Intensive Cartographies
The Intensive Cartographies series is hosted by the Architecture Theory Chair / Ecologies of Architecture as part of its Public Program. In these events, the work of scholars, designers and artists will be presented and discussed in lectures and roundtable seminars from a transdisciplinary perspective. The events touch upon various concerns surrounding our material world, and the ways in which we experience and map it.
Mapping the Anthropocene
In the first event Mapping the Anthropocene our guests deal with notions of cartography and mapping in the “age of man and capital” from a variety of angles. Niels Schrader’s ‘(In)convenient Alt Truth: Donald Trump and Al Gore Speech Analyses’ algorithmically compares two speeches that may prove decisive for the faith of the Paris Climate Accord. Sjoerd van Oevelen’s ‘Speculative origins of the Anthropocene and its Consequences for our Visual Faculty as a Geological Force’ exposes the building blocks of our visual faculty. Sybille Lammes’s ‘Mapping Immutable Mobiles: Of Humans and Other Things’ focuses on the status of the image as part of digital mapping interfaces.
Mapping Sonic Space
The second event, Mapping Sonic Space, explores by ear the universe, its architectures, and our architectonics. Listening to Babel, Bubbles, Burrows, Barrows, Beehives, Bâtiments, Baryons, & Bunraku, Hillel Schwartz and Raviv Ganchrow address the motives, measures, and methods of mapping worlds—and lives—acoustically. An afternoon roundtable with Hillel, Raviv, Marcel Cobussen, and Taufan Ter Weel commences with calisthenics auditory and ambulatory, moves on to sonicities embodied or theoretic, then quietly reflects on the consequences of taking sound to heart.
Mapping the Gesture
The third event, will explore gesture in architecture. Most topical subjects in contemporary architecture pertain to the surface. Texture, relief, tectonics and even atmosphere – if we free it from its subjectivist form – can be conceptualized as a dramatization of the surface. The architectural surface is the domain of forces: contortion, the famous ‘twist’, reincarnates the 16th century figura serpentinata. Ressault and rustication show us an imminent world moving towards us, echoing the so called ‘thrust’ of the inner elevation of Michelangelo’s Bibliotheca Laurenziana. Corrosion hollows out geometry by the sheer multiplication of its figures in a fractal dimension: interiors today appear as spongy matter, as grottos in which earth exhibits a formidable creative force already transforming matter into manner. We have moved from a renaissance of space to a mannerism of the surface. The building as staircase, the wrapped-up square and the street folded into the building: all these complicated sloping floors, enlivening program and intensifying urban space, indicate a clear step towards a virtuoso modernity.
Mapping Rhythm
The fourth event, will explore rhythm in architecture. On October 11th 1978 the exhibition 間 [Ma]. Espace- Temps du Japon, designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, opened its doors in Paris. The Architecture Theory Chair will commemorate the 40th anniversary of this exhibition with a public seminar. Isozaki designed nine spatial installations in which [Ma] shows up in different modalities of thought and action. In its architectural context [Ma] shows a moment at which time and space are not disentangled as distinct and abstract notions. [Ma] shows a single sensible spatiotemporal reality characterized by a unique spatial arrangement ‘movement space’ and approach to design ‘co-becoming’. ArtScience students of the Royal Academy of Arts, the Hague, will, under the guidance of artist Cocky Eek and architect/PhD researcher (KU Leuven) Renske Maria van Dam, present their ‘Moment of [Ma]’ in a revisited exhibition. Followed by a lecture by van Dam on the potentials of [Ma] for contemporary architectural practice and education.
