Master of Architecture

In Approaching Singularity: The Emotional and Physical Embodied Form

By CALEB EATHAN GENEROSO

SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: PROF. NAME: Adeline Hofer, CHAIR PROF. NAME: Hui Zou, MEMBER

A PROJECT IN LIEU OF THESIS PRESENTED TO THE COLLEGE OF DESIGN, CONSTRUCTION AND PLANNING OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2020

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In Approaching Singularity: The Emotional and Physical Embodied Form reflections

A Masters Research Project in Architecture

by Caleb Eathan Generoso

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My eyes were set towards a turning sky; the colors reflected in familiar yet unrecognizable structures. There was a solitary figure at a distance - a measure of the words: we’ve never met. I could make out no features except the shape of hair tracking the motion of her turning away, and a gesture.

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I followed. She walked. ran. leapt. climbed.

I followed - getting neither closer, nor farther. I was lead across open lots, between structures and through them. All were filled with an uncanny feeling of life and activity which did not exist. Impressions of the living, but of no life in particular.

I can no longer remember the features of any one space, except for their emptiness.

And as the sky seemed to finish turning to darkness, so did she seem to begin turning to face. In an instant, my eyes were set towards a familiar ceiling. My nose tasted a familiar air. My skin warmed by a familiar sky through a familiar window. And a new feeling which would become familiar as it pressed beneath my senses. The feeling of a dream.

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:)denigami(nu eht sdrawot ,niaga ecnO

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Perhaps, then, towards the (un)known:

the embodied architecture of dream

met ?

Have we

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gratitude

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prologue

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in-situ studies

memory, muscle, and ma

Alberto Giacometti, the fixed distance, and the Absolute

the Chinese perspective of depth and gesture

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explorations in phenomena recollection

erasure (and eikon)

socio-determined space

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animation

the reciprocal relationship of person and place

drawing as collaboration

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theatre

Palace at 4am

performance and collaboration

a twist in the global human fable

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what next?

closing remarks and continuing practice

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bibliography

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topics reflections

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gratitude

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Thank youProfessor Nina Hofer for providing me with a new way of seeing and understanding the world around me through the tactility of vision and the practice of drawing.

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Thank youDr. Hui Zou for offering me new perspectives on how it is that I do see and for coloring that vision with a poetic beauty translated through the practice of writing.

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Thank youSara, Stas, Fhenny, Max, and Verity for our weekly conversations through the development of our individual MRPs.

Prof. Sarah Gamble Prof. Jason Alread Prof. John Maze for your questions and your suggestions. Each of you provided me with a critical moment in thought in the process.

And to the rest of the faculty, my cohort, and graduate and undergraduate students for our continued conversations and collaborations, thank you.

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prologue

What are you studying in school?

Architecture Oh, is that what you’re drawing all the time?

Oh No, not buildings, if that’s what you’re asking.

People

I’m drawing people.

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It can be observed within contemporary practices that the human form is underrepresented within architectural drawing. This reflects a time existing within the impressions of “form ever follows function,” a design principal coined by architect Louis Sullivan (1896). Contemporary design tools and processes take forms that celebrate efficiency and function. Many would agree that these tools are not necessarily the critical progenitor towards banal design and are, in fact, very useful towards the production of a building. However, it is in good practice that we examine our processes of drawing in order to take a critical stance on what they mean to our design. Thusly, the following criticism is a key motivator in this research project.

We rely on tools which gather and catalogue information into digital libraries. Just as they commodify materials and information, they commodify the building as product. It is natural then for the human form to be commodified, stored in digital libraries, and made ready to populate our virtual fantasies. Still yet, to readily have populations of the human form does not advocate for a more human-centric design process – one which is motivated to develop architecture towards the potentials of human phenomena. That motivation must come from the designer.

Typically, human representation is largely limited to the intentions of and functions of scaling, populating, and suggesting activity within space. The figure is seldom inserted into the process for use in designing towards the phenomena of human experience. This is not to say that designers are ignoring experience, rather, there is simply an absence of a process which intertwines human representation into design in a way which prioritizes phenomena. When human representations are utilized, they are often vaguely drawn or are standard universal figures. They are silhouettes or photographed (sometimes photorealistic) digital entourage inserted into a market image or market animation. While the argument can be made that these digital figures can inform design decisions as the creation of these images and animations become more integrated into the design process, they carry with them the problem of being generic plug-in figures lacking emotion and gesture. They are thought of as a resource first and a design tool second (if at all). We nickname them “scaleys,” and as such they never seem to become much more. They offer little mystery to evoke such questions as “who are you; where are you from; where are you going; and do you plan to stay?

