The Interior Prospect

Degas at the Royal Academy

2011-11-01T20:23:00.007Z

Within the excellent new exhibition, Degas and the Ballet, at the Royal Academy there is a wall describing the way a series of his interiors were directly affected by the new photographic technique of panoramic photography. He painted and drew these interior views at the same size and format as the popular photographic views (approx 50cm x 20cm). It seems he may have liked the inherent action of movement in viewing these, as one scans from side to side. The distortion apparent in such photography is also somewhat assimilated in his art, another method to flatten and abstract the space, perspective loses any strict rules. In addition there is his play on 'photographic' composition - large areas of floor, truncated figures, strange edges and the apparent invisibility of the artist - that 'moment'.

While he was fascinated by the latest photographic techniques and experimented himself, his own paintings and pastels could not have been rendered photographically, neither the exposure nor the movement nor the depth of field nor the angles of view could have been achieved with cameras of that period. Cameras became metaphors for the experience of sight. What the show makes clear is that he was an artist who explored how we see.

Dean Pike - Tactile Interiors

2011-07-12T10:02:00.016+01:00

Dean Pike, a London based architect is exhibiting at the Royal Academy and has kindly sent us some information on one of his ongoing projects:

"I was interested in designing a building that had an uncanny property while remaining a recognisable social and tectonic reality.

I took the theme of ‘the pocket’ and elaborated it physically and spatially. My analysis of Westminster showed a world of lobbies, tea-rooms and spaces within spaces creating an interior labyrinth for intrigue and negotiation; an antidote to the banal correlation between democracy and transparency.

I started the process by designing a single pocket; drawing and making this at 1:1. This was a response to a poem about the relationship between memory and forgetfulness. Pockets are like miniature stores for memories. The vast quantity of overlapping pockets creates confusion and disorientation. This idea led to the design of a shirt constructed entirely from pockets - like the feathers of a bird. It became the spatial idea for a building interior - the tactile qualities of pocket interiors offer comfort and luxury - like an Adolfo Loos interior.

I began exploring the idea of a building without an exterior. To make this work I concentrated on making large models of interiority only; an ensemble of fragments that collectively portrayed the interior sequence of rooms and spaces. They became like masks that could be experienced internally.

The large scale wrappings of Christo & Jeane Claude were particularly inspiring - the elegance of the way spaces are draped and technical challenges of working with fabric to create large fabric enclosures -how to join material, different stitch types, folds and pleats for stiffening etc....

The eventual program was for a council for Camden Market. Council buildings are interesting because of their internal spatial density. Rooms that lead into rooms, that lead up to other rooms. Corridors were omitted, with rooms adding to the overall depth of secrecy. Using the language and structure of the existing market, a camouflaged environment of leather draperies is created where the politics of market trade and Camden interweave.

Darkness became important and enhanced aspects of secrecy. Beneath tough outer casings of leather, are a world of soft frills and folds, as layer upon layer is tailored into walls and space."

Dean Pike RIBA

There is an interesting challenge in representing a series of interiors that could only, it seems, be experienced individually and sequentially, the views become sliced and abstracted and float apart into a vacuum of darkness. There is something of the theatre to the mood a sense of anticipation.

Asier Gogortza

2011-05-09T19:25:00.009+01:00

Asier Gogortza has made pinhole cameras of military bunkers and made visual again their connections with their landscapes. Drawing on the researches of Paul Virilio and related to the work of Abelardo Morel l his images transform these interior spaces by seeming to both flatten them to an image and open them to a landscape. Even more than Morell's spaces these views quite literally formed the buildings into instruments to view and control. With thanks to Asier for the information and photographs.

How did you choose which bunkers to use?

There are thousends of bunkers around all Europe, so i have a lot of "cameras" to choose from. I have visited a lot of locations and I chose depending on the landscape around the bunker and the interior architecture of the bunker.

Did you create your pinhole in positions where there had been windows or other openings?

Yes, the window is the place where i put the little hole, so the landscape you see from inside the window is the landscape that will be projected on the wall of the bunker.

Are the views of landscape therefore representative of certain historical points of views? Of certain soldiers at specific historical times?

The project talks about the relationship of the bunker, like a human construction, and the landscape. This landscape is the target of the building, the bunker is made to shoot at this concrete landscape. Those war constructions they have something that attracts me, because they talk to us about another period of history. Now they are like monolithic sculptures, totally anachronistic in peace time, and they have been fighting only against time and nature.

It seems that often these war bunkers are reflections/creations of their landscape and environment, did you find new connections between the buildings and their landscapes?

Yes, for me it is interesting the conversation that develops between the bunker and the landscape. The bunkers are places from where you can look to the landscape without being seen, they are always in good locations with panoramic views. The objective of the bunker is to control and dominate all the territory, and finally appropriate the landscape. I think the final objective of all landscape photographers is the same.

On the other hand, its interesting to study how nature fights against the bunker, recognizing in it a strange element. You can see bunkers totally crooked in the beaches, or others totally covered by weeds in the mountain.

I have seen your careful working method on your stop motion animations on your flickr page, how did you prepare the bunkers to take these images? What sort of equipment and exposures did you use?

First of all I make the bunker dark. I use black plastic. Then i put the pinhole in the window and i go inside with the digital camera and the tripod. I shoot with very high sensitivities, 2.500 or 3200 ISO, because otherwise the exposure time would be very long and with digital cameras you have a lot of noise in that case.

Nadar and Nishizawa

2011-03-29T17:19:00.008+01:00

Felix Nadar 1820-1910 - Interior of a balloon 1863. This was his own balloon, the largest ever made at the time with a two storey basket including sitting room, photographic room, wc and printing room. His flying exploits inspired his friend Jules Verne to write From the Earth to the Moon.

There is something of this in the views of Ryue Nishigawa and Rei Naito's Museo-N in Japan 2004-2010 which strives for..."a specific endless environment. Light should be the only physical element besides the art" It is intended to be a space without angles where it is never clear how large it is or what shape it is.

Previsualisation 2004

Photograph of finished building 2010

Josef Sudek - The window filter

2011-03-15T10:54:00.009Z

Chair in Janacek's house 1948

1960

1972

Josef Sudek 1896-1976 a Czech photographer who found his subjects in his domestic surroundings and in particular in the material quality of light as it penetrated windows. The relationship between inside and outside, the gaze of a filtered window is explored in his long series on the Composer Janacek. He remained for most of his life around Prague and contributed to its somewhat melancholy and romantic character. Though much theory has been read into his window views, political, philosophical and psychological, there is a tension within them that seems to reflect a repressed ambition. A very different atmosphere to those somewhat similar viewpoints of Wyeth or Hopper. Despite having lost an arm in the first world war Sudek used a large format camera and preferred always to create contact prints rather than enlargements. Interesting link here to a combined study of the window pieces of Kertesz and Sudek.

Last year in Marienbad

2011-03-10T21:02:00.013Z

In Manhattan Murder Mystery Woody Allen fondly remembers how he brought Diane Keaton to Last year in Marienbad on their first date. Not a great idea.

