shreyank k

Style as affective relation between the building and inhabitants

July 8, 2021July 9, 2021

Farshid Moussavi in her book The Function of Style says that the question of style in architecture has been concerned with only representational aspects. These representational aspects include the following: 1) Representation of internal narratives: technics from different practices of an era, a culture, a region etc. 2) of an autonomous internal order of building systems: […]

Cathexis and Style: (un-intention and intention)

July 4, 2021

Cathexis, a wonderful term for mental energy or libidinal force or drive, is what is quintessential for Freud’s understanding of life or at least animal life in the world. It is the internal charge arising from the (nucleus of the unconscious). What we have illustrated at the beginning of this essay is that the drive […]

Subject and Object: Freud and OOO

June 24, 2021June 25, 2021

One of the questions that has haunted Object-Oriented Ontology since its early days is if it objectifies the subject in its ontology? Or does it even have space for subjectivity in the ontology? While it is an important question, and one that I will briefly open in this section, the question that I am interested in exploring is, whether […]

LIVING ARRANGEMENTS

June 16, 2021

In a discussion on the idea of home, during the course on emerging urbanization at SEA, it occurred to me that we use the term living arrangement in a colloquial manner. But it is such a beautiful term that can encompass a broad range of things concerning living. I will try to give a preliminary […]

Erasing Oneself?

June 5, 2021

Why is the question of erasing oneself so important in the continental thinking? The larger project seems to be that of humility. Humility as opposed to hubris. Humility in accepting that there are several kinds of limits in being human. And in the last decade or so, humility as a means to subvert several assumed […]

Objects Without Form

June 5, 2021

The Dutch East India Company or VOC, as described by Graham Harman in his book Immaterialism, becomes an interesting object to discuss the difference between forms and objects. The VOC is an organization which has its operations spread from the Netherlands to Indonesian islands in Asia. VOC is an entity in its own accord, yet […]

Emergence and Growth

May 20, 2021May 20, 2021

One of the things that we learn from Graham’s book Immaterialism is the difference between Emergence and Growth. I would often mix up these two notions and often wonder, if everything is individuated, how is it that everything grow? or become? I will try to clarify this question, very very briefly in this post, based […]

A Dadaist Reading of Charles Correa (2015)

May 6, 2021

“Beauty today can have no other measure except the depth to which a work resolves contradictions. A work must cut through the contradictions and overcome them, not by covering them up, but by pursuing them.” Theodor W Adorno, 1965 (translated from German). “There is aconnection possible between the two, but neither Dada nor Zen are […]

Framing the Common (2016)

May 6, 2021

In 2010 me and two of my friends, all architects, rented a One-Room-Kitchen in an S.R.A building. Oblivious to what that means. Written and illustrated in hindsight this project narrates a biography of the time lived in the S. R. A through spatial and architectural notation systems – a spatial biography. This project employs my […]

The Question of Energy in Harman’s Ontology

May 4, 2021May 4, 2021

Since OOO is a philosophy that posits aesthetics as the root of all philosophy, it does not give primacy to human knowledge as a way to get at reality of things. This also means that science too does not have the primacy on the matters of reality of things. In such a case, Harman would […]