What can I offer for you?”

Questions which require imagination.

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To draw immediately towards the real, bounding imagination becomes a necessary trap. With a reliance on motives, tools, and images focused on the real, design leans towards the pragmatism of architecture, the reality and the efficiency. As an Architect and the co-founder of Archigram (an influential thinking group focused on imagining a new urban future through the hypothetical and speculative), Peter Cook (2014) claims that “architectural drawings are easily able to transcend any reference to reality,” with an ambition and “belief that architecture has much left to discover,” and that these types of drawings “tread completely into the unknown”(2). With a single suggestion, he brings us back to the tradition of surrealism, “Perhaps the ideal way in which an architect can approach the act of drawing is to be unaware that he is actually doing it at all”(8). The intent of this research is not to overly critique contemporary design and documentation tools, and this critique is simply a context which plays a role in motivating the exploration.

Rather the intent is to speculate and propose other avenues of drawing based processes and thinking which would weave human representation into architectural representation.

The development of such processes suggests a familiarity with both the human and the architecture. So naturally, questions of the human arise. Notably one which I have wondered on for some time now and as good a question as any to begin with.

What is embodiment in architecture?

As a body of work, this research seeks to uncover an intimate understanding of embodiment through an understanding of the nuances of human form and its internal and external relationships in social, architectural, and personal phenomenology. These relationships as well as ideas of memory are explored through methods such as insitu observation and drawing, recollective speculation, and the animation of reciprocal relationships between body and place in both the 2D and 3D. Unifying these multilayered processes is a constant: the drawings begin with body. The body in love, the body in conversation, the body in contemplation, the body in detachment… Can these drawn forms become more than “scaleys?”

Can they become “singularities” which embody the nuances of both the emotional and physical human form? Through them, can we imagine an architectural narrative in which they dwell, and can they inform an embodied architecture?

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I wonder how a deaf musician may feel. One who can read notes but not hear them. One who has written music but has never seen them experienced by an audience.

After four to five years of professional practice, I realize that I may have never seen the spaces of my designs inhabited by people uninvolved in the processes of construction.

I realize that there is an enormous gap in my understanding of embodiment and craft beyond the processes of the designer and the maker.

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in-situ studies

From the age of 6 I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things.

When I was 50 I had published a universe of designs.

But all I have done before the age of 70 is not worth bothering with.

At 75 I’ll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects.

When I am 80 you will see real progress.

At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself.

At 100, I shall be a marvelous artist.

At 110, everything I create;

a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before.

- Hokusai Katsushika (Lonergan 2014)

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What a performance it is to design a building.

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For hours on end, I drew, and I drew. I contemplated every line as a marking of material and space. I contemplated its construction and relationship to people, but I found myself at odds. For all my contemplation of space for people, so rarely did I draw a person. Sure, I had my library of standardized human forms, but rarely did I draw a person. And after some years I questioned, “has the human form been commodified to act in service of the architectural image?”

I wondered how I might draw in a way that embodies the notion of architecture in service to the human. I wondered on the construction of the human image, the many emotional and physical nuances of its varied gestures, and the relationships between person and place.

And so I set off on a quest to understand people.

What a performance it is to chase the human.

For hours on end, I draw, and I draw. I contemplate every line as a marking of form and space. I contemplate its construction and relationship to people, and I find myself in an odd Giacomettian search for the essence of human form. Always at a distance, yet seemingly closer with every mark and every drag of every line - every line a trace of the subconscious intimacy in the space between.

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Memory is often thought of as a collection of information that is stored in some location within the mind and is recalled by will or triggered into recollection.

This “storage” model implies that memory can be put away and taken out whole with the only changes being those brought about by the erosive qualities of time (Carruthers 2002). However, memory is crafted. This suggests that the act of recollection is in its own form an act of recrafting. In that light, memory is not as pure or truthful to reality as normally believed. It is linked 28

to our senses, to emotion, people, and place. It is “a physiological, bodily phenomenon” (8). In the context of human interaction and remembering people, people become characters exhibiting specific traits, performing certain actions within a specific temporal event. A memory exists within a duration. The broader image of any one person becomes a conglomerate understanding of multiple memories within their relationships to each other in addition to each one’s external relationships to something else. However, it is important to recognize

that memory relies on the crafted memory-image, images of visual or auditory information, of language (Ricoeur 2004). Therefore, the person that exists within the mind is not the person that exists in the corporeal dimension. It is simply a representation, a character, a presence of an absent thing (eikon) (6).

