the humanimal recordings

the humanimal recordings, an ex-domestication of architecture.

To all my feral friends,

The “imaginary”. This word becomes (or better: becomes again) magical. It fills the empty spaces of thought, much like the “unconscious” and “culture.”…

…Since two terms are not sufficient, it becomes necessary to introduce a third term. The third term is the other, with all that is this term implies (alterity, the relation between present/absent other, alteration-alienation)Reflexive thought and hence philosophy has for a long time accentuated dyads. Those of the dry and the humid, the large and the small, the finite and the infinite, as in Greek antiquity. Then those that constituted the western philosophical paradigm: subject-object, continuity-discontinuity, open-closed, etc. Finally, in the modern era there are binary oppositions between signifier and signified, knowledge and non-knowledge, center and periphery… but is there ever a relationship between two terms? One always has Three. There is always the Other.

Lefebvre, H. La Precence et l’absence, 1980: 225 and 143.

Thirdspace: the space where all places are capable of being seen from every angle, each standing clear; but also a secret and conjectured object, filled with illusions and allusions, a space that is common to all of us yet never able to be completely seen and understood, an “unimaginable universe,” or as Lefebvre would put it, “the most general of products.”

Soja, E. Thirdspace: Trialectics of Spatiality, 1996: 56.

Architecture is a vehicle for emotion, intimacy, and interdependence.

And it’s presence poses questions of invitation, passage, and otherness. It does this by association and articulation, a multiplicity of coincidences. Architecture is built through a registration of an internal belief against a material reality. This thesis uses the human animal to exploit the dishonesty of the architectural metaphor and explicate the development of a formal and material discomfort.

To define human as distinct from animal, there must be a boundary. These boundaries define the domus, a physical and emotional quantification of our comforts. Transgressions of these conditions are the ideological thirdspace for questioning the Architect’s formal project and this great animal will grow. Here, we find a place for the feral.

The feral animal questions parallax comfort, its conservations and preservations, and its manifestation as architecture. This is a taxidermy of the ex-domestication of the architectural origin and its material oriented ontologies.

Comic effect is realized when: (i) there is a violation of the rule; (ii) the violation is committed by someone with whom we do not sympathize because he is an ignoble, inferior and repulsive (animal-like) character.

Carnival is the natural theatre in which the animals and animal-like beings take over the power and become the masters... ...Carnival is revolution(or revolution is carnival).

Eco, U. Carnival!, 1984: 3-4

A carnival of civil and savage, an architectural dialectic of nondifference. Here, material, texture, and volume define an alternate understanding of the formal project. Respectively redefining the association and understanding of form through the architectural object, its tectonic action and material misrepresentation.

Panem et circenses.

The place where the love child of George Bataille’s informal project, Fontana’s disruptive, discreet materialisms and a marginalised ecological intimacy with dirty or ugly matter is purposefully misunderstood. Because of the non-nature of its spatiality, there needs to be radical forms of intimacy with and between all matter. A thirdspace, the unimaginable, eccentrically inhabited by human and animal, impossible not to be stopped by the spectacular phyla that inhabit this place. The creatures here are unprecedented in their curiosities, curious about themselves, their natural habitat, their physical and material properties, and their relationships with one another. So curious that they’d put themselves in a digital captivity for our scrutiny and inquisition, manipulating our deductive Darwinian instincts.

Pay close attention to the live feed, there have been limited, but important new species added to this model vivarium. Here the feral is visceral.

The humanimal is live.

The humanimal recordings can be understood as an addendum to the Borgian Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge (translated by Kuhn). The addition offers a further ten categories with which to understand the animals: interiority, organic armature, macroscopic detail, embryonic, grounded, cultured colony, skin colony, skinnings, structural body, and the amniote.

The humanimal poses questions of scalar and proximal relations, it simultaneously unravels and recomposes the savagery of the human and the civility of animal in space, asking that we embrace its emancipation from the domestic.

These creatures are the multivalent, idiosyncratic amalgamations, that express materiality directly. The colour, finish and materiality produce multiple layers of articulation and association, these systems are deployed to disrupt the reading of form.

