TUTORIAL QUESTION 9

CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY

USING THE READINGS AND OTHER PROJECTS, DISCUSS THE PHENOMELOGICAL TACTICS EMPLOYED BY ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICES

DONOVAN HILL AND ANDRESEN O’GORMAN.

WHAT IS THE DEFINITION OFPHENOMENOLOGY IN ARCHITECTURE?

CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY

DEFINITION :

Phenomenology in architectural term is a philosophy affecting contemporary architecture into the experience of constructed space and of building materials and their sensory aspects.

“While the family house is described as an ordered, familiar spacedominated by convention and clear boundaries, the area under it is anunstructured void, associated on the one hand with sexuality, freedom andmystery and yet also with darkness, fear and death. It is the area of illicitactivity, representing all that is repressed within conventional social life:'under-the-house was another and always present dimension ... For me ...that underworld was full of threat.” – David Malouf

CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY

PHENOMENOLOGY IN ARCHITECTURE?

PHEMENOLOGICAL REFLECTIONSOF VERANDAH

- Poetic of verandah by David Malouf:

“My memories were all of our old house in South Brisbane, with its wide latticed verandahs, its damp mysterious storerooms where sacks of potatoes and salt had been kept in the ever-dark, its washtubs and copper boiler under the porch, its vast garden that ran right through to the street behind, a wilderness that my grandfather... had transformed into a suburban farmlet, with rows of spinach, tomatoes, lettuce, egg-plants, a shed where onions and garlic hung from rafters, and a wire coop full of fowls.”

- The idea of the verandah is a form of experiential effect

- The essence of verandah is not defined only by its phenomenological qualities but also by its anatomical and tectonic form of timber elements (its basic skeletal structure

CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY

WHAT IS TECTONIC FORM?

- A space that is made up of articulated pieces assembled stick on stick

- Basically relating to either skeletal or massive structural systems

- Has potential expressions in construction of timber

CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY

MYTH

• Ancient Greek derivation of harmony – ‘harmonia’ (the binding together of the whole)

- An arrangement of related elements such as colours, proportions and sounds that make a pleasing pattern

- Taking away any one of the elements would collapse the ‘whole’

CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY

• Homeric Age – harmonia (binds together as a unity)- Three dimensional timber frame symbolised the

power of conceptual thought to reflect, in a uniquely human way, the interrelatedness of the metaphysical world

• Ancient Greek word of building, demos, a derivation of demas.

- The human mind and body as a unity- The body was the structure that gave the soul its

dwelling

MYTH

CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY

• EXPRESSED FRAME (TECTONIC FRAME) - The essence of harmonia can be a potential in

the fundamental architectural idea- Visually registering skeleton frame as ‘demos’

(‘the human mind and body as a unity’)- register scale relations to interrelate the body,

the building and the setting

VISUAL PATTERNING

CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY

VISUAL PATTERNING

Tomsgate Way House- Suppression of the figurative expression- Reverse the frame exposure from outside to

inside

Mooloomba House, Anderson O’Gorman- Frame exposed on both inside and outside

Tomsgate Way House, Anderson O’Gorman

Mooloomba House, Anderson O’Gorman

Ambiguity of inside and outside condition.

CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY

- An interesting characteristic of buildings, permits layers of space to be seen simultaneously inside and outside, higher and lower spaces, space and threshold

TRANSPARENCY

CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY

THRESHOLD

- An intangible moment thatdelineates the inside out.

- Threshold offers a transition space to improve the experience of occupants and create a stronger relationship between the building and its physical as well as to portray the characteristics of sociology and methodology context.

CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY

- The space is neither an interior nor an exterior space

- It is a space for rest which gives a sense of enclosure

- Provides functional appropriateness to address changing spatial uses

… this is where we were called in to eat pikelets or pumpkin scones for morning tea from a three-tiered cake stand, and in the afternoon, date slices, anzacs and cream puffs ... Here, ... ladies took their afternoon nap, and here we were settled when we were sick, close enough to the street to take an interest in the passing world ... but out of the sun. Here too on warm evenings, with a coil burning to keep off the mosquitoes, we sat after tea, while my father watered the lawn and chatted to neighbours – David Malouf

CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY

VERANDAH AS A LIMINAL SPACE

- A device for public interaction to overcome the potential of social isolation

- Acts as a gate-keeper to mediate social casts in terms of gender and race to enter the liminal space

- A space that is constructed by a territorial and proxemics extension of the ‘safe’ codes of moral behaviour sanctioned by the interior

CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY

VERANDAH AS A LIMINAL SPACE

James Street Markets, Cox Rayner Architects- Experimented with “new

typologies for urban shopping”- Hybridized the traditional

typologies of the shopping strip ‘high’ street’ together with the typology of the industrial shed

- Liminality and spatial ambiguity

CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY

EXAMPLE OF LIMINAL SPACE

D HOUSE, DONOVAN HILL- Relationship between the house

and the street- Limited sectional separation

between the building, its liminal space and street

- A sense of ‘aspect and prospect’ to the public domain of the street

CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY

EXAMPLE OF LIMINAL SPACE

THRESHOLD AND LIMINALITY

- Create a form of phenomenological effects- A state of indeterminacy

- neither exterior nor interior- Generated by tectonic structure

CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY

CONCLUSION

REFERENCES: -

• Andresen, Brit, and Peter O’Gorman. "Timber Tectonic." UME 22 (2011): 28—39.• Brisbin, Christopher. "Whats in a Name?: The in-netween-ness of the verandah's pubic faces and threshold

spaces." In Surfaces and Deep Histories: Critiques, and Practices in Art, Architecture, and Design, (ed) Anurandha Chatterjee, Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2013).

• Elizabeth Ferrier, "From pleasure homes to bark huts: Architectural metaphors in recent Australian fiction," Australian Literary Studies 13, no. 1 (1987): 49. Ferrier is quoting David Malouf.

• Skinner, P.R, Reflections on Inside-Outside Space, in Newton, C., Kaji-O’Grady, Wollan, S. (eds) Design + Research; Project based research in architecture, 2nd International Conference of the Australasian Association of Schools of Architecture, Melbourne, 28-30 Sept 2003. (http://www.arbld.unimelb.edu.au/events/conferences/aasa/papers)

CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY