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’.

 

Richard Black. Mobile Landscapes, 2010.

According to the English Oxford Dictionary, a site, as a noun word refers to ‘an area of ground on which something is located’ [1].  In architecture, a site is commonly understood to be a parcel of land having dimensioned boundaries that define its location and size. To imagine a site connected into its surroundings is to move it into more dynamic territory.

Sites interact, spatially and conceptually, with other places. This can occur at a number of levels. An unobstructed visual field can bring near, middle distance and the distant horizon into relationship. An ecological point of view can also contribute to connecting near and far, particularly when landscape systems such as water catchments form networks that do not adhere to property or statutory boundaries. It is this reciprocity and interconnectedness between the micro and macro scales of landscape, which challenges an interpretation of site as a bounded piece of property.

The proposal for the exhibition is a series of mappings of the River Murray addressing these concerns. A collection of drawings, text and archival images are combined, revealing a personal interpretation of the Murray floodplain. This work captures an intimate and remote reading of this vast landscape, where the transitory aspects of the landscape and living patterns are brought into relationship.

This working method reveals the creative potential of site analysis as a generative influence upon an architectural design process – where a site is constantly understood at a range of scales and times, and at many levels of engagement, from the ecological, to the political and the personal.