Still, a surreal and beautifully filmed point of view that captures fickle surfaces and reflections that mirror the ambiguous characters and the architecture. Part baroque, part cubist the film seems to question its own form by its insistent unreliability, the narrative is unclear, the spaces are inconsistent, the characters unnamed and perception dizzingly questioned. Influenced Kubrick, Antonioni and Bergman, so no surprise Woody Allen loved it then.

Last year in Marienbad, directed by Alain Resnais 1961.

Patrick Hogan

2011-03-09T11:47:00.016Z

Prayers
Mustard

Learning to eat

Behind the Garden Wall

Animal in the dark no. 3

Patrick Hogan is the winner of the Gallery of Photography Artist's award 2010. His series, Solitary, half mad deals with living alone in rural Tipperary. The relationship between internal modesty/poverty and external wonder gives a powerfully suggestive insight into a fading way of life.

ST - Having grown up myself in the Tipperary countryside I remember many echoes of your works atmospheres in the empty houses we would explore when we were young. I am interested in how views of interiors can be used to communicate or suggest meaning. Regarding your series Solitary, half mad, which I believe has a fictive aspect to it, did some of the interiors that you created have some personal resonance for you?

PH - When I began this project, I decided to move from the urban area where I had been living, to a small cottage in the Tipperary countryside. All of the interiors that I photographed were found around the area where I live but they have no direct relevance to me, other than to say that they were chosen and photographed with a degree of empathy.

As I had been living alone and also working on this project alone for six months and on a very low budget, you could say that the overall series has absorbed a mood and a tone that I don't think would have emerged otherwise.

Initially, I was interested in the notion that romantic ideals of solitude and escapism are often more fantastical than reality will ultimately offer. Regarding meaning, I wanted to find a way to communicate this sense of tension between reality and fantasy. All of the interiors that I photographed were rooms where people lived or died alone. For the most part, everything was photographed as I found it. This was important. By paying particular attention to how these interiors were composed and lit, I could bring a sense of theatre to these very real situations. The sequencing of interior and exterior pictures and the significantly small number of pictures used in the final sequence, leaves enough space between the images to enable the viewer to form their own interpretation. In this sense, I think meaning is communicated by suggestion rather than direction, and relies on an element of elusiveness.

ST - In terms of point of view were you seeing the spaces through someone else's eyes?

PH - While I was researching this project, I found an unused and isolated house at the edge of a wood in the mountains near where I live. The house had been owned by a man who lived and died alone there only a short time before. Everything had been left untouched after his death. His bedroom remained as it was, as did the contents of all the other rooms. Looking at the poor conditions he had been living in, I became interested in the capacity we have as people to be alone and whether we're capable of long periods of isolation. I found myself returning to this house many times, often at night. I photographed interiors and also the woods around the house. I tried to see the place through his eyes, although this was done very much in a fictional capacity. At this point of the project however, I found that the original significance of the subject matter - that of isolation, had begun to shift from real to 'ideal' and a rather psychological landscape was emerging. Also, the final process of selecting pictures and constructing narrative was conducted very loosely with this person in mind.

ST - The interiors seem to reflect a life of exclusively solitary existence and both attract and repel through curiosity and food. Are these found spaces?

PH - Yes, all of the interiors are found spaces. Over the six months of the project, I met with and photographed people who live alone or in remote areas and also photographed the unused house as I mentioned. When I met people, I would usually begin with a portrait but soon found that the interiors seemed more interesting and were places that could hold more meaning than a portrait. In the end, none of the portraits were used.

The tension between attraction and repulsion that you mention was important throughout this project. Some of the interiors were photographed in what could be described as a forensic manner, like the bedroom, using a wide angle lens to include as much of the bed as possible and photographing it as I found it. On the other hand, by controlling the light and considering the camera view-point, the colour palette when printing and finally the framing, I could bring a somewhat seductive quality to these images. On closer inspection of course, we can see that in most cases, we are looking at scenes of neglect and often poverty. In this sense the visual language employed relies on a contradiction and I think meaning is communicated through this opposition.

ST - The claustrophobia of the interiors are relieved by the freshness of the exteriors was there some aspect of depicting a mental space? A life lived between the two?

PH - Yes, the forest scenes at night were used in sequence with the interiors to help construct a mental space, but in a visceral or imaginative sense. The sequence switches between exterior and interior to suggest both a physical connection between the two, and also a psychological sense of restriction and release. This movement between the two spaces also allowed me to experiment with the rhythm and pace of the overall narrative and I've used this as a platform to explore, in a fictional sense, the internal psychology of the character I had in mind.

Again, lighting was important when I photographed the exterior spaces. I used different techniques, often making use of long exposures, lights and sometimes torch light to bring a subtle sense of fantasy to these natural spaces.

Technical Info
I use a nikon DSLR and a Bronica medium format film camera depending on the situation. Colour film is Fugi Pro 400H 120 film for the Bronica or Ilford FP4 Black and White. I scan the negatives and use photoshop to adjust colours/levels etc. Other than basic colour correction, photoshop isn't used much.
If I shoot digitally, I will shoot in RAW format and use Nikon Capture NX to process if there are a lot of shadow areas, as there were in this series. I find it better for reproducing shadow details, or Aperture if the highlights are important.
The animals and some of the interiors were shot digitally. The exteriors use long exposures. The woods were 10 mins I think and the shed was 2 mins to get some movement in the trees behind. With the lighting I kind of experiment using handheld flash or a torch during the exposure. The interiors use mostly available light with a reflector, and sometimes a softbox.

Vilnis Vitolins

2011-03-08T10:41:00.007Z

Vilnis Vitolins is another photographer who uses a cabinet of curiosities approach to portraiture. These high resolution images (Hasselblad digital) appear as feasts for the eyes, there is no rummaging in the cupboards as everything is on display in a claustrophobic life-story-in-a-room sort of way. The people themselves blend in with their environment as if almost camouflaged, small fragments of the constructed whole. Again the spaces are compressed to patterns by the lighting and depth of field, the photographic space seems treated like a painted canvas with every available area carefully filled in.

Jasper White - Sheds

2011-03-07T15:57:00.009Z

Jasper White has looked closely at the Australian art of (male) shed making , man caves, a type of extension of customised cars and sports bars. These wunderkammers are presented as abstracted quilts with areas of rhythm and order, surgically flattened by the lighting, the vague spatial dimensions and the depth of field. Vibrant yet empty White says he sees these images as 'portraits in the purest sense' . They also work as reflections of the landscape.

6 x 7 film camera 90mm lens and lighting kit.

Via British Journal of Photography and by kind permission of the artist.

Via Things - a children's version by James Mollison

The Tracing Floor - Niall McLaughlin Architects

2011-02-28T13:43:00.010Z

The Tracing Floor is a 5m x 4m plaster floor drawing at University College Dublin School of Architecture.

