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This is the author version of article published as:
quarrelTaylor, Mark (2005) Projected Evolution: Expanding Self into the Environs, in Wilson, Andrew, Eds. Rev
iew 2004 : projects review of architecture at QUT in 2004, pages pp. 27-34. Queensland University of Technology, School of Design. Copyright 2005 (plea consult author)
Accesd from eprints.qut.edu.au
Projected evolution: expanding lf into the environs
Mark Taylor
Published in:
Taylor, M., ‘Projected Evolution: Expanding Self into the Environs,’ Andrew Wilson, (ed.), Review 2004: projects review of architecture at QUT in 2004, Brisbane, Queensland University of Technology, (2005) pp 27-34
In this short essay I will discuss the relationship between the body and tectonic surroundings, particularly ttings generated by the imprint of an inhabiting subject as it projects into the environs. Such a debate is contingent on both traditional and modernist orthodoxies of western architecture, particularly as they attempt to distinguish between surface effects emanating from a subject and tho impod by tectonic condition. My concern is to discuss the imprint of the body in its environs
怀孕吃什么水果比较好as a form of projected evolution, a term borrowed from the philosopher Gerald Heard, but also as a means of understanding how interior space can bear the imprint of an inhabiting body, a body that leaves traces.
Following nineteenth century industrialisation wherein the effects of capitalism and commodification where manifested as exuberant excess in the home, modernism sought to unhinge the traditional relationship between structure and ornament by recasting the debate through gender and cultural difference as much as tectonic distinction. Such formulations driven particularly by the influential writing of Adolf Loos, adhered to binary classifications that assigned ornament with feminine, primitive cultures and irrationality (negative), and structure with order, masculine and rationality (positive). Such judgements, conditioned by a desire to return to classical transcendent values rather than the immanence of living-in-the prent, are antithetical to the project of modernity. Gilles Lipovetsky in The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (1994) argues that fashion and taste are aligned to modernity by an insistence on rejecting conformity and uniformity of the past and eking individuality, difference and the cult of personality, that is “fashion plays a radical role in history becau it institutes an esntially modern social system, freed from the past.”1 Freed from class-bound ideology the individual is now the “creative principle of a social and political bond produ
cing ways of life of exceptional historical originality.”2 Within this emancipatory framework the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century saw the emergence of many domestic interiors decorated and ornamented respective of individuality and personality. More often than not the woman of the hou performed this task and sought assistance in the form of advice manuals.
吴耀宗One aspect of modernism’s rejection of ornament was the identification of ornament with women, and women’s values (particularly tho associated with adornment and beautification), although as Lisa Tiersten notes there exists a clearly articulated feminine modern.3 The site for this structure/ornament debate gained visibility in the domestic interior, or more particularly upper and middle class interiors arising from the division of labour and ‘parate spheres’ ideology. Under this conception women were identified with home and men with work. Appearance in the home was argued as important since it reflected a moral condition in which outward appearance was an expression of inwardness, the soul. Identified this way, inward arching was quickly associated with the psyche and interiority. However this bourgeois interior was one of the few locations available for women’s lf-expression; an expression that Beverly Gordon suggests can be read as the conceptual conflation of women, dress and the interior.4 Women decorated rooms as a reflection of lf, individuality and eventually personality. They decorated and ornamented in parallel with their own bodies and
clothes, extending one into the other. Metaphoric relationships between married women and the attention given to the imprint of female character on a room were, as Gordon notes, realid as an extension of lf/woman. This position was also encouraged by the suffragette and feminist writer Francis Power Cobbe who notes that “the more womanly a woman is, the more she is sure to throw her personality over the home, and transform it… into a sort of outermost garment of her soul”.5 The method was to u language that exclusively described women’s bodies to portray the adornment of home. Hence fabrics and trimmings, lace and bows are transpod from the ‘decorated’ female body onto the interior; the interior is another outfit, another projection of lf. The implication of Gordon’s obrvations on domestic ornamentation suggests that woman’s inhabiting body is projected out and moulded onto the returning surface now re-described as an enclosing and enveloping volume. Another connection between interior spaces, women and the body was also signalled by the suffrage campaigner and art critic Mary Haweis in The Art of Beauty (1878) and later readdresd in The Art of Decoration (1881). Although not clearly articulated, and initially ridiculed in the press, Haweis argued for the right to dress the body, not from convention, but through individuation, in an environment that is both a projection of the body, and a carefully constructed tting for the prentation of beauty’s worth. One premi being that “dress is the cond lf, a dumb lf yet a most eloquent expositor of the person”6 and “bears the same relation to the body as speech does to
the brain; therefore dress may be called the speech of the body”.7 Dress is the first outward projection, wall ornamentation is another evidenced by the idea that people do not adapt to their walls but that “their walls are to be adapted to them.”8 That is, rooms are decorated as an outward projection of lf and are returned, in a form of doubling, by “carefully decorating our rooms as a background to our figures.”9 Understood as a mirroring of the body, or a projection of the domestic body into its environment, surroundings become an extension of lf. More recently Lee Wright in Objectifying Gender: the Stiletto Heel obrves that clothes have an ordering relationship to the body such that, “clothes were meant to be an extension of the female figure and emphasi it rather than distract from it.”10 Hence the projection of clothes into the environs as an ordering device leaves traces of the inhabiting body. Further this notion that clothing as an extension of the body projects beyond its immediate corporeal prence is also read into furniture. Haweis again regards furniture as a further extension announcing “furniture is a kind of dress, dress is a kind of furniture, which both mirror the mind of the owner, and the temper of the age.”11 A position that is conceptually distinct to practice a century earlier when “furniture occupies the room and then the figures inhabit the furniture.”12
