Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts

Architectures of love: “Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair”

Andrew Douglas — 2024-08-30

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Hors d’oeuvres: Consuming La Petite Maison

Marissa Lindquist — 2024-08-30

This article foregrounds the philosophical and architectural interpretations of Jean-François de Bastide’s novella La Petite Maison (1758) to discuss creative work included in Banquet, a recent exhibition at Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney (2022). The exhibition explored the relationship between food, the human condition and architectural production through critical literary and film sources. Here, we centre on the first course, the hors d’oeuvre - inspired by the desire, love, and illicit liaison traced throughout Bastide’s novella.

The term hors d’oeuvre came into usage within the context of architecture and gastronomy across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hors d’oeuvres were inherently extravagant and excessive—their most elaborate entwining encountered in the clandestine houses of the French bourgeoisie. Through Edmund Burke’s sublime, we will discuss the interiorisation of the architectural hors d’oeuvre within the novella until its climactic ending, not just in the unfolding ardour but through the intensity and delight of the Maison’s novel machinery.

Where is the love?

Mark Jackson — 2024-08-30

The central concern of this paper is guided by two brief citations, one from Jacques Derrida and the other from Walter Benjamin. In ways that are both direct and indirect, these philosophers reference architecture, love and ruin. The paper’s aim is to suggest that architectures of love, whatever they may be, are obliged to address our encounters with violence, justice and politics, especially in relation to crises we could gather under the notions of precarity and ruin, what Derrida at one time called the bio-deconstruction of lifedeath, and Benjamin the politics of nihilism. The paper’s introductory paragraphs aim at offering an orientation for asking something fundamental in the approaches taken by Derrida and Benjamin.

Love’s labour’s lost: Alberto Pérez-Gómez’s Polyphilo

Sean Pickersgill — 2024-08-30

Alberto Pérez-Gómez’s Polyphilo, or The Dark Forest Revisited, An Erotic Epiphany (1994) is an imaginative re-telling of the famous architectural text Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) by Francesco Colonna. Pérez-Gómez transfers the events of the original from a Renaissance dreamscape of forests, processions, and architectural set-pieces to the dissociated spaces of air travel from airports to experience of flight itself. In the original the temper of the narrative is directed at the manifold experiential qualities of architecture, metaphorically expressed by the protagonist, Poliphilo, pursuing his love, Polia, through a picaresque journey of discovery. In Pérez-Gómez’s modern version, the estranging effects of modernity have interposed themselves into the narrative and created a melancholic Weltanschauung centred on the alienating effects of technology. However, a form of redemption occurs through, as the title notes, ‘an erotic epiphany of architecture’.

Pérez-Gómez’s intention in the text is to build a contemporary argument for an ‘ethics’ of architecture based on the sensory richness, the poiesis or ‘bringing forth’ as he characterises it, that comes from the attuned observer of architecture. His merging of aesthetics and ethics form a kind of categorical imperative for architecture – you must create what you love. However, in Pérez-Gómez’s telling it can be argued, the narrative for fulfilling this state becomes muddled in its abstraction. As an antidote to this, we can look to contemporary narratology and the developed understanding of the rhetorical device of ekphrasis that has been present from Classical times to the present, including the Renaissance of Colonna. How images illustrate and illuminate a text, and how the character arc of narratives generally fulfill a world-making function reveals another aspect of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphilo, and of illustrated architectural texts in general: architectural ethics is a story illustrated and told.

Rhetorics of love in the field of working-class housing in nineteenth century Europe

Lucie Prohin — 2024-08-30

This paper examines the rhetorical uses of the notion of love in the discourses surrounding the issue of working-class housing during the second half of the nineteenth century. The aim is to understand how and for what purposes this notion was mobilised and to explore its architectural and spatial implications. Firstly, the actors (for instance, philanthropists, reformers, or industrialists) involved in this field sometimes presented love as a crucial source of motivation in their actions, using it as an argument to justify their interest in this question. Perhaps more importantly, the architecture, outdoor amenities, and interior layout of the dwellings themselves were supposed to awaken feelings of love within the working-class population. Through the analysis of printed sources from European authors, the study thus focuses on the use of the notion of “love of home” and questions the social and political significance of the links woven, in these discourses, with other types of love, at the confluence of three distinct spheres: individual, family, and nation.