The Tracing Floor - Niall McLaughlin Architects at UCD from stephen tierney on Vimeo.

"The Tracing Floor was made in response to a request from the School of Architecture in UCD to create an exhibition that would accompany our lecture in the Into Practice series being held there. We were invited to show one building and we chose the new chapel for Ripon Theological College in Oxfordshire. The title of the series made us think about the way we design and we wanted to make something for the event. We were offered a room for the exhibition, which is connected by a doorway to the lecture hall. We chose to make something that would stand beside, rather than duplicate, the content of the lecture.

In conceiving this piece, we reflected on a number of interrelated matters; the history of the building as the old Masonic School, remembered by elegant carved and tiled symbols on walls and floors; the exacting tradition of hand drawing in the School during my time there in the 1980s and a desire to communicate the contemplative and communal activity of drawing that is practiced in our own studio. We found a reference to the old English tradition of the tracing floor used by medieval masons to set out jigs for vaulting. Remnants of these can be found in cathedrals such as York, Wells and Hereford. They were made of plaster and they show the marks of drawing and cutting.

Professor John Tuomey described the exhibition room as the spiritual heart of the School and it is in the central flow of circulation. We were curious to know if it could be blocked and what effect that might have on movement in the building. We liked the idea of something very fragile becoming an obstruction. By covering the floor in lime plaster we intended to create an inversion of the natural light in the space. We wanted to fill the whole floor of the room. We hoped that foot traffic might gradually erase the drawing, enhancing its fugitive quality. We made a time-lapse piece from the ceiling recording its emergence and dissolution. We edited the film so that it has a drawing-like quality.

The drawing is a plan showing many layers at once. The chapel is organised around one pure ellipse containing an antiphonal arrangement of seating and surrounded by a

narrow ambulatory. The pure central geometry is focussed on the lectern and the altar. Outside the ambulatory, the singular form is broken down into a collection of attached structures that contain spaces for individuals or groups to pray in intimate settings. In many of our buildings, the plan has a particular antecedent. Here, we acknowledge our debt to Rudolph Schwartz’ church of St. Michael in Frankfurt from 1954. In our case, we moved the structure to within the surrounding walls, making a perimeter ambulatory to recreate the narrative of conversion suggested in Richard Sennet’s description of the Palatine Chapel at Aachen.

The status of the drawing cannot be justified as a depiction, an instruction or a cutting jig. We consider the manual repetition of the original setting out of the ellipse as a meditative or ritual activity more akin to beating the bounds. The project team carried it out at a liminal moment in the life of the building; the design has been completed and the construction is soon to commence. This project is the slow, rhythmic act of making the piece. It allowed us to dwell in it in a way not permitted by deadlines and drawing software. We moved apart and came together on the same floor over four days. All the time we talked about how we got here and what the chapel might become. The marks on the floor are the record of a contemplative activity. So drawing the nave was itself a still point suggested by the double meaning stored in the origin of the word."

Niall McLaughlin

Drawing Team

Tim Allen-Booth

Ciaran Conlon

Maria Fulford

Joanna Karatzas

Niall McLaughlin

Eoin Murphy

Project Team

Pierre Jolivet

Kirsty Smeaton

Stephen Tierney

For further information on the design on which it is based see here. The experience of walking on a plan at the scale of 1:5 is somewhat uncanny, one feels nearly in the building, one inhabits the plan. The exhibition will remain open for two more weeks, the drawn lines are slowly being erased by passing traffic.

Todd Hido - Foreclosed Homes

2011-01-25T14:32:00.010Z

1922

1968

1927

Todd Hido's evocative images foreclosed homes seem to relate poetically as the expired remains of his earlier series homes at night. If architecture is not buildings but how people use them, then there is an air of crime scene like uncertainty about these abstracted compositions. Time of day or night is ambiguous and they capture the disbelieving gaze of one looking at the uncanny appearance of one's emptied house..... was this our home?

The quality of light, filtered and from without underlines their quiet redundancy, extinguished. The rooms seem to act as imperfect cameras themselves absorbing unfocused light on to their faded walls, negatives, shuttered. If the rooms have character remaining to them it seems as helpless observers to a future beyond their control. Could these be the opposite of real estate views? Todd kindly sent some further information:

As an artist I have always felt that my task is not to create meaning, but to charge the air so that meaning can occur.

These images of homes at night are about the anonymity of those who reside in them. The pictures hint at some kind of story - only lurking in the vicinity of narrative.

Standing outside looking in—the lights come on and the inside seeps to the outside.

In the interior photographs—some of these foreclosed homes were cleaned up and some were filthy. The filthy ones I liked best for pictures, they told a better story. In the clean ones, I wondered what was erased.

For a very interesting interview with the artist where he reflects on the idea of 'home' and the process of presenting his work please see Ahorn Magazine.

Georges Rousse Anti-Quadratura

2011-01-04T17:40:00.005Z

Georges Rousse's work in both photographic and installation form plays with our binocular vision and the flatness of the photograph. While the images that flatten a three dimensional space with geometric forms seem strong the opposite works, where alternative three dimensional forms are applied, work less well. Rousse usually works in derelict buildings and often seem to operate as abstract visualisation exercises in that civic authorities often reconsider the possibilities of such spaces on the strength of the projects. Felice Varini does installations in more public spaces that similarly reward a priveliged viewpoint. Gordon Matta Clark's more agressive impositions seem more effective as they are not delicately applied but excised to show the true nature of structure, less artifice, less 'presentation'.
Conical Intersect 1975, Gordon Matta Clark.

It brings to mind a super game, Valve's Portal, where no dimensions are stable.

Charet Architecture

2010-11-06T16:07:00.006Z

Jerome Breslin of Charet Architects has shared these super interior views

....."I was interested in describing a quality of interior light and an illusion of space other than which is obtained through computer rendering. The quality of a computer rendering depends on manipulations of various parameters, whether these parameters are set to accurately reflect the conditions of the scene or instead to depict the scene in a certain way. The scale model, either daylit or artificially lit can also be faslified, but somehow you believe the falsification more. Whereas the scale model is a representation of building elements at scale, the light cannot be scaled and is therefore not a representation, It is the light. The model's expression was influenced by the lively interior models of SANAA, and the cardboard illusions of Thomas Demand. The space depicted is a virtual office, so the creation of an illusion was important."

Andrew Wyeth - Point of view

2010-10-04T11:19:00.007+01:00

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) one of the most popular american painters of the twentieth century. His spare watercolours often evoke a spiritual connection to rural landscapes that strike a chord with many. His interior views seem weather dependant and unsheltered. Steadfast to his craft to the end he was criticised by some for an illustrative approach but by the end of his life he had become very wealthy and there is a cutting honesty to his view of a rural homestead from the comfort of his private jet.

Scenographic Protractor

2010-10-04T11:02:00.008+01:00

With thanks to Bill Hastings, some images from instructional books on perspective. 300 years on and people still persevere to find a scientific method of depicting space.

