Feeling the Table Without Touching the Cloth Design Report

Crossings, Tables & Scales Feeling the Table without Touching the Cloth Design Report Marek Sivák University of Edinburgh_School of Arts Culture & Environment_Architecture Architectural Design Thesis Closure_U00769 May 2010 Thesis & Haptics ‘Haptics is a sense of the project. Haptics is perception beyond traditional senses1. Haptics is experience of the world, environment and us, full and complex. It is materialization of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh2. Haptics3 is the ultimate state of perception.’ 1 Sometimes referred to as Aristotelian senses: vision, audition, gustation, olfaction and tactition. Nonetheless haptics is neither restricted to other more recently classified senses like equilibrioception, nociception, thermoception, magnetoception, kinaesthesia, etc. 2 Occurrence of reciprocity either abstract or material in between the perceiver and the perceived. See Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968). The visible and the invisible, ed. Claude Lefort. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press 3 Matter of Haptics is further elaborated in essays ‘Haptics’ and ‘Haptical museum of Florence’ by the author. 3 Thesis & Haptics In the thesis Florence is explored under the theme of Urban Museum where everyday plays out monumental and monumental everyday. Through series of orchestrated touches I intervene urban, architectural, historical, instrumental and socio-political spheres of Florence1. Dining is an everyday action but can also be a ceremony; it is a delegate of Ital- ian culture that stretches athwart contemporary and historical, wealthy and indi- gent. I employ dining as a narrator that spans three selected interventions. Three prima facie unrelated private commissions at three sites in Florence with three programmes set around dining are called Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. The interventions play out the Haptics of their immediate and distant context. Each intervention is built on tectonics of trivial and transcendental, programmatic and phenomenological, literal and metaphorical, present and absent, physiological and that of the flesh. 1 Florence is viewed as a very specificUrban Entity. It was founded as an ‘cosmically ideal’ Cartesian (axes cardo and decumanus) grid of Roman castrum. Following several hundred years a pure necessity and law of survival guided the city’s dimensions and appearance over any vision or idea. During the golden age from Renaissance to 18th century thoughts of geniuses fertilized the city’s fabric. Florence was now an architectural gem but no overall urban idea, nothing of the kind we would call a masterplan, touched the city until 19th century sanations and adaptations to Italian capital. I locate my interest into Brunelleschian Florence where absolute clarity of an architectural masterpiece within its context was everyday standard of the master (meaning Filippo Brunelleschi but on a wider scale and to a certain extent every master of the time) but no desire to master the entire city ever entered the thoughts or practice of his. Every little gem was placed with utmost respect to the neighbouring and distant gems by other masters but the time, state of affairs or the mentality did not ask for more significant cut of the overall city’s diamond. Based on such strategy, my project’s urban attitude is fractional intervening, orchestrated touches. Urban consistency is reflected chronologically, spatially and through grammar legacies and reciprocal ties. For further elaborated argument see ‘Urban Statement’ essay by the author. 5 Thesis & Haptics Haptics is an overall attitude, point of view in the project. Haptics started simply as an architecture using touch rather than vision as primary means of perception but it evolved into much broader scheme. Haptics contains both physiological and metaphysical denotations of perception. Dining is a good example of such ambig- uous hapticality. When Blood flows around me and I see no blood 1 but I smell it. Theory of Haptics pursues the phenomenological elaboration of perception and And when the Sea transpires its salty odeour senses by Maurice Merleau-Ponty2. It is also underpinned by works of ecological and I smell no salt psychologist James J. Gibson3. Key for Haptics is Merleau-Ponty’s flesh, an occur- but I hear it. rence between the perceiver and the perceived, their reciprocal relation. Haptics is Blue. applicable both to the perceivers - us - and the perceived - environment, urbs and architecture. Haptics in architecture works with a version of genius loci, uncovers ‘A certain blue of the sea is so blue, that only blood would be more red.’1 and amplifies historical, contemporary, geographical, social & political, tangible and metaphysical layers of places. My designs should mediate Haptics of places to 1 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968). ‘The intertwining: The chiasm’, The continental aesthetics reader, Clive Cazeaux (ed.). London: Routledge: 165, cf. Claudel. its users or passers-by. In the end Haptics lost nothing of its tangibility, it is still an object to touch, no matter if the object is a story, history, social relation or an aesthetic shape, no matter if the touch is done by hands, eyes, ears or our brain. “Senses, as we think to know them, are lost. They are sleeping beauties. Senses, as we call them haptics, are inside us, around us, in the cries of seagulls. Tact and vision are nice words indeed. First is wave in the sea, second cloud in the sky.