Object-Orientated Ontology and Architectural Darkness Simon Weir

Object-Oriented Ontology and Architectural Darkness

Simon Weir Lecturer in Architecture: Design Philosophy

The Lotus Conceals At the southern end of Tokyo’s Ueno Park is Shinobazu Lotus Pond, 55 000m2 of lotus flowers. The lotuses completely cover the pond, you don’t see any water, only their light pink flowers set against wide, dark green leaves. It is uncanny to come to a pond and not see water. You imagine it’s there, concealed beneath the surface. Without the surface reflections that you always see in bodies of water, at night it is an unusually dark object. In the metropolis’ shining night, a pool of genuine darkness.

The Darkest Gallery At the northern end of Ueno Park is another remarkably dark space, Yoshio Taniguchi’s 1999 Gallery of Hōryūji Treasures. Turning off the road, the walkway is nestled into the shrubbery, beneath a closed canopy. The path ends at a square pond and you pause in the shade of the trees to look at the grey sunlit facade reflected in still water. The foyer is a long, tall rectangle, with a grey stone floor, and glazed on three facades, the fourth long northern wall is pale yellow-brown stone, sunlit near the translucent ceiling. You exit the foyer by turning right into an opening in the stone wall, into a small room clad in plywood. Here the mood is arrestingly different, like a fire in the cave on the side of a snowy mountain. The eastern wall of this small space holds a pair of glass doors. Pause and you will notice the glass doors are almost mirrors, and you see yourself. This moment of self-reflection can be rather startling. It is not merely that there is a glass door reflecting the light, but the reflected image is unusually sharp as the interior beyond is unusually dark.

Here you enter the short end of a long narrow room. At the far end a staircase leading upwards to a skylight high above. Cabinets display ancient masks, but you have to wait for your eyes to adjust to the darkness to see the details. The wall opposite the second cabinet opens into an even darker room, our destination.

This dark exhibition hall hosts dozens of small, eighth century bronze Buddhist statues from the Hōryūji Temple in the former Japanese capital of Nara.1 The room

1 Hiroko McDermott, “The Hōryūji Treasures and Early Meiji Cultural Policy.” Monumenta nipponica 61.3 (2006): 339–374. 2 Graham Harman, “The Third Table,” Documenta (13): 100 Notes - 100 Thoughts/100 Notizen - 100 Gedanken, (Hatje Cantz; Bilingual edition, August 31, 2012), 4. 3 Timothy Morton. Dark Ecology: for a Logic of Future Coexistence. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 4 Simon Weir, “Object Oriented Ontology and the Challenge of the Corinthian Capital” Make Sense 2020, (Harvest, Sydney, 2020), 114-116; Simon Weir and Graham Harman, “Architecture and Object-Oriented Ontology,” Architecture Philosophy, 6(1), 2021.

is very dark, but in time you adjust. The walls are lustrous, almost luminous, clad in roughly polished copper whose blurred reflections lend the room an indistinct visual boundary. The copper imparts a unique warm hue, like a great fire burning brightly at a great distance. And like being caught in bushfire smoke, the ceiling is absent; there’s just darkness up there.

Photography is unable to convey the optical experience. Like the darkness of the Lotus Pond, there is a distinctly visual yet non-representational quality to this wondrous room. You won’t find photographs of this space on the internet. The Gallery of Hōryūji Treasures, doesn’t have a Wikipedia nor an Archdaily entry. There is a peaceful darkness here that eyes but not cameras enjoy.

Mining object-oriented ontology for architectural precepts Object-oriented ontology (OOO) is an infra-realist ontology, where reality resides beneath experience. The notion that a hidden reality underlies our experience is the core of many myths and religions: the Tao cannot be named, the holy spirit cannot be perceived, Medusa’s face can only be seen in reflections; one way or another, reality is veiled. Art can reflect this veiling with actual veils, but the ontological veil cannot be removed.