Inner World

2010-09-07T21:28:00.007+01:00

Stratis Vogiatzis, a Greek photographer who has spent three years recording the interiors of the houses in the Mastic villages on the island of Chios. This is one of those islands like Cyprus, Malta and Sicily that seems to have absorbed something from all of its many invaders, Genoese, Arab, Greek, Turkish. These have some of the same mood as those by Patrick Prendergast.

via Heidi Romano at the super Tales of Light blog.

St. Jerome in his study

2010-09-07T11:53:00.009+01:00

Nicolás Francés
French Early 15th Century

Henry V. Steinwick
Dutch
1560 - 1649

Albrecht Dürer
German
1471 - 1528

Antonello da Messina
Italian (Southern Italy)
1430 - 1479

Michelangelo Merisi, called later Caravaggio
Italian (Milanese)
1571 - 1610

An interesting thread of how to show a very particular space - St. Jerome absorbed in his desert study, isolated yet consoled by his crucifix, skull and loyal Lion. The paintings all illustrate a part of the medieval Golden Legend (1260) which elaborated the lives of various fathers of the church. What is interesting is the point of view of the viewer, most of the artists keep us apart, looking in, to heighten the isolation and undisturbed quality of his space. Antonello and Steinwick both feel it necessary to somehow create a space within a space to further underline the other worldly quality of the saint's state of mind, Durer and Caravaggio do this with light. They all seem to strive to portray the space as a representation or parallel of the saint's psychological remove. So in a way they are spaces that we can never be part of. Caravaggio with his typical baroque swagger invites us to cross the line.

3D-2D-3D-2D

2010-09-06T15:17:00.004+01:00

Peter Greenaway's projected installation onto a copy of The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese in its original location in the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. This was realised by the very talented team at Factum Arte, if anybody knows where to find their animation in 3D of Piranesi's Carceri I'd love to see it?

The Wedding at Cana. A Vision by Peter Greenaway from factum-arte on Vimeo.

Wijnanda Deroo

2010-07-22T15:12:00.003+01:00

Wijnanda Deroo, a Dutch photographer whose interiors have a link to Vermeer; rich colours, implied inhabitation, formalised compositions. Her interest is in finding a shared humanity in how spaces throughout the world are occupied.

Imaginary Jerusalem

2010-06-24T13:12:00.005+01:00

The extraordinary drawings of Stefan Davidovici, an architect in Milan. These drawings explore an imaginary Jerusalem as created by layers of longing and myth. Both detailed and minimal at the same time, they suggest the qualities of space most experienced in an ancient city, to be enveloped, disorientated and bewitched.

In his own words:

Like a supersonic aircraft leaving behind its own sound, the mental representation of a city can be so powerful that the actual city – though strengthen by its own reflection – is simply left behind.

New York and Paris are perhaps the most ubiquitous examples of such cities in the modern world. They are enchanting, amazing cities with strong personalities – but they are present in the imaginary of the whole world in a way other places, equally enchanting and amazing, are never going to be. They leave the realm of reality to enter the domain of myth.

Jerusalem has been there since long before Paris and New York even came to exist. It’s not for nothing that a city is holy for three monotheistic religions. Suspended above the edge of the endless desert, Jerusalem is literally half on Earth and half in the sky.

So much Jerusalem identifies with its own myth that the image of a Celestial Jerusalem, accompanying its actual material model from the heart of Heaven, exists from the times of Babylon.

Real Jerusalem is still there, I know it well, I used to live there, yes it is the same city sung and missed for millennia, fought for and claimed by Jews and Christians and Muslims alike, but it lives its actual life with its normal rhythms, with its buses and markets and living rooms and streets and trees. Interrupted sometimes by breathtaking views or by glimpses of ages-old history. Living its normal life, though under the shadow of a conflict so deep, so old, so multifaceted that it looks as natural as the strong light bouncing on the stone of the city.

Jerusalem is still there but I am far from it now, and my own nostalgia for it is merely my own reflection of the same age-old nostalgia for Jerusalem. Far from the actual Jerusalem, I am free to explore the other Jerusalem, the imaginary one, and to reflect into imaginary spaces the amazing depths and spatial richness of a city unlike any other.

Ancestral Interiors - Patrick Prendergast

2010-06-11T21:38:00.006+01:00

The photographs of Patrick Prendergast, an exhibition at the Irish Architectural Archive. These views of the liminal spaces in Irish country houses are evocative of many layers of inhabitation. All the houses featured were still in the ownership of the original families that had commissioned the buildings. They are a type of anti-architectural photography in that they don't feature any grand views, important spaces or key details. They are more about wear, patinas, making do, growing up and the very nature of home. Many of the images allow the windows to flare in over-exposure reminding you that in most of these dusty spaces you would indeed be probably squinting in half-light. The photographs were taken with a 6x7 medium format Plaubel Makina.

The project was made possible by John Belmore and the accompanying book has a very good introduction by William Laffan.

Lense as window - window as lense

2010-06-09T10:28:00.006+01:00

Interiors of cameras by Mervy n Arthur. A logical reply to the many metaphors of rooms as cameras. If anyone knows anything more about this photographer please let me know, seems to have a low profile.

Reminds me of Danny Boyle's movie Sunshine where the key space is the hypnotic room where the characters go to absorb the sun's light.

UCD Exhibition

2010-06-03T16:44:00.007+01:00

UCD, Interior Prospect 2010, seminar/exhibition.

Exhibition of Camera Obscuras at Richview. These devices experimented with different ways to look at space and examined the difference between looking and seeing.

Thanks to all.

Lisa Cassidy
Ciaran Conlon
Conor Morrissey
Enda Naughton
Patrick Stack
Raukura Turei
David Walsh
Ania Zabiegaia

Raukura Turei

Lisa Cassidy

Conor Morrissey

Joseph Mackey

2010-05-27T10:56:00.008+01:00

Joseph Mackey, Thesis UCD Architecture, has created a book of interior spaces about a book about interior spaces. The "casting" of specific spaces in the appropriate roles is an interesting parallel to how we might imagine literary places. Seductive.

In his own words:

Le Petite Maison

Le Petite Maison is a novel by Jean-Francois Bastides which describes a plot of seduction as it unfolds in a visit to a maison de plaisance in suburban Paris. It presents an intimate relationship between a host, a guest and a building, through its layering of spaces and its elaborately ornamented rooms its describes an architecture which explicitly seduces and manipulates the senses.

Tremicour, the host, ‘is a man of wit and taste..magnificant and generous’. Melite the guest ‘had never played the coquette and had yet to take a lover; time that other women squandered in love and deception, she spent in instruction, acquiring true taste and knowledge’ he challenges her to visit his Petite Maison after she had discouraged his advances, ‘so they called it a wager and there she went’. The building itself is an active participant in this seduction not only is it the setting but it also acts as an instrument deploying a sequence of scenes where painting, sculpture and ornament are staged to manipulate a user. ‘I can’t take this any more she said this house is too beautiful, there is nothing comparable on earth’.

