PUBLIC LECTURE - BODY AND LANDSCAPE AS WAYS OF SEEING
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Eric Chen, who was the lecturer in the talk of “Body and Landscape as ways of Seeing”. He is currently a lecturer at his master and serves as an art consultant for 201 ART, principal architect at ArchiBlur Lab and navigator for Interbreeding Field.
The development of modern architecture stresses the external pursuit for systematic efficiency, visual superiority and natural boundaries. However, often because of the inability to resist time, the roof collapses and the stairwell shows non-geometric discontinuity, leaving walls with longer substantive temporality, or even a complete openness in the end. This natural transference leads to a disordered time and space. Dissipation of function causes the original space to lose directionality. The non-systematic dilapidation of the roof leads to local plant growth and a place full of vitality. This seems to finally be the time for us to reflect on what exactly a building is. Eric Chen has creative context is in the micro-relationships causing destruction and landscapes he formed, to reconstruct the terms of architecture. Returning to the state before formation of architecture, through the repetitive intervention and formation of physicality, it also considers the possibility of destruction, so that another interface, the conversion of materials, the errors in connective points, and the location of the body. He engages in three layers of “empathy” in thought and practice, to critique the breakage of systematic, visualized and natural relationship.
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Forming a material texture empathy
The practice of creation allows the body to be in very close contact with materials, forming continuously aggregating substantive textures. This complex texture transcends economical and visual characteristics; it is not systematic, but is corporeal. The local construction materials are layered and reflect the minute changes of different times and locations, catalyzing every joint progression of physical sensation and feeling. The sedimentation of materials reflect the body’s limit and every possible turn, recording the trajectory of physical sensory movement, forming repetitively stacked substantive texture, so that each body in the work follows the texture of complex substances to enter a tactile state that transcends vision. In this trajectory of texture with complex substances, “empathy” through substantive textures is created for the people.
Forming force empathy
The practice of the creation forms and transfers the necessary forces in the construction relationship of substances, rather than only accounting for solidness and safety, but rather attempts to create an adjacent relationship, which jointly bears force through distribution of groups. Thus, the effects of force are visible through the complex sedimentation, and repetitive physical testing is conducted. As the force moves toward the group, the substance’s own texture and constructed relationship form a balanced bearing and transferring of force, so that each entering body can sense the group effect of force, and sense mechanical transfer for the body within, affecting every substance formed and affecting the bodies of every other person entering, as “empathy” of the forming force is effective.
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The empathy of common movement
The modern and systematic development architecture created a “negative correlation” between the artificial and the natural. The limitless expansion of architecture not only erases the body’s location but also breaks the relationship between the body and the environment. The “empathy” of force formation in the creative practice allows the groups entering the work to have the same rhythm and tempo. The repetitive substantive texture and the occurrence of tactile states constructed allow the body, through extension of construction, to become aware of the distance, while simultaneously returning endlessly to the substantive texture close to the body itself. When the body is oriented to the distance, the long and continuous landscape, the changes in light over time, and the bodies moving elsewhere, they all move with the body subconsciously in the distance. The formation of architecture is no longer the issue of “one” building, but the formation and connection of tactile states beginning with the body, forming an aggregation of force, forming incidents, displayed, forming fields; cities from environments and landscapes, ultimately returning to the body. “Architecture” is the media that needs to be rethought and redefined in the formation of these relationships, forming an “empathy” with connected movements.
“Open our mind to use our body to feel the environment.” – Eric Chen