Some of Haweis argument is taken from Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus: the Life and Opinions of
Herr Teufelsdröckh (originally published in 1831) in which the clothes metaphor is applied to every area of human life at length and with great humour and ingenuity. When Carlyle’s invented German philosopher, Professor Teufelsdröckh (Devil’s Dung) turns to language he has this to say, “Language is called the Garment of Thought; however, it should rather be, Language is the Flesh-Garment, the Body, of Thought”.13 Moreover Carlyle’s wide discussion of our relation to clothes concludes with the proposition that “the first purpo of Clothes, as our Professor [Teufelsdröckh] imagines, was not warmth and decency, but ornament… [and] the first spiritual want of a barbarous man is Decoration”.14 The need to decorate, whether through tattooing or painting, provided distinctiveness, but even this required tempering as Carlyle saw the relationship between clothes and society tested by ornament, “Clothes gave us individuality, distinctions, social polity; clothes have made Men of us; they are threatening to make Clothes-screens of us.”15 Although commenting on various peoples’ attire Carlyle manages to avoid the
misogynistic ntiments of later critics by recognising clothing as an artificial device necessary to a naked animal.
Haweis’ u of clothing is not metaphoric but her identification of thin fabrics having the double condition of both hiding and revealing the body is pertinent to contemporary thinking and was taken
up by the British philosopher Gerald Heard. Moreover in Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes (1924) Heard crystallid the body’s relationship to its surroundings by proposing that we should expect evolution to “cea in the body itlf and to pass out into the body’s environs.”16 In this way Heard attempts to frame a philosophy of clothes and the clothed body, in relation to architecture. The logic being that we are tool-using animals and evolution is no longer happening in the body but around us, and becau the environment is a less resisting medium, it is happening at a faster rate. It is a projected evolution radiating outward through weapons, dress, architecture and the city. The text traces a chronological history of the interrelationship of clothes and architecture from Stone Age ‘man’ in his cave through to contemporary civilisation’s confrontation with the machine. In the former period Heard notes that ancient ‘man’ when driven by cold into caves found the rock resistant to shaping but open to surface marking and “hou decoration was already within power.”17 The decorative surface markings as outward projections of body adornment are conceptually similar to the nineteenth century domestic interior bearing the imprint of the inhabitant. As an intentional action they concern the registering of prence and identification, and when situated in a Benjaminian context derived from relationships to human activity, are regarded as temporal traces.18
Often, as indicated above, the traces are found as extensions of the body through surface marking,
adornment, decoration and ornamentation. In the nineteenth century world of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), the interior was again attended to, but with the now female Orlando feeling constrained by Victorian morality and physical containment. Rooms and furniture were covered, swaddled and bound, a projection of entrapment and morality indicated by “furniture was muffled; walls and tables were covered; nothing was left bare.”19 The narrative has Orlando feeling melancholy and unwell, suggesting hysterical, consumptive women who have to “lean; to sit down; yes, to lie down; never, never, never to get up again.”20 The architecture, too, is infected. Woolf conveys the n of projected unhealthiness in Orlando’s hou mapping the language of bodily health onto the architecture. Surface and space are imbued with peculiarly human qualities reinforcing Orlando’s sickliness and depicted as sweating, dripping, oozing, and discharging. Uncontrollable cretions and unsightly emissions as a sign of Orlando’s (feminine) weakness are manifest in the very architecture of her hou. The walls themlves em unable to control themlves, leaking fluids, contaminating the environment. This feminist reading of the nineteenth century reveals women at their most constrained, their most archetypally ‘feminine’: weak, nervous, modest, timid, reliant on men, and extremely fecund. Woolf has the architecture of this period characterid by dampness, which “began to make its way into every hou,” causing furniture to be covered, ivy to grow in profusion and walls to sweat.21 The moistness that Woolf describes in the bu
ildings corresponds to common reprentations of women’s corporeality as “a mode of epage,” a “liquidity” that requires cleaning up, absorption, and control lest it pollute indiscriminately.22
Noting that epage is also antithetical to the project of modernism, it reappears in Katherine Shonfield’s publication Walls Have Feelings: Architecture Film and the City (2000); a discussion of the failure of unadorned and ‘honest’ construction policies. In one chapter she outlines the architectural ‘fantasy’ that results from an interior
considered merely as the other side of the wall, particularly when surfaced with 1960s system building, Brutalism and building failure. Against the notion that the interior, as a distinct and parate entity, has disappeared she discuss two examples of the vengeance of the interior. That is when the difference between interior and exterior refus to disappear and reasrts itlf. Her examples are two Roman Polanski horror films, Repulsion (1965) and Romary’s Baby (1968). In the former film, invading rvices and damp alluding to building failure are unable to hold back the outside, and surfaces crack. Shonfield obrves that Carol (played by Catherine Deneuve) flings herlf against the wall and clinging to it; it clings back.23 The protagonist’s need for personal curity forces her literal bodily projection onto the interior wall, imprinting a distinction on an otherwi undifferentiated surface. In an attempt to hold back the exterior, curity of home is made by impressing lf, an extr
eme form of projection, onto the surface.
