INTIMATE IMMENSITY
The title of my presentation today is Intimate Immensity
The title is inspired by a chapter of the same title from the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s book “the Poetic of Space”. Bachelard use the term to describe the poetic experience of reverie and contemplation, its capacity to extend beyond the intimate, private realm and into the vast, limitless possibilities of our imagination. The immensity of our imagination is not restricted by physical size or boundary, but is part of our inner constitution as meaningful and poetic individuals.
For me, Intimate Immensity provides an interesting conceptual and operative armature for my academic and professional interests that span across two different scales of experiences – that of the city and the interior environment. One concerned with collective experiences and the other an interior, private world. It also allows me to read the city at a different scale and vice versa for the interior environment and to postulate their possible inter-crossings.
The notion of interior has a double meaning for the body- what it houses inside and what it experiences on the exterior. We carry in us the city and it forms part of our interior organism while at the same time, we are also enclosed and ingested by it. In a sense, this work by Giorgo de Chirico, titled The Archaeologists best expresses this embodiment and intertwining of different scales of habitations, experiences and memories.
By approaching the notion of interior in such an elliptical manner, perhaps we may uncover what lies within the depth of its fabrication and its numerous forms of manifestations across different scales, disciplines and realities. As a practicing architect, I appreciate the particularity and specificity of the interior design profession. However, as an academic who has broad interest in art, design, media and theory and history, I discover the academic boundaries among the disciplines are not so clearly demarcated. I find this to be very liberating as I am able to draw from a rich body of knowledge across different fields of study and to make connections between them. Therefore, my presentation today will reflect and include different scales, practices and works on the city, on art, interior environment and architecture.
PIRANESI
I like to start with Piranesi’s plan of the Roman Forum. Piranesi’s imaginary plan of Campo Marzio in 1764 was an inspiration to many architects who sought an alternative vision of the city. The Roman city as imagined by Piranesi is not conceived by grand, heroic gestures like Versailles in France. Piranesi’s plan rejects all accepted principles of spatial organizations in the city and relationships between buildings and open spaces.
Traditional associations with hierarchies of built forms and spaces, boundaries between these urban elements and notions of rigid continuity and orientations are absent in his plan. Piranesi’s imagination of Rome is a collage of architectural fragments drawn from different periods, juxtaposed and carefully ordered as a series of experiences as one moves through the spaces. It is a city for the body and of the senses. It is a textured and layered city of individual and collective memories, histories and experiences of its inhabitants. The buildings are drawn revealing their street level plans. The interiors of these buildings are open and porous, creating a rich pattern of ambiguities between interior and exterior spaces. Boundaries become permeable and layered as the forms of the buildings dissolve into the public spaces. Streets are defined by the loose dispositions of buildings instead of having clear demarcations. The city is a dense network of interiors inter-connected and inter-dependent of each other. Wasn’t it Louis Kahn who described the plan as a society of rooms? By extension, can the city be considered a gathering and ordering of many large interconnected individual rooms as imagined by Piranesi?
The rooms drawn by Piranesi are not only containers but perform the role of conduits as well. They are vessels for habitation and exchange, both as housings for the bodies and passages. This duality of meaning offers an interesting way to look at our material culture and in particular our built environment. Artifacts in all scale and sizes become carriers of manifold layers of meanings, symbolisms, associations and scales, besides their primary roles as housings for our bodies. We can also begin to see the city not as a series of isolated, disconnected buildings but one that enables and supports spatial connectivity and human interactions.
SIR JOHN SOANE HOUSE
At a different scale, the house and present museum of Sir John Soane in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London presents an intriguing interior environment. The interconnectivity of rooms and views, deep recesses filled with an amazing collection of artifacts and paintings, skilful manipulation of light and darkness and attention to details have created a warm yet expansive, multi-layered and intensely private, contemplative interior environment. The intertwining of life, a passion for collection and the unification of painting sculpture and architecture within an interior environment reinforce the experience of immensity, through time.
