Space, place and the body

The homely
house
home
domestic
family and childhood
sanctuary
memory
nostalgia
experience
lived space

The Unhomely
The haunted house
surreal
subversive
psychic
fragmented
distorted
nightmare

- Design, form and structure
- simply put architecture is 'the complex or carefully designed structure of something' OED

Modernist architect Le Corbusier defined architecture as : “the precise and monumental interplay of form 

within light.”

Foucault:

Michel Foucault: Relational Space/ Social Space

‘The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in

which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the

space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous

space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of

which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a

void that could be coloured with diverse shades of light, we live

inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to

one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.’

The Visual Arts

Leonardo da Vinci 1487 Vitruvian Man

The Body and the City

Fritz Lang, Metropolis 1927

The Body and Architecture:

Corbusier, Le Modulor 1942-48

Mapping intersecions between Body and Space in Art Practice:

Minimalism- Body, object, space, 1962

Minimalism or ‘Minimal’ Art appeared in America in the 1960s. Artists associated with it include Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Eva Hesse, Sol Le Witt, Donald Judd.

It aimed to reduce art to abstract elements, geometric forms and formal solutions.

Artworks often used industrial processes of production and materials such as bricks, fluorescent tubes, metal etc

Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII, 1966

Andre’s work is part of a series of eight sculptures that use 120 firebricks. Each sculpture is arranged differently but they all have the same height, mass and volume.

'It must somehow confront the beholder- they must, one might say, be placed notjust in his space but in his way.'

'The onject, not the beholder, must remain the center pr focus of the situation; but the situation itself belongs to beholder - it is his situation.'

Bruce Nauman 'green light corridor' 1970

Gender and Space- The feminist critique of gendered space, 1970s

Postmodernism- changing status of space and experience: 'non place', global and collectie space, 1980s

onwards

Phenomenology

Oxford English Dictionary: 1. The science of phenomena as distinct from that of the nature of being.

2. an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience.

Phenomenology tells us that we experience the world through our body —we are an extension of it.

It is only by having a body that we experience the world.

It is about perception – we perceive the world with our body through vision and movement.

Philosopher Edward Casey proposes: ‘The places we inhabit are known by the bodies we live.’ 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of perception 1945

‘As far as bodily space is concerned, it is clear that there is a knowledge of place which is reducible to a

sort of co-existence with that place, and which is not simply nothing, even though it cannot be conveyed

by a description or even by the mute reference of a gesture.’

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of perception, p.121

'there would be no space at all for me if i had no body.'

Merlaue-Ponty, phenomenology of perception, p.117.

Shepard Fairey, Phenomenology of the City, Manifesto, 1990

‘The OBEY sticker campaign can be explained as an experiment in Phenomenology.

The FIRST AIM OF PHENOMENOLOGY is to reawaken a sense of wonder about one’s environment.

The OBEY sticker attempts to stimulate curiosity and bring people to question both the sticker and their

relationship with their surroundings.’ 

Gender and Space: Critical Approaches

It is possible to identify the ‘intricacy and profundity of the connection of space and place with gender and

the construction of gender relations.’

Dorreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 1994, p.2

Postmodernism:

 ‘If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.’  

‘…the real non-places of supermodernity – the ones we inhabit when we are driving down the motorway, wandering through the supermarket or sitting in an airport lounge waiting for the next flight to London or Marseille….’  

Creating space and place?

Lucy Orta, Nexua Architecture x 50, Intervention Koln 2001

Interiority: Phychic Space/ Surreal Space

We can also map an exploration of the relationship between space, place and the body in the visual arts and cultural theory that is concerned with the spaces of the mind. 

Here an occupation with the individual’s psychic space and an experience of space which may be subversive, surreal, disconcerting or ‘unhomely’, can be registered in Modernist and Postmodernist art practice and architectural design.

These phenomena and ideas have recently been explored in two key exhibitions: 

Hayward Gallery, Walking in My Mind, 2009

Barbican Art Gallery, The Surreal House, 2010 

  

Walking in My Mind: Adventure into the Artist’s Imagination, Hayward Gallery, Southbank, 23 June- 6 September, 2009

Mental and psychic space

Interiority

Experience

Creativity

Alternate places

Escape

Intersections between art and architecture

Cities and Film

Georg Simmel (1858-1918)
- German sociologist

- Writes Metropolis and mental life in 1903

- Frankfurt school thinkers: Walter Benjamin, Fracauer, Adorno and Horkheimer

Talks about the effect of the city on an individual instead of writing about life in the city as a human.

1903.

Architect Louis Sullivan (1856-1924)
- creator of the modern skyscraper

- an infulential architect and critic of the chicago school

- mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright

- Guaranty Building was built in 1894 by Alder and Sullivan in Buffalo NY

The Tall Office building artistically considered - 'form never follows function'

 

Four Zones.