This architectural animal is composed of vast genetic distribution of proto-organic architectural components. Each component is a literal translation of an architectural system, respectively questioning material quality and formal association.

In the species humania,skin is skin,

bone is bone,organ is organ,

embryo is embryo,amniote is amniote,

Each system is an exploration of form and material that operates both autonomously and collectively. The species humania requires an honest representation of materiality.Architecture should confront the comforts of scale, material and form as its primary task.

This is nothing new. Jean-Jacque Lequeu’s work is deliberately monstrous and he is painfully aware of his place in the margin. He is the 16th century Humanimal, self indulgent in his context, limited to exploiting his skills as a master draughtsman of shade and shadow.

We find that Diderot, in his Encyclopedia, presents an abstract understanding of architecture as, like poetry, a product of imagination, modeled on imitations of nature. And poetry, like nature, has its monsters and its mutations.

Fontana relentlessly questioned the undisclosed, the hidden, and the proto-native narratives in his work. Because of this, illusion and misrepresentation of depth and space were critical in the misunderstandings and readings of Fontana’s spatial imagination.

The unimagined has been the unbeknown leper messiah for spatial agency. It is a curious threshold as the humanimal humbly exposes for us the underside of a ripple, her soft belly.

Departure from contact with the humanimal is the literal disembodiment of the unimagined; it is the moment of contagion, the moment in which we must freeze, preserve, and taxidermy in order to understand her architecture.

Dissecting a contemporary digital Lequeu, in her model vivarium, enables an ontological questioning of architectural space and form making. The animal is the literal generator of form, materiality, texture, and association.

The unimagined quality of the animal is the tripartite of:(i) the protagonist, the spatial activator, a performative machine with whom we simultaneously ridicule and feel compassion for, (ii) the attractor, iconographic, symbolic of the inherent activities, caught between Venturi and Scott-Brown’s duck and shed, and (iii) the antagonist, a physical presence that evokes emotional and physical response to danger that either draws us in or pushes us away.

These qualities of the animal question and invert, and the elements of the tripartite are often simultaneous and interchangeable.

Manifesting in space, for scientific purposes only, and architecture at three different scales: urban, architectural and intimate.(i) the urban scale animal utopia, boundaries for conservation and preservation, the fringe between the city and the natural ecology (ii) translations of the physical animal in architecture, formal and textural,and (iii) direct animal-human relationships, where the animal becomes a physical extension of the human body.

We must liberate the architectural animal from the perils of the posthumous photograph and explicate this feral system as a model for misunderstanding our architectural context.

We are all animals.

A collection of the social and spatial relationships between human and animal. Locations where the humanimal has a physical presence. These are places that echo the spoliar-um, a morgue for architecture and a butcher for exotic

meats.

Precedent

Urban Scale

Ngorongoro Crater

A UNESCO site since 1979, The Ngorongoro Crater Conservation Area is one of the only sites in the world with a high concentration of wildlife living in harmony with a human community. The multiple land use and conservancy system in this area are among the earliest to be established around the world as a means of reconciling human development and conserving natural resources. People have mutually occupied the Ngorongoro for at least 300 years. The Masai, today a population of 42000, share the Crater with a variety of wildlife, a population close to 25000. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area is adjacent to the Serengeti National Park where the proposed development of trans-park motorways has and will have severe effects on the migration of wildlife populations.

(http://www.ngorongorocrater.org)

Mexico City

Mexico city has the largest concentration of active contemporary circuses in any city, up to 200 circuses are operational per night. The circus, animal rights aside, is an important display of the intimate relationship that can be had between animal and human.

Disney Land

Disney has long used the personified animal or the anthropomorphized human inter-changeably in the development of their brand and urban spatial capital.

33°48’34.8”N 117°55’08.3”W1313 Disneyland Dr,

Anaheim, CA 92802

2°58’33.7”S 35°27’00.4”ENgorongoro Crater Conservation Area

Arusha,Tanzania

19°28’20.3”N 99°05’34.0”WMexico

An establishment of luxury and curiosity.

