| Architectural
Voices Presented
by the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Architecture+Philosophy
research group, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University. New textures of voice are currently being explored in architectural history, theory, criticism and design. A morning PhD seminar hosted between the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL and the Architecture+Philosophy research group, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, followed by an evening public lecture at UCL by Dr Hélène Frichot (RMIT) and Prof Stephen Loo (University of Tasmania), will examine various modes of writing which cross the critical and the creative, the subjective and the objective, adopting different positionalities to construct new forms of architectural knowledge. PhD
seminar: Featuring work by Ema Cheatle, Julieanna Preston, Michael Spooner, and Popi Iacovou. Hosted by Prof Jane Rendell (Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL) and Dr Hélène Frichot (RMIT).
This PhD seminar hosted by Prof Jane Rendell (Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL) and Dr Hélène Frichot (RMIT) will include presentations by four PhD candidates: Sweeping
and Mouthing Dust: Reconstructing overlooked aspects of the Maison
de Verre Entitled ‘Part-architecture:
the Maison de Verre through the Large Glass’, my PhD
proposes analytic and fictional methods of writing about the spaces
in and between these built forms. Investigating imagined and real
historical intersections between protagonists and events in 1935,
I give an alternative spatial reading of female inhabitation in
Paris between the wars. There are two methodical strands. The Sweeping
of the title above is a material method which assembles ‘evidence’.
Found snippets of ‘stories’, socio-historic ‘facts’
and archive material are rewritten as a text of fiction and analytic
commentary. 1930s medical tools and devices associated with female
sexual health, and dust, (collected by methodically sweeping the
building), inform a visual practice of drawn and constructed projects.
The Mouthing is a method which recreates short spoken-word narratives
from the fictions. This presentation will present excerpts of these
methods: with voice recordings laid over a sequence of still images
of text and dust/instrument artefacts.
This presentation
develops a key proposition in
Commissioned in 1990 by RMIT University, and designed by the Australian Architects Edmond and Corrigan, Building Eight derives much of its impulse from is difficult mode of citation. In my PhD by project A Clinic for the Exhausted, an architectural imaginary emerges that conflates Building Eight with an ocean-liner. The plausibility of this proposition is discovered in a letter addressed to Peter Corrigan from the architect Howard Raggatt. Raggatt, who admits in the letter of the influence of alcohol, offers, on taking note of Building Eight’s illuminated interior, the image of Building Eight as it “began to lift off as though released from its anchors, or set free from its foundations, now departing like a P&O liner.” (1996) A Clinic
for the Exhausted draws on the protean transfiguration of the
detritus on the horizon, the remains of all that is left from the
sudden collision of Building Eight and ocean-liner, establishing
Raggatt’s letter as a sort-of-instruction and his vision as
a sort-of-evidence of an intoxicating malady that in turn keeps
this narrative afloat. The presentation will continue across the
unfettered contours of Raggatt’s inebriation and tangle up
everything and everyone in the same improvisation, bearing you aloft
only to throw you back into the tumult of that night. It is a voice
compelled to turn the audience out onto the street as giddy conspirators
in an unfathomable act. Performing
Casa Malaparte My research focuses on the interrelations between performance and architecture through an investigation of a building; the Casa Malaparte, the house of the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte (1898-1957). Malaparte stated many times that he considered his house the best portrait of himself and he called the Casa Malaparte ‘A House Like Me’. Driven by this statement and by findings through my stay at the house, the Casa Malaparte is interpreted as an autobiographical performance. The thesis asks how architecture performs autobiography and aims at opening up a discourse where architecture is understood as a performative act, both in its making as well as in its inhabitation. The thesis follows
a twofold method: text and design. The writing aims at reflecting
the telling organisation of the house whereas the design aims at
bringing the writing of my own filmic voice.
