Catharsis VII – Acting and the Collective VII

The topic is CATHARSIS; an inspiration to “Act The Collective” or to “Act Because Of The Collective” either as the architectural “relief from strong or repressed emotions” or, as the subversive antonym to it, “causing repression and/or strong emotions”. How to free and architecturally act a desire driven emotive collective, or how to conceive architecture in response to such a collective, is the task for these semesters. Students are to develop their own personal architectural program in relation to a social construct, a built autonomous construct and a desired connection to nature/environment. The studio works on the subthemes of “expression, language and the inexpressible”.

Semester Task

Spatially to release your necessity to make something because of something. To act, react or enact the collective (a chosen group of individuals; e.g. spectators, visitors, dwellers, workers, travellers, onlookers, mourners, guests, ill, suppressed, free, animals, people etc.) through a distinct architecture / architectural awareness. To experience, reflect upon and describe the necessity/necessities made.

Body and Space Morphology - a syllabus

Body and space morphology is about the relationship between body and space.


How it manifests itself to be human in a room; outdoors, indoor, outside and inside, and within the manmade room. Alone or together, as one amongst the thousand, or as the thousand above the one.

Body and space morphology is about your body and the room you have within.


How it manifests itself to be human in architecture; what it inspires us to, and what it inspires as an architecture, towards an architecture. Seeing the offer that lies in architecture, the perversion of it, the infrastructure, the poesy, the container, the gate, darkness or light from darkness.

Body and space morphology is about meeting the wall.


How it manifests itself being human between the walls; knowing or not knowing the self, loneliness, longings and all that is imaginable. Seeing change, insights and outlooks, transparency and visibility, hideouts in an omnipresence of the stage. Seeing light come and go, seeing chairs and mirrors shrink and grow. Seeing how all things inhabit and capture the room. Beining between and at the walls. Looking at how they swallow and devour the things. Seeing how the walls become.

Body and space morphology is about the problem of body.


How it manifests itself to face the unknown; what presents itself as new or what just became in front of you. That which yet not has a name, although it shows itself, can be touched, heard, smelled and felt. That which stands sound and nevertheless can leave, that which can or cannot be moved; moves us.

Body and space morphology is about the distance in space.


How it manifests itself to stand still; moving just a little, approaching things nevertheless, every thing, to jump, penetrate, going into things, turning around, looking up and down, taking on the things, looking back and keep moving on.

Body and space morphology is about what we do not know and approach anyway.


Without a map there are only lines and without a compass directions just get more, then the word world is exploded before recognition has become, and it is resemblance and closeness that which implodes us astray. This you might endure and as you wish.

Body and space morphology is about “to act necessities”;

wanton and radically so, using your hands, using the other, using your head but not meaning a thing, acting abstract, acting the figure, autonomous it is and dirty it will get, serious too; ridiculous and radically so.

Recommended Literature

Abraham, A. A new nature: 9 architectural conditions between liquid and solid

Allen, S. Points and Lines

Arendt, H. The Human Condition

Arendt, H. On Violence

Barthes, R. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

Barthes, R. Empire of signs

Barthes, R, & Heath, S. Image, music, text

Benjamin, W. The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media

Benjamin, W. Walter Benjamin’s archive: Images, texts and Signs

Benjamin, W. On Hashish Berger, John. About Looking

Berger, J. Why Look at Animals?

Berger, J; with Dibb, M., Blomberg, S., Fox, C. & Hollis, R. Ways of Seeing

Borges, J. L. Labyrinths

Calvino, I. Invisible cities

Deleuze, G. Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation

Deligny, F. The Arachnean and other texts

Descola ,P. Beyond Nature and Culture

Descola, P. The Ecology of Others

Derrida, J. The truth in painting

De Toledo, S. A. Cartes et lignes d’erre / Maps and wander lines: Traces du réseau de Fernand Deligny

Druot, F., Lacaton, A. & Vassal, J-P. Plus

Ellis, B. E. American Psycho: A novel

Fehn, S. The poetry of the straight line_Den rette linjes poesi

Fjeld, P. O.. Sverre Fehn. The pattern of thoughts

Flusser, V. Towards a Philosophy of Photography

Frampton, K. Labour, work and architecture: collected essays on architecture and design

Gissen, D. Territory: architecture beyond environment

Godard, J-L, & Ishaghpour, Y. How video made the history of cinema possible

Hays, M. K. Architecture theory since 1968

Hejduk, J. Architectures in Love. Sketchbook Notes

Hustvedt, S. The blazing world: A novel

Hustvedt, S. What I loved: A novel

Kittler, F. Optical Media

Kittler, F. & others. ReMembering the Body: Body and Movement in the 20th Century

Koestler, A. The Roots Of Coincidence. An Excursion Into Parapsychology

Koestler, A. The Act of Creation, a Study of the Conscious and Unconscious in Science and Art

Koestler, A. The Ghost In The Machine: The Urge To Self-Destruction

Kracauer, S. Theory of Film: the Redemption of Physical Reality

Krauss, R. & Bois, Y. A. Formless – A Users guide

Kwinter, S. Architectures of time: toward a theory of the event in modernist culture

Leatherbarrow, D. Uncommon ground: architecture, technology, and topography

Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of PerceptionM umford, Lewis. The transformations of man

Kolhaas, R. & Obrist, H. U. Project Japan: Metabolism Talks

Richter, G., & Friedel, H. Gerhard Richter: ATLAS

Scarry, E. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

Serres, M., Malfeance: appropriation through pollution

Skinner, B. F. Walden Two

Sontag, S. Regarding the Pain of Others

Sontag, S. On Photography

Stein, E. On the Problem of Empathy

Stein, E. Potency and Act, studies toward a philosophy of being

Stein, E. Finite and Eternal Being: an Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being

Thoreau, H. D. Walden, Or, Life in the Woods

Vesely, D. Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation. Question of Creativity ...

Viola, B. Reasons for knocking at an empty house: writings 1973- 1994

Woolf, V. Kew Gardens