Matter of the Manor

South African Journal of Art History, 2013

As a starting point of consideration, this enquiry briefly weighs up the Pre-Socratic (materialists) position of 'the primary stuff of the universe' with the trio Socrates-Plato-Aristotle's differentiation between Form (morphe) and Matter (hyle). The purpose of this initial exercise is to highlight, as suggested by Vitruvian myths and revisited in recent architectural discourse by Joseph Rykwert and Aaron Betsky, the differentiation between architecture (event, notion) and building (scenography, thing). Reinforced by the essays of Jonathan Hill (Immaterial Architecture) that suggests a fusion of the immaterial and material in architecture and Katie Lloyd Thomas (Material Matters) who shifts the focus towards the material over the form, this endeavour exposes the blurred boundary between the visible material of building and the invisible immateriality of event-architecture. With the aforementioned in mind, the Dematerialisation of Mies Van der Rohe, Immaterial Material of...

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2011

This article explores the fluidities and stabilities of urban materiality by looking at the ongoing emergence of a 300-year-old church in central Manchester. The notion of assemblages is utilised to investigate how places, such as the building featured here, are simultaneously destroyed and altered by numerous agencies, and stabilised by repair and replacement building material. By examining the vital properties of stone and the particular non-human agents that act upon the stony fabric of the building, I explore some of the processes that render matter continuously emergent. I subsequently consider the consequences of these material transformations by looking at how they promote the enrolment of two human processes of spatial (re)ordering, the forging of connections between the city and sites of stone supply, and the changing and contested process of repair and maintenance. I argue that by acknowledging complexity, historical depth and geographical scale, non-human and human entanglements, and ambiguity, we might write accounts that do justice to the emergence, contingency and unpredictability in a world of innumerable agencies.

From the Things Themselves: Architecture and Phenomenology, 2012

Journal of Art Historiography, 2013

The materiality of architecture and the materiality of things have not long been closely linked in the scholarly imagination. Architecture, that largely permanent manipulation of space and the built environment, is in everything but the most abstract speculations a material construction, a physical entity that creates and defines space. When writing about architecture, it is perhaps all too easy to slip from discussions of materiality to ones of structure, the way in which a building stands and remains viable. Structure and materiality might seem identical, but they are not. Materiality, the 'thingness' of a building, makes it an object as much as a creator of space, and one can say that a building's materiality affects its inhabitants whether or not they comprehend its structure. 1 It is likewise difficult to isolate buildings from their larger social and environmental settings, which usually is a positive outgrowth of their materiality, but this can sometimes draw attention away from a building's broader effects. Objects, in contrast, seem supremely isolatable, easily detached from their original contexts of production. Object analysis, particularly in the growing interdisciplinary field of material culture studies, typically seeks to elucidate portable things, entities easily controlled through human manipulation, frequently moved, and that typically enjoy a close relationship to the possessor's body. 2 That objects likewise have wide-ranging spatial dimensions can therefore be as difficult to conceptualise as architecture's status as a thing. This is even true in those instances where objects and buildings enjoyed a My heartfelt thanks to Jeffrey Collins, Jennifer Ferng, Mimi Hellman, and Kristel Smentek for their comments and suggestions for this essay.

Civitas, 1997

The historic relationship of religious sensibility to artistic sensibility is both self evident and complex. But this relationship has become problematic in a post-modern world on the one hand no longer confident in the social and intellectual adequacy of secular materialism, in which on the other hand both religious and artistic sensibilities have become themselves to a remarkable and unprecedented degree secularized and / or individualized.

The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge, 2010

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2018

Landscapes, we are assured by the organisers of the Royal Historical Society symposium, Putting History in its Place, 'are not merely canvasses on which human action is played out, but constitute active social and cultural agents in producing change.' During the course of our discussions we witnessed just how that might work out across a range of landscapes and a broad swathe of periods and places. Of course, as a modernist, there is always a fear that my subject is simply not as exotic or as exciting as those that went beforeand the fact that my paper came last of all only enhanced that fear. But let me start with a modern-a twentieth-century-example of the power of place, nonetheless: one every bit as mountains of Campagna, just a few miles south of the commune of Mignano Monte Luca. 'It was', writes Dover an absolutely still day, with a blue sky from one horizon to the other, and the Matese massif was covered from end to end with snow. The scene struck directly at my penis, so I sat down on a log and masturbated; it seemed the appropriate response. What, though, is the appropriate response of the historian to this rather unlikely reminiscence? For journalists in the mid-1990s, who headed a report of Dover's disclosure 'Oxford Don Takes Memoirs in Hand', this was simply a laughing matter. For the author himself, anxious-in his own words-to avoid the suggestion that his recollections amounted to nothing more than Confessions of a Wanker, and keen, presumably, to distinguish his writings from the shamefaced masturbatory memoirs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this physical, sexual response to a landscape could be simply and easily rationalized. 'The explanation of such events', Dover concludes, 'is scientific rather than philosophical.' 3 In other words, he saw this somehow as a natural response: natural in the sense that this was a simple, physiological reaction; and natural, too, in that it reflected some primal, essential, subconscious connection between a man and the natural world. Clinicians are inclined to agree. Certainly, a recent encyclopaedia of human sexuality notes that it is not untypical for 'a person so inclined' to respond erotically to 'a pleasing landscape or art work'. 4 But philosophers might well beg to differ. Indeed, for the political philosopher Jane Bennett, considering what she calls 'the sex appeal of the inorganic' opens up all sorts of questions about human relationships with-and responsibility for-the

All too often, a fascination with ruins produces little more than reflection on the qualities of decay and abandonment that stimulate nostalgia for lost and vanquished pasts. In this exhibition by Witherford Watson Mann, a subtle reflection was provided on the potential for ruins of diverse kinds to have contemporary life and relevance. Indeed, the beauty of the exhibition belied the willingness of this practice to engage with places that would not often be regarded as ruins worthy of careful study or adaptation, and to transform them precisely by doing so.

The Journal of Architecture, 2016