KURT SCHWITTER’S STUDIO
The interior of Kurt Schwitters’s studio is both the site for his work and his home. The project combines sculpture, architecture and collage, which span a period of approximately 15 years. Although it started out from a small corner of his studio in Hanover, Germany, the work eventually took over much of his home and the distinction between art, life and the interior environment becomes blurred. The process of growth and evolution of the Merzbau is organic. It is not a work that begins with a preconception. Instead, It responds to the specificity of the context, adjusts and negotiates with the materials and the site to create a seamless and infinite landscape of forms, meanings and symbols. The various niches and grottos, which he created in the work are filled with memorabilia and souveniers dedicated to his circle of friends like Hans Arp, Lissitzky, Theo van Doesburg and even one for Mies van der Rohe.
BEISTEGUI HOUSE
This penthouse project in an existing building on the Champs-Elysees, Paris by Le Corbusier is another very intriguing example of the sometimes paradoxical relationship between interior and exterior environment. Commissioned by the Spanish eccentric millionaire Charles de Beistegui, the penthouse is originally designed purely for the purpose of entertaining his guests. There is no provision of electrical lighting in the house. All illumination is by candlelight and electricity is used to operate the various devices that conceal and reveal selected parts of the city to the visitors. This image shows an elaborately decorated fireplace flanked on both sides by two equally ornate chairs on the roof terrace of the apartment. The fireplace is located on axis with the Triumphant Arch, making reference to the arch not only in form and appearance but symbolically as well.
Another equally intriguing image is the periscope that frames selected view of the Parisian skyline such as the Eiffel Tower and the Triumphant Arch. It is paradoxical that one is subjected to such a small, private, interior space in order to experience the various important public monuments in the city through a periscope.
ALDO ROSSI
As a student, I remembered the drawings and installations of the late Italian architect, Aldo Rossi, where an ordinary interior environment is furnished with everyday domestic vessels - coffee percolators and pots. Unlike the earlier examples I have shown, Rossi’s domestic vessels actually become larger than life. The notion of immensity is literal and palpable. How uncanny to see them in a larger than bodily scale within such a context. I imagined them to have grown overnight, taking possession and center stage in the space previously inhabited by its occupants, while their shiny surfaces seemed to capture all that is around them. The space is at once intimate, familial and theatrical. Rossi titled his work the Domestic Theatre.
Throughout his life as an architect, Rossi views the city as consisting of a collection of enduring, archetypal artifacts of various scales.These artifacts are tangible, material manifestations of the collective memory and psyche of its inhabitants. They are not merely housings for the body but the soul as well.
In the elementary school at Fagnano Olona, Italy and many of his other projects, the recurring use of the cross axis window frame as a thematic element through time becomes the emblematic Rossi’s window. Besides its functional requirements of protection, enabling ventilation and views for the interior space, Rossi’s window is also the quintessential window of our childhood, one that is ingrained in our collective memory and consciousness. The window simultaneously possesses a physical dimension as well as an individual and a shared one.
GIORGO MORANDI
The still life watercolour and pencil renderings of everyday vessels by Giorgo Morandi are more than a collection of inanimate objects. They possess depth, thickness and volume. One may even read them as sections through space and imagine residing in these vessels, traveling through the spaces or linger momentarily. The space between the vessels is no longer just treated as left over but as the means where objects are gathered and bound together. This is the complete opposite of a modernist conception and relationship of space and objects, which celebrates the autonomous, the fragmentary and the discontinuous.
CONCLUSION
My fascination with Intimate Immensity is not primarily academic. As a designer teaching and working in the 21st century, these thoughts and reflections help me to make sense of what I teach, my relevance as a teacher and how I may operate in a world where traditional concepts of space and time are losing its meaning as technology compresses time and reduces distance.
Through this presentation, I hope to extend Bachelard’s definition of Intimate Immensity by interpreting the experience as the simultaneous presence of diverse, multiple, paradoxical but mutually dependent and affective experience and phenomenon. I hope to have also shown that all profoundly inspiring and creative works, both past and present, whether through use of the pencil, the paint brush or stone and mortar, possess this inexplicable and mysterious quality that transgresses individuality, historical, cultural, academic and professional boundaries to acknowledge a dimension of life that is inclusive, participatory, imaginative and collectively inspiring.
