Thoughts and Words- what? how? why?................mk II

What?
My architecture seeks to synthesise a milieu of ideas concerning the body- its tectonic surfaces, mechanics of motion and relations to space, and the performative roles of the anatomy within a larger techno-ecological framework. This coupled with a preoccupation in futurist notions of representing (or indeed the misrepresenting in the traditional sense) the anatomy/anatomical surface in ‘movement space’, delineates my current architectural agenda.
The title is a reference to the ‘tropes’ of cyber-theory. Which as a discourse on the reflexive relationship of corporeality and technology, propagate a hyperbolised, neo-cartesian idea of metaphysics that connotes the separation of body and mind - in which the body exists as a lesser mechanism (‘the meat’) distinguished from an ontologically superior mind, and experience of the world is mediated via ‘consensual hallucinations’.1

Using the skin as a conceptual and thematic frame extrapolated from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 3 notion of the phenomenological body that contests the cartesian model founded on the corresponding dualism of the mind and body; ‘res extensa’ and ‘res cognitans’. For Merleau-Ponty the body is not simply a material location from which we perceive. He positions perception as a fundamental ‘corporeality’ rather than as a result of the actions of a disembodied thinking. Merleau-Ponty talked of the body as ‘flesh’, of the same ‘flesh’ of the world. Where ‘flesh’ in this instance becomes an extended meaning of skin and, accordingly, skin not as surface or membrane, but rather like ‘a place of minglings’.4 Thereby implicating a notion of three-dimensionality that is manifested through the material landscape of skin. It is an indeterminable organ state - its visibility/invisibility congruent with a categorical separation between seeing and touching.5 It is the Visible and the Invisible. The skin begets a primary architectural state- one of encapsulation, protection, coverage. Mechanically and thematically it is placed within the aforementioned theoretical framework, thus becoming an expression of complex relationships and dialectic nature of the forces shaping it. a spatial filter between states demarcating properties of interiority and exteriority (the traditional being of architecture.)

How?
The project hopes to function on a number of levels in terms of theory, material and representation.
In one instance, imagining a coalescence of skin, fabric, flesh (or indeed fabric/clothing as an extended/second skin as McLuhan would have it)6 and utilising contemporary developments in textile sciences, coupled potentially with theoretical biotechnologies as a process of material research. This would be either the use of actually biological materials to propagate a skin(s); and/or the use of a specific bio-mechanical function of the skin as a model for which to develop synthetic systems/textile/material.
In terms of representation, an aesthetic trajectory is defined that conveys said visceral surfaces and emergent bodies, and recalls such visuals as Francis Bacon’s tortuous anatomies, Ansele Seam’s slit-scan distortions and Caravaggio’s deft rendering of the veil. Materiality is implicated through scanning, folding, creasing, layering and blending; scale is questioned, and a  visceral landscape suggested.
A further layer is embellished with a narrative arc of the myth of Marsyas and Apollo re-read through contemporary theoretical ideals, namely the Deluezian notion of Leibniz’s fold (articulated in the work of Didier Anzieu 7 and Stephane Dumas 8). The myth can be deployed as a potential symbolic overlay or a conceptual ‘diaroma’. Pertinent is the depiction of said event by Juseppe de Ribera (, wherein the two figures are depicted in stark contrast with the radiant apollo towering above the prostrate Marsyas. Flesh and fabric merge into one another, where the billowing material recalls fleshy fruit and becomes a sort of carnal landscape enclosing the figure of Apollo before flying off the frame of the picture. There are obvious aesthetic resonances in the visceral nature of the image, but moreover a recapitulation of the scenario with the protagonists and the myths own symbolism re-imagined to convey the wider, pervasive agenda of the work

Why?
The project will serve as a commentary on such aspects of corporeality, and seek to potentially reconcile conflicting notion of phenomenology and technology. where the so-called surfaces of biology and technology are being interleaved in ways which question the tenets of materiality and confront the portrayal/postioning of the ‘body’ within architecture/architectural representation, wherein the tectonics of the anatomy serve as a dialectic on wider issues of human ‘being’. Nigel Thrift articulates that ‘the object surfaces which interpose with our bodies are forming a new kind of carapace, a matrix of informational surfaces which by the combination of machine and theory creates a new inside which is also simultaneously an outside.