Aarchitecture 33 Consider Architecture in a Sensual Form

AArchitecture 33 Consider architecture in a sensual form – a form made to seduce you, a form that is not concerned with physicality but potential. A form that arouses you from mere expectation. This is the pleasure of architecture and the architecture of desire. For this issue, AArchitecture presents the position of desire from within the blurred realms of art and architecture. Architecture historian Adrian Forty describes human desire as ‘a single idea, which comes across as so familiar that we find ourselves supposing it to be exactly what we ourselves had always thought’.→ 1 This suggests that with desirability comes intention. It takes a sense of feeling or experience to replicate a particular allegory within an object, building or artefact. Desire In ‘The Pleasure of Architecture’, Bernard Tschumi discusses the idea of pleasure through the 1951 filmA Streetcar Named Desire, writing that ‘desire was never seen. Yet it remained constant’. He characterises the presence of desire in this film as ‘the movement toward something constantly missing, toward absence. Each setting, each fragment, was aimed at seduction but always dissolved at the moment it was approached’. → 2 Tschumi is saying that the very essence of desire is that which cannot be attained. ‘To desire’ is to want or to anticipate, and therefore the moment of satisfaction is also the termination of desire. The ‘architecture of desire’ must then be a choreographed apparatus for anticipation, and the architect or artist becomes the erotic curator. In this issue Penelope Haralambidou writes about her analysis of Marcel Duchamp and her depiction of the architecture of desire through his work and her own drawing technique. She does this through three main themes: allegory, visuality and desire, which are drawn upon more extensively in her book, Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire. → 3 For AArchitecture, Haralambidou has focused on two works by Duchamp; Given, which she describes as ‘the construction of a daydream’, and Large Glass. Haralambidou tells us that, ‘Duchamp wasn’t necessarily interested in the built architecture; rather the philosophical potential of it’ – though she does explain how Duchamp was curating an intended gaze of the constructed nude. In the case of Given, Duchamp was creating physical and spatial work, but he was building it with an awareness of erotic anticipation, through the experience of the limited gaze. Therefore, his work was not designed through physical form, but through the phenomenological act of desire. On a similar note, in his essay ‘A Mahjong Table, a Façade and a Hotel Room’, James Mak deconstructs three scenes in Wong Kar Wai’s 2000 filmIn the Mood for Love. Mak tells us that the film, ‘is a story of two married couples who happen to rent rooms in adjacent homes. Gradually realising that their respective spouses are having an affair with each other’ – though of the four, it is ‘two people and two phantoms’ so that the two actual characters are haunted by their partners’ infidelity, and their own desire. Mak’s analysis of the film considers desire on an emotive scale, employing a metaphysical lexicon – through the terms such as ‘haunts’, ‘glance’, ‘erratic’ – to describe each setting in which desire is situated. This semantic field seems to resonate with Haralambidou’s understanding of the architecture of desire and further proves that in desire we find the sensual dimension of space. Following this, in ‘Genealogy, or Philosophising with a Hammer: Critique and Desire’, George Jepson writes on the genealogy of desire and desire production. Jepson first outlines the genealogical paradigm as ‘the origin of values’ and that it is through the ‘the particularities of formulations of subjectivity as manifested in usages of desire as a concept’, that we should understand the full extent of the term. This is where the nuances of ‘desire’ have the dynamism to influence spatial choreography as well as a social dynamic, or according to Jepson, ‘desire production’. 1 Adrian Forty, Objects of desire: design and society since 1750 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012). 2 Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) p 96. 3 Penelope Haralambidou, Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire (London: Routledge, 2017). AArchitecture is a magazine Student Editorial Team: Design: Published by the edited by students of the Sensy Mania, Intermediate 5 Jan Blessing Architectural Association Architectural Association, Emily Priest, Diploma 14 36 Bedford Square, London published three times a year. Illustration: WC1B 3ES Editorial Board: Patricia de Souza Leão Müller, AArchitecture 33 Alex Lorente, Membership Diploma 12 Architectural Association (Inc) Term 1, 2017 – 18 Samantha Hardingham, Registered Charity No 311083 www.aaschool.ac.uk Interim AA School Director Printed by Blackmore, England Company limited by guarantee Registered in England No 171402 © 2017 All rights reserved Registered office as above Pete Jiadong Qiang Pete Jiadong Qiang is an artist and student at the AA (MPhil Media