My essay 'Time by Windows is Time Well Spent: Practicing Full Emptiness in Architecture' is now published in the new Valiz publication Slow Spatial Reader: Chronicles of Radical Affection. I am honoured to share my perspective on architecture in this collection of essays about ‘Slow’ approaches to spatial practice and pedagogy from around the world.
Cutting the void, working with and in betweenness, with and in ma, means to biotopologically craft openings within what was thought to be empty. It is in this reservoir of subtle realities between inside and outside, between mind, body, and environment, that a practice unfolds. Time by windows is time well spent, because only close to a window a small step is enough to affirm full emptiness as life.
Summary
Time by Windows is Time Well Spent: Practicing Full Emptiness in Architecture is a re-gnosis on the potentials of biotopological craftsmanship. Based on a study to the Japanese architectural practice of ma, practicing ‘full emptiness’ in architecture is introduced as a direct engagement with the sensorial charged field that emerges by virtue of bodies movement. In this context, architecture can be reinterpreted as a biotopological craftsmanship, a craftsmanship not of wood but of bio-topo-logical entrainment. Through a re-gnosis in which we look from the future back to today, the potentials of biotopological craftsmanship are explored. In conclusion, biotopological craftsmanship is presented as a way to overcome cultural and transcendental otherness.
Slow Spatial Reader
Slow Spatial Reader: Chronicles of Radical Affection offers a collection of essays about ‘Slow’ approaches to spatial practice and pedagogy from around the world. The book’s contributors are from twenty-four countries on five continents. Each one brings distinct philosophical and disciplinary approaches—from ‘spatial’ fields like architecture, sculpture, and installation, but also performative, somatic and/or dramaturgical practices—, exploring how we think about and engage with space at a range of scales, tempos, and durations. The essays chronicle projects and processes that amplify tangible and intangible qualities of spatial experience: reaching into the cracks of the body, probing the fuzzy borders of atmospheres, and extending out across both geographical and epistemological coordinates. The term ‘radical affection’ in the book’s title was coined to unite those diverse approaches in a call for tender acts of individual and collective imagination through which new forms of caring, connection, and resilience might emerge. Like its predecessor, Slow Reader (Valiz, 2016), this new publication is intended to spur meaningful dialogue between disciplines and cultures, inspiring not only a different velocity of engaging the world but also critical shifts in consciousness.