Kovar - Architecture in abjection: bodies, spaces and their relations

Zuzana Kovar is a lecturer in architecture at Griffith University, Australia, where she teaches design and contemporary architectural theory. She is also co-director of the practice ZUZANA&NICHOLAS architects, who are engaged in a range of commercial project work, exhibition work and research.

The work of Zuzana Kovar, drawing on Gilles Deleuze but more specifically on Julia Kristeva, is an essential contribution to the project of overcoming the space-body dualism in architectural thinking. This book marks a crucial and admirable development in the progress of such theory.

Andrew Benjamin, University of Technology Sydney and Kingston University London

Contents

Figures

Diagram for the Deleuzean assemblage versus the Tschumian architecture

The wall cavity section

The wall cavity diagram

The sewing room section

The sewing room diagram

The clinic section

The clinic diagram

Abject(ion)s possible relations

Moth print

The undercroft

Architecture on the plan(e) of immanence

Transfer paper side

Linen side

Graphite sew line, transfer onto linen during sewing process

Detail

Linen sleeve for transport and storage

Transfer upon contact

Tree diagram

Distinction between scaffold supporting object and only scaffolds

Scaffolded bodies and assemblages

Abject(ion) on side of bodies and assemblages (for clarity, the scaffold is represented here as a dashed boundary line)

Concentration of processes

Abjection as common thread

Acknowledgements

There are many people and events that become intertwined in and that have an effect on the publishing of a book. First I would like to acknowledge Dr Ross McLeod, Dr Juliette Peers and Dr Hlne Frichot, who were instrumental in the development of the content in various ways and at various times: Hlne through her direction in the initial stages of this project, through the sharing of her philosophical knowledge and through our regular discussions; Juliette through her insightful injections of knowledge at key times; and finally Ross, whose critique of the structure and the key arguments on an ongoing basis greatly benefited the work. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the School of Architecture and Design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology for providing the framework for the development of this work.

Further to Ross, Juliette and Hlne, there are numerous people who have had an effect on the thinking present here over the last several years. These people, through either their reading of the manuscript or critique of presentations, have greatly enriched the project: Esther Anatolitis, Suzie Attiwill, Karen Burns, Marion Campbell, Peter Downton, Pia Ednie-Brown, Bill Fox, Lyndal Jones, Stephen Loo, Julieanna Preston, Jane Rendell, Sean Ryan, Undine Sellbach, Cathy Smith, Chris Smith, Teresa Stoppani and Linda Marie Walker.

Most importantly, I would like to acknowledge my partner and fellow practitioner Nicholas Skepper. This book would not have been possible without his love, friendship and critical feedback. I am also thankful for the various apartments and houses in which Nick and I have lived over the past six years: through their own idiosyncrasies and states of decomposition, each of them has proved endlessly stimulating. And my gratitude also goes to our adopted greyhounds, Max and Maggie, who make working from the home studio enjoyable and provide distractions at critical times.

Finally, I would like to mention my Grandpa, Stanislav Ort, who did not live long enough to get to see the inception of this book. I dedicate this work to him.

This research was partially supported by the Australian Government through the Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship. The copy-editing and indexing of this research was funded by the Griffith University through the Research Start Up Fund.

Introduction: Architecture in abject(ion) bodies, spaces and their relations

Examining the concrete floor, you see greys, blacks, yellows, smudges of white and reddy-orange stains, holes at 15-centimetre intervals, dirt at the peripheries, cracks and construction joints. To this you contributed splotches of white when you painted two of the walls.

Your gaze shifts to the nogging of an unpainted wall on the right, where a draught is rocking a dead fly suspended on a strand of hair backwards and forwards. Atop the nogging, and in the groove of each chamferboard cladding the wall to the outside, films of dust lie seemingly still. Yet, when the afternoon sun shines through the rusted shut bay of louvres, it reveals millions of particles in flight. These, like many others that have come to rest momentarily on the numerous horizontal surfaces of this studio space books, tables, windowsills stir incessantly at your every move, passing through and around you. Since moving down here, you have voluntarily subjected yourself to the volatile field of matter that is the studio. There is a persistence to this matter. Each morning before you begin work, tables must be swept clean and pages of current work shaken out. But even then, dandruff, grass seeds and vehicular soot manage to accumulate on the table within a matter of hours. Writing from left to right in a repetitive motion allows you to keep a certain area of the page and table clean, but it also gradually wears the edge of the table down and rubs dead skin cells and sweat into the surfaces.

There are other things, too: the vine growing in front of the window, perpetually finding crevices through which to come in, the regular drip into a glass from the rusted-through water main, which with its splashes has sent the wall orange. And then there are the stains that you make from sitting the tea bags on the cutting board, the grubby fingerprints that you put on the door for the lack of a door handle. And these are only the exchanges that are perceptible.

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Thinking about bodies, spaces and their relations has long been a central concern of philosophy and architecture, and has in the past 20 years or so reached yet another critical turning point within architecture, given the explorations that are taking place into biology, matter, flows and emergent phenomena. Despite these relatively recent shifts, which speak to a certain volatility, a dualistic understanding of bodies and spaces seems to a large degree to prevail within the architectural discipline in the form of phenomenology and its conceptions of the body as subject and space as object. Given the architects preoccupation with articulating spaces in order to manifest idiosyncratic moments that are described through our subjective experience, it is perhaps not hard to see why such an understanding continues to be of value. But while phenomenology, being dualistic, provides for a sufficient account of our engagement with space, its key shortcoming within architecture is that it is a static notion of things. It therefore is incapable of addressing transitions and exchanges not only between bodies and spaces, but within the bodies and spaces themselves. To shift the way architecture thinks of bodies, spaces and their relations is an immense task that requires not only great rigour but also an awareness of and a drawing upon further disciplines. My hope here is to contribute to this contemporary thinking.