lightness of being | thought

The most beautiful is not to be present. It is the absence of an element that creates desire and activates the imagination. There is always a pursuit towards completion when a lack is sensed. The imagination takes place in the many trials of the user to fulfill his quest for the absent. The pleasure is granted when architecture fulfills one's expectations. But that is only momentary pleasure. The desire for architecture lies where spatial contrasts merge in the middle of Lightness. Lightness is the place where architecture is dematerialized into a thousand pieces, where elements are dismantled, to be eternally recreated.

lightness of being | 360

lightness of being | object

“The image must have access to the indefinite, while being completely determined, the space must always be any space, disaffected, even if geometrically determined in its entity” Deleuze

The initial attraction towards the choice of the Grand Theatre is the issue of separation from the object, a separation that takes a perceptual dimension.
When looked at from any angle, the building produces a sense of boundary, an opaque surface that does not allow looking past it. The object is seen as an enclosure, and it becomes limiting. It is an interruption but creates an opportunity to set up a problem. The problem is that this found object in the city manifests frustration and stimulates curiosity to face the feeling of absence and lack it creates in its current state.

The photographs are used to evaluate the contrast with the exterior perception of the object in order to reinforce the first intuitive choice of the object, and in an attempt to get closer to an objectivity. The images show an internal logic that puts forward a complexity in the physicality of the space. Diverse qualities of light emphasize the released materiality of the interior elements. Interactions between energy and light happen through the selected frames. They create fragments of a lost reality, and unavoidably introduce cultural concerns about the history of the theater. But, far from dwelling on these allusions, these fragments are to be seen merely as part of the material of architecture, as indifferent.

A series of nine interior photographic shots are selected and labeled as spatial moments in the Grand Theatre. Each frame is isolated from the next and is deconstructed, dematerialized and contracted into the only fragments absolutely necessary to outline the overall structure of the element in question. These fragments are the essential spatial components selected from the cinematic: energy, light and frame. The choice of the sequence of images follows a jump-cut technique and thus space can follow space, not necessarily in the order normally expected, but in a series of staged revelations that can announce a new spatial structure. 

lightness of being | sequence

click here to watch sequence

 

The inevitable intrusion of bodies into the controlled order of architecture comes into perspective when we start to perceive architecture as substance, beyond the material delimitation of a building and the physicality of a space. Hence, comes the need to be aware of the quality of spatiality. Spatiality lies in the continuous overlaying of all the aspects I perceive when I, the body, move through a space. These perceptions are either physical representations of actual objects, or certain events that happen during the passage through the space.

The dimensions of view (frame), the light conditions and the spatial consciousness affect these events.

 

lightness of being | thesis

“The essential is invisible to the eye, one cannot see rightly but with the heart.”

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The snake, as it is, shown in side view, digesting the elephant, takes the shape of a hat. The drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. “Grownups” overlook the little details that are the essence of the object, and would say that there is nothing frightening in the image of a hat. What needed to be realized is that the frightening aspect of the picture is invisible. This puts forward the idea of the absent and unseen, and declares that there must be something that we have overlooked.

But clearly, what is invisible is invisible. And to insist on defining the nature of absence would be missing the point. Because it would be trying to define something that has been absented from the field of vision. It would be defined and made visible in order to say that it is absent, which is again useless.

For example: “The elephant is not seen in the picture”, says, by negation, that the elephant is not there. Such procedure of thinking goes against the whole purpose because it is only by opposition. It states that “absence” is standing in opposition to what is seen, or present.

This is why the thesis will simply put forward the hypothesis that there is a potential in the idea of absence in architecture. There is something of value in building to see the essence of what is not there. So the main question becomes finding a way (methodology) to explore this phenomenon of absence.