Animating the Inanimate: Architectural ‘Magicking’ at Work

This is a practice-based PhD that seeks to reflect on the evolution of my practice as an architect and designer, exploring its motivations through a series of lenses applied to four distinct projects that track and reveal my recurring preoccupations. The operative manner of working is examined and framed in relation to broad connecting themes, uncovering traces of what I term “magicking” at work in my creative process as the design takes shape, as well as in the experience of the projects, where conventional perception of time and space is upended. This recurring theme of spatial and temporal distortion in projects is traceable in my creative process operating at all scales. The magicking unfolds via an animation of tangible energies perceived in inanimate elements of a site; presences and absences that become amplified and made manifest in the architectural details. The thesis explores practice at the intersection of magic and architecture – an uncomfortable pairing of worlds. Each belong to different realms: solid, rational, grounded, trustworthy versus ethereal, intangible, illusory, mystical. In the early stages of the research, I selected three case study projects to frame and explore methods adopted in my design practice with its distinctive way of working. These three case studies explore the domestication of buildings with a particularly non-domestic former use: an abandoned former stable block in London, recently completed; a decommissioned lighthouse in Norfolk completed years earlier; and a derelict seventeenth century Sicilian farmhouse in a dormant volcano crater undertaken during the research process. A fourth case study was added, since it was ongoing throughout the PhD and distinctly different from the other three. A new-build project on an urban site evolved from a relatively blank canvas where the design process didnot involve riffing off an existing building. Also, unlike the first three, it was also not destined to become a home for me personally. Although derived from distinctly different building typologies, all three projects resulted in residential use but the fourth was a commercial mixed-use development. Moreover, this last case study, a gallery and apartment building in London’s Mayfair, presented a valuable opportunity to explore whether magicking is always at work, even given the context of commercial pressures when designing at a larger complex urban scale for a speculative property developer. The research involved an analysis of the design approach to each of these specific projects, as well as what is particular about my methods when ‘domesticating’ a site and building. Using a ‘thinking through making’ process, I reflect on my creative practice through a lens of my flea-market collecting, tampering with books and several curious devices inspired by ancient navigational stick charts, which I assembled and then filmed. I also juxtapose the materials of the building site with nineteenth century embroidery via a ‘resampled sampler’ that I redacted to consider what is distinctive about my approach to domesticating. This offers up new insights into the grain of my creative practice, exploring the unconventional way in which my version of domesticating these buildings located on challenging sites unfolds, so that aspects of their un-domestic past-life, such as shipwrecks and volcanic eruptions, become amplified and brought to life through the architectural details. Through this reflection I discover new ways of understanding my work, such as the profound influence of my collecting on my design practice. I also identify and examine the influences from other creative practitioners on my own practice, including female trailblazing architects, contemporary artists and surrealists as well as ardent collectors. The research reveals ‘alchemical’ methods of working, involving bringing together notable and disparate elements of a building in context and reconfiguring them to create an entirely new experience which deeply resonates with a site and its layered backstory, to anchor it with a renewed sense of place. Having identified these important touchpoints in my projects I reflect on the strong influence of performance from artforms such as set design and choreography which is demonstrated by the inherent sense of narrative and kinetic elements alive in my work, as well as the experience of the buildings. The study also reveals an impetus to highlight non-tangible elements such as smell and sound in the creative process, like the Siren’s voices channelled through The Farmhouse in Sicily and the aroma of a Scottish distillery emanating from the walls of a whisky lounge in Seoul clad in charred barrel staves. The magic at work involves finding ways to weave these other senses into the experience for an augmented perception of time and place that is newly embedded in the sites and buildings. The research uncovers how my working method begins with a heightened sensorial forensic selection process of so-called ‘specimens’, both physical and metaphysical, plucked then rearranged to highlight previous presences and tangible absences in a site and its existing buildings. This process seeks to reawaken and make manifest hidden energies that are brought to life in the experience of the architecture – an animation of the inanimate that I term architectural ‘magicking’. This creative process takes root irrespective of the scale of a project, operating in much the same way when designing a small intimate piece of jewellery as well as a new-build commercial development. The design thinking is aligned with my habit of collecting, where observations of a site are intuitively selected and put together in an assemblage of metaphorical specimens in a tray that are grouped and arranged then regrouped, paired up and juxtaposed for heighted effect. These catalogues of oddities comprised of seemingly mundane, apparently discarded, and unrelated physical objects and traces of past lives lived are carefully gathered together and recomposed, bestowing the components with new status. These blended animations become an anecdote retold, a play reperformed, a place reimagined, imbuing the new buildings with dramatic narrative tension and a latent temporality. With this new awareness of the factors influencing my creative process, I seek to reinforce these powerful motivations and drive my practice in new directions.<p></p>