Graham Harman’s 'third table' essay, written for the 2012 Documenta catalogue, sketched out OOO’s schema for extracting knowledge from objects: undermining and overmining.2 In undermining, objects are reduced to their origins and/or parts, eg. ethanol is C2H5OH. In overmining, objects are reduced to their purposes and/or effects, eg., ethanol gets you drunk. While both statements are true, the philosophical catch is when these statements are taken literally and an ontology is implied. It is not exactly true that ethanol is C2H5OH, or that ethanol is for intoxication, however much this may be true for us. So, Harman’s three tables are the undermined table, the overmined table, and the table that is independent of any human perception, the third table that is withheld, hidden, dark.

Harman’s three tables also lays out of the basic formula of infra-realism: the external object, its observer, and the image or notion of the object generated by the observer. These three objects of perception in OOO are real object - sensual object - real object. During perception and causal interactions, a real object contacts only an abstraction, a fragment of the other real object. The sensual object acts as a conveyance for one object’s qualities to contact the other object, but also effectively limits and suppress the objects’ qualities involved in the interaction; just as a door connects two rooms it also places a limit on the objects that can pass between them. OOO thereby suggests a rethinking of connections and passageways as spaces of understated complexity, as objects of agency.

An architectural example of this ontological idea is the light and sound lock separating a gallery’s inner sanctum, or a theatre’s performance space, from the brighter, noisier foyer. We usually describe the qualities of an architectural space as if the qualities are in the object, and materials add qualities, but the function of the light and sound lock is to remove qualities, to absorb and eliminate the visual, acoustic and thermal qualities of the adjoining spaces. They are the black holes of galleries and theatres. Usually they’re designed to be ignored, passed through without comment, the pause before the main event. Cinemas and theatres often have light and sound locks that are dark in colour with absorbent surfaces. Taniguchi’s solution is rather unique, making the visitor pause and notice their own image. Like stepping from a busy street into the antechamber of a cathedral, the quietness of a stone room, and its echoic quality, draw one’s attention to one’s own noisiness, and elicits a cautious quietude. Not only are these spaces inherently quiet, they also quieten. OOO helps us recognise that the point of contact between two objects is not a point, but an object to be designed.

Towards an ontography of darkness The Lotus Pond, a reprieve from the onslaught of city light, is a body of water hidden by spectacular natural display, hosting a dark ecology.3 The Gallery of Hōryūji Treasures deploys darkness to allow the ceiling, walls, and the outside world, to withdraw. Darkness is ontographic of infra-realism’s withdrawal of reality and the persistence of mystery. Architecturally, this withdrawal is also manifest in the separation of elements, with what I have called occasionalist tectonics. 4 Lotuses separate water from sky, light and sound locks separate foyer from sanctuary. They are connectors and the suppressors of qualities, they sever relations, allowing each architectural space to have its own haecceity, its unique uniqueness. Only when separated from its milieu does the cloud assume an identity separate from its oceanic parent. Only when the sanctuary is separated from the ordinary can it accept its sacred task as host of a veiled reality. So a sanctuary like a gallery, a theatre, or a temple, is a veil pretending to veil, the ghost of a ghost, but nonetheless, a ghost that whispers.

EXHIBITIONS, SYMPOSIUMS AND INTENSIVES

21 January – 19 February 2021 Julia Davis and Lisa Jones in collaboration. Curation by Claire Taylor.

‘Thresholds’ invites visitors to reimagine layers of the built environment under Sydney’s CBD and contemplate the passing of time in both human and geological time-scales. The immersive installation draws the viewer into an enveloping darkness from which details of tunnels and chambers beneath the city are glimpsed in torchlight. The imagery reveals ethereal, liminal spaces that exist just beyond the brightly-lit, bustling, familiar city. Experientially, the installation gives visitors an opportunity to slow down, reflect and be immersed in a unique subterranean landscape where there is a very different sense of time. The installation and photographs reveal material histories of orphaned infrastructure sites. Once vital to the evolving city, successively repurposed and now abandoned, these sites appear in a state of suspended animation, as if waiting for the next phase of redevelopment. This is a layer of the city being actively reclaimed by the city’s remnant ecology, waterways and latent geology. The large-scale drawings in the exhibition were created by submerging sheets of paper in the flooded chambers and then fixing the sediments that were deposited on them. They register the actions of the artists and capture the materiality of a particular time and place in the underground chambers: accretions of rock dust, city pollution, and traces of thousands of journeys in the particulate brake dust and dirt from the trains passing through adjacent live tunnels.