“ 1 For a detailed theory on Haptics see essays ‘Haptics’ and ‘Haptical Museum of Florence’ by the author. 2 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968). The visible and the invisible, ed. Claude Lefort. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press . 3 Gibson, James J. (1983, c1966). The senses considered as perceptual systems. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. 7 All Three Museums Altogether Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner are Museums. They might be even called Museums of Dining or Haptic Museums. They encompass many qualities museums connote. But they are certainly not museums as we would imagine denoting the word. This is the key to understand the reciprocity and necessity of all three 'museums'. As much as senses bear a certain essence of indiscerptibility when they can still work after destruction of one but never to the same extent or quality, the 'museums' might exist without one or two of the others but never in their present shape. The Table Instrument of Florence is a map showing all three interventions togeth- er in relation to Cupola (dome of Santa Maria del Fiore) - the metaphor for relating piece in Florence, each of the museums has such relating piece of its own in its local context. Breakfast relates to real Cupola, Lunch to tower of Palazzo Vecchio and Dinner both to Ponte Vecchio and Cupola. The Table (usual prerequisite for Dining) is an instrument that 'draws new Florence' - it took important part in understanding relations in Florence and consequently placing interventions into the city. The Tower is a personification, a blending concept, of Breakfast, Lunch and Din- ner. All are entangled around the same narrative of haptics, dining, culture and history. All feature several ‘tables‘ vertically displaced (nested) and joined by series of staircases / ramps which metaphorize the journey from induction to resolution. All feature its own ‘Cupola‘ - a relating monument, point of localization in Florence. Dinner furthermore contains its own materially present ‘cupola‘1. The white card Tower is chronologically third - tangible - tower in a series. All Towers work as adumbrations of the next step. Non-dependant on being an object or eidolon they constitute ideals that shield and stimulate factual architectural interventions. 1 Note the difference:cupola (lowercase) refers to the newly built extension suspended above the Dinner building while Cupola (capital C) refers to the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore. 9 All Three Museums Altogether All Three Museums Altogether Object of three tables, metaphysical but tangible 'museum' encom- passing quality of Florentine haptics: All parts of the Materiality and Tower: immateriality Table (3x) Reliefness of the city and its Cupola façades Ramp / Stairs - Verticality of its leading element structures and from happening horizontality of A (induction) its far-going re- to happening B lations (resolution) Sociality and Three-table as- politics of its semblage and dining , tables bearing pillars and gathering , Reflection of its history Inseparability from its presence 12 13 Dinner - Borgo San Iacopo 20 and 22, Florence, Italy Dinner is a living mall. Dinner is composed of two neighbouring buildings, one dating to 1200’ and the other 1950’. The party wall then sections in between the historical and contemporary. It is an authentic palace and post-war facsimile, quãle of the border of bombing. Dinner investigates the flesh of touch of the old brick and the new brick. Dinner is an expenditure in Bataille’s sense1, heap of gold and jewellery - a prosthetic arm of Ponte Vecchio2. It is an everyday life in flats, gold bought into the flats, it is an evening theatre but also a theatre of that everyday life. But foremost it is the Dining: dining in breakfast bar, lunch bistro, dinner restaurant, cupola3. Dinner is a key to Breakfast and Lunch. It is incar- nated Cupola. Dinner is an evening ball in the ballroom, dancing tango on top of the roofs, suspended in the air. 1 Bataille, Georges (1985). ‘The notion of expenditure’, inVisions of excess: Selected writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 116-29. 2 Since 1593 Ponte Vecchio has

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