In order to establish the extent of Melite’s seduction I chose to study Bastide’s Petite Maison through the construction of a layered narrative or scene study, my intention is that through the turning of the pages the seductive layering of the Petite Maison is revealed to the reader.

As there is no accurate architectural representation of Bastide’s Petite Maison. I chose to construct the layered narrative using an architectural cast of players to appear in 3 scenes from the text. The Salon, The Bedroom, and the Boudoir.

Architectural Cast

Salon – Sir William Chambers – York House

Bedroom – Jacque-Francois Blondel, Maison a l’Italienne

Boudoir – Claude-Nicolas Ledoux - Théâtre Guimard

josephmackey@yahoo.com

2010-05-10T11:20:00.006+01:00

Parsifal III

Immenraum

Deutschlands Geisteshelden (Germany’s Spiritual Heroes), 1973

Anselm Kiefer, more usually a landscape painter, creates huge canvases that deal with German history and myths, his occasional interiors which normally have a portentous sense of place seem also to be treated like landscapes, epic, monumental and with a strength to the floor that seems to come from his landscape painting where he often mixes earth and ash to his ground. The intense and layered textures and the large scale makes for a oscillation between 2d and 3d. Like the late German writer WG Sebald, also a self-imposed exile, he covers some of the same territory of memory, time and identity. With both Sebald and Kiefer the world is seen under the crushing weight of nature and history. A good essay here on the connection between the two. Sebald however always thought the practice of painting to be questionable (Vertigo, last chapter) and sometimes it seems these themes are more successfully dealt with through the modesty and ambiguity of text. Kiefer also resorts to text; poems, slogans painted or scratched into his work as a kind of soundtrack to the images.

2010-05-10T10:43:00.002+01:00

Vojtěch Sláma

An-Architecture

2010-05-05T15:32:00.007+01:00

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978)

Following yesterday's discussion of format. While the fractured arrangements of Matta-Clark's collages have a relationship with the violent cutting of his installations it's interesting that often what threads them together, like his projects, is the void, the absence. Format of the work informing the format of the presentation.

Though he had studied architecture some of Matta-Clark's first conceptual experiments began with cooking (polaroids and gold in oil)

Hitchcock - Hopper

2010-04-29T12:06:00.007+01:00

Edward Hopper, Night Windows 1928 top

Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window 1954 above

As discussed on Monday, the connection between Hitchcock and Edward Hopper. On further investigation it seems the connection was sometimes almost literal as seen above but the themes of urban isolation and loneliness and, above all, that we are all voyeurs threads through both. The huge sound stage used for Rear Window was created to look like Greenwich Village in New York which is also where Hopper did many of his night paintings. The interior spaces are often shown as small cocoons of light where the occupants are aware only of their small parcel of space. Hopper's art seemed to strike a chord with depression era America and he became well off during the 1930's. He continued to sketch houses at night from his car and returned again and again to the theme of a couple in a room, in silence (Degas, Sickert?). The ambiguity in many of his interiors and a sense of narrative suspense has been attributed to his fascination with cinema. The paintings are often distilled, using light, to the experience of a 'moment' .

The device of viewing an interior from outside, as a voyeur, makes for a fragmented picture of peoples' lives and their environments. The window seems a vital release. There is a caged or claustrophic mood as the spaces seem cell like and one is less aware of the other rooms.

Edward Hopper, Room in New York 1932

With thanks to the Alfred Hitchcock Geek

2010-04-26T19:17:00.006+01:00

Thomas Struth, German photographer who studied with Gerhard Richter and Bernhard Becher. He has been exploring how people look at art for 20 years. This series of views of views, Making time, was sited in the Prado, as always, the technique and format are of the architectural photography type; large format camera, tripod, perspective correction, large depth of field, but the subjects are the people, living and painted and their varied gazes. The art (Velasquez) is re-animated. One can imagine how self consious one would feel looking at these in situ, as you yourself get drawn into the narrative as one more layer.

The huge scale of Struth's photographs and the richness of their colour and detail bring them close to paintings, something of an inversion of his tutor Richter who's paintings have a photographic quality. Struth's photographs from the Accademia in Florence look at people viewing Michelangelo's David. Some adopt similar poses, some look at others looking, some are absorbed, we are seeing them from the point of view of the statue itself, again the art is given a new life. He explores both the collective and individual experience of looking and seeing. Interestingly it is only in the presence of something so impressive that you would be able to take people's picture without any self consiousness, they don't seem to notice the photographer.

There is something about artists who examine the philosophy of their medium that makes for long term critical importance but sometime popular apathy, the critics will always obsess over it because it complements them, it is about what they do. Not just photographs about photography but paintings about painting (Picasso, Cezanne, Velasquez), Films about film making (Robert Altman, Woody Allen, Fellini, Hitchcock) Writing about writing (Charlie Kaufman, James Wood, Joyce, Proust) Theatre about theatre (Stoppard, Beckett) etc. etc. They all speak with unique authority but is it sometimes self indulgent?

2010-04-16T14:26:00.001+01:00

Ciaran Conlon's winning entry in this year's UCD ArcSoc photography competition. This was Ciaran's submission for the quality of light exercise in the Interior Prospect seminar.

2010-03-15T16:31:00.002Z

Unhappy Hipsters, a knowing smile at the pressures of the "inhabited" architectural photograph.

2010-03-11T11:04:00.011Z

William Eggleston, Graceland, 1984.

As Eggleston was from this part of the American South (Memphis, Tennessee) one imagines he understood the feel of these extraordinary rooms. His style of strong colours combined with his engaging point of view (his 'democratic eye') mark them as very different to standard architectural photography. Despite their angled perspectives the spaces are rendered flat by the confusion of patterns and textures, the depth of field is technically deep and yet everything is about surface.

Thanks to Morgan Jones for the suggestion and the informative comment/expansion attached to this post.

2010-02-23T09:45:00.004Z

Aaron Hobson an American photographer creates what he calls Cinemascapes, panoramas made from a number of stitched vertical images....

..."thereby offering more visual information and an obscured rendition of any moment depicted by a single image. These preserved moments straddle between the contexts of fictitious, universal and isolated autobiographical experiences."

2010-02-18T13:07:00.005Z

Andy Sheridan, an Irish architect/photographer who has been fine tuning his technique of interior panoramas over the last few years. He uses a variety of software to stitch up to 30 images together to make these vast views. They are different to regular wide angle views in that they do not share the particular distortions associated with such lenses, there seems to be a more subjective distortion however that's based on point of view and format. In his own words:

".....I choose my location just the same as when I'm taking a single shot, except I'm picturing the overall composition when I am taking the individual shots...so, I'm watching out for potential leading lines and perspective and deciding where the the main subject will be located within the overall composition"

".......just like the eye moves to inspect a view the camera moves too, but with the photos you have the opportunity to see all those little views together - floors, walls, ceiling, top to bottom and side to side. It's inherently unnatural of course...in many cases the panorama contains far more information than your eyes can actually view at the one time.....Regarding scale, again it very much depends on the nature of the space and the result you get when you merge the image. For example the Pantheon shot, with it's exaggerated roof, gives an exaggerated sense of the scale of the building...especially when you spot the tiny individuals walking beneath it. With that shot I wanted to capture the drama of the ceiling ...it's the true subject of the shot. Generally it's not something that I deliberately manipulate. Usually I am trying to create a realistic representation of a space. Or more accurately I suppose I'm trying to create what I think is a realistic representation!"