By focusing on the imprint of an inhabiting body on an interior space I have tried to open another theory on interior design, one that realis the interior as an extension of lf. The argument is made knowing that I have privileged texts concerning the practices and needs of women and their experiences into an area of architectural discour from which they have historically been excluded. If we take the premi that architectural discour has to a large extent been constructed through the writings and interests of male architects and critics to the exclusion of women, then this essay points to the recovering and reappraisal of an area traditionally ignored or marginalid. That is the moulding and imprinting of the inhabiting body as a projection of lf as inparable to architecture. Such associations are capable of continual adjustment and as Mark Goulthorpe suggests, define an alloplastic relation between lf and environment where we find “environment adapting to our bodies and continually recalibrated to suit the vulnerability of our relation to the environment.”24
1 See Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press. 1994 p 23.
高山上的花环>有奖游戏2 Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press. 1994 p 243.
3 Lisa Tiersten, “The Chic Interior and the Feminine Modern”, in (ed) Christopher Reed, Not at Home: the Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Architecture, London, Thames and Hudson, 1996.
4 Beverly Gordon, “Woman’s Domestic Body”, Winterthur Portfolio, Vol 31 No4, 1996, pp 281-301.
5 Frances Power Cobbe, The Final Cau of Woman , in (ed) Jophine Butler, Woman’s Work and Woman’s Cultur e, London 1869 p 10.
6 Mrs H. R. Haweis, The Art of Beauty, London, Chatto and Windus, 1878, p 11.
7 Mrs H. R. Haweis, The Art of Beauty, London, Chatto and Windus, 1878, p 17.
8 Mrs H. R. Haweis, The Art of Decoration, London, Chatto and Windus, 1881, p 23.
9 Mrs H. R. Haweis, The Art of Beauty, London, Chatto and Windus, 1878, p 194.
中考的英文10 Lee Wright, Objectifying Gender: the Stiletto Heel, in (eds), Judy Attfield and Pat Kirkham, A View from The Interior: Women and Design. London, Women’s Press, 1995 p 9.
11 Mrs H. R. Haweis, The Art of Decoration, London, Chatto and Windus, 1881, p 17
12 Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, London, Architectural Association, 1997, p 219.
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13 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: the Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh. London, Black, 1897, p 115. [reprint of 1831 edition]
14 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: the Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh. London, Black, 1897, p 81. [reprint of 1831 edition]
15 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: the Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh. London, Black, 1897, p 83. [reprint of 1831 edition]
16 Gerald Heard, Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes, London, Kegan Paul Trench Trubner, 1924, p 20
17 Gerald Heard, Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes, London, Kegan Paul Trench Trubner, 1924, p 42
18 e Walter Benjamin, “Louis Philippe, or the Interior” in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, London, NLB, 1973. [reprint of 1937 essay]
19 Virginia Woolf, Orlando, St. Albans, Granada Publishing, 1977, p 142. [Reprint of 1928 edition, Hogath Press]
20 Virginia Woolf, Orlando St. Albans, Granada Publishing, 1977, p 153.[Reprint of 1928 edition, Hogath Press]
21 Virginia Woolf, Orlando St. Albans, Granada Publishing, 1977, p 142. [Reprint of 1928 edition, Hogath Press]
22 Grosz, E., (1994). Volatile Bodies, St Leonards NSW, Allen & Unwin, p 203.
23 Katherine Shonfield, Walls Have Feelings: Architecture Film and the City, London, Routledge, 2000, p 59.
24 Mark Goulthorpe, Notes on Digital Nesting: A Poetics of Evolutionary Form, Architectural Design, Vol 72 No2, 2002, pp 21-22.
