132 Y78.978 E32.27706 G1 X-50.998 Y220.789 E8.31944 G1 X102.132 Y79.483 E32.28216 G1 X-53.209 Y220.392 E8.34213 G1 X116.044 Y65.571 E32.48094 G1 X-55.144 Y219.251 E8.36483 G1 X116.549 Y65.571 E32.48604 G1 X-56.561 Y217.508 E8.38752 G1 X102.132 Y79.988 E32.69204 G1 X-57.355 Y214.432 E8.41962 G1 X102.132 Y80.493 E32.69714 G1 X-57.355 Y64.438 E9.93505 G1 X117.054 Y65.571 E32.91035 G1 X-57.339 Y63.988 E9.93960 G1 X117.559 Y65.571 E32.91545 G1 X-52.731 Y-1.053 E10.59838 G1 X102.132 Y80.998 E33.13588 G1 X-52.156 Y-3.281 E10.62162 G1 X102.132 Y81.503 E33.14098 G1 X-31.810 Y-47.108 E11.10981 G1 X118.064 Y65.571 E33.36862 G1 X-30.519 Y-48.946 E11.13250 G1 X118.569 Y65.571 E33.37372 G1 X-28.670 Y-50.221 E11.15519 G1 X102.132 Y82.008 E33.60858 G1 X-26.044 Y-50.788 E11.18233 G1 X102.132 Y82.513 E33.61368 G1 X0.926 Y-50.788 E11.45482 G1 X119.074 Y65.571 E33.85575 G1 E9.45482 F2400.00000 G1 X119.579 Y65.571 E33.86085 M103 ; 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extruder on G1 X102.132 Y89.583 E37.73067 G1 F1800 G1 X126.144 Y65.571 E38.07375 G1 X102.132 Y65.848 E29.50866 G1 X126.649 Y65.571 E38.07885 G1 X102.132 Y66.353 E29.51376 G1 X102.132 Y90.088 E38.42915 G1 X102.915 Y65.570 E29.52495 G1 X102.132 Y90.593 E38.43425 G1 X103.420 Y65.570 E29.53005 G1 X127.153 Y65.572 E38.79176 G1 X102.132 Y66.858 E29.54845 G1 X127.658 Y65.572 E38.79686 G1 X102.132 Y67.363 E29.55355 G1 X102.132 Y91.098 E39.16159 G1 X103.925 Y65.570 E29.57917 G1 X102.132 Y91.603 E39.16669 G1 X104.430 Y65.570 E29.58427 G1 X128.163 Y65.572 E39.53863 G1 X102.132 Y67.868 E29.61710 G1 X128.668 Y65.572 E39.54374 G1 X102.132 Y68.373 E29.62220 G1 X102.132 Y92.108 E39.92289 G1 X104.935 Y65.570 E29.66225 G1 X102.132 Y92.613 E39.92800 G1 X105.440 Y65.570 E29.66735 G1 X129.173 Y65.572 E40.31437 G1 X102.132 Y68.878 E29.71461 G1 X129.678 Y65.572 E40.31947 G1 X102.132 Y69.383 E29.71972 G1 X102.132 Y93.118 E40.71306 G1 X105.945 Y65.570 E29.77419 G1 X102.132 Y93.623 E40.71816 G1 X106.450 Y65.570 E29.77929 G1 X130.183 Y65.572 E41.11896 G1 X102.132 Y69.888 E29.84099 G1 X130.688 Y65.572 E41.12407 G1 X102.132 Y70.393 E29.84609 G1 X102.132 Y94.128 E41.53208 G1 X106.955 Y65.570 E29.91500 G1 X102.132 Y94.633 E41.53719 G1 X107.460 Y65.570 E29.92010 G1 X131.193 Y65.572 E41.95242 G1 X102.132 Y70.898 E29.99622 G1 X131.698 Y65.572 E41.95752 G1 X102.132 Y71.403 E30.00132 G1 X102.132 Y95.138 E42.37997 G1 X107.965 Y65.570 E30.08466 G1 X102.132 Y95.643 E42.38507 G1 X108.470 Y65.570 E30.08976 G1 X132.203 Y65.572 E42.81474 G1 X102.132 Y71.908 E30.18031 G1 X132.708 Y65.572 E42.81984 G1 X102.132 Y72.413 E30.18541 G1 X102.132 Y96.148 E43.25672 G1 X108.975 Y65.570 E30.28318 G1 X102.132 Y96.653 E43.26182 G1 X109.480 Y65.570 E30.28828 G1 X133.213 Y65.572 E43.70591 G1 X102.132 Y72.918 E30.39327 G1 X133.718 Y65.572 E43.71101 G1 X102.132 Y73.423 E30.39837