David Hockney said that what differentiates photography from painting is that painting has so much time invested in it, the surface is worked. One of David Hockney's images below that has had some time, like Andy's, invested in it. Note the artist in the mirror (Van Eyck)

Sunday Morning, Mayflower Hotel, N.Y., Nov. 28, 1983

Collage of (approximately 140) chromogenic color prints
Approx. 116.0 x 184.5 cm

2010-02-09T11:54:00.003Z

The hybrid 3d photographs of Sebastian Denz, between virtual and real in what he calls postvirtual spaces. The photographs, that are printed at life size, were taken with a specially designed large format stereo camera (8" x 10") and blended digitally. Many precedents of those connecting skate-boarding with spatial analysis - Professor of Architecture at my Alma Mater Iain Borden - sex and skating....

But more from Denz (.....dense):

“(...) Actually, though, nothing else takes place, beyond the fact that the viewer’s imagination has to fill in and add to the geometric space of the image, so that his own metaphysical ‘reality’ can unfold, as it were, while this geometrical space also takes on a phantasmagoric component. A considerable increase in the power of illusion is responsible for this; the optical sense absorbs, in a certain way, all the other senses into its suggestive pull. On one hand, Denz employs to perfection the possibilities offered by this visual technique, yet, on the other, he obtains his aesthetic capital from its obvious dilemma, which is, that it is ultimately, not able to close the rift between the sight and the psychical ‘touch’ (Mark Rothko) of the visual space. Here, a constitutive role is played by the cardboard glasses and the red-and-cyan-colored view they provide. In no way is it the usual, burdensome imperative, but rather, it opens up a critical dimension: motifs, technology, and artistic concept are seamlessly interwoven. (...)”

Thanks to Lisa Cassidy for this.

2010-02-03T12:27:00.004Z

Donovan Wylie: Maze

HM Prison Maze, Long Kesh, Lisburn, Co. Down, Northern Ireland 1976-2007

A political series of photographs on the intentional sameness of this most controversial site. Scene of hunger strikes, mass breakouts, murders and ceasefire negotiations, parts of the building are now listed. The photographer spent over 100 days on site while it was being slowly decommissioned. Absence seems to be the underlying atmosphere and a generic pathos that goes with empty institutional buildings. The disorientating repetition of almost similar cells, corridors and courtyards gives this work its power rather than any individual image, although you've got to wonder about the curtains...

2010-01-26T11:23:00.006Z

Robert Polidori, a Canadian artist interested in cultural evidence through habitat has been interested in the palace of Versailles for most of his career. There is an interest in how different generations preserve historical spaces, layers upon layers. Some of the images use the claustrophobic decoration and carefully chosen viewpoints to reduce the spaces to 2D patterns, like a Bonnard painting. There seems also to be a counterpoint between the spaces and materials depicted in the paintings and the architecture itself. A good article here.

Abelardo Morell

2010-01-19T12:57:00.007Z

Abelardo Morell's photographs of camera obscura images. The rooms are carefully blacked out and a pinhole made to expose the room to it's view. A long exposure (six hours etc) with a large format camera reveals the exterior overlaid on the interior. He leaves the interiors as they are, sometimes messy or under renovation, over decorated or spare. The rooms seem something of a metaphor for our own cluttered minds or the bagage onto which we project all images we see. These views, often famous, may also be "burnt" onto the identity of these rooms. Does having a view make a room into something of a camera in any case? Surreal and uncanny. A good essay here by Bonnie Costello that fittingly finds a reference to the work of Edward Hopper and de Chirico, where there is an equally ambiguous relationship between interior and exterior and time can also seem to stand still.......the fugitive intimacy of hotel rooms. Thanks to Hugh Campbell for the reference.

2010-01-14T15:55:00.005Z

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

The Third and The Seventh by Jorge Seva (Alex Roman). Watch full screen.

3d Studio, Vray, After Effects, Premiere. One film-maker. One Computer. Two years of work

All of the buildings and nature are computer models. Except the figure of the photographer - the film-maker himself composited into his favourite buildings (Hitchcock). There is something of an irony in his obsession with cameras, their imperfections, the devices that help them move, with all the functions and protocols of architectural photography........and all the time no camera was used in making this. A kind of toying with reality, a nostalgia surely for how things were done. He does say that all his inspiration is photography and not CGI. Many references in spirit, nostalgia, architecture and music to Gattaca. Certainly the interest in time, aging, discolouration and imperfections suggests a different approach to standard modernist views of buildings. The piece seems more an animated photograph than a film. Architecture is not usually animated with this level of fetish, pity.

In terms of studying buildings like these, looking at them, is there a difference between what the architect sees and what the photographer sees? If so, then what is the viewpoint of someone who visualises? They too have "made" the building to a certain extent and indeed have usually made the weather to go with it. Is the point of view as deliberate and purposeful as the architect? Is the camera here a proxy for the human eye? With thanks to Andrew.

2010-01-02T13:02:00.005Z

Richard Learoyd, an English Photographer, uses a room as a camera, there is a lense in a hole in the wall. In the adjoining room, of similar size, he carefully composes his subjects. The image is exposed onto a type of positive photographic paper, there is no negative, each image is a unique very large format direct exposure. The images are about life size. There is a wonderful symmetry to the arrangement; the photographer positions himself in the camera/room, the subject in the other room/studio, the level of detail and effects captured are somehow closer to the experience of being beside these people. In these views scale matters, the taking and the displaying and possibly also in the composing and point of view. A limited space, a shallow depth of field and those measured greys make for powerful, quiet illusions.

2009-12-21T17:05:00.004Z

One of the most iconic interior views in the history of art, Velazquez' Las Meninas 1656. Variously described as the 'Theology of Painting' or the 'Philosophy of Art'. There are very few paintings that so directly question the point of view of the viewer. Are we in the shoes of the King and Queen as they pose for their portrait? Every aspect is shrouded in ambiguity, what is the subject? Where are the mirrors? Must Velazquez have been outside his own painting and placed in later? Interestingly the painting was painted for the room that is depicted. As Velazquez was the curator of the Royal collection at the time, he was in a way recording that role and perhaps drawing on another of the paintings in that collection Van Eyck's The Arnolfini Marriage.

Picasso was obsessed by the painting and made many studies of it, some shown above. Also above is an empty version created by Bredan Whelan at UCD, an empty stage set of a sort... An excellent and passionate analysis of the painting is in Laura Cumming's A Face to the World. A rich and readable book on self portraiture.