It is easy to say the same of a drawn person.

While I may be drawing people, each figure in its state within paper is an ( ). This is not a person in the same way that Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

In this sense then, I attempt to craft a memory of the person in order to embody some essence of their form and gesture within my mind and my muscles - not just the muscles of my hands and my arms, but the entirety of my own body as well. Through drawing, I hope to construct a new library, a library constructed of the memories crafted in and accessed through the act of drawing and performance.

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In his book The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture, Juhani Pallasmaa (2009) asserts that in western philosophy the body and mind have been seperated. He observes that “pedagogies and practices also regrettably continue to separate mental, intellectual and emotional capacities from the senses” (12). The discussion he approaches is one where the practices of the hand can be regarded in more holistic terms, that the “thinking hand” is inseperable from the body and the world around it.

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He expands on holistic philosophy with the following, “Human consciousness is an embodied consciousness; the world is structured around a sensory and corporeal centre. ‘I am my body,’ Gabriel Marcel claims; ‘I am what is around me,’ Wallace Stevens argues;’ I am the space where I am,’ Noel Arnaud establishes; and finally, ‘I am my world,’ Ludwig Wittgenstein concludes (13).

Likewise, I argue for a holistic understanding of self and the world around us. There is a reciprocity between our inner selves, our corporeal body, and the exterior world perceived through the senses. Focusing on these relationships, we can spread apart the interior and exterior to create meaningful space for discussion and examination, but we should also recognize that these components are intrinsically linked.

While many of the drawings in this research are solely attentive to capturing the human figure, others

like this series of five attempt to capture place through the same methods of sketching. Like the human figure drawings, they attempt to capture a distilled essence of form and gesture of place, one which relates specifically to the form and gesture of the person. How is it that a person is drawn to some edges, some surfaces, and not others? What compels them to position themselves within space and place a certain way? What exists in the space between where they find comfort enough to dwell, or discomfort enough to move along?

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It is just as pertinent to then consider the conscious and subconscious relationships within the mind-body-world. If there is a way to examine this through observational drawing, I believe the lower half of any person is as revealing a focus as any. After all, it is through our legs that we near constantly engage with our world through physical touch. I believe the majority of people would align themselves to some notion that sight is the primary sense for most people. I would ask for more specificity, is sight simply the sense that most 58

people are consciously aware of and consciously acting on? It would seem, through observation, that most do not take notice to the gestures of their legs. They shift in ways to keep a figure upright and comfortable, but rarely does a person seem to make a conscious effort in moving their legs unless they find a motivation to move them in a way outside of the most routine performances of their lives.

So much could be imagined of the upper half of any figure from the nuances in gesture of the lower.

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The studies alternate between figure and figurewithin-place. The repetitious drawing is as much a performance of embodiment, of building memory, as it is a distillation and refinement.

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While the previous set of “lower half” studies explored legs as perpetual subconscious anchors to place and explored the low-energy almost static states of the figure, these studies explore highly conscious, dynamic efforts.

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The first three studies of this set focus on children. They revealed a state of the relationship between the mind-body-world and the “lower half” that constantly shifts between consciousness and subconsciousness. This is a state of learning, of bodily memory crafting. They engage with the world, process it through sensations of balance in the upper body, and build the muscle memory of balance in their legs through constant adjustment.

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“It’s not the walking, but the where and the why.”

-Ken Cobb (a friend and fellow thesis student) Is it?

By this point, the studies had begun to take on a relationship of their own with the people who viewed them. I am grateful for the conversations.

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These final studies are focused on people in place, but they do not include physical markings of place itself. Instead, they begin to explore the idea of gesture as the context from which place could be extrapolated or imagined. The reciprocal relationships of mind-body-place would also suggest a reciprocal relationship of embodiment.

“Oh, your thesis is about ‘ma!’”

-Prof. John Maze

It is?

“Ma” is a Japanese word which describes the space between or emptiness. While the final meaning will depend on its usage, its relationship with other characters, it seems to always concern itself with a space or place. Fascinating to me is the usage of the character in the written form of “human-being” which places the character for “ma” next to that of “person.”

In this sense, the concept of human-being embodies a notion that person and place are both needed in a holistic understanding of humanness (Nitschke 2018).