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End Notes

LIST OF FIGURES

002 / 003 002 / 003 002 / 003 018 / 019 020 / 021 026 / 027 028 / 029 034 / 035 036 / 037 042 / 043 044 / 045 046 / 047 048 / 049 050 / 051 054 / 055 054 / 055 054 / 055 054 / 055 056 / 057 056 / 057 056 / 057 056 / 057 058 / 059 058 / 059 062 / 063 062 / 063 064 / 065 066 / 067

Fig 001. Onewhereo Landscape. (1) Fig 002. Onewhereo Landscape. (2) Fig 003. Onewhereo Landscape. (3) Fig 004. The Skyline of Contemporary Architecture. (Koolhaas, fffffffffff 2010.) Fig 005. Fountain. (Duchamp, 1917.) Fig 006. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. (Wilson Hill Academy, 2018) Fig 007. The sky of Gdansk. (Rizzi, 2014.) Fig 008. Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth. ffffffffffff(Turner, 1842.) Fig 009. Pokeno from Above. (Waikato District Council, 2017.) Fig 010. Double Negative. (Heizer, 1969-1970.) Fig 011. Valley Curtain. (Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 1970-1972.) Fig 012. Bruder Klaus Feldkapelle Skylight. (Zumthor, 2007.) Fig 013. Pin River of the Hurricane Sandy Flood Zone. (Lin, 2012.) Fig 014. Riverbed. (Eliason, 2014-2015.) Fig 015. Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. (Eisenman, ffffffffffff2008) Fig 016. Ruakuri Cave Entrance. (Leuschke Group, 2005.) Fig 017. Ceremonial Space. (Insley, 1971.) Fig 018. Cenotaph for Newton. (Boullée, 1784.) Fig 019. Facade of the American Folk Art Museum. (Williams ffffffffffffand Tsien, 2001) Fig 020. Tindaya Cavern (Chillida, 1994.) Fig 021. Vietnam Veterans Memorial. (Lin, 1982.) Fig 022. Schaulager. (Herzog & de Meuron, 2003.) Fig 023. Pyramid. (Lewitt, 1997.) Fig 024. Grotto. (Demand, 2007.) Fig 025. A Library for Ground. Fig 026. Preliminary Sketch. (1) Fig 027. Traces of the ground illuminated by the setting sun. Fig 028. Aerial view of the Library.

Fig 029. Surface of the Wall. Fig 030. The void which engulfs and sustains. Fig 031. Crossing the reflection pool to a hollow carved in the ffffffffffffcliff. Fig 032. Floor plan of the Library Fig 033. Elevation of the Library. Fig 034. Looking outward from the void. Fig 035. Cross section through the void and reflection pond. Fig 036. A Ritual of the Void. Fig 037. Preliminary Sketch. (2) Fig 038. Edge of the void. Fig 039. The absence of a presence and the presence of an ffffffffffffabsence. Fig 040. Spaces for bathing. Fig 041. The anchoring mass. Fig 042. Cross sectional view. Fig 043. Entry into the Balneary. Fig 044. Stage for the performance of ritual. Fig 045. Floor Plan of A Ritual of the Void. Fig 046. Cross Section of A Ritual of the Void. Fig 047. A Journey towards Interiority. Fig 048. Preliminary Sketch. (3) Fig 049. Cross section through the courtyard andinner most ffffffffffffwall. Fig 050. Beginning the descent. Fig 051. External plinth protruding from the ground. Fig 052. Pushing and pulling at the intersection between ffffffffffffground and form. Fig 053. Areal view of the Labyrinth. Fig 054. Development model with alternative core design ffffffffffffcolapsing at its centre. Fig 056. Ruin of the model upon first cast, revealing the decent fffffffffff inward. Fig 057. Floor plan of A Journey Towards Interiority. Fig 058. Cross Section of A Journey Towards Interiority. Fig 059. Onewhero Landscape. (4) Fig 060. Limestone Sample from Onewhero.