The title of my presentation today is Intimate Immensity
The title is inspired by a chapter of the same title from the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s book “the Poetic of Space”. Bachelard use the term to describe the poetic experience of reverie and contemplation, its capacity to extend beyond the intimate, private realm and into the vast, limitless possibilities of our imagination. The immensity of our imagination is not restricted by physical size or boundary, but is part of our inner constitution as meaningful and poetic individuals.
For me, Intimate Immensity provides an interesting conceptual and operative armature for my academic and professional interests that span across two different scales of experiences – that of the city and the interior environment. One concerned with collective experiences and the other an interior, private world. It also allows me to read the city at a different scale and vice versa for the interior environment and to postulate their possible inter-crossings.
The notion of interior has a double meaning for the body- what it houses inside and what it experiences on the exterior. We carry in us the city and it forms part of our interior organism while at the same time, we are also enclosed and ingested by it. In a sense, this work by Giorgo de Chirico, titled The Archaeologists best expresses this embodiment and intertwining of different scales of habitations, experiences and memories.
By approaching the notion of interior in such an elliptical manner, perhaps we may uncover what lies within the depth of its fabrication and its numerous forms of manifestations across different scales, disciplines and realities. As a practicing architect, I appreciate the particularity and specificity of the interior design profession. However, as an academic who has broad interest in art, design, media and theory and history, I discover the academic boundaries among the disciplines are not so clearly demarcated. I find this to be very liberating as I am able to draw from a rich body of knowledge across different fields of study and to make connections between them. Therefore, my presentation today will reflect and include different scales, practices and works on the city, on art, interior environment and architecture.
PIRANESI
I like to start with Piranesi’s plan of the Roman Forum. Piranesi’s imaginary plan of Campo Marzio in 1764 was an inspiration to many architects who sought an alternative vision of the city. The Roman city as imagined by Piranesi is not conceived by grand, heroic gestures like Versailles in France. Piranesi’s plan rejects all accepted principles of spatial organizations in the city and relationships between buildings and open spaces.
Traditional associations with hierarchies of built forms and spaces, boundaries between these urban elements and notions of rigid continuity and orientations are absent in his plan. Piranesi’s imagination of Rome is a collage of architectural fragments drawn from different periods, juxtaposed and carefully ordered as a series of experiences as one moves through the spaces. It is a city for the body and of the senses. It is a textured and layered city of individual and collective memories, histories and experiences of its inhabitants. The buildings are drawn revealing their street level plans. The interiors of these buildings are open and porous, creating a rich pattern of ambiguities between interior and exterior spaces. Boundaries become permeable and layered as the forms of the buildings dissolve into the public spaces. Streets are defined by the loose dispositions of buildings instead of having clear demarcations. The city is a dense network of interiors inter-connected and inter-dependent of each other. Wasn’t it Louis Kahn who described the plan as a society of rooms? By extension, can the city be considered a gathering and ordering of many large interconnected individual rooms as imagined by Piranesi?
The rooms drawn by Piranesi are not only containers but perform the role of conduits as well. They are vessels for habitation and exchange, both as housings for the bodies and passages. This duality of meaning offers an interesting way to look at our material culture and in particular our built environment. Artifacts in all scale and sizes become carriers of manifold layers of meanings, symbolisms, associations and scales, besides their primary roles as housings for our bodies. We can also begin to see the city not as a series of isolated, disconnected buildings but one that enables and supports spatial connectivity and human interactions.
SIR JOHN SOANE HOUSE
At a different scale, the house and present museum of Sir John Soane in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London presents an intriguing interior environment. The interconnectivity of rooms and views, deep recesses filled with an amazing collection of artifacts and paintings, skilful manipulation of light and darkness and attention to details have created a warm yet expansive, multi-layered and intensely private, contemplative interior environment. The intertwining of life, a passion for collection and the unification of painting sculpture and architecture within an interior environment reinforce the experience of immensity, through time.
