writing
For buddying architectural and design fanatics, here are some interesting text extracts from Donatella Mazzolini, Gaston Bachelard and Cherie Federico that were selected to accompany the brief for this year's 2018-2019 MArch Advanced Architectural Design (AAD) module "Architecture in the City" within the Oxford Brookes School of Architecture that we thought we'd share with you.

Writing extract; The City and the Imaginary - Donatella Mazzolini
“Why ‘the city and the imaginary’? Why these two words together? Why ask about the meaning and non-meaning of Architecture and the City? Why approach a subject which touches not only on levels of cultural consciousness but also on those of the collective unconscious? Why not, instead, concentrate on those aspects of Architecture and town planning which have always been considered an integral part of this discipline, and have always been so urgently involved: Function (utilitas), Form (venustas) and static solidity (firmitas)?
May we be forgiven, in proposing this topos of encounter, for not sharing the same opinion as Vitruvius? The habitat (city, metropolis, post-metropolis) does not seem to be representable merely as a physical phenomenon, a material extension of constructed things.
Buildings, streets, squares are just part of the habitat; the tip of an iceberg: the visible and tangible part. Behind and within this tangibility and visibility, there is something else which is difficult to represent with concepts and words because it belongs to a pre-logical field of experience, to non-verbal communication; it has more to do with what Minkowski calls the spaciousness of existence. The question of habitat thus becomes the question of the concretisation of the great oneiric structures of our collective body (the communal body, if it has a monocentric structure, or the social body, if it has a polycentric structure). It is constituted in each case by the mass of our bodies living in space. We must note, at this point, a different urgency (diverse, oriented in a different way but also deeply rooted in the here and now, which regards the continual emergency situations which fill our lives and affect our work as architects): the urgency of confronting collective living right where it’s most radical possibility of crisis exists: that is, in its imaginative roots. The destruction which comes from outside (even from earthquakes) seems to us less serious than the destruction which comes from within if we cannot learn to live in a post-metropolitan condition, to live beyond the uprooting of the affinity between the eye and the World by positing a possibility of a new imaginary.
Work on the ‘city and the imaginary’ cannot take place within the traditional limits of the disciplines. We must compare different disciplinary perspectives. But we must also move on interdisciplinary levels and be open to the re-examination of the discipline themselves. Thus, in considering architecture and urban studies we must propose that the culture of the habitat be deconstructed, dehistoricised, and returned to a primary experienced by means of an epistemological enquiry which questions its foundations and shows its deeply psychic roots.
We wanted to return the problems of habitat to the body, and we realise that the body is in some way indescribable, something that sustains the signified of language, but which in itself is not expressible in language. Let us turn again to architecture, but this time with the awareness that architecture is nothing if not: (1) an extension of the body, a modality that the body expresses to try to satisfy the need for totality; (2) a metaphor of the body, a modality that the body expresses to symbolise itself. A replica - and a double.
In this way we come to understand architecture in a very broad sense, not as an array of more or less monumental works, made by technicians, artist, or ‘masters’ etc., and above all not as a complex unfinished objects (the products of the art of construction) but rather as an array of continuously open processes, in which construction is simply a phase in a complicated life which continues without limits infinitely to manipulate the habitat.
We understand architecture as the totality of the integuments and exoskeletons of our individual and collective body; this totality includes those vast groups of objects which are known in everyday language as clothes, furniture and architecture in the more restricted meaning of the word.
The awareness that this very broad sense of Architecture, implying as it does the recognition of its profound link with the body is present in very few of the ‘historic’ exponents of this discipline, should induce all architects to serious reflection in the dramatic preconceptions that hegemonic cultures continue to build upon, through a specific type of history or geography, criticism and teaching.
There are few but significant examples. In 1923 the ‘master’, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe dryly formulated the theory which was to become the supporting principle of rational-functionalism, in words which carry a deep contempt for the possibilities of body expansion: ‘structures in concrete are, in essence, skeletal structures’. ‘Thus, buildings, skin and bones’. In opposition to this, his contemporary Hermann Finsterlin - who remains today a visionary - called passionately for an architecture lived as an extension of the body: ‘Do not content yourself with the outline and the surface you who are aware of the corporeal… Forget your existence, construct huge vessels worthy of the gods, and when in an hour of repose your soul sheds its leaves and hardens then you can consecrate this monument to the permanent matrix of your body or to your peers. Human space is no longer an impression of hollowness in Elementary and stereometric bodies, but the system of giant kettles of the soul… the unmoving substitutes for those ancient pieces of furniture which are physically alien to us.’ And further: ‘The covering of the most divine animal with a fabulous body profile, which, being of a soft nature, disappeared as the material wore out, would live again and leave behind as an inheritance only the intimate image, perfectly consolidated, as testimony.