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A necessary interjection:

In his commentary The Search for the Absolute, Jean Paul Sartre examines the work of Alberto Giacometti, specifically his sculptures. He juxtaposes them against classical sculptures which seem as though they attempt to freeze a human in an instance. In a way, they are closer to anatomical models than they are representations of human life. He claims “for three thousand years, sculpture modeled only corpses... But a dead man plus a dead horse do not equal the half of one living being. They lie, these people of the Museums...”

(Sartre 2012, 182). Against these sculptures, exist the emaciated figures crafted by Giacometti. They are inert, like any sculpture, but they embody a sense of life, a sense of movement, and a sense of intent.

“There was only a long indistinct silhouette, moving against the horizon. But one could already see that the movements did not resemble those of things: they emanated from the figure like veritable beginnings, they outlined an airy future; to understand these motions, it was necessary to start from their goals - this berry to be picked, that thorn to be removed - and not from their causes” (181).

In these thoughts, I find grounding in my own work. In search of embodiment, in search of the essential gestural forms which embody physicality and emotion, I have avoided the details of surface. Instead, I have sought the motivated embodied in figure. I have remained at a distance to see the full body in its performance. It is a distance where the nuances of gestural form are observable, but not lost in the nuances and details of surface.

In this regard of distance, Sartre comments on Giacometti’s work again.

“At ten paces, I form a certain image of that nude woman; if I approach her, and regard her from up close, I no longer recognize her: these craters, tunnels, cracks, this rough black hair, these smooth shiny surfaces, the whole lunar orography: how could all these qualities go to compose the sleek fresh sin that I admired from far off?” (184)

He discovers a paradox: as one approaches a sculpture, it increases in detail, but in reality one only approaches closer to the marble, and not the human. Sartre criticizes the classical sculptor in their approach to detail, in the shifting distance between them and the model. He sees Giacometti’s approach like that of a painter.

“Painters have understood all this for a long time, because, in pictures, the unreality of the third dimensions causes ipso facto the unreality of the other two. Thus the distance of the figures from me is imaginary. If I approach, I come closer to the canvas, not the figures on it. Even if I put my nose against it, I should still seem them twenty paces distant, since it was at twenty paces from me that they came to exist once and for all” (184).

Alberto Giacometti, the fixed distance, and the Absolute

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Giacometti sculpts his figures from a fixed distance, and it is from that distance that the figure and the gesture are understood. It is absolute in this way. It is evident that no matter how close you approach a sculpture, you approach the material of the sculpture, the bronze, and not the human it is modeled after. So the essence of the human instead exists at this fixed distance. In trying to understand the person, it is senseless to approach closer than the distance they were observed.

I draw at a distance. The distance somewhat varies between sketches, but remains constant within a single one. The figures remain at that distance. As the form and the gesture continue to distill towards a minimal quality, the level of detail uncouples itself from distance in the illusory depth of perspective on paper. As I have embodied these forms into my memory, when I recraft them, their quality remains largely consistent at varying scales.

It is at this point that my preconceived notions of how to capture depth and space on paper takes a shift from the diminishing perspective into a way of seeing new tomyself, but has otherwise existed for centuries.

Man Crossing a Square on a Sunny Morning,

by Alberto Giacometti (1950).

Untitled, illustration 142,

by Alberto Giacometti (1969).

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Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua Mountains, by Zhao Mengfu (1295).

the Chinese perspective of depth and gesture

In traditional Chinese landscape paintings, the figures, be they people, building, or natural elements, retain a consistency in their size and their detail. In these paintings, depth and distance are not dependent on the diminishing perspective. Their lines do not reach towards a vanishing point. Rather, depth and space are created in the vertical arrangement of these figures on the canvas. In the image above, the human figures, 136

small and almost fading into the work, perform activities discernible only in their gesture and location in place.

Instead of an image of realistic visual mimicry, the painting ultimately captures a mood or atmosphere.

For me, it is one that somehow evokes memories upon a glance, but of no single memory in particular. Perhaps this is the mind’s response to make sense of or to process the image and the mood it possess. Instead of

searching for visual memory-images to relate it to, it instead seeks atmospheric memories. To me, the image begins to slip away towards imagination. Vague memories begin to come forth in my mind, memories of places I’ve never been, memories of longing for them.

It is a strange nostalgia for what never was, for what continues not to be.

Perhaps this is the strength of the simple gesture, of allowing drawing to be free of an attempt to mirror reality in all of its detail and visual phenomena.

