Diaphanous Bodies – Tall Tales and Mythrepresentations

Thursday 16.11.2023 @17:30-19:00 at BPB506

Peter Baldwin is an architect, artist and educator. His research explores the generative and speculative potential of architectural drawing, representational methods, and design practices and their role in the experience, perception, and shaping of space. His projects Soul B[u]oy, featured in the ‘In Memoriam’ exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture, New Haven, Connecticut (2020), and Charting Null Island at the ‘Cartographies of the Imagination’ drawing festival, London (2021), and in work featured in AD ‘Radical Architectural Drawing’ (Wiley 2022). His Research has been published in, DRAWING: Research, Theory, Practice (Intellect Books 2022), and in AD “A Sublime Synthesis: Architecture and Art” (Wiley September 2023). Peter collaborated Professor Bryan Cantley on his latest Book “Speculative Coolness” (Routledge 2023). Peters latest work “Diaphanous Bodies, which prophesises an immanent “Spectral Turn” in Architecture, is supported by Arts Council funding, and will feature in Guest edited and issue of Architecture Design (AD), titled “Ghost Stories: Architecture and the Intangible” (Wiley 2024). 

Synopsis

Architecture has long served as a mediating ground between tacit and tangible, presence and absence. The Vessel for our hopes, our dreams and the host of our narratives, myths, and rituals. Torn by the opposing forces of reductive instrumentality and aesthetic fetishism, architecture has in recent years lost sight (should that be site?) of conditions of uncertainty that provide a home for the imaginative and imaginary devices that nourish the creative imagination. 

Elucidated through the medium of my “Diaphanous Bodies” (Baldwin 2021-), this talk explores the disjunctions between contemporary (representational) practice and historical understandings of the communicative, poetic, and mediatory functions of architectural space and representational practice, before positing an oppositional paradigm, an alternative conceptual and methodological framework, which attempts to resurrect and re-centre the ephemeral, (in)tangible, the tacit, the transient, and the [un]certain as essential conditions of the Architectural Drawing.