Rachel Carley completed her PhD in Architecture in 2006. Her thesis, Whiteread’s Soundings of Architecture, moulds a series of contours between the British artist Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures and architectural discourse. Soundings are taken in order to explore the complex ways in which the artist enlists architectural drawing and modelling practices to shed light on the rich interior lives of quotidian spaces and typological structures frequently overlooked.
Post-doctoral research continues to seek out and mould contours between spatial practices: these include interior design (in particular a preoccupation with colour and surface treatments), literature (in particular forms of literary constraint), still life, and gastronomy. Recent research has sought to investigate the adaptive reuse of interior architecture in sub-optimal conditions and interrogate how rationing methodologies can guide the development of evocative design propositions at postgraduate level.
On Wednesday, March 25 at 11.59 pm, 2020, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern placed Aotearoa (New Zeal... more On Wednesday, March 25 at 11.59 pm, 2020, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern placed Aotearoa (New Zealand) into lockdown to shelter citizens from the catastrophic impacts of the Covid-19 global pandemic. Entire households were placed in isolation, permitted only to travel locally to access food or medical supplies. The media messaging was resoundingly clear: stay at home. This contemporary context contributes to an analysis of sculptor Michael Parekowhai's The Lighthouse: Tu Whenua-a-Kura (2017), a full-scale model of a State House building typology. State Houses have been lauded as symbols of Aotearoa's ongoing commitment to the principles of egalitarianism. First produced in the 1930s under the leadership of Michael Joseph Savage's Labour government, they were intended to house those unable to afford their own homes. However, in recent years this form of social housing and, in particular, those who have access to it have been the subject of vociferous political debate. A current housing shortage has exacerbated matters as exponential increases in accommodation costs have coincided with increases in homeless numbers in the city. These developments make Parekowhai's public sculpture particularly timely. Sited at the terminus of Queens Wharf on the Waitemata Harbour in Tamaki Makaurau (Auckland), the sculpture contains a single room and a single man: the eighteenth-century English explorer Captain James Cook. He is larger than life-size and adopts a penitent deportment. Cook's heroic legacy has been questioned by revisionist historians and Maori scholars who have identified a plethora of negative impacts colonization had and continues to have on indigenous communities. Cook is now under house arrest, quarantined in a prototypical State House, appearing to reflect on his actions. This paper examines how the artist assiduously reinvents this housing typology as a beacon on a prime piece of real estate. The familiarity of the exterior form is belied by the sculpture's provocative interior contents, where the artist manipulates an elaborate suite of figurative and abstract forms rendered in an array of dazzling surface treatments to shed light, both literally and metaphorically on troubling aspects of our colonial history and access to the provision of land and housing in Aotearoa. Here, at the end of the wharf, we lose our footing;we have to consider where we stand in relation to our colonial past and our contemporary relationship to whenua (land). As calamitous events unfold on the global stage that make us all turn toward our domestic interiors, the conceptual ideas that underpin The Lighthouse: Tu Whenua-a-Kura make one consider what it means to stay at home now in Aotearoa.
George Perec's novel, Life A Users Manual (1978) focuses particular attention upon domestic a... more George Perec's novel, Life A Users Manual (1978) focuses particular attention upon domestic artefacts that shape and influence our experience of the interior. Chapter by chapter, room by room, the novel describes a Parisian apartment building, whose facade has been peeled away to expose a cross section of the interior, leaving rooms and residents (both past and present) simultaneously visible. Perec regulates the elements to be described in each chapter: they include inventories of objects, characters, actions, and allusions to other texts. The author employs elaborate organisational principles that are analogous to a structural armature, containing his luxuriant forays into documenting the minutiae of everyday life. This paper argues that Life invites designers to take particular account of how objects occupy the interior. In the novel, objects serve to activate rooms and occupation. They serve to radically remodel and re imagine the interior, offering ways to consider how one ...