Imagination is evoked by the image and is at once liberated from it. The sureness yet frailty of the gestures make space for the viewer to offer the substance of their own imagination. In that way, the spectator is the one to complete the image.

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explorations in human phenomena

Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh? ...

The world seen is not ‘in’ my body, and my body is not ‘in’ the visible world. ...

My body as a visible thing is contained within the full spectacle.

But my seeing body subtends this visible body, and all the visibles with it. There is reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2004, 255)

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So I wonder, do your figures...are they perceptive? Or are they just physical bodies within the space? ...

Are they conscious beings that are inhabiting space and perceiving whats around them? Or are you really just interested in them as physical objects?

Prof. Sarah Gamble

These are lasting questions.

They were asked during the February mid-term presentations. I feel as though if they were asked in any other context, in any other project, I could of answered them easily and simply.

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In one way right now, I can’t tell if I’m looking at people in a space or if I’m in the space. ...

Are you imagining these as you’re a person in the space or are you imagining them as you are looking at those people and what they are doing in that space?

Prof. Jason Alread

Instead, I probed the implications of their words through three sets comprised of three drawings each.

Each set focuses on a topic and process:

recollection, erasure, and socio-determined space.

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recollection

Each drawing is crafted from memory.

Each memory is recrafted in the act of drawing.

In the drawing to the right and on the next page, I constructed the edges and surfaces of things through their relationships to the figures. I imagined these people to be perceptive and they and the place were constructed via lines which extended from body through space and towards place. In these reciprocal 144

relationships between body and place, the drawings find themselves through the senses, through phenomenology.

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e r a s u r e

In this set, the drawings were crafted by reductive means. Rather than constructing them through the additive process of reciprocal relationships, I took complete drawings from previous projects and removed the architecture.

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Would figures that were drawn in tandem with place (architecture) embody some notion of the place they populated after ( ) is removed?

Do they read as perceptive beings which reacted to and situated themselves in place?

Or do they remain as markings of the missing architecture? Objects not unlike ruins.

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s o c i o - d e t e r m i n e d s p a c e

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This final set explores the space and place constructed by people, not just as bodies in a field, but as perceptive beings. By reading their gestures, independently and in relation to one another, we as viewers, as outsiders, determine through social perceptions the quality of the space they create and whether or not that space is one we can take part in.

If a certain revelation could be made, it’s that people drastically affect the reading and the quality of a space. Their bodies create spaces of their own. If we resituated them within a drawn place, how much would place affect their gestures? How much would their gestures affect the place?

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animation

Good drawing is not copying the surface. It has to do with understanding and expression. We don’t want to learn to draw just to end up being imprisoned in showing off our knowledge of joints and muscles. We want to get the kind of reality that a camera can’t get.

-Richard Williams (2009)

Movement isn’t neutral.

It has intent.

That’s what makes muscles move.

- Hayao Miyazaki (Arakawa 2016)

But don’t confuse a drawing with a map! We’re animating masses, not lines. So we have to understand how mass works in reality.

In order to depart from reality, our work has to be based on reality.

-Richard Williams (2009)

It’s important to draw full human beings.

You’re drawing people, not characters.

I’m counting on you.

- Hayao Miyazaki (Arakawa 2016)

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It is important, when dealing with animation, to recognize it as a sequential art form within which a series of crafted images overlap, cover, and reveal each other in an order (not always chronological) and timing that creates motion. This is my fascination with animation. It can be appreciated as a temporal event at the same time that it can be appreciated as a collection of singular images.

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In approaching animation I took note of two opportunities. Firstly, I could further explore the reciprocal relationship between body and place by actively drawing them one after another in layers. As they shift and adjust each other, I could explore the physical manners in which they impress their presences unto each other. Secondly, I could explore the inbetween states, the nuance of human performance which is often ignored in typical still images of human

Video link for animation: https://youtu.be/3AbrD6bcJ-4

representations. We often visualize people at the “key frames” of their motions. In drawing animation, I’ve asked my self to engage in the “in-between” stages of motion in order to understand the ways in which we move through space, interact with surface, and with each other.

Two of four animations are detailed in this book. The first (above) explores a one to one process of animation where surface and body affect each other

per frame. As a highly reactive way of drawing, the person and place are performers which through the futures suggested by their gestures, push the animation forward as much as they push on each other.

The second further explores the possibilities of spatial and social narratives through different arrangements of gestures.