HyperSext City

4 March – 9 April 2021 An exhibition by XYX Lab

Extending Monash University XYX Lab’s ongoing local and international applied research, ‘HyperSext City’ draws attention to the experiences of women, girls and LGBTQI+ communities by representing data and intersectional narratives of gender that affect how places are accessed and occupied. By drawing together the polemics of inclusion/exclusion in urban spaces, the exhibition invites the audience/participant to contribute their own solutions and suggestions for possible futures that might mitigate spatial inequality. The exhibition is a framework that is both a receptacle and a host for conversations about, and actions for, under-represented communities. The accumulative interventions and events provide multiple ways for audiences to contribute their lived experience and/or to develop understanding and empathy. Making gender data visible, and generating new narratives based on evidencebased research and lived experience are important tools in developing gender-sensitive approaches to design, architecture and urbanism. This exhibition reveals existing data sources globally and locally to spectacular effect. Through the multi-modal tools of crowd-sourcing, co-creation and material making, ‘HyperSext City’ surfaces, activates and amplifies the voices and experiences of a diverse range of people who are not often heard.

Exhibitions, Symposiums and Intensives The Architecture of Multispecies Cohabitation

22 April – 5 June 2021 An exhibition by Feral Partnerships. Beth Fisher Levine, Matthew Darmour-Paul, James Powell, Enrico Brondelli di Brondello and Francesca Rausa.

Carp as kitchen helpers. Shadehouses designed to host guests amidst ferns. Farmhouses where the cattle live downstairs. Decorative dovecotes for the harvest of nutrient-rich fertilisers. Enormous cylindrical towers for human remains to be devoured by vultures... ‘The Architecture of Multispecies Cohabitation’ presents ongoing research by Feral Partnerships of surprising and hopeful stories of human and other-than-human interdependence, facilitated by the architectures that host them. In the context of anthropogenic global warming and the accelerating extinction of species, the exhibition draws from historical precedents in order to inspire new possibilities for building worlds with the other-than-human in mind. Architects, developers and planners find themselves ever more at the intersection of contested natures. The politics of crisis and the (many) anthropocene(s) have intensified the responsibilities of design and planning towards mitigating climate change and protecting biodiversity. ‘The Architecture of Multispecies Cohabitation’ offers a platform for difficult discussions around the many nonhuman lives that make human life possible, and what is at stake in the continued production of spatial separation between species, while piecing together an alternative and joyful constellation of meaningful references for designers.

Emergence

17 June – 31 July 2021 A constellation of research fragments from the Byera Hadley Travelling Scholarship Anna Ewald-Rice, Doug Hamersley, Byron Kinnaird, Tiffany Liew and Eleanor Peres.

‘Emergence’ brings together decades of architectural research from the Byera Hadley Travelling Scholarship in an interactive exhibition and a series of public talks. A collection of 35 diverse research projects have been unveiled from print and digital archives and curated together for the first time in an engaging physical and digital constellation of ideas. Established in 1951, the scholarship is based on the belief that travel is key to architects, students and graduates developing new architectural ideas, staying connected with the global community and continuing a strong discourse throughout the architectural profession. What has developed is an exhibition of important knowledge and ideas, which provides a space to reflect, converse and plan for new journeys. ‘Emergence’ hopes to provide a physical forum and digital resource to facilitate these conversations, foster intrigue in architectural research and allow audiences to travel to other communities at this time of restricted movement. For many recipients, the Byera Hadley Travelling Scholarship is just the beginning of a life-long journey of developing and sharing the ideas first formed by their research projects. ‘Emergence’ aims to be a catalyst itself, raising the profile of this important work, accommodating previously undiscovered connections and fostering curiosity in new architectural research.

