Ephemeral Architectures
Buildings are no long conceived as static objects; instead they become places to stage change over short and long spans of time where notions of the incomplete and the transitory hold more significance than permanence. This suggests ways in which a building might be formed to anticipate its future use or misuse. To invite time into a work is to also open it to external forces acting beyond the scope of conventional site boundaries.
Landscape and ecological systems, and urban flows provide a dynamic context for creative works. Site phenomena – light, the weather and seasonal change – have a material presence that is integrated with the everyday use of the building and landscape. Ephemeral architecture privileges the life of a work over its formal appearance.
Richard Black [Times Two Architects]. McMillan Road Studio
The shed is an interactive space where the shifts of light and shadow, the landscape, seasonal change, and the working life of the ceramicist – are all brought into dynamic relationship. These concerns are refl ected in the design of the western wall. Its colour and lack of detail are an attempt to make this small building register when viewed from a distance. Its geometry and colour also refl ect an ongoing concern for an architecture of light and shadow, in this instance the low afternoon light from the west.
Andrea Mina. Intimate Immensity: The miniature as spatial discourse
My work is concerned with the possibilities of constructing spatial dialogue through the making of small objects at enigmatic scale. Through the use of common materials and in some instances their seemingly unlikely application, architectures at full-scale are constructed following working methods that have as their premise notions of architectures at their points of destruction/disintegration being redeemed through concerns for the ‘interior’. The work is predicated on ideas of tensions; tension between durability and fragility, between completion and destruction, between erosions and revelations, between the object and the frame and between making and the exclamation thereof.
Richard Black [Times Two Architectures]. Water Theatre. 2003
Our projects are designed to engage with the lived dimension of their surrounding context. This position ultimately challenges the permanence of architecture looking toward opportunities of the transitory. This installation for the Melbourne Festival used the existing service infrastructure of a laneway to create a series of ephemeral water events for the duration of the festival. The cyclical appearance and disappearance of water created a series of events paced to the passage of light and people through this urban space. Water theatre was an ongoing exploration of an architecture that is open to change and modification in use.
John McGlade. Making in Landscape: Time, Geometry, Observation and Transitory Objects.
Unselbstandingkeit” (from Husserl): Phenomena before concept.
Object as matter and event within specific geometry.
This work begins with pleasure in those transitory, poetic moments that can enter into the patterns of daily life. More specifically at the intersection of landscape, natural ephemera, introduced geometry and the attached observer.
Gini Lee. The Intention to Notice. 2004
The intention to notice is a curatorial framing to imply conjectural narratives for the Oratunga landscape, devised through examining; terrain in all its guises, traces of material occupation, everyday activities and time passing. Events co-locate with sites or domains to uncover underlying narratives that shape the political, ecological and cultural landscapes of arid places. This curation is an experiment contrary to chance events and associations as it is a speculative community of practice composed with intent; a mechanism for translation for locals and for tourists, for those who ‘know’ the place and for those who embark on coming to ‘know’.