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The original base image of this animation was constructed from recrafting memories. re-imagining crafting imagining again

It is in-situ in the way that mind-body-world is entangled, and to conjure forth these drawings from memory is an act that engages with all three at once.

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There are two versions of this animation. The first is only with the human gesture. The second includes spatial speculations drawn in 3 ways - surface by way of wash, linework by way of lines reaching out from the figures to form space, and lasty, surface by way of the shadow they cast.

Ideally, the version with only the human gestures is watched first multiple times. Discussions on Alberto Giacometti and the Chinese landscape paintings have found a place in this animation. These figures, with their

Video link for animation v1: https://youtu.be/kWHt_g8c9vA Video link for animation v2: https://youtu.be/thd_Gr0ufeg

simple gestural quality and their shifting arrangements, provoke imagination. As each arrangement changes and their relationships vertically create distance, spatial layers may begin to emerge. Spatial narratives form. And as each gesture shifts and settles into new arrangements, the gestures as they relate to each other begin to formulate social narratives.

The version which materializes the spatial possibilities is a product of my own imagination. It may be what I saw, but not necessarily what others imagine.

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In this process, the gestures of figure and place become characters with whom I collaborate.

I do not try to force one or the other into my design agenda. Nor does one serve the other. Instead they motivate the drawing. The figures present emerging spatial needs and when that need is met, when it seems to pass and shift towards something new, so does the drawing.

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Video link for animation: https://youtu.be/XpbdOV0f1_0

These final animations continue to expand on these ideas. However, the last one (right) pushed me as the animator into acting. It is worth noting that when there are no other people around, the best way to study motion is to act. That came with an important observation.

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Video link for animation: https://youtu.be/NGnQNG5uN0U

Muscles move with intent. They behave differently with different motivations. The body does not simply move, it performs with desire, with purpose.

But the performance changes depending on the motive or lack thereof. And the difference can be vast, or it can be nuanced.

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theatre

- a collaboration with Sara Culpepper a friend and fellow thesis student

We constructed a fantastical palace in the night ...a very fragile palace of matches; at the least false movement a whole section of the diminutive construction would collapse; we would always begin it all over again

- Alberto Giacometti (Fichner-Rathus 2013, 566)

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The Palace at 4 A.M.

by Alberto Giacometti (1950).

The Palace at 4 A.M. by Alberto Giacometti presents itself with the frailty of a dream. A moment that seems to capture the memories constructed in the relationship between two people and houses those memories in the space between them. It is sure in its framework and lines, yet paradoxically weak at the same time that it is certain. In his commentary of it, Giacometti presents us with the notion of its periodical collapse and its periodical 194

reconstruction. This highlights an important temporal quality of the work. Like his sculptures of human gesture, it is inert in nature, but it embodies the ever changing motions of life. In light of that, I imagine that the moment it captures, the one this sculpture embodies most, is the moment and act of its own creation. Like his other work, it leaves space for the dream and the imagination to come forth with possibilities.

Margaret Sobrino Almánzar (friend and fellow thesis student) preparing to model her own thesis work (Wearable Architecture: Cloth as Shelter) within the theatre project.

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The theatre project is the brainchild of Sara Culpepper and constructed by the two of us in collaboration. It exists in the vomitorium of the Florida Theater in Gainesville, Florida. As described by Sara, it exists within a liminal space, within a building in a liminal stage of its life between occupants. It is an installation which has generated many conversations, many discussions, and many ideas pertinent to and advancing our individual researches. As such, I will include 196

excerpts from various conversations. Henceforth, statements made by Sara will be attributed to “SC.” However, a more complete understanding of the project is offered in reading Sara’s thesis book Terra Incognita: Navigating Space, Time and Memory in tandem with my own reflections as our findings intersect, disperse, and reconvene at various points of interest. By no means do my reflections alone fully capture the project.

This installation offers the user a chance to edit mental maps and to envision new possibilities in the built environment. By altering perspective, light and transparency this study aims to induce sensations of being lost, the first step of any new journey. -SC

We constructed a fantastical canvas in the theatre, a very fragile canvas of surface and light; at the least movement the entire atmosphere of the space would collapse into new dimensions, into something unknown; we would always begin it all over again.

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The first step was to neutralize the space.To almost white it out and start with a fresh canvas so that we could build that theatrical set differently every time. -SC

To achieve neutrality, we brought it down to its bare geometry with as few lines as possible. The geometry produces a forced perspective. It embodies a visual illusion. However in its form, it also embodies a tactile illusion. In inhabiting the space, one feels as 198

much disorientation from the visual qualities as the felt qualities. The relationship between person and place changes drastically at any point within the space as an understanding of scale shifts dramatically throughout.