C’est
la voix: A methodology of exhaustion and some notes on stupidity
and boredom In The Exhausted, Gilles Deleuze’s essay on the playwright Samuel Beckett, the philosopher points out that exhaustion is not just about being tired. He remarks that there are at least four ways of exhausting the possible, and we would add that this list should not be taken as exhaustive. We will argue that the four approaches describe a methodology of exhaustion that can be usefully applied to critical creative practice. These approaches include: 1) the formation of exhaustive series; 2) the drying up or exhausting of the flow of voices; 3) the extenuation of the potentialities of space; 4) the dissipation of the power of the image; a list to which we would add a further item, and that is the breakdown of the organic body. To Deleuze, the exhausted person renounces all need, preference, goal or signification and is therefore “sufficiently disinterested” and we would add, suffers from a kind of boredom. Exhaustion presents a comportment that is wordless, indeterminate and generic. Exhaustion may stupefy us, but it is precisely in the voidal nature of the comportment that new unanticipatable modes of expression are made possible. The voice of exhaustion is breathless. Not meager and unequivocal and therefore secondary to writing, the voice has no equivalence to writing-sense. As Hélène Cixous says, the metaphysical sense of writing must be destroyed so the soufflé – the undifferentiated, non-articulated cry of the divine – can be voiced. She says, “… I am at the mercy of their inspiration [insufflement]. They can fail me. I master nothing, I submit to the oracles. This risk is the condition of my creative energy and of my discoveries. It can happen that I run out of breath [souffle], that something loses steam [s'essouffle] … a word whispered/given by someone else, and a word stolen, whisked away.” We will present this methodology of exhaustion in relation to exemplary practices located in the transdisciplinary terrain marked out between architecture, art and philosophy, which allow us to expand what a methodology of exhaustion can be. This work, in two voices, will include re-voicing the work of Emma Cheatle, Julieanna Preston, Michael Spooner, and Popi Iacovou. Hélène will also touch on the work of Michelle Hamer and Bridie Luney, and Stephen will speak on voice (voix), speed (vitesse) and life (vie) in the work of the recently late John Barbour, and his own work K2-02 (with Michael Yuen) that includes sweeping the gallery floor exhaustively. In conclusion, when exhausted, and in relation to exhaustion, we will make a few remarks on the perplexing power of stupidity and boredom, not as a derogatory marker of ineptitude, but rather as the cry or warning that alerts us to the danger of claiming we know more than we do. Biographies: Dr Hélène Frichot is a senior lecturer in the Program of Architecture, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University. While her first discipline is architecture, she also holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Sydney. Hélène is co-curator (with Esther Anatolitis) of Architecture+Philosophy, a public lecture series and forum that commenced in 2005. Recent publications include: “Following Hélène Cixous’s Steps Towards a Writing Architecture” in Naomi Stead and Lee Stickells guest editors, ATR (Architecture Theory Review), 15:3 (2010); “On Finding Oneself Spinozist: Refuge, Beatitude and the Any-Space-Whatever”, in Charles J. Stivale, Eugene W. Holland, Daniel W. Smith eds., Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text (Continuum Press, 2009); “Olafur Eliasson and the Circulation of Affects and Percepts: In Conversation”, in Julianna Preston, guest ed., Interior Atmospheres: Architectural Design, vol. 78, no. 3, (London: John Wiley and Sons: May/June 2008). She also writes regularly for Artichoke, Architecture Australia, and similar art and design journals. Dr
Stephen Loo is Professor of Architecture at the School
of Architecture & Design, University of Tasmania. He has published
widely on the spatiality of language, affect and the biophilosophy
of the contemporary subject, which includes ethico-aesthetic models
for human action, posthumanist ethics and experimental digital thinking.
His current research book project (with Dr Undine Sellbach) concerns
the connections between ethics, psychoanalysis and the space of
the entomological imagination with forthcoming publications in Angelaki,
Parallax and Deleuze Studies. He is on the Editorial
Board member of several journals including Interstices: A Journal
of Architecture and Related Arts and is curating its 2011 symposium
on Technics, Memory and the Architecture of History. Stephen
is a practicing architect and Founding Partner of architectural,
design and interpretation practice Mulloway Studio. His recent artworks
include Longing for the Field, LARC Gallery, Launceston
(2010), and K2-02 (with Michael Yuen), SASA Gallery, Adelaide (2009). ARCHITECTURE+PHILOSOPHY 2011 PROGRAM:
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