The Versailles Menagerie is the predecessor to the development of the circus and the zoo for privatised scrutiny. As the Royal Hunting Lodge and the new location for planned fights between exotic ani-mals, Versaille is the manifest destiny for the relationship defined by Louis the Fourteenth that divides human and animal, the savage and the civil.

Running Pamplona

The event in which thousands of white and red clad humans chase and are chased by chas-tised bulls down a narrow street. This event is as spatial as much as it asks the question of the human agency with the animal. The human has turned a placid domesticated animal, the cow, into a ranging beast.

48°48’18.6”N 2°07’11.7”EPlace d’Armes

78000 VersaillesFrance

42°48’38.2”N 1°39’57.2”WPamplona,

Spain

Rabbits in the Wall

The during its existence of the Berlin wall, and more importantly, when it was actively used, a population rabbits thrived in the grassy plain between East and West Germany. The animal utopia in the human distopia.Rabbits in the death zone, a 28 year old colony that thrives with in the bounds of the Berlin wall, here the animal finds sanctuary in another mans conflict.

The Circus Maximus and the Flavian Amphitheater [the Colosseum]

These public spaces mandate architectures for animals. This context transcends all three scales.The Ludus Matutinus (Morning School) is a training camp for the Bestiarii and Venatores - the gladiator hunters. While amphitheaters such as the Colosseum required special de-fenses to be built for the safety of the audience, built with seating raised thirteen feet above the area of the arena floor, made of smooth stone, and topped with grates and a balustrade that prevented animals from climbing out. A peripheral architecture, but nonetheless im-portant, the Spoliarum, was the morgue for gladiators and wild animals, exotic cuts of meat were also sold from here.

Elephant in BangkokSumet Jumsai, the architect of the Elephant Tower, a mixed use high-rise building in downtown Bangkok. The building is a direct, formal anthropomorphism of an Elephant.

52°32’09.8”N 13°23’30.7”EBerlin Wall MemorialBernauer Straße 111

13355 BerlinGermany

41°52’40.0”N 12°27’11.0”ERome,

Italy

13°49’32.4”N 100°34’05.2”E3300 Phahonyothin Chom Phon,

Chatuchak, Bangkok 10900,

Thailand

Architectural Scale

A Temple for Hunting

Cabela’s Retail Stores, specifically the store located in Hamburg, PA embodies the earliest conditions of the circus; the venatio and the bestiarii, the hunt and the hunter. The Store is a contemporary Ludus Matutinus, questioning scale and grandeur of the animal in lavish taxidermy and ecological displays.

Bangkok mall crowed with Fish

New World Mall in Bangkok has attracted a slightly different clientele. Happily swim-ming among dilapidated storefronts and waterlogged escalators, koi and tilapia feast on fish food sold by enterprising locals and thrown by tourists who continue to descend on the surreal scene. The fish were a solution for the mosquito problem created by standing water.

40°33’24.1”N 76°00’20.2”W100 Cabela Dr

Hamburg, PA 19526

13°45’07.7”N 100°30’17.5”E313 Mahachai Rd.,

Samranrat, Bangkok,

Phra Nakorn 10200Thailand

Intimate Scale

Please feed the Animals

The Khmer ruins of Phra Prang Sam Yot temple in Lopburi, Thailand, rather than being shunned away as pests, the Macaques and Humans find the mutual benefits of a collective living. The monkeys have a source of food, and in the case of the temple, the monkeys are fed as a celebration of their presence as an attractor and protagonist. These compassionate relationships are ideal for researching the socio-spatial relationship between animals and humans.

LocationPhra Prang Sam Yot Temple

14°48’07.7”N 100°36’47.9”EMueang Lop Buri District

LopburiThailand

Pride and Protection in Lagos

The smell of his rotting teeth is unmistakable, putrid. I can see his teeth pushing outwards from the confines of his muzzle. The gentleman holding his chain smiles at me, turns and walks through a crowd, he bounds along next to his coat tails. I watch as the crowd parts, displaced, moving into the road, up against the wire mesh fence. Was it pure fear of the animal? or a misunderstanding of the bond shared between this gentleman and his beast. Peiter Hugo photographs Nigeria’s Gadawan Kur - Hyena handlers, these double portraits describe a trans-species relationship unfolding in a setting of poverty and uncontrolled urbanization.