Sound vibrates the surfaces. To close one’s eyes only heightens the shifting qualities of space felt in the legs and the shifting auditory pressures on the ears and the skin. We set out to take advantage of its illusory qualities and alter the space through projected drawings.

This process shows a combination... of designing, and drawing, and capturing in the space with the light available, with the tools available, with the time available. And testing in that way made it very much... of the site. -SC

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The original intention here was to have people limited to a certain area of space and have them experience the changes, but in capturing that [space from spectator’s perspective] we found that it was harder to understand the qualities of space without there being a human in it. -SC

Such an observation became critical to my own research. The necessity of human representation became paramount to understanding a space. However, how might a person inhabiting the space not only alter the image of it, but how might different people respond to the space itself and bring out other qualities in real time? How might the space bring out qualities of the people? Would they impress unto each other, a mood?

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Everybody brings their own memories to the table.

So even in the theater, the idea is that no matter how neutral of a space we make, there are certain cues that we cannot eliminate... even [within] that entirely disorienting space of the white box... there are still cues and memories that will trigger for everybody. And that’s part of it. I don’t want to eliminate that. That’s the point about putting all of the different cues and factors back in. They are, like we talked about, nebulous enough so that people can find 202

themselves within it, but they are ambiguous enough so that they’re not a specific place or a specific thing. So it’s an opportunity to restructure your own memories. But they are so bizarre and unexpected that you reconfigure memories that you already have into a new configuration. And this, my friend, is my argument for what creativity is. -SC

I do agree that creativity, when talking about imagination, is tied explicitly to memory. And it is by and large a recrafting of the things that you’ve carefully crafted and put away in your mind.

Each person who visited the space reacted in their own earnest way. I would argue that each reaction can be thought of as each person’s own creative performance in first making sense of the space, followed by enjoying the space in their own way.

As they perform, they reshape the space, in turn shaping how others view it, potentially inhabit it. I find the two photos above particularly resonant of the shifting quality of space as impacted by the person. In one, the space is shrunken in the dynamic play of a child, in the other it is suddenly large against her stillness. In my own intimate familiarity with the space, I know that it is neither as small or as large as the images present. Yet as my own perspective shifts, so do I also imagine new possibilities.

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a twist in the global human fable

These interactions highlight the reciprocal relationship between person and place. I can only speculate for now on what may have been gleaned had a group of people been able to visit, rather than one at a time, a result of the state of the Covid-19 pandemic at the time of constructing this installation and the time of writing this reflection. However, I do not regret the situation because it has provided new questions on

the human condition, the phenomena of social spaces (non-virtual and virtual), and the mandated “fixed distance” for all persons to re-know each other. However, I will leave those musings here to be saved for exploration another time as there is plenty to reflect on in what was achieved.

It’s a lot. -SC It’s a lot.

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There had always been a lasting question in my mind, “What would happen when my animations were projected into space?” The architectural process requires a constant cycle of shifting perspectives between two dimensions and three dimensions. I mean this in both mental and tangible imagery. After all, the profession asks us to conceptualize the 3-D spaces of imagination and translate them into the 2-D of drawing. Coupled with the liberation from diminishing perspective that my drawings and my animations underwent, it was a fascinating

prospect to then project them into a three dimensional space with a forced perspective. Bring in the additional dimensions of time and mood, and certainly there would be something to mine.

I was not sure at first how to react once it occurred.

It was truly remarkable for the linework of speculated space and people to inhabit reality in such a fragile and ephemeral quality, but I was not sure yet what to make of it. And so we continued testing, conversing, and thinking.

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An early interest of mine was the use of scrim and atmospheric layers in space... Margaret did it very nicely for us and [showed] how the space and depth changes when fabric or some other material catches between. -SC

When we invited our friend and fellow thesis student Margaret Sobrino Almánzar, we asked her to bring a piece of her own work (Wearable Architecture: Cloth as Shelter) to model in the space.

Margaret’s visit was critical to bringing new thoughts to the discussion on different ways of seeing, new perspectives, and reinvigorated the question of what occurs in the shifts between 2-D and 3-D by charging it with an emerging possibility.

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As she danced with the space, with the drawings, as contours and gestures fell to the contours of her own gestures, I found myself confronted with the unknown.

