This project engages notions of philosophy through the realm of ontology and materialism. Understanding the potential residing in phenomenology and applying it to innate objects such as works of architecture opens a world of speculative possibilities. I argue for entities to have no ontological privilege over one another, but rather that all things and beings exist equally.
As the contemporary discourse positions our center around human concern as precluding all entity’s perception of the world, I posit that we could perceive buildings or objects as finite things in it of themselves rather than filtering our perception of things through human experience. In the acknowledgment of elevated importance to things, this project seeks a noumenal repositioning of entities. In doing so, I draw attention to things at all scales of space and time and contemplate their nature and relation with one another and with myself. The partial construction of the Mount Analogue and its surroundings serves as an attempt at creating architecture in a space where the reality of anything outside of the thought-and-being correlation is unknowable but imaginable. This project is a knowledge-seeking expedition to a symbolic mountain where human comprehension and architectural realization are partial. The Mountain is the bond between Earth and Sky. Its solitary summit reaches the spheres of eternity, and its base spreads out in manifolds foothills into the world of mortals. It is the way by which man can raise himself to the divine, and by which the divine reveals itself to man.
A journal recounts the knowledge-seeking expedition, from the moment we decided to embark on the adventure, and until the descent. Here is an excerpt:
Now, like you, in my studies and my practice, I had heard about a superior entity, possessing the keys to everything which is a mystery to us. A nonlocal, viscous presence so large that we could not grasp it. One thing massively distributed in space-time. A dense mass of everything contained entirely. An alien, a black hole, operationally and physically. This is how Father Sogol put it. We were after the universal Thing in which all things recede to an ethereal beyond. Our expedition would attempt to scale the ultimate mountain – the one I propose to call Mount Analogue – for its inaccessibility to ordinary human approaches. The journey opened the door to positive explorations of productive ambiguities, multiple readings, and gestalt-switches.
(…)
There, on a summit more pointed than the finest needle, he, who fills all space resides into himself on high in the most rarefied air where all freezes into stone, the supreme and immutable crystal alone subsists. Up there, exposed to the full fire of the firmament where all is consumed in flame subsists the perpetual incandescence. There, at the center of all creation, is he who sees each thing accomplished in its beginning and its end.
The project was developed at the University of British Columbia.
I posit that we could perceive buildings or objects as finite things in it of themselves rather than filtering our perception of things through human experience.
KOOZ What prompted the project?
LC I am exasperated by our pretense to understand, and our desire to control our world and its many beings. The project raised a problem instead of solving one. Because ultimately, the way we perceive a problem can itself be part of the problem.
KOOZ What questions does the project raise and which does it address?
LC I reflect on the divide between the real and the perceived. I speculate on the potential, the alternative truth, the revisited perception, and the fascination towards the other. What interests me is not the question is it true, or does it exist? But rather: can it work, and what new thoughts does it make possible to think?
[...] the way we perceive a problem can itself be part of the problem.
KOOZ How does the project approach the very notion of architecture and the role of the architect?
LC The project requires that we unframe our thinking and exclude a lot of the common-sense world. We free architecture from its function and free ourselves from our interests, and prejudices and expectations about architecture, its function, its social role, and how it was or should be physically built. The world that it constructs cannot be reduced to a mere purpose. Architecture is not just about the need for shelter or the need for a functional building. In some ways, it’s just what exceeds necessity that is architecture. And it’s the opening onto that excess that makes architecture a fundamental endeavor. Architecture is too often a technical answer to a question that’s not technical at all but rather is philosophical, and social. It’s how to think about architecture, but also about architecture as a mode of thought. It is about the architectural imagination.
KOOZ What role does narrative play within the articulation of this?
LC The narrative enables me to frame the creation of spaces and entities in a hermetic reality. Mount Analogue is an autopoietic continent with its laws of physics, its beings, and its buildings. Its existence can be deemed speculative as it is the only access one has to other entities. Here, I allow speculation on the nature of being things as things, not on the human’s approach to it. Speculative realism is a philosophy claiming that “things speculate and, furthermore, one that speculates about how things speculate.”
Mount Analogue is an autopoietic continent with its laws of physics, its beings, and its buildings.
KOOZ How has the project affected and influenced you as an architect?
LC If architecture engages a culture’s deepest social values and expresses them in a material form, then Object-Oriented Ontology engages in the material’s deepest truth and expresses them through speculation. I introduce fictional material into my process as a way to spread “intelligence” throughout the whole system, and it allows me to evolve with the project. This particular project influenced my architectural production through intellectual, self-reflexive, recursive, and very abstract investigations of matter.
KOOZ What is for you the architect's most important tool?
LC Creativity is the most valuable tool. But to stay creative, we must engage in the act of Wonder. Keeping a curious attitude is central. Humility and self-criticism are also very important to challenge our biases, prejudices, and entitlements in front of the many unknowns of our reality.
Bio
Laurence graduated from the University of British Columbia (M.Arch) and McGill University (M. Arch. in History & Theory). Laurence’s thesis at McGill dealt with phenomenology and behaviourology in urban space whilst her thesis at UBC created an architectural project inspired by Object-Oriented Ontology. Laurence lives and works in Berlin.