Measured love: Regulating infantile bodies, the Plunket Society and modern architecture

Susan Hedges — 2024-08-30

The Plunket Society in New Zealand has been involved in regulating infantile bodies since its foundation in 1907. The first aim and object of the Society was, however, directed to a detached and genderless body, with the stated aim being: “To uphold the Sacredness of the Body and the Duty to Health”.[1]

Plunket's representation of the relations between mother and child implicates architecture not only through notions of foundation, inception and the control of space and time but also calls for the regulation of babies' bodies that can be seen to parallel the ideals of architectural modernity. In both cases, fresh air and sunlight are advocated for—advocacy dense in gendered implications, as this paper will explore. Architecture in New Zealand in the 1940s also called on the notion of health and training to describe its modernisations.[2] The paper will build on Erik Olssen’s proposition that the history of New Zealand modernisation is closely tied to the Plunket Society as a key actor.[3] Consequently, the paper looks at representations of modern architecture in relation to the Plunket Society in the 1940s. It seeks to discern the connections and disconnections between these seemingly separate worlds, with images from both fields being examined through the notions of control, discipline, and the regulation of time and space. Plunket's strategies to ensure a separation between mother and baby through processes of control such as weighing, measuring, sampling and regulation can be seen to have recalibrated what affection, care and love looked like, a recalibration inseparable from places of care where such affection was enacted.

[1] The Work of the Plunket Society in New Zealand for the Mother and Baby and Pre-School Child. Dunedin: The Royal New Zealand society for the health of women and children, 1944.

[2] ‘…good design of modern industrial products can only come from trained designers, and the only designers in New Zealand trained in the discipline of function and in the understanding of many different materials are the architects. The first sign of good health, there will be an upsurge of vitality in architecture.’ Howard Wadman, “This Is Beginning to Happen," in Yearbook of the Arts in New Zealand edited by Howard Wadman, (Wellington, N.Z.: Wingfield Press, 1948).

[3] Erik Olssen, "Truby King and the Plunket Society: An Analysis of a Prescriptive Ideology," New Zealand Journal of History 15, no. 1 (April 1981): 3-23.

Missing you already: Losing the love of the unhomely homes of the dead

Isabel Lasala — 2024-08-30

Cemeteries are landscapes created to hold the physical remains of people who have died. Their buildings and monuments are architectures of love built to mark the landscapes of the beloved dead. They act as perpetual reminders of love, longing and loss through the words, images, and symbols inscribed in their fabric and in their organisational and material qualities. They can be seen as microcosms of the cities of the living, creating a permanent, if unhomely, home for the dead.

Decay challenges cemeteries assumed physical state of permanence, transforming them from landscapes of love to abandoned realms of death and even horror. These tensions inherent to cemeteries, between permanence and decay, between remembrance and forgetting, are intrinsic to their enduring power and fascination.

This paper compares three cemeteries located in Paris, France, Windhoek, Namibia and Melbourne, Australia, to explore the history of Western burial landscapes, their colonial application and appropriation as political narratives, and how the concept of perpetuity produces deserted urban cemeteries. These case studies underscore the significance of preserving cemeteries as cultural expressions, as they often face the threat of vanishing.

To love after life: On the memorialisation of the immemorial in Last and First Men (1930 and 2021)

Andrew Douglas — 2024-08-30

The paper explores questions of love and architecture through the quasi-architectural context of monuments, in this case the take-up of a range of post-Yugoslavian spomenik in the experimental film Last and First Men (2021), directed by Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson in collaboration with cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen and fellow composer Yair Elazar Glotman. The film, itself incorporating elements of Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 novel of the same name, offers a complex meditation on loss and love, pairing the approaching dereliction of certain Balkan commemorative architectures with the truncation of humanity tout court as fictionalised by Stapledon in 1930.