066 / 067 068 / 069 068 / 069 070 / 071 072 / 073 074 / 075 074 / 075 076 / 077 076 / 077 078 / 079 080 / 081 080 / 081 082 / 083 082 / 083 084 / 085 084 / 085 086 / 087 088 / 089 090 / 091 090 / 091 092 / 093 094 / 095 094 / 095 096 / 097 096 / 097 098 / 099 098 / 099 100 / 101 102 / 103 108 / 109 110 / 111

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Fig 061. Onewhero Landscape. (5) Fig 062. Catographers Notes (Ireland, Paul, 2017.) Fig 063. Surveying the Landscape via Drone. Fig 064. Wandering the Landscape with The Cartographer. Fig 065. Map of the Onewhero Landscape based on The fffffffffff Cartographers notes. Fig 066. Photogrammetric Model. Fig 067. Conceptual Imprint. (1) Fig 068. Conceptual Imprint. (2) Fig 069. Conceptual Imprint. (3) Fig 070. Conceptual Imprint. (4) Fig 071. Conceptual Model of the Alchemical Sublime. Fig 072. Studies of discepancy between the maps x6. Fig 073. Casting the Design Models. Fig 074. Demoulding the Design Models. Fig 075. Design Models x9 Fig 076. Abstraction of the Design Models x12. Fig 077. Plaster Model (Rizzi, 2016) Fig 078. Monoliths. (1) Fig 079. Modelling in the Digital. Fig 080. Typical mould assembly. Fig 081. Four types of mould. Fig 082. Casting the models. Fig 083. Shadowgap. Fig 084. Monoliths. (2) Fig 085. Presentation for critique.

All images, unless stated otherwise are the property of the author. ÂŠ Callum Ireland, 2019.

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End Notes

BIBLIOGRAPHY BOOKS Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra” In Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaster 3-30. Michigan: Michigan University Press, 1994. Baudrillard, Jean. “On Nihilism” In Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaster 104-107. Michigan: Michigan University Press, 1994. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful with Several Other Additions. New York: P.p. Collier & Sons Company, 1909-14. Campi, Mario. Young Italian Architects /Giovani Architetti Italiani. Bilingual original edition. Bosto: Birkhäuser, 1998. Celant, Carlo Bonini, Germano, Alex Farquharson, and Robert Storr. Thomas Demand: Processo Grottesco / Yellowcake. Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2007. Coole, Dianna and Samantha Frost. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham and London, 2010. Downton, Peter. “Maps of What Might Be: A Dozen Works on Ideas and Possibilities.” In Cartography and Art, 329-344. Cartwright Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2009. Edbrooke, S.W. Geology of the Auckland Area. Lower Hutt, Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences Limmited, 2001. Frichot, Hélène and Stephen Loo. Deleuze and Drachitecture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.

Heizer, Michael and Mark C. Taylor. Michael Heizer : Double Negative. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992. Hicks, Stephen R. C. Explaining Postmodernism : Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Expanded Edition. Ockham’s Razor Publishing, 2011. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1977. Irwin, Robert. Notes Toward a Conditional Art. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011. Lin, Maya. Boundaries. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Morris, Mark. Models : Architecture and the Miniature. West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, 2006. Newman, Barnett. “The Sublime is Now.” In Art in Theory 1900 – 2000 : An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 580-581. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2003. Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Ontario : John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2007. Pawson, Eric. “On the Edge : Making Urban Places.” In Making a New Land, 226-240. Otago: Otago University Press, 2013. Rattenbury, Kester. This is Not Architecture. London: Routledge, 2002. Rajchman, John. Philosophical Events : Essays of the 80’s. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Rizzi, Renato. “Contemplation : The Appearance of the Immutable.” In New Italian Architecture : Italian Landscapes Between Architecture and Photography, 100-103. New York: Abbeville Publishing Group, 2000. Rizzi, Renato. “The End of Becoming.” In Anybody, 249-252. New York : Anyone Corp, 1997. Rossetto, Andrea. “The Model as Experience. Experience with Models.” In Urban Design and Represetation. Cham : Springer, 2017.

Watson, Sally. Building the New Millennium : Architecture at the Start of the 21st Century. London : Phaidon, 2009.

JOURNALS Capro, Mario. “Digital Darwinism : Mass Colaberation, Form Finding, and the Dissolution of Authorship.” Log 26 (2012) : pp. 97105. Delatte, Norbert J. “Lessons from Roman Cement and Concrete.” Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications 127, no. 3 (2001) : pp. 109-115. Jenner, Ross. “Production of Site and Site of Production : Herzog & de Meuron’s Schaulager and Zumthor’s Feldkapelle.” Architectural Research Quarterly 20, no 4 (2016) : pp. 313-323 King, Anthony. “Baudrillard’s Nihilism and the End of Theory.” Telos 112 (1988) : pp. 89-106. Koolhaas, Rem. “Junkspace.” October 100, (2002) : pp. 175-190. Nesbitt, Kate. “The Sublime and Modern Architecture : Unmasking (An Aesthetic of) Abstraction.” New Literary History 26 no.1 (1995) pp. 95-110. Macklin, S.R, C Merino, P Varley, and P Varona. “The Investigation and Design for a Unique Architectural Space – The Chillisa Cavern, Mount Tindaya, Fuerteventura.” Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology incorporating Trenchless Technology Research 31 (2012) : pp. 9-19.