Practices). His work focuses on the specific investigation between architectural and pictorial space in terms of a new ideal of hyperisation and gamification. His current project, Architectural and Digital Material Cultural Probe (ADMCP), uses hybrid art and architectural approaches to create a hyperactive pictorial space filled with digital and physical tensions. The work interrogates hyperisation and gamification in reference to its architectural, digital, anthropological and material cultural significance. By frequently collaborating with maximalist artists, the new research ultimately reuses and reinterprets digital virtual tools to create a new interdisciplinary process through contemporary art, architectural, technological and anthropological boundaries. For more information: www.admcp.online David Flook David is a fifth-year student at the AA (Diploma 1). He holds a BSc in Architecture from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where he led the lecture series ‘Arch Objects in 2015 – 2016’, based on the mediating fields around architecture. His work and interests lie between the realms of architecture, art and sculpture. A Desire Plate 36b Embroidered panel worked in silks and linen ground, possibly made from a ready-printed kit. Adapted from a design by Louisa Pesel c 1900. AArchitecture 33 2 A Desire for Plenty curates a selection of Arts and Crafts publication. Their colour is not as found but has been textiles and finishings both well known and obscure. digitally altered. Their threads, already translated through Interspersed throughout this issue, these fragments pixels, are faded to infer the varying rates of decolouring continue to enact their role as backdrop, but no longer of natural pigments, or they are inversely oversaturated for the furniture and objects of a room. Rather, they to recall a futuristic and improbable past life – one that are the background for words and the articles in this hopefully remains desirous, plentiful, yet different. Pages: 2 – 3, 9, 13, 16 – 17, 20, 40 – 41 for Plenty Plate 9 Sunfower hanging, embroidered in silks on a linen ground, designed by William Morris c 1876 and worked by Cathrine Holiday, one of the most accomplished craftswomen of the period, and who used designs by Morris and her husband, painter Henry Holiday. Desire 3 Desire and the Unconscious Ana Araujo Ana Araujo is an architect and researcher interested in the crossover between architecture and subjectivity. She is Unit Master of Intermediate 2 at the AA and leads her own studio. She has published and exhibited internationally on the themes of Latin American design, interiors and craft and ornament in architecture. AArchitecture 33 4 To Desire: performs by subtraction; the metaphor, by addition. If we think, for instance, of a difficult emotion to describe – love To want something, especially strongly – metonymy will lead us to find ‘definitions’ for it: love is To have a strong sexual attraction to someone. → 1 a perception, love is a sensation, and so on. We can go on In the last century, the word desire has been closely but the process will be endless as we know very well that tied to the world and culture of psychoanalysis. The idea these definitions will never account for what the idea of of a strong wish, charged with sexual undertones, aligns love really entails. Metaphor proceeds through a different with Sigmund Freud’s revolutionary ‘discovery’ of the route – that of analogy. We may say, for instance, that ‘love unconscious in the late nineteenth century: a repository is a pebble shining in the sun’, and we may even find this of forgotten experiences that defines, to a great degree, who quite satisfactory as an image, but, again, we know that we are, what we like, why we suffer and, most importantly it fails to grasp the emotion per se. All it does is get us perhaps, who we want to be. → 2 Desire may be defined as closer to it, by adding more meanings, more words, more a yearning that drives many of our actions in life, but it is evocations. This is analogous to the analytic process. something about which we know very little, even nothing. We bring a dream, and, with the help of the analyst, we Psychoanalysis supposedly offers the opportunity for a ‘interpret’ it: we may find explanations and analogies, patient to come to terms with these invisible forces and and we indeed get nearer to grasping its meaning. But we make better use of them. are always left with the feeling that something essential Freud’s theory of the unconscious is famously is missing. Analysis is always a frustrating process, articulated using spatial metaphors and perhaps for this highlights Brazilian psychoanalyst Antonio Quinet. It is a reason it is popular among architects. He talks about form of mental torture, of trying to grasp the ungraspable. rooms that correspond to different compartments in our However, Lacan contends, how else might we acknowledge minds, and about thresholds that keep some of our feelings the presence of the unconscious, empower it, and, through and experiences in spaces that are difficult to access.

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