Desiring Transitionality - Transit

Pre-empted by the conditions of dream and play, now is the scape of escape by diving into the paradox of instability and doubt, where beliefs and questions of belong are suspended between worlds and cosmoses, and the constituency of selves is constantly being morphed through ingestion and expulsion. How to transit when everything is already in transit? Questions are raised here through paracosm, swimming, id-entity crisis and counter-aesthetics, either as architecture as itself, or as that which is larger than, and breaking away from, itself. Yet the momentum unravelled in these sessions is precisely to step aside from the identification and perpetual self-reference when architecture is subject to the trajectory of the projective. Instead, the dream-displacement, play-transition, affect-entanglement, threshold-discovery, aesthetic-modulation and world-paracosm bring forth alternative modes of spatial enactment, where architecture materialises through the recognition of the many selves that hide with the tiger under the table, ride with the wind that carries the chimes of the bells on the porcelain tower, and plunge into a pool of slanted affective fields, where we are moving and being moved. In this sense, architecture is the actuality of transit.

Transit is the final of the three seminar sessions on the theme of Desiring Transitionality, which is the second episode of the PhD seminar series Interjectures 2022-23. The ‘Desiring Transitionality’ episode will be co-convened by Doreen Bernath, Gabriela Jimenez and Tian Pan. Each session engages presentations by guest speakers, followed by comments and discussions, and is open to participants from the PhD and graduate school programmes, as well as open to the larger AA school and community.

Image: Architecture of Hysteria, Draft M, 1897, Sigmund Freud

Watch online here.

SCHEDULE

2:00pm - Introduction: Doreen Bernath, Gabriela Jimenez and Tian Pan

2:10pm - Mark Morris: The Paracosm as a Transitional Reality

2:40pm - Naina Gupta: Potential, Potential Space

3:10am - John Abell: Psychical Transitionality and the Architectural Object

3:40pm–4:00pm Break

4:00pm - Teresa Stoppani: (Either) Architecture or Theory, or, Id-entity Crisis

4:30pm - Madeleine Liyen Ang Griffiths: Counter-Aesthetics - Thresholds of Belonging

5:00–6:00pm - Discussion with Nerma Cridge, Merce Rodrigo, Marina Lathouri and all guest presenters

Guest presenters and abstracts:

Mark Morris

The Paracosm as a Transitional Reality

A neologism from the 1970s, a ‘paracosm’ is used to describe a detailed and consistently structured imaginary world with its own cultures, history, religions, geography, weather and even languages. A paracosm typically originates in childhood as a form of escapism and may persist into adulthood as a personal creative laboratory. It can be fantastic or based largely on reality. As a directed form of imagination, a paracosm nurtures the intellect, yielding discoveries with potential real-world application. Michelle Root-Bernstein asserts in the Creativity Research Journal that paracosms ‘supplement objective measures of intellectual giftedness … as well as subjective measures of superior technical talent’. The theme of paracosm may be a useful guide in examining other worlds, civilisations of science fiction, and the history of architecture. Paracosmic thinking could be considered a valid methodology for the designer, a basis for worldbuilding as one form of output. Rather than view paracosms as merely coping mechanisms, a thesis may be put forward claiming that paracosmic thinking may be a defining attribute of many architects.

Mark Morris is Head of Teaching and Learning at the AA. He completed his PhD at the University of London’s Consortium doctoral programme supported by the RIBA Research Trust. He previously taught theory and design at Cornell University, where he served as Director of Graduate Studies in the Field of Architecture. He is the author of Models: Architecture and the Miniature and Automatic Architecture. His essays have featured in Domus, Log, Frieze, AD, Cabinet, Cornell Journal of Architecture, and Critical Quarterly. He is a member of the V&A Museum’s Architectural Models Network and RIBA Academic Publications Panel. He lives in Kent and is a keen architectural toy collector.