(Smith, W. The Hyena and Other Men. 2008)

Location6°26’46.2”N 3°23’55.3”E

Lagos, Nigeria

A collection of definitions and architectural systems analysis of the humanimal, where material transgressions feed

formal misunderstandings, bringing and gathering together families bound to an architectural investigation of the

humananimal.

Divine and Taxidermy

A collective definition

wild, feral, untamed, animal, unbounded, instinctual, fierce, animal, barbaric, frantic, embryonic

(of an animal or plant) living or growing in the natural environment; not domesticated or cultivated.

uncontrolled or unrestrained, especially in pursuit of pleasure.(especially of an animal) in a wild state, especially after escape from captivity or domes-

tication.resembling a wild animal,

not domesticated or otherwise controlled.a living organism that feeds on organic matter, typically having specialized sense organs

and nervous system and able to respond rapidly to stimuli.having or appearing to have no limits.

an innate, typically fixed pattern of behavior in animals in response to certain stimuli.More a natural propensity or skill of a specified kind.

the fact or quality of possessing innate behavior patterns.imbued or filled with (a quality, especially a desirable one).

showing a heartfelt and powerful intensity. powerful and destructive in extent or intensity.

a living organism that feeds on organic matter, typically having specialized sense organs and nervous system and able to respond rapidly to stimuli.

savagely cruel; exceedingly brutal. primitive; unsophisticated.

wild or distraught with fear, anxiety, or other emotion.essential; fundamental.

relating to an early stage in evolutionary development; primeval.in a rudimentary stage with potential for further development.

Material and category

interiority, organic armature, macroscopic detail, embryonic, grounded, cultured colony, skin colony, skinnings, structural body, geode

latex, deer bone, boar bone,

turkey bone, oil-based clay,

clay, rockite, PLA,

hydrogel, balloons, faux fur,

felt, silicon,

acryllic paint, polyester resin, casting rubber,

cellophane,timber door,

timber windows with glass (nicotene stained),timber cutsize,

steel roof brackets.

HAC-FP-01

HAC-XX-XX-(x)

Human Animal Catalogue�e architectural ideology - for

scienti�c purposes only.

Autonomous CollectiveCollapsing the distinction between

form and matter - for scienti�c purposes only.

Genetic AdaptionMaterial, colour and �nish disrupt the reading of form - for scienti�c

purposes only.

Special NoteIndividual identifying characteristic -

for scienti�c purposes only.

EmbryonicsThe earliest deformations of a primary form, this must be the first step toward the ex-domestication of architecture.

HAC-E-08Cement, Acrylic Paint

HAC-E-09Cement, Acrylic Paint

HAC-E-010Balloon, Hydrogel

AmniotesCrystallized in section,

gold leaf embellishment.

HAC-AMN-01Cement, Resin, Gold Leaf

Organic ArmatureShe needed something to cradle her soft

embryo belly. All too often, split at the seam.

HAC-OA-01PLA

HAC-OA-01-(i)PLA, Balloon, Hydrogel

HAC-OA-02-(s)PLA, Balloon, Hydrogel, Latex

HAC-OA-04-(m)PLA, Balloon, Hydrogel

HAC-OA-03PLA, Balloon, Hydrogel

HAC-E-04Balloon, Latex, Silicon, Hydrogel

First EncountersInitial contact and attempted occupation, resistance in

their isolation, bottled to capture their essence and exaggerate their new glassy features.

HAC-E-02Cement Print, Acrylic Paint, Fur, Pleather, Rubber

HAC-E-03Cement, Acrylic Paint, Resin

HAC-E-05Cement, Resin

HAC-E-06Cement, Rubber

HAC-E-07Balloon, Latex, Silicon, Hydrogel

HAC-E-08Balloon, Latex, Hydrogel

GroundedThe humanimal finds its legs.

HAC-G-01PLA

HAC-G-02PLA

HAC-G-03PLA

Cultural ColonialismSeldom does an architecture capture and encourage such

cultural growth.

