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Relational architecture: dense voids and violent laughters

Relational architecture: dense voids and violent laughters

Stoppani, Teresa (2014) Relational architecture: dense voids and violent laughters. field: Urban Blind Spots, 6 (1). pp. 97-111. ISSN 1755-068

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Abstract

Starting from an analysis of Georges Bataille’s text ‘The Labyrinth’ (1935-6), this paper addresses the always changing relationship between architecture and the city, considering in particular the architectural ‘void’, as both a physical space and a disciplinary domain. In the city, architecture operates in a ‘void’ that is dense of tensions, unevenness, singularities, stratifications and movements, and must devise strategies for addressing and inhabiting these networks of relations. Focusing in particular on Peter Eisenman’s definition of the ‘interstitial’ as a spacing condition of form-form relation, and on Rem Koolhaas’s ‘strategy of the void’ and its congestion with architectural ‘junk’, this text argues that different postmodern positions on architecture in the city have addressed the ‘void’ as a space that is not feared – and therefore ‘designed’ by the architectural project – but tensioned with the potentiality of Bataille’s convulsive laughter: that destabilizing and de-compositional force that transverses relations of structured organizational contiguity, and challenges them with a force that travels across the (architectural) ‘void’.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: © Copyright 2012 - 2016 | field: Journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike. This paper was presented at the RIBA London on 11th June 2010 as part of the Critical Spatial Practices Research Seminars organised by the Centre for Spatial Analysis and Intervention, University for the Creative Arts, Kent.
Uncontrolled Keywords: architectual practices, space, spatial awareness, architecture
Subjects: N Fine Arts > NA Architecture
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group: Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Related URLs:
Last Modified: 19 Sep 2019 08:57
URI: http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/3685

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