Depth and color shifted, light reflected with incredible dimension, and I witnessed a series of moments which now only exist in the dream, the imagination.

Video links: Translation: https://youtu.be/3a4UdyyXTyc Disorientation:

https://youtu.be/kb-cAA53UGg

Animation in Space:

https://youtu.be/SnAIX2HHXc0

Theatre 01:

https://youtu.be/_LGvnnnFwmY

Theatre 02:

https://youtu.be/zaLh5WwmKzc

Theatre 03:

https://youtu.be/1Hwka0FV_QA

Sunrise 01:

https://youtu.be/tpnH1dJrA3Y

Sunrise 02:

https://youtu.be/AEkJJkg0yAI

Margaret 01:

https://youtu.be/CtruN9iwyPE

Margaret 02:

https://youtu.be/-ngKlYICDzE

Margaret 03:

https://youtu.be/TPnuANxkWJs

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what next?

From the age of 6 I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things.

When I was 50 I had published a universe of designs.

But all I have done before the age of 70 is not worth bothering with.

At 75

I’ll have learned something of the pattern of

nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds,

fish and insects.

When I am 80

you will see real progress.

At 90

I shall have cut my way deeply into the

mystery of life itself.

At 100

I shall be a marvelous artist.

At 110

everything I create;

a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before.

- Hokusai Katsushika (Lonergan 2014)

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Peter Cook (2014) claims that “architectural drawings are easily able to transcend any reference to reality,” with an ambition and “belief that architecture has much left to discover,” and that these types of drawings “tread completely into the unknown”(2). With a single suggestion, he brings us back to the tradition of surrealism, “Perhaps the ideal way in which an architect can approach the act of drawing is to be unaware that he is actually doing it at all”(8).

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Perhaps this is what he meant.

I continue to ruminate on suggestions of “empirical imagination” and “emergency,” words which had surfaced in conversation with Professor Nina Hofer.

In these moments between moments where things shift, change, recombine, and emerge, how can I create singularities? How has the very notion of singularity changed since this research began? As the embodied

forms of person and architecture continuously shift, I find that the definition of embodiment I sought is running, leaping, climbing. And I follow, uncertain if I am getting closer or farther, yet I find grounding, I find conviction in the flimsy, frail, fragile nature of such a dream. I imagine the images above as drawings. One is not a drawing projected onto Margaret within a space, nor is the other an image of a drawing projected onto Margaret within a space projected into the same space.

They are, in this state, returned to 2 dimensions, unrealities with new possibilities as drawings for further study. It may seem odd to conclude this writing in such open-ended terms, but it is only this writing that concludes. I have re-found a passion in my relationship with architecture, and with new invigoration. In light of that I will continue to chase these questions in search of more. I find it fitting then to close this chapter on these terms...

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I have much left to discover

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Arakawa, Kaku. 2016. Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki. Blu-Ray. NHK WORLD TV. Breton, Andre. “First Manifesto of Surrealism 1924.” Translated by Tony Kline. n.d. Accessed

May 1, 2020. https://www.poetsofmodernity.xyz/POMBR/French/Manifesto.php.

Carruthers, Mary J, Jan M Ziolkowski, and University of Pennsylvania Press. 2006.

The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures. Philadelphia, Pa.:

University of Pennsylvania Press.

Cook, Peter. 2014. Drawing: The Motive Force of Architecture. 2. ed. AD Primers. Chichester: Wiley.

Dodds, George, and Robert Tavernor, eds. 2005. Body and Building: Essays on the Changing

Relation of Body and Architecture. 1st MIT Press pbk. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Fichner-Rathus, Lois. 2013. Understanding Art. Boston, Mass.: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Giacometti, Alberto. 1932-33. The Palace at 4 A.M.

http://www.all-art.org/Architecture/24-6.htm Giacometti, Alberto. 1950. Man Crossing a Square on a Sunny Morning. Sculpture. Place:

The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan, USA, Founders Society Purchase,

Friends of Modern Art Fund, 52.8, http://www.dia.org/. https://library.artstor.org/asset/

AMICO_DETROIT_1039543315.

Giacometti, Alberto. 1969. Untitled, illustration 142, in the book Paris sans fin by Alberto

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of Illustrated Books, 2000.200.50.143, http://www.thinker.org/. https://library.artstor.

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Lonergan, Sonya. 2014. Hokusai: 97 Drawings. Osmora Inc.

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