Rothwell Research Studio

Coordinator Catherine Lassen

Rothwell Co-Chairs Anne Lacaton Jean-Phillipe Vassal

Tutors Peter John Cantrill Catherine Lassen

External contributors and guest critics Hannes Frykholm, Rothwell Postdoctoral Associate Tao Gofers, architect David Shoebridge, NSW Greens MP Philip Thalis, architect + City of Sydney Councillor This intensive design workshop - the first in a series of three annual Master of Architecture Rothwell Studio research electives – invited students to closely consider a selected social and affordable housing context. Participants critically evaluated architectural and urban strategies to identify and catalogue design tactics for appropriation in contemporary Sydney. The workshop built on the Rothwell Symposium (27-29.04.2021) to examine issues associated with the program led by the inaugural Rothwell co-chairs and 2021 Pritzker Prize Laureates, French architects Anne Lacaton and Jean Philippe Vassal. Their nominated agenda “Living well in the big city” integrated themes echoed in their Pritzker Prize jury citation: ‘By prioritising the enrichment of human life through a lens of generosity and freedom of use … this benefits the individual socially, ecologically and economically, aiding the evolution of a city.’ In this course, students extended questions raised in the symposium to critically research and precisely document aspects of a nominated social housing project in Sydney. Designed by architect Tao Gofers in 1978-79 and completed in 1980, former public housing apartment building Sirius in the Rocks was controversially sold in 2019 for private redevelopment. Selected for its architectural, urban and social ambitions, together with a focus on individual inhabitants and qualities that frame an imagined life, the building has been associated with architectural ‘Brutalism,’ a development within late modernism. Previously framed as brutal and ‘ugly’ public housing, from June 2021 private ‘luxury’ 1-bedroom apartments in the Sirius building were available from a cost of $1.7 million. One penthouse was sold for a reported $35 million. Students considered this transformation from ugly social housing block to luxury apartment complex, to examine what we might learn from Sirius via themes such as housing quality, ecology, economy, affordability and social impact. The studio asked: What is luxury? Beauty? Generosity in architecture? Using archival and historical research, data collection, numerical analysis, collage techniques together with measured architectural drawings, students worked in groups to develop close readings of Sirius. These materials helped focus historical, cultural, economic and disciplinary issues, investigating housing that can provide, ‘luxury for everyone’.

the Sirius situation Thomas Chen, Sophie Corr, Mackenzie Nix, Miriam Osburn

STUDENT EXCELLENCE

Postgraduate Prizes and Scholarships

Bates Smart Prize for Architectural Design Celine Noviany

Bluescope Lysaght Prize in Architectural Design Tze Kang Wesley Fong

Conrad Gargett Prize Selina Wang

Cox Architecture Scholarship Angela Xu

Ethel M Chettle Prize in Architecture Matthew Asimakis Blake Davis Jackson Birrell Alvin Hui James Hartley Bibby Memorial Prize in Architectural Design Miriam Osburn Jun Hyung Hwang

Ruskin Rowe Prize for Architecture Nicholas Bucci

Sir John Sulman Prize in Architectural Design Nicholas Bucci

Sunlord Perpetual Prize in Architectural Design James Wen Yu Zhou Feng

George McRae Prize in Architectural Construction Alvin Hui

Henry J Cowan Prize in Architectural Science Connor Tan Emily Flanagan

Undergraduate Prizes and Scholarships

CHL Turner Memorial Prize in Architectural Design William Clarke

Henry J Cowan Prize in Architectural Science Yinuo Chen Kevin Luu

Arthur Baldwinson Memorial Scholarship in Architectural History Marcus Kalaf

Burnham Prize in Urban Planning and Architecture Kaveen Wickremaratchy

Elizabeth Munro Prize in Architecture Anton Luc Bucich

Leslie Wilkinson Prize in Architectural History and Theory Dylan Harry Liren Froude

Australian Institute of Architects NSW Chapter Awards

Brian Patrick Keirnan Prize Ryan Dingle

Commendation – Brian Patrick Keirnan Prize Lucy Sharman

2021 MADE by the Opera House Scholarship

Rhys Grant Arissara Reed

The Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning would like to thank the following sponsors for their generosity in making the 2021 Graduate Exhibition possible.

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