What is fabricated or made to exist calls attention to what is not made and is non-existent, thereby bringing to consciousness the relativity of both what is perceived and the means of perceiving and making as well as the fiction or artifice of facticity.
This article examines one example of another Modern tradition – a tradition in which spatial concepts, ordering principles, experiential precepts and design methods are shared in the work and teaching of both Modern artists and Modern architects: a tradition originating in the beginnings of Modernism and continuing unabated, if largely unrecognized, to this day. The work of the painter Josef Albers and the architect Louis I Kahn are presented as an example of a parallel in practice, an actual relationship where contemporaries shared principles of space, order, perception and design, as well as being influenced by each other’s work, thought and pedagogical insights. The article briefly explores a number of the ways in which Kahn’s architecture actively engaged the implications of the spatial speculations to be found in Albers’ paintings and teaching.
In January 2013, I questioned the decision of my employer, UCL, to accept $10 million of funding from the Anglo-Australian multinational mining and petroleum company BHP Billiton to create an International Energy Policy Institute in Adelaide, and the Institute for Sustainable Resources in London at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment. At the time, I was Vice Dean of Research and my questions started a process which is figured here as a site-writing, articulated through two registers: bios – a set of diary entries noting personal anxieties and hopes related to my institutional role at UCL, and logos – an attempt to relate these issues to the development of my own intellectual work and concepts concerning ethics and critique generated by others.