ARCI 411_Atmosphere through Material Decay

ATMOSPHERE through

Material Decay

EXTRACTING TERRITORIES Grant Douglas ARCI 411: Design as Research

Material Decay The city’s scars are stimuli for the mind. They raise questions, about memories and imaginations of a foregone past, and of potential futures. They visualize the passage of time and the inevitability of collapse. On a smaller level, they show traces of faded lives, moved communities and shrunken economies. The voids provide space for the observer to interpret them as he likes, to fill them with imaginations and meanings.

- Mark Minkjan -

Inevitable Decay

Ghuznee Street - Wellington - New Zealand

Through initial site analysis, the spaces within the Ghuznee Street car park revealed through its decay of materiality a certain history, a past which, only through the scars that are left behind can we truly imagine a former life. Imprints within the buildings tissue, rotting timber, scars from knocks and scratches, the contact of machinery, all spark images and performances from the past through this inevitable decay that is present everywhere in the built environment.

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Detail in the Decay

Details of material decay throughout the site

Imperfections in the urban environment stimulate the mind into a dance of imagination, they tell a story about the former past, and the present future. Decay has a temporal dimension that does not freeze a building into a particular time or moment, but holds it in a state of flux, provoking the bodies that interact with it physically and psychologically through its perceptive qualities.

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Exploration into the Existing Site Photography revealed qualities about the site in both distant and close-up scales. By layering over these photographs, details are exaggerated and a narrative of the present site conditions and the imagined spaces within the decay is revealed.

Technical drawings, a process of formulating the design before construction are a depiction of what could have been, while the uncertainty of sketches and decayed images contribute to the composition of the imagined atmosphere. As an whole, the image is somewhat incomplete, it does not pursue an answer, but entices questions of the unfinished, the unseen.

The “scar or imprint... it retains and invokes memory: the memory of the pen which crossed the paper, the pencil which dug into it; the movement of the body which guided the instrument.�1

1. Justine Clark. Drawing on Architecture: Gender, Subjectivity, Surface. 1997. p101

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Exploration into the Existing Site The mind is transposed into the site, through the decay and deconstruction that has gone before us.

As we experience the decaying body of the built environment, we project onto it a perceived past that, only through the decay of such spaces, can we truly imagine the history behind it. Decay preserves the building by creating an impression in the mind of an unknown space.

Just as the action of conceptualising in the mind is a performance, the drawing is analogous to that through its creation. The act of drawing responds to the pictures that are built up in the imagination, following lines into the paper guided by the decay and the atmosphere of the spaces created by it.

Decay forms this tension between the known material qualities, and the unknown immaterial subjectivities. A dichotomy lies between them, which creates the atmosphere of material decay.

Experimentation through Modeling Through the extraction of the decaying qualities of the site, and the gestures involved in drawing, the investigations of material decay progressed into modeling.

This form of representation sought to spatialise the images and spaces that were invoked in the mind.

By extracting qualities from the site, certain aspects that are revealed through the decay of the materiality and the forms that are present are extracted and communicated through card modeling.

The city is arranged and created through a narrative that involves the past, the present and the future. The models act as an experiment, towards the question of decay, leaving behind each time a scar of the past.

Formation

Manipulation and adaptation of steps and staircases. The body is a master in decay. As the body decays, each wrinkle, each scar holds a memory of a distant past yet to be told.

The body creates decay, and informs it.

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Manipulation

The way in which the cuts are choreographed are dictated by the way in which the knife slices the cardboard, initiated from the strong forms and areas of decay around the site.

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Through simple manipulation of the elements, scratches are made, the stroke of the pencil is imagined, and the scars created illustrate only in the mind of the observer, a seduction into the model and the drawing.

The body becomes central in the preservation of the past, using decay as a medium towards imagination.

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Iteration Two As the masking tape, a vital structural element is erased, a scar is created that speaks about its former arrangement.

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Iteration Three The model is repositioned, cut, erased, indented and represented according to its relationship with its previous self. The forms are not indicative of the actual site, the form, but are forms themselves, manifestations of the formless atmosphere of material decay.

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Iteration Four

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Perception through Decay

After all of the iterations of the model, imprints of its former self have been preserved through the scratches and marks that are left behind. We can no longer accurately visualise the initial form, however, through imagination and our perception, we can build within our mind a history of the spaces, the formless qualities representative of decay.

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Extracting Territories Experiment Two

Initial experiments in modeling revealed a process of decay, which, through iterations with the modeling material , created scars, imprints and marks that all linked together to allow for immaterial qualities to appear.

Experiment two starts to interpret the decay through the medium of drawings and layering techniques.

It de-materialises the form that was constructed by withdrawing what was form, and expressing what is formless.

The drawings are seen as an avenue into the expression of immaterial thought, extracting the atmosphere from material decay.

Model 1

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Extracting Territories Experiment Two

The body is a crucial part of decay. As we rub onto things we scratch surfaces, we create dust, bang objects against walls, and cause organised and accidental demolition.

As layers are drawn, marks are made which creates a description of the way the drawing is conceived; through the body.

The drawing itself is analogous to the construction, as marks and erasures are created, form is manipulated. The drawing starts to decay into an image of heightened sensuality, no longer a depiction of the formlessness of the form, but a space of its own, with its own atmosphere.

Model 2

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Extracting Territories Experiment Two

The final iteration of the model starts creating internal spaces, places that could be inhabited once the body was project into it through the creation of place in the mind.

Lines are continuous, a process that extends and exaggerates the material aspects into an immaterial thought, an imaginative space or form, formless of any material qualities.

Model 3

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In between Form & Formless To arrive at this destination, experiments in the process of decay, and the in-between state of the material and the immaterial needed to be addressed to create atmosphere.

Atmosphere in this sense, is created from the in between state, the dichotomy of material and the immaterial, through the temporal process of decay, fabricating in the mind a heightened sense of the preexistence of that space, the people involved, and its haptic qualities.

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Form & Formless Inside & Outside Material & Immaterial Form cannot support itself, architecture as a dichotomy of the form & formless, the inside & outside, the material & the immaterial, has a binding relationship that depend upon one another to coexist and be heard. It is this threshold of the in-between that creates the distinction, the division of the binary functions that provides that ambiguity, the tension creating a heightened sense of space, atmosphere.

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Atmosphere through Material Decay The concept of decay, a phenomenon that deteriorates matter is typically seen within architecture as a diminishing process, that haunts buildings, creating derelict and unwanted spaces. However, through analysis and experimentation of both the idea of decay and its processes, decay creates not a diminishing sense of the present and future, but generates an atmosphere from the immaterial spaces within architecture.

Decay is an inevitable process that renders in every architectural structure, from the moment it is created. It is an unavoidable process; it can be denied, but never forgotten.

As a temporal force, decay creates a heightened sensuality, which brings added meaning and imaginative thought.

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