LECTURES Brown, Deidre. “Meeting Places and Spaces” Lecture presented at University of Auckland ARCHHTC 304, University of Auckland, March 16, 2016. Eisenman, Peter, and Mark Wigley. “Wobble: The Cat Has Nine Lives.” Lecture presented at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, University of Colombia, September 12, 2012, accessed 26 June, 2019. https://www.youtube.

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com/watch?v=Gu4-ErX6hDA&t=2588s Koolhaas, Rem. “Countryside.” Lecture presented at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, October 30, 2015. Accessed 11 June, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shVxB6wRHo0&t=2138s Koolhaas, Rem. “Navigating Modernization.” Lecture presented at American University Beirut, May 17, 2010. Accessed 11 June, 2019. https://oma.eu/lectures/navigating-modernization Rizzi, Renato. “Architecture of Deconstruction.” Lecture presented at University of Belgrade Faculty of Architecture, April 2, 2014. Rizzi, Renato. “Lonely Architecture: Soul, Matter.” Lecture presented at University of Waterloo School of Architecture, November 17, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMRHoPvUeSU&t=2786s Rizzi, Renato. “The Rebellion of the Invisible.” Lecture presented at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, 11 May, 2016. https://vimeo.com/190553847

FILMS Kino, Carol, and Erik Olsen. “Maya Lin’s ‘Wave Field’.” 2008; New York Times. Accessed June 14, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/ video/arts/design/1194832296918/maya-lin-s-wave-field.html?searchResultPosition=4 Tatge, Catherine, dir. “Identity.” 2001; Art21, accessed June 14, 2019. https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/ s1/identity/ Rosefeldt, Julian, dir. “Manifesto.” 2015; Julian Rosefeldt, accessed June 11, 2019. https://www.julianrosefeldt.com/filmand-video-works/manifesto-_2014-2015/

INTERVIEWS Eliason, Olafur. “Oalfur Eliasson Interview: A Riverbed Inside the Museum.” By Marc-Christoph Wagner. Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Accessed June 26, 2019. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLUX3AI2Uic Lin, Maya. “Disappearing Bodies of Warer” By Ian Forster. Art21 : Extended Play Series. Accessed June 14, 2019. https://art21. org/watch/extended-play/maya-lin-disappearing-bodies-of-water-short/ Lin, Maya. “New York” By Ian Forster. Art21 : Extended Play Series. Accessed June 14, 2019. https://art21.org/watch/extended-play/maya-lin-new-york-short/ Rizzi, Renato. “Architecture Today. A Conversation with Renato Rizzi.” By Ruxandra Grigoras. Share-Architects.com, Accessed April 10, 2019. https://share-architects.com/architecture-today-a-conversation-with-renato-rizzi-for-share-forum-bucharest-2017/

WEBPAGES Christo and Jeanne-Claude. “Valley Curtain.” Christo and Jeanne Claudde. Accessed 16 June, 2019. https://christojeanneclaude. net/projects/valley-curtain Dictionary.com. “Sublime.” Accessed 16 June, 2019 https://www. dictionary.com/browse/sublime Eisenman, Peter. “Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.” Accessed 14 June, 2019. https://eisenmanarchitects.com/ Berlin-Memorial-to-the-Murdered-Jews-of-Europe-2005 Insley, Will. “Ceremonial Space.” Museum of Modern Art. Accessed 16 June, 2019. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2669 Leuschke Group Architects. “Ruakuri Cave.” Accessed 14 June, 2019. https://leuschke.co.nz/en/commercial/ruakuri-cave Pallister, James. “Sacred Stories - Bruder Klaus Field Chapel.” Accessed 16 June, 2019. https://au.phaidon.com/agenda/archi-

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tecture/articles/2015/february/04/sacred-stories-bruder-klausfield-chapel/ Sol Lewitt, “Pyramid (Keystone NZ).” Gibbs Farm. Accessed 14 June, 2019. http://www.gibbsfarm.org.nz/lewitt.php Tsien, Billie and Tod Williams. “American Folk Art Museum.” Archdaily. Accessed 14 June, 2019. Waikato District Council, “The District’s Built Environment.” Accessed 14 June, 2019. https://www.waikatodistrict.govt.nz/ news/media-releases/article/2017/11/06/the-district-s-built-environment Wilson Hill Academy, “Plato’s Cave Drawings.” https://www.wilsonhillacademy.com/2018/03/platos-cave-drawings/ Accessed 14 June, 2019. OTHER Ireland, Paul. The Rockery. 2017. Notes in pen and pencil on drafting paper.

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