Naina Gupta

Potential, Potential Space

In ‘Public and Potential Space: Winnicott, Ellison and Delillo’, Zimmerman calls for the need for public spaces to be designed with the qualities of ‘potential spaces’ to combat the comatose homogenised urban architecture where spontaneity and play have been replaced by consumerism and theme parks. Zimmerman is referring to psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s theory of potential space. Winnicott advances the role played by this ‘mental’ space in personal development of a child or even an adult arguing for it as neither inner nor outside the subject, but somewhere in-between. The idea of potential space as a physical-space calls for a suspension of disbelief. Quoting Zimmerman who is quoting Winnicott – "My contribution is to ask for a paradox to be accepted and tolerated and respected, and for it not to be resolved.” This is not the first time that terminology from other disciplines has been appropriated to catalyse spatial practices - third-space, in-between space, spaces of agonism, and interstitial space are all terms used in architecture and urban design to describe ideas of confrontation or exchange between the I and the ‘other’ towards theories of societal development or progress. Swimming pools are inherently in-between spaces – as spaces of leisure and sport, as conditions of public and private, and as spaces that are extremely contrived and natural, to mention a few qualities. Focusing on some of these qualities of the space, I will argue that it can be considered an example of a potential space, thereby, arguing for its relevance in the development of society.

Naina Gupta is an architect. She has a PhD from the Architectural Association, School of Architecture that focuses on social reform, internationalism, and modern architecture. Her research on swimming pools stems from her dissertation. She teaches in the UK including at the AA and has taught and practiced internationally. She swims regularly and believes that many of her ideas take shape on the black line. This seminar is an episode in a larger series that includes teaching, writing, and field work about swimming pools.

John Abell

Psychical Transitionality and the Architectural Object

Freud offers much to our understanding of the transitional functions of architectural objects, particularly functions associated with important psychoanalytic concepts: phases of psycho-sexual development in childhood, identification, phantasy, and projection. In this talk, I explore how such transitional functions bear on the modern architectural object’s function in working through individual transitions associated with loss, and socio-cultural transitions associated with the experience of otherness. I touch on the implications for understanding transitional negotiations of cultural distinctiveness and relations of modernity to regional identities, from East-West (‘chinoiserie’ - ‘occidenterie’) to North-South America, extending to issues of cultural appropriation and cultural translation.

John Abell is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Program at the School of Design and Construction, Washington State University. He specialises in modern architectural design, critical theory, design psychology, and the social construction of technology, particularly as these intersect with aesthetic experience. His publication, Freud for Architects (2020, Routledge), highlights architectural implications of Freud's ideas on the foundational developments of childhood, developments on which the adult psyche is based. Further writings include 'Architectural Envelopment and the Late Avant-garde,' and ‘On that Oceanic Feeling: Architectural Formlessness, Otherness and Being Everything’, which expanded from PhD ‘Desiring Spatialities’ research in Histories and Theories of Modern Architecture at the Architectural Association.

Teresa Stoppani

(Either) Architecture or Theory, or, Id-entity Crisis

Architecture or (Le Corbusier), and (R. van Toorn), from without (D. Agrest), from outside (E. Grosz), from [with] in (A. Benjamin), between (J. Rendell)… Prepositions and locatives abound when we talk, write, think with architecture, when lines, dots, bits, pixels become words. Yet, I argue, the two are inextricable, and their entanglement is what makes architecture – between thing and idea/image.

Self-doubt, crisis, instability, are the characterizing traits of architecture that (paradoxically?) make it, and make it last – resilient, metamorphosing onto itself, cannibalising itself. It is the refusal of the either/or that makes architecture both un-certain and possible, a fragile diamond. What then of architecture theory? Where does it stand? does it need to stand at all? For me it is personal: I have tried to approach this dilemma borrowing from the work of philosophers – opening up the paradigm as revisited by Giorgio Agamben, or embracing the ineffable Neutral proposed by Roland Barthes. It is personal, but not autobiographical. How then to practice a discipline that (my friend the architectural historian tells me) does not exist? Walter Benjamin’s angel of history sees but cannot linger propelled by external forces. Manfredo Tafuri’s architectural historian tries to walk his (yes, it’s a he) straight tightrope amidst adverse winds. Maybe the architecture theorist can dive in, stir, re-emerge, lift a lot of silt in her moves, swim around in murky waters.