Here architecture begins by rituals of appropriation, manipulation, transformation of the first space perceived as an ‘external’ space; that is, external to the body: the surface of the skin. I refer here to the various forms of cosmetics and tattoos. It is not by accident that Adolf loos, ‘master’ of that proto-rationalism which is behind the reductive and geometric sterling to which we referred earlier in Mies work, in scandalously associating ‘ornament’ with ‘crime’, felt the need to express his contempt for tattoos, for decorations of the body and for every type of artistic dabbling - that is, for every action that reveals (as he himself says) the ‘erotic origin’ of art - affirming that these despised things are suitable only for children and savages, and indignantly comparing them with the soiling of toilets.
It seems to me extremely important for anyone who wants to make architecture a complex and not a reductive experience to recognise the chromatic and plastic treatment of skin as an act of creativity and spatial communication. We are in fact in space, in the proximal space of zero radius: the sphere that is the limit which both guarantees separation and continuity between the inside and the outside of the body; that is to say, the topology of the body. Skin is simultaneously the limit of space (Raumgrenze) of the body, experienced as an internal cavity (a breathing cavity, a digestive cavity, a pregnancy cavity) and the limit of the mass (Massengrenze) of the body experienced as a dense and full entity situated in the void of the environment.
Finally we have actual architecture itself which is to say essentially the house since the various buildings of a modern cities differentiated according to their functions factory school Hospital Market and so on are in effect no more than separated and greatly enlarged organs of a primordial house.” - Donatella Mazzoleni



Writing extract; The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
“But over and beyond our memories, the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits. After twenty years, in spite of all the other anonymous stairways, we would recapture the reflexes of the “first stairway,” we would not stumble on that rather high step. The house’s entire being would open up, faithful to our own being. We would push the door that creaks with the same gesture, we would find our way in the dark to the distant attic. The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands. The successive houses in which we have lived have no doubt made our gestures commonplace. But we are very surprised, when we return to the old house, after an odyssey of many years, to find that the most delicate gestures, the earliest gestures suddenly come alive, are still faultless. In short, the house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting. We are the diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particular house, and all the other houses are but variations on a fundamental theme. The word “habit” is too worn a word to express this passionate liaison of our bodies, which do not forget, with an unforgettable house.
A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.
We are constantly re-imagining its reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house.
The house acquires the physical and moral energy of a human body. It braces itself to receive the downpour, it girds its loins. When forced to do so, it bends with the blast, confident that it will right itself again in time, while continuing to deny any temporary defeats. Such a house as this invites mankind to heroism of cosmic proportions. It is an instrument with which to confront the cosmos. And the metaphysical systems according to which man is “cast into the world” might meditate concretely upon the house that is cast into the hurricane, defying the anger of heaven itself. Come what may the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world. The problem is not only one of being, it is also a problem of energy and, consequently, of counter-energy.” - Gaston Bachelard
Writing extract; Aesthetica - Editors Note; Cherie Federico
“We are constantly developing as humans, but this progression isn’t always as ground breaking as starting to use tools or developing language. Rather, we are evolving emotionally. Thanks to technology, we can readily have anything we want - from ordering dinner and groceries to streaming entire television series in one binge experience. We no longer have to wait for anything, so what does this mean for our humanity? What does it mean for patience, kindness, and courtesy? How will this affect the world in 100 years’ time?
Within the same breath, I marvel at what technology has done for us now and how it has transformed the ways in which we live. I have a two year old daughter and the thought of having to go to the bank to withdraw money, drive to the supermarket and then do the shopping seems a million miles away. The time I get back through online commerce is revolutionary and almost priceless, and for that I am grateful. Still, it has been months since I even set foot in a shop, and there’s also something a little strange about that fact too.” - Cherie Federico