2009-11-23T11:45:00.002Z

The pervasive influence of M C Escher on all fantasy interiors. From this excellent blog connecting Architecture, game design and maths. Its a pity that more games don't deal with the impossible rather than endless dystopian near futures (The excellent -Portal excepted)

2009-11-21T15:17:00.003Z

The Interior Propect at University of Limerick. We had a one day Interior Propect workshop hosted by the Society of Architecture. Its great to see the activity in the architecture department in Limerick, a lot of interesting design projects involving the wider landscape. Some local issues but a broad context.

Some Camera Obscuras made on the day above, and some images made on the day, below:

2009-11-16T12:33:00.003Z

The art of the interior model shot. Top image by DRDH bottom by Sergison Bates. It seems the models need to be generally 1:20 or larger to have good photographic potential, the play of light on carefully photocopied materials is convincing. They have also something of the quality of a stage set which in effect, at scale, they are.

2009-11-05T10:20:00.003Z

The half modelled/half photoshopped interiors of Carl Zimmerman. He is interested in that period of history between the wars when architecture evoked an heroic civic pride, when big was best. Their fading shells perhaps now remind us of our own uncertainty regarding the role of civic architecture.

2009-09-22T10:43:00.005+01:00

Gustave Caillebotte, impressionist painter, lawyer, engineer, soldier, boat builder, sailor, yacht designer and patron of the arts. He had a style close to his friend Degas and he was equally inspired by photography but his interiors show a more intimate and involved point of view. He composed with unusual perspectives and his interiors use soft reflected light in a sculptural way. Like his fellow impressionists he wanted to break away from the traditions of the academy and paint "modern" life. He is shown above designing a boat in his painting studio. During his life he was France's most accomplished sailor and the boats he designed continued to win medals at the olympics after his early death. Puts one in mind of Woody Allen's short story - If the Impressionists had been Dentists :

Dear Theo,

Will life never treat me decently? I am wracked by despair! My head is pounding! Mrs. Sol Schwimmer is suing me because I made her bridge as I felt it and not to fit her ridiculous mouth! That's right! I can't work to order like a common tradesman! I decided her bridge should be enormous and billowing, with wild, explosive teeth flaring up in every direction like fire! Now she is upset because it won't fit in her mouth! She is so bourgeois and stupid, I want to smash her! I tried forcing the false plate in but it sticks out like a star-burst chandelier. Still, I find it beautiful. She claims she can't chew! What do I care whether she can chew or not! Theo, I can't go on like this much longer.

-Vincent.

2009-09-09T13:03:00.002+01:00

Portrait of M. Duranty by Edgar Degas 1879

Interior - Pierre Bonnard

Interiors of semi abstracted colour arrangements, the space is compressed, realism is ignored, books and food become the domestic tools of composition.

2009-08-27T13:31:00.003+01:00

John Singer Sargent - Daughters of Edward Darley Boit

This painting puzzled critics when it was first exhibited with its strange arrangement and square format. Sargent was recently influenced by Velasquez and was experimenting with depth of field and single light sources to create some mystery. The daughters at the rear, dressed like servants, were more reclusive and had later mental health problems, it may seem casual but he was very picky about the composition and usually even chose his sitters' clothes.

John Singer Sargent - Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife

A restless portrait of the author, but in some ways more an abstract arrangment, the space again is not just a frame or backdrop for the sitter but suggesting something more. The red again....

2009-08-26T16:57:00.004+01:00

The Art of looking down....Frank Miller the king of comic noir. Sometimes minimal, sometimes over the top, Miller's images always have memorable graphic quality. Inevitably his graphic novels, ready story-boarded, are now films, the diligent cartoonist is now a celebrity movie director....unfortunately he doesn't seem to draw much anymore.

2009-08-24T13:57:00.002+01:00

Botticelli

Rogier Van der Weyden

While northern and Italian renaissance paintings have many differences, their treatment of interior views is often quite similar - the space is used to frame a view of a landscape, the landscape recedes in a linear continuation of the space of the interior and indeed seems to share the same milky "weatherless" lighting effect. It seems that the landscape is an extension of the interior space and that the spaces are barely interior at all. Patterns emphasise the recession of the space and shadows help compose the figures.

2009-08-21T15:11:00.002+01:00

Andrei Tarkovsky - The Mirror, a good example of his elemental interiors and his "sculpting in time" technique. He was famous for his long takes and the ambiguity of his imagery.

2009-08-21T10:12:00.002+01:00

Leverentz's imagination, spaces as imagined and as completed

2009-08-20T10:14:00.004+01:00

The uncanny interiors of Thomas Demand, at first, they seem normal large scale photos of interiors until one notices that everything is made from cardboard, suddenly this unsettling realisation turns everything on its head, scale and space become uncertain. One thing these mock ups seem to prove I think is that it is often the quality of light that convinces us most.

2009-08-19T12:57:00.003+01:00

Eduoard Manet's Olympia shocked the art world, one of the reasons for that disgust was the point of view which suggested the viewer was the prostitute's next client. Interestingly the model Victorine Meurent was a well known painter as well as Manet's favourite model. Manet took the well known conventions of classical nudes and twisted every little detail, to suggest a more modern interpretation. The high contrast studio lighting flattens the space in another strange anticipation of photography.

Yasumasa Morimura's photographic reinterpretation of the scene.

2009-08-19T12:49:00.002+01:00

Peter Greenaway's reinterpretation of the Leonardo's The Last Supper in Milan. A projection of a 3d animated version of the painting onto the painting itself. 2.5D?

2009-08-17T11:09:00.003+01:00

Degas - Interior. Degas' paintings owed something to photography but they leave many unanswered questions as was becoming more common with the ethos of modernism, the quality of light heightens the brooding sexual tension. The room may be small but there is a large void between the figures. The painting was considered so unsettling with its ambiguous narrative that at the time that it became known as "The Rape"

Degas - L'Absinthe, one of Degas' memorable compositions, strong diagonals, limited palette, use of mirrors (again) and the unclear subject. Though the models were his friends the painting has the appearance of an unposed snapshot. The painting was hugely controversial at the time and the English press held it up as an example of French moral degradation.

2009-08-07T15:14:00.007+01:00

Rothko

Matisse

Ingmar Bergman - Cries and Whispers

Peter Greenaway - The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

Degas

The different powers of red interiors, red seems to flatten a space, light is less able to define the depth and other colours are absorbed or overpowered, a sense of claustrophobia perhaps...