Basement- mechanical and utility area - didn't show on the face of the building, was underground.

Ground floor- public areas, shops, entrances and lobbies.

Office floors- identical office cells around elevators.
Final zone- terminating zone, elevator equipment utilities and few offices.

Terracotta blocks covered the steel structure. Different styles of block were on each of the four zones. "It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line."

“The numerous parallels between Sullivan’s ornament and the architectural decoration of Furness make it clear that Sullivan’s ornament came directly from Furness and, through him, from earlier ornament by English architects.” (Sprague 1979)

Carson Pririe Scott stro in Chicago (1904)

- skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity

- Fire cleared buildings in  Chicago in 1871 and made way for Louis Sullivans new aspirational buildings.

Manhatta (1921) Paul Strand and Charles Scheeler

Manhatta (1921) is a short documentary film which revels in the haze rising from city smoke stacks. With the city as subject, it consists of 65 shots sequenced in a loose non-narrative structure, beginning with a ferry approaching Manhattan and ending with a sunset view from a sky scraper. The primary objective of the film is to explore the relationship between photography and film; camera movement is kept to a minimum, as is incidental motion within each shot. Each frame provides a view of the city that has been carefully arranged into abstract compositions.

It was an attempt to show the film makers' love for the city of New York. The interspersed title cards include exceprts from Whalt Whitmans poetry

Ford Motor Companies plant at River Rouge, Detroit (1927)

Fordism- coined by antonio Gramsci in his essay "Americanism and Fordism"

maximum productivity and minium effort

Modern Times (1936) Charlie Chaplin

Wrote, directed and starred in 'modern times'
factory worker, employed on an assembly line. 

After being subjected to such indignities as being force-fed by a "modern" feeding machine and an accelerating assembly line where Chaplin screws nuts at an ever-increasing rate onto pieces of machinery, he suffers a mental breakdown that causes him to run amok throwing the factory into chaos.

Gets accussed of being a communist, goes to jail, meets a girl, ends up working as a waiter ends up performing a kind of pantomime which is a hit and saves the dy for the two of them.

Stock Market Crash 1929. the Great Depression

Man with a Movie Camera (1929) Dziga Vertov and Elizaveta Svilova

Russian silent documentary film, no story or actors. 

cinematic techniques Vertov invents: double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeza frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angels. extreme close ups, tracking shots, backward footage, stop motion animations and a self-reflexive style (at one point it features a split screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles).

futuristic city that would serve as a commentary on existing ideals in the Soviet world. This imagined city’s purpose was to awaken the Soviet citizen through truth and to ultimately bring about understanding and action. Celebrates industrialisation mechanisation transport communication.  The camera has access to intimate moments bed/birth as well as public street life.  World peopled by mannequins.

Flaneur - french for masculine.

Susan Sontag- On photography

solitary walker, flaneur, discovering the city.
Street photographer

Sophie Calle Suite Venitienne (1980)

‘For months I followed strangers in the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them.

At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice.’ Frieze magazine

Weegee )arthur Felig)

Lower east side of NY. Press photographer 19030s and 40s.
Developed his photographs in a homemade darkroom in the back of his car in 1938.

LA Noire 2011

L.A. Noire is set in LA in 1947 and challenges the player, controlling a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective, to solve a range of cases across five crime desks. Players must investigate crime scenes for clues, follow up leads, and interrogate suspects, and the players' success at these activities will impact how much of the cases' stories are revealed.

As the title suggests, the game draws heavily from both plot and aesthetic elements of film noir – stylistic films from the 1940s and 1950s that shared similar visual styles and themes including crime, sex, and moral ambiguity and were often shot in black and white with harsh, low-key lighting. The game uses a distinctive colouring-style in homage to the visual style of film noir, including the option to play the game in black-and-white. The post-war setting is the backdrop for plot elements that reference the detective films of the '40s (as well as James Ellroy's novel L.A. Confidential and the Curtis Hanson film based on it), such as corruption and drugs, with a jazz soundtrack. L.A. Noire is also notable for using Lightsprint's real-time global illumination technology, as well as Depth Analysis's newly developed technology for the film and video game industries called MotionScan, where actors are recorded by 32 surrounding cameras to capture facial expressions from every angle. The technology is central to the game's interrogation mechanic, as players must use the suspects' reactions to questioning to judge whether they are lying or not.

L.A. Noire is the first video game to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival.Upon release, the game received critical acclaim.

Walker Evans Many are Called (1938)
Clarke says Evans used a concealed camera hidden beneath his trench coat. The result is one of the most incisive series of photographs of city life ever taken.  There is a haunting quality appropriate to the environment in which figures are placed. Everyone appears alone and separate.