HAC-CC-01PLA, Fur, Rubber, Flour, Sugar, Humidity

HAC-CC-02PLA, Flour, Sugar, Humidity

Structural BodiesBanal structural components and associations of

architecture are divisive in the creation the humanimal. By giving the inverse other agency, the anatomy of the species humania can be used to investigate our understanding of

structure and material instability in architecture.

HAC-SB-01Latex, Cellphone, Bone, Hot Glue, Oil Based Clay

HAC-SB-02Oil-based Clay, Bone, Latex

HAC-SB-03Clay, Bone, Latex

HAC-SB-04Clay, Bone, Latex, Fur

HAC-SB-05PLA, Latex

HAC-SB-04Oil-based Clay, Bone

Self PortraitureThe self portrait is a reflection of self. A pure representation

of form, surface, volume and material.

HAC-SB-01Ink on paper, floated

HAC-SP-02Ink on paper, floated

HAC-SB-03Ink on paper, floated

HAC-SP-04Ink on paper, floated

InteriorityThis inside-out exploration of the feral,

here the humanimal emancipates form from domestication.

HAC-I-01Rubber, Balloon, PLA, Scale-figure

Rubber, Balloon, PLA, Scale-figure

HAC-I-01

HAC-I-02Latex, Rubber, Fur, Hydrogel, Balloon

HAC-I-03A feral lavatory

HAC-I-04A feral livingroom

HAC-I-05A feral bedroom

HAC-I-06A feral bathroom

HAC-I-07A feral domestication.

Macroscopic DetailExamination of a micro-macro scalar deformation. The

relationship between material, scale and depth of the field is important in keeping the emotions of the antagonist

animal at bay.

HAC-MD-01PLA, Fur, Latex, Bone, Skin, Toe Nail

HAC-MD-02PLA, Fur, Latex, Stocking

HAC-MD-03PLA, Latex

SkinningsInternal volume and structural bodies have become vehicles

for shallow readings of form as surface.

PLA, Latex

HAC-SKNG-01

Balloon, PLA, Latex

HAC-SKNG-02

PLA, Latex

HAC-SKNG-03

Balloon, PLA, Latex

HAC-SKNG-04

PLA, Latex

HAC-SKNG-05

Balloon, PLA, Latex

HAC-SKNG-06

Latex, Cellophane, undisclosed Structural body

HAC-SK-03-(sb)

Latex, Cellophane

HAC-SK-03-(b)

Latex, Cellophane

HAC-SK-02-(f )

Latex, Cellophane

HAC-SK-03-(f )

Skin ColonyAn dermatological examination of architectural surface

articulation, volume is an extension of texture and materiality, pulled tight over my structural body.

Ink on paper

HAC-SK-01

Ink on paper

HAC-SK-02

Ink on paper

HAC-SK-03

Ink on paper

HAC-SK-04

Ink on paper

HAC-SK-05

Ink on paper

HAC-SK-06

PLA, Latex

HAC-SK-07

Balloon, PLA, Latex

HAC-SK-08

WithdrawalsThe drawing yearns to be three dimensional. The drawing

and the model of the drawing are both taxidermied specimens of the humanimal. Here the humanimal is in

motion: attempting departure, not death.

HAC-WD-01AInk on paper

HAC-WD-01BInk on paper

HAC-WD-01CInk on paper

HAC-WD-01DInk on paper

HAC-WD-01PLA

HAC-CC-02PLA, Flour, Sugar, Humidity

Eccentric Mega-faunaIn situ, at large scale, the humanimal presents us with a fear of failure, low resolution, disappointment in the architectural detail, and the complexities of material

articulation.

HAC-MF-01Ink on paper in context

The dog stares down the road.


The livingroom sails out into the bay.


The paper tree.


The dog stares down the road.

HAC-MF-05Cellophane, timber frame, door, windows, bamboo, latex, spraypaint

The Ex-domestic Architecture.

We are all animals,

The humanimal recordings.Joris Daniel Komen, 2015

Advisors:Ronald Rael Marco Cenzatti

Architecture Chair:Tom Buresh

the humanimal recordings

Documents