notes for Jon

Jon:

Here are some suggestions for your work.
You must consider the spatial and visual data of experience above the narrative ………this is not an either or towards the word or the image. As an architect your artistic orientation must be towards the eye (plus othes senses as our topic requires) as a mode of knowledge. Again not instead of the story, but as a primary vehicle of expression in support of the narrative.

In your presentation so far you have privileged the story line, the plot, the human drama. That is great but, as an architect YOU MUST GIVE PRIORITY TO THE VISUAL not the INVISIBLE. So, as your degree project critic I feel compelled to push you towards a faster translation of your “story line” into it’s material/spatial/physical/visual support base.

First you must quickly identify the series of events taking place in the story, locate and describe them and their factual need to take place in space and time. Describe the stage set as if you were a stage set designer the concrete physical/visual attributes of each scene/event and diagram showing the placement of characters and their surroundings:. DESCRIBE IN WORDS AND DIAGRAMS EACH SCENE.

OK: If you want architecture as theater than go all the way!!! Choose as your program the design of a theater space, lets say for the famous 60’s group “the Living Theater” (research it….), You might also find links to Camillo’s “theater mundi” concept of place in Donald Kunze’s description of Vico and in Francis Yates “The Art of Memory”. I will give you these on Tuesday.

This should help you in locating the role of the narrative in the work of architecture

The hermeneutic question ! (look up the word if you need too)

Two different strategies for interpretation-hermaneutic and phenomenological

1. hermaneutic strategy-the use of story devices and (metaphorical naming)
in order to create an immidiate noetic(thought) context. The story creates a condition that immidiately sediments the perceptual possibility. Perception takes shape within and from the power of suggestion of a language-game.


2. phenomenological strategy-centering on the subject , the way in which perception functions is made thematic -the instructions of how to look, rely on certain knowledge of the mechanisms of perception and on a turn to the subject as active percievers.



Operational rules in a phenomenological approach to architecture/visual arts

1. attend to phenomena as they appear. A parralel rule, which makes attention more riorous, may be stated in the Wittgensteinian form:
describe, don't explain.

2.carfully delimit the field of experience to avoid a confusion of immidiacy with non-experienced elements presumed or posited in explanation

3.horizontalize or equalize all immidiate phenomena. -do not assume an initial hierarchy of 'realities' -This procedure prevents one from deciding too quickly that some things are more real or fundamental than others



In the meantime I realize that I have not answered your last question.. I still strongly feel that for your specific degree project approach the “performative technique” can be based on the Goodman categories of architectural means of representation. I don’t feel you understand yet the usefulness of his examples. Try again and to apply those to your work on developing a stage set for your story. Those terms should be your tools !!!!! Lets talk about that.

Goodman (How Buidings Mean)Jacobson (Six functions of language)

(1)Denotation Denotative Function

(2)Exemplification Poetic Function

(3)Expression, Mediated reference Connotative Function

Again, lets talk about how, operationally these types of references work in atchitecture and how you might be using them in your project. Again, they are your performative techniques…….


Here is a quick reference to Donald Kunze”s description of Camillo’s “theater mundi” :




Ch. 5. Theater of the world

page 148

Camillo: Fearing death, Camillo hastily dictated an outline of the idea of a theater, which was published in 1550. in this work, he described the inverted architecture that placed the solitary observer on a small stage overlooking an auditorium filled with a mock audience of images drawn , in part from the Myths of Homer……..

page 153

“The most significant feature for the interpretation of Vico and Camillo is that this inversion of ordinary relations portrayed a gradual process of embodiment, a decent of the soul through the succession of planetary spheres. At each level, the soul forgot more of its eternal nature and acquired the qualities of the ruling planet. Macrobious describes this passage of the soul in terms that strikingly anticipate Vico’s symmetry of the “true” and the “made”, connected by an “ideal eternal history”:…..
page 156…Camillo’s conception, though elaborate in the extreme, may seem to some more than artful arrangement of the ready-made materials of classical literature. In an age where “theater” was used to describe any comprehensive treatment of a subject, Camillo’s real theater may even be a literalistic attempt to find a spatial structure to all humanistic loci. But, the deceptive ease with which the vast array of gods, planetary attributes, myths, images, other commonplaces found their place in the seats of the Camillo’s auditorium belies the fact that he had found , in the form of a traditional building type, an uncanny congruence between architectural form and thought….Camillo’s theater is, as theater, forcefully present as an ordinary place turned liminal. The locus of theater is an active presence. We are forced to consider the classical universe it contains from the point of view of the traditional “ironic” disconnection of the viewer and the viewed , as well as in light of the Camillian irony whereby the viewer and the viewed are reversed.”

page 159…….

Up to now, no particular significance has been attributed this story other than its service as an illustration of an artificial memory’s method of places……Elsewhere, Serres has shown the connection the idea of noise as interruption with such liminal places as crossroads, wells,bridges, and boundaries…………….. The middle term for Serres’ spatialized philosophy is the chi (Chimera, or a monster in three parts in the Bellerophon myth)..The Chi is a special form of monster or sign. Two motions are crossed, and their intersection is defined in terms of a catastrophe. The logic of myth is crossed with the logic of men, who cannot decipher the metaphorical riddles of things arranged paratactically, that is
side by sidewithout logical mediation. Hypotaxis , or the subordinative ordering, signals the destruction , or “interpretation,” of the monster as sign: the riddle answered…….
In Vichian terms, one may “make” the myth for oneself by finding a necessary order in the apparently casual details of the anecdote. For us as students of the humanistic theatrum mundi , this making involves themes of division, , interruption, and opposition found in both the story’s narrative and its spatial ordering. ………