2009-08-06T11:30:00.004+01:00

Edouard Vuillard, a member of the Nabis group of painters who reacted against the impressionists, he concentrated on Paris interior scenes, he lived with his mother, a dressmaker for most of his life and pattern, decoration and colour are constant themes. Inspired by Gauguin and Japanese art the Nabis began expressionism, emotions in spaces were of prime importance

2009-08-05T18:08:00.003+01:00

Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? by Richard Hamilton

2009-08-05T13:18:00.002+01:00

Piranesi's Carceri

...."Many years ago," he wrote, "when I was looking over Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, which record the scenery of his own soul during the delirium of a fever.....enclosed spaces in which wander aimlessly or deliriously the wraiths of damned men, not a whit less wretched nor awful than Dante's immemorial mob

2009-08-04T12:11:00.000+01:00

Another famous point of view interior scene - Scorcese's Mean Streets

2009-07-31T20:54:00.003+01:00

The unavoidable and unsettling points of view in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, leading diagonals, the eyes wide staring symmetries, more here

2009-07-31T20:36:00.002+01:00

Jan van Eyck - The Arnolfini Portrait
So many questions, was the wife actually dead when the portrait was painted, is the painting a legal document, can all items be read as symbolic? In any case one of the first oil paintings in western art and one of the first realistic depictions of space and light.

David Hockney in his book Secret Knowledge claims that the painting was probably created with the help of a mirror lense, that is a concave mirror which can focus an upside down image onto a panel. The impressive chandelier apparently was painted without any underdrawing, very unusual for such a dramatically foreshortened form. The telling clue of course is the convex mirror on the far wall which is just the right size if reversed to do the job.

2009-07-31T12:29:00.000+01:00

Ken Adam - Set design for Dr. Strangelove

2009-07-31T09:34:00.001+01:00

Bladerunner as pre-visualised by Syd Mead

2009-07-29T20:45:00.001+01:00

Next meeting Friday, try to bring first sketches of Character's apartments...etc.

2009-07-29T11:04:00.004+01:00

Ennis Brown House as featured in Bladerunner and over twenty other movies, now for sale for $15 million.

Some interesting thoughts here

2009-07-27T13:22:00.000+01:00

Bladerunner, Tuesday July 28th Memorial Hall - 6.15pm

2009-07-27T12:26:00.000+01:00

Peter Vilhelm

2009-07-27T12:11:00.000+01:00

Emanuel de Witte

2009-07-27T11:44:00.000+01:00

Richard Williams in the Guardian

2009-07-26T20:06:00.001+01:00

There was a time when I experienced architecture without thinking about it. Sometimes I can almost feel a one particular door handle in my hand, a piece of metal shaped like the back of a spoon. I used to take hold of it when I went into my aunt’s garden. That door handle still seems like a special sign of entry into a world of different moods and smells. I remember the sound of the gravel under my feet, the soft gleam of the waxed oak staircase, I can hear the heavy front door closing behind me as I walk along the dark corridor and enter the kitchen, the only really bright room in the house. Looking back, it seems as if there this were the only room in the house in which the ceiling did not disappear into twilight; the small hexagonal tiles of the floor, dark red and fitted so tightly together that the cracks between them were almost imperceptible, were hard and unyielding under my feet, and a smell of oil paint issued form the kitchen cupboard.

Everything about this kitchen wad typical of a traditional kitchen. There was nothing special about it. But perhaps it was just the fact that it was so very much, so very naturally, a kitchen that has imprinted its memory indelibly on my mind. The atmosphere of this room is insolubly linked with my idea of a kitchen.

From ‘A Way of Looking at Things’ by Peter Zumthor. Published in A+U.

2009-07-24T10:14:00.003+01:00

Minimal Mies

2009-07-23T10:58:00.001+01:00

2009-07-23T10:30:00.003+01:00

"How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect."

Gaston Bachelard - The Poetics of Space

2009-07-23T10:16:00.002+01:00

Charles Sheeler's curious interior views, mostly of his own house that he seemed mildly obsessed with, an American spin on cubism? His commercial photography and his interest in industrial architecture seeps into the abstracted still lifes of his own home. The point of view is also somewhat abstracted and almost a dazed daydream....

2009-07-23T10:13:00.000+01:00

Georges Perec - Life a User's Manual

2009-07-19T14:18:00.004+01:00

Tom Hunter

2009-07-19T13:48:00.004+01:00

Lets play the game....

Georges Perec - Life a User's Manual

2009-07-17T12:56:00.002+01:00

Space

"When nothing arrests our gaze, it carries a very long way. But if it meets with nothing, it sees nothing, it sees only what it meets. Space is what arrests our gaze, what our sight stumbles over: the obstacle, bricks, an angle, a vanishing point. Space is when it makes an angle, when it stops, when we have to turn for it to start off again. There's nothing ectoplasmic about space; it has edges, it doesn't go off in all directions, it does all that needs to be done for railway lines to meet well short of infinity."

Georges Perec - Species of Spaces and other pieces

2009-07-16T17:03:00.000+01:00

Phantom from Ronan Coyle on Vimeo.

2009-07-16T10:46:00.004+01:00

The Bank of England in Ruins, design by Soane, image by Gandy

First meeting 6.15pm Friday July 17th in seating area beside cafe Richview

Hopper - Inside to outside

2009-07-07T15:06:00.002+01:00

Edward Hopper

2009-07-07T11:02:00.000+01:00

Thank you to all those who came to the launch of "Now What" at Richview last night. There were many interesting workshops and I think there is a good opportunity for different groups to work together. This workshop will be working in partnership with Workshop # 7 - Multiplex.

The first meeting of the group will be in Richview on the evening of Friday the 17th of July. Generally we will meet for about 90 minutes twice a week on Tuesday and Friday evenings with a drink afterwards. Also we will visit galleries at weekends (times to be arranged to suit people)

The imagined output from the workshop is one image, in any medium, per person.

2009-07-07T10:51:00.000+01:00

This is a workshop about images of interiors. In the last 10 years computer visualisation has become commonplace, and yet it still seems as though it has to find its own voice. It is usually commissioned for quite specific purposes; to sell, to persuade, to impress. The medium operates within the environment of tight budgets, impending deadlines and is commissioned to order, it is not involved in the architecturally more engaged discussion that occurs between photographers and architects at the building’s completion.

Now, with less selling to be done, I’d like to explore the possibility of visualisation being used to express some of the core ideas of the architecture and to uncover or suggest some of the future qualities of the spaces. At present internal images are often relegated to a secondary supporting role in architectural presentations, one slowly collects one’s impression of a scheme through plans, sections and concept models. Strong internal images can highlight the experience of a building, a method of working that involves internal exploration can reduce “object-like” architectural design. Computers have been criticized for allowing architects to work like product designers, but there is another side to those new tools.

I would like to explore how best to create a truly rich image with layers of meaning and suggestion, using all the tools and mediums at our disposal to tell more about the fundamental ideas of a project. So expanding on Louis Kahn’s interest in the room as the starting point, this will mean concentrating on the creation of a single strong internal image of an unbuilt building. The Dutch parallel between internal space and psychological space will also be explored.

One common problem in this area is that while buried among the technical difficulties involved in crafting a working image, often one feels one loses sight of how the image will be seen. Guest critics will be invited to explain their work and contribute to the group’s discussion. We will also of course be burying ourselves in technicalities.