More broadly, the paper undertakes an exploration akin to what Elizabeth Grosz has termed an “ontoethics”—a necessarily politicised enquiry into the nature of what is and will come to be.^[1] The gambit trialled here is that an ontoethics of this sort has something to say about love, and following Grosz, something more to say about materiality, a domain routinely assigned to the ‘working up’ of architecture in concrete terms, but also its dereliction. Where Grosz argues that the material or the corporeal itself is not sufficient to articulate its own subsistence within and across time,^[2] I consider how modalities implicate with ‘love’ may both alloy with the concretely manifest, while exceeding all and any object-closure.

Reworking a range of philosophical orientations, a consideration of love is played against a trope offered by Gilles Deleuze in relation to modern political cinema: “the people no longer exist, or not yet…the people are missing”.^[3] Life in anticipation of, or after, determinant groups of people, as I seek to show, call on a deepening of love beyond the immediately corporeal and personal. Henri Bergson’s meditation on morality and religion, and the centrality he gives to “open love”, relative to determinant objects of affection like families and nations, rounds out the commentary enacted by the paper.

[1] Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism, (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2017), 1.

[2] Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism, 5.

[3] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 216.

Under the rug: Pleasure, violence, and other operations to de-sediment Central Park

Tiago Torres-Campos — 2024-08-30

In The Manhattan Transcripts (1977–1981; Transcripts) Bernard Tschumi explores pleasure and violence as two driving forces in the creation of architecture space.

Tschumi’s experimental operations supported a design enquiry that probes across his proposed architecture of the event and recontextualises it from the contemporary perspectives offered by the Anthropocene theory. The operations were also calibrated to inform a design exploration that sought to de-sediment Manhattan’s ground conditions from within its geologic entanglements.

Under the Rug was the first of three instalments titled Insular Events, which were produced and curated as a virtual installation in 2021. Drawing more specifically from the Transcripts’ first episode—‘MT1—The Park’—the work critically reflects on how issues of representation may affect notions of ground as something that extrudes, fractures and de-sediments the city. It examines Central Park’s rigid boundaries within Manhattan’s urban grid, and it questions its political circumscription of land ownership and real estate development by following clues provided by the landscape’s topographical and hydrological conditions. These dissonant conditions of wetness and dryness activate lines of transgression with which to read Central Park less as a unified rug and more as a fractured archipelago, which breaks up its rectilinear limits and expands it into the city.

Through a series of interrelated experiments using distinct representation techniques, Central Park’s thickness is explored in both plan and section to provoke the idea that the construction of the landscape might have erased and concealed many of this territory’s pre-park occupations.

Regarding Manhattan as a coalescence of dissonant spacetime conditions begins to suggest an architecture that offers a type of transgressive pleasure that comes from the violence of material movement through space. It is then suggested that an Anthoprocenic architecture of the event is a kind of seismic scoping that de-structures the city from within and that it may exist as a practice founded within an ethics of matter.

Speculative inconstancy: Exploring the architectural potential of porosity

Qixuan Hu — 2024-08-30

The design project Speculative Inconstancy situates itself in a seasonally submerged ravine site in the San Miguelito Favela along the Rio Abajo, proposing a community centre that responds to these seasonal shifts by offering variable spatial configurations. The project constructs a blurry boundary between inhabitation and nature, encouraging residents to engage cooperatively with natural elements like rain, wind, and flood.

This project aims to challenge the anthropocentric idea, which typically regards inconstancy as negative. It discusses the potential of inconstancy and the possibility of humans living with territories affected by climate shocks. Specifically, the project investigates how a porous and loose-fitting architectural language can act as a permeable agency between human and non-human objects on inconstant sites. The notion of porosity is explored as an architectural methodology to respond to changeable ground conditions.

Diagrams of Power in Benjamin and Foucault: The Recluse of Architecture, Mark Laurence Jackson

Stephen Zepke — 2024-08-30

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Our Concealed Ballast, Marian Macken

Elizabeth Musgrave — 2024-08-30

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Observations on Pacific heritage conservation practice

John H. Stubbs — 2024-08-30

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In honour of Jeremy Salmond: Let’s talk about old buildings, new work, and design

Julia Gatley — 2024-08-30

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Biographies

Issue Editor — 2024-08-30

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Colophon

Issue Editor — 2024-08-30

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Interstices Issue 23: Architectures of Love CFP

Andrew Douglas — 2024-08-30

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