KURT SCHWITTER’S STUDIO
The interior of Kurt Schwitters’s studio is both the site for his work and his home. The project combines sculpture, architecture and collage, which span a period of approximately 15 years. Although it started out from a small corner of his studio in Hanover, Germany, the work eventually took over much of his home and the distinction between art, life and the interior environment becomes blurred. The process of growth and evolution of the Merzbau is organic. It is not a work that begins with a preconception. Instead, It responds to the specificity of the context, adjusts and negotiates with the materials and the site to create a seamless and infinite landscape of forms, meanings and symbols. The various niches and grottos, which he created in the work are filled with memorabilia and souveniers dedicated to his circle of friends like Hans Arp, Lissitzky, Theo van Doesburg and even one for Mies van der Rohe.
BEISTEGUI HOUSE
This penthouse project in an existing building on the Champs-Elysees, Paris by Le Corbusier is another very intriguing example of the sometimes paradoxical relationship between interior and exterior environment. Commissioned by the Spanish eccentric millionaire Charles de Beistegui, the penthouse is originally designed purely for the purpose of entertaining his guests. There is no provision of electrical lighting in the house. All illumination is by candlelight and electricity is used to operate the various devices that conceal and reveal selected parts of the city to the visitors. This image shows an elaborately decorated fireplace flanked on both sides by two equally ornate chairs on the roof terrace of the apartment. The fireplace is located on axis with the Triumphant Arch, making reference to the arch not only in form and appearance but symbolically as well.
Another equally intriguing image is the periscope that frames selected view of the Parisian skyline such as the Eiffel Tower and the Triumphant Arch. It is paradoxical that one is subjected to such a small, private, interior space in order to experience the various important public monuments in the city through a periscope.
ALDO ROSSI
As a student, I remembered the drawings and installations of the late Italian architect, Aldo Rossi, where an ordinary interior environment is furnished with everyday domestic vessels - coffee percolators and pots. Unlike the earlier examples I have shown, Rossi’s domestic vessels actually become larger than life. The notion of immensity is literal and palpable. How uncanny to see them in a larger than bodily scale within such a context. I imagined them to have grown overnight, taking possession and center stage in the space previously inhabited by its occupants, while their shiny surfaces seemed to capture all that is around them. The space is at once intimate, familial and theatrical. Rossi titled his work the Domestic Theatre.
Throughout his life as an architect, Rossi views the city as consisting of a collection of enduring, archetypal artifacts of various scales.These artifacts are tangible, material manifestations of the collective memory and psyche of its inhabitants. They are not merely housings for the body but the soul as well.
In the elementary school at Fagnano Olona, Italy and many of his other projects, the recurring use of the cross axis window frame as a thematic element through time becomes the emblematic Rossi’s window. Besides its functional requirements of protection, enabling ventilation and views for the interior space, Rossi’s window is also the quintessential window of our childhood, one that is ingrained in our collective memory and consciousness. The window simultaneously possesses a physical dimension as well as an individual and a shared one.
GIORGO MORANDI
The still life watercolour and pencil renderings of everyday vessels by Giorgo Morandi are more than a collection of inanimate objects. They possess depth, thickness and volume. One may even read them as sections through space and imagine residing in these vessels, traveling through the spaces or linger momentarily. The space between the vessels is no longer just treated as left over but as the means where objects are gathered and bound together. This is the complete opposite of a modernist conception and relationship of space and objects, which celebrates the autonomous, the fragmentary and the discontinuous.
CONCLUSION
My fascination with Intimate Immensity is not primarily academic. As a designer teaching and working in the 21st century, these thoughts and reflections help me to make sense of what I teach, my relevance as a teacher and how I may operate in a world where traditional concepts of space and time are losing its meaning as technology compresses time and reduces distance.
Through this presentation, I hope to extend Bachelard’s definition of Intimate Immensity by interpreting the experience as the simultaneous presence of diverse, multiple, paradoxical but mutually dependent and affective experience and phenomenon. I hope to have also shown that all profoundly inspiring and creative works, both past and present, whether through use of the pencil, the paint brush or stone and mortar, possess this inexplicable and mysterious quality that transgresses individuality, historical, cultural, academic and professional boundaries to acknowledge a dimension of life that is inclusive, participatory, imaginative and collectively inspiring.