Teresa Stoppani is Professor of Architecture and Director of Architecture and Interior Design at Norwich University of the Arts. An architect and architectural theorist, Teresa studied Architecture at the IUAV University of Venice and received a PhD in Architecture and Urban Design from the University of Florence. She has taught at the IUAV, the University of Greenwich, UT Sydney, and Leeds Beckett University where she was the Head of the School of Architecture. She is a member of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) Steering Group, an editor of the RIBA’s Journal of Architecture, and co-founder of the international research collective ThisThingCalledTheory, for which she has co-edited the book This Thing Called Theory. Her work focuses on the relationship between architecture theory and the design process, and on the influence of other spatial and critical practices on the specifically architectural.

Madeleine Liyen Ang Griffiths

Counter-Aesthetics - Thresholds of Belonging

The project began with a queer club nite named GGI 끼 (pronounced ‘kkei’), an event that manifests a beautiful threshold of belonging. For those of us that fall through the gaps categorically, we might find we are partially but never fully designed for and with. Instead, we are pressured to conform to a set of societal expectations and “fit in.” Exploring tension at these thresholds through a documentary, the captured interviews reveal a desire for a new aesthetic that tolerates and embraces contradictory and ambiguous identities, queerness, and found family. This presentation explores concepts of affect and counter-aesthetic, the latter borrowed from Nigel Thrift’s suggestion that the “most powerful means of setting up counterpractices might be to aesthetically modulate” overlapping affective fields. Aesthetics is alive; it is both moved and is moving. What if we collaborated with aesthetics to generate new, intentionally designed affects? With a counter-aesthetic, we could disrupt and subvert. We could shape an aesthetic to queer normative architecture and “slant” our way of orienting ourselves to the spaces we inhabit.

Madeleine Liyen Ang Griffiths is currently a 5th Year Diploma student at the AA School of Architecture and is originally from Hong Kong. Having recently found a passion for queer, feminist and decolonial theory, she hopes to explore how a queered design methodology can reshape the way we practice architecture. She has a particular interest in alternative modes of knowledge production, affect theory, object-oriented ontology, and “making kin.” Madeleine would also call herself a hobbies enthusiast and finds it hard to turn down trying something new.

Guest discussants:

Merce Rodrigo-Garcia is an architect and PhD candidate at Birkbeck College. After studying at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), she obtained her MArch from Research Architecture Goldsmiths. She has taught at Oxford Brookes University, has been a fellow at Tokyo Institute of Technology, and has held residencies and participated in symposia internationally.

Nerma Cridge is a London-based academic and practitioner, and teaches at the AA in the Design Research Laboratory and History and Theory Studies and directs small practice - Drawing Agency. Her first monograph, Drawing the Unbuildable (2015), is based on her PhD thesis at the AA on the Soviet avant-garde. Recent publications include "Printing the Familiar" in Re:Print (2018), “Restless: Drawn by Zaha Hadid” in The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture (2021), and "Extreme Interiority" in Remote Practices: Architecture in Proximity (2022). She is currently working on two books: The Politics of Abstraction, on former Yugoslavia, and Architecture of the Extreme Environments.

Marina Lathouri studied architecture, philosophy of art, and aesthetics. She directs the Graduate Programme in History and Critical Thinking at the Architectural Association and lectures at Cambridge University. She has previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania and is Visiting Professor at the Universidad de Navarra, Spain, and the Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile. She writes and teaches on a variety of subjects that lie in the intersection of history and modernity, architecture and writing, the city and political philosophy. Most recently, she co-authored Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City (Routledge, 2008) and City Cultures: Contemporary Positions on the City (AA Publications, 2010), and has published several articles.

Find out more about the other events in the series Desiring Transitionality - Dream andDesiring Transitionality - Play