Silent Witness examines the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library, (1996-2000), a ... more Silent Witness examines the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library, (1996-2000), a holocaust memorial in Judenplatz Square, Vienna. For her project, the sculptor designed an inverted library in concrete, the proportions being derived from those found in a room surrounding the square. While the majority of critics refer to this memorial as an ‘inside out’ library, this paper argues that Whiteread’s design is not so easily understood. It will identify the ways in which her design complicates relationships between sculpture and architecture, container and contained, private and public, interior and façade, as well as domestic and civic scales. The work is placed within a ‘counter monumental’ tradition of memorialisation, as articulated by James E. Young, which demonstrates a radical re-making of memorial sculpture after the Holocaust. It is argued that this site-specific memorial, partially cloned from the urban context in which it is placed, commemorates a loss that is b...
Silent Witness examines the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library, (1996-2000), a ... more Silent Witness examines the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library, (1996-2000), a holocaust memorial in Judenplatz Square, Vienna. For her project, the sculptor designed an inverted library in concrete, the proportions being derived from those found in a room surrounding the square. While the majority of critics refer to this memorial as an ‘inside out’ library, this paper argues that Whiteread’s design is not so easily understood. It will identify the ways in which her design complicates relationships between sculpture and architecture, container and contained, private and public, interior and façade, as well as domestic and civic scales. The work is placed within a ‘counter monumental’ tradition of memorialisation, as articulated by James E. Young, which demonstrates a radical re-making of memorial sculpture after the Holocaust. It is argued that this site-specific memorial, partially cloned from the urban context in which it is placed, commemorates a loss that is b...
Intended as a dialectic on the theme of preservation from the position of memorial, this paper ex... more Intended as a dialectic on the theme of preservation from the position of memorial, this paper examines how ritualised practices concerned with preserving can be understood in relation to demotic memorials. To preserve is to make a tangible, enduring record of a temporal event. This temporal event may signal a ‘compulsion to repeat’ a culinary tradition and also operate as a prudent strategy to extend the shelf life of seasonal produce. Trench stores and survival packs are examples of how provisions can sustain life during times of mortal danger. The concept of memorial is also evidenced in domestic provisioning where stores can be read as gifts to others: there preciousness afforded by the time and devotion given to their production and display.
We have considered the context of food in relation to memorialisation - that what we provide for others to eat connects us through social memory. Food is poignantly connected to both landscape and memory through material culture, as food is representative of certain rituals, in this case those rituals are associated with preservation of self. Given this preciousness preserves are often forever preserved. Unopened, they become memorials to the everyday, secreted away in kitchen cupboards, away from the degenerative effects of heat and light. They can be seen as memento mori’s that give weight and meaning to the temporality of the seasons, extending their life. They also act as signifiers of personal largesse.
George Perec’s novel, Life A Users Manual (1978) focuses particular attention upon domestic artef... more George Perec’s novel, Life A Users Manual (1978) focuses particular attention upon domestic artefacts that shape and influence our experience of the interior. Chapter by chapter, room by room, the novel describes a Parisian apartment building, whose façade has been peeled away to expose a cross section of the interior, leaving rooms and residents (both past and present) simultaneously visible. Perec regulates the elements to be described in each chapter: they include inventories of objects, characters, actions, and allusions to other texts. The author employs elaborate organisational principles that are analogous to a structural armature, containing his luxuriant forays into documenting the minutiae of everyday life.
This paper argues that Life invites designers to take particular account of how objects occupy the interior. In the novel, objects serve to activate rooms and occupation. They serve to radically remodel and re imagine the interior, offering ways to consider how one might design an interior for occupation through the judicious study and placement of artefacts. The first section of this paper will examine the multivalent ways in which Perec inhabits the interior. The second section of the paper looks at how Perecquian stratagems can be put to work in the architecture and interior design studio and does so by reflecting upon two design studio projects. The first project, Intérieur, required students to critically examine Perec’s novel Life and design an apartment building. Throughout the paper, particular attention was placed on the ways in which the interior was wrought in an array of architectural representations. The studio was designed to foreground the interior over the objectification of building, which often results in the negation of a rich interior experience.
In the second studio, Natura Morta: Architectures of Still Life, students were required to investigate how domestic objects, and the genre of still life painting in particular, could function as catalysts in the formation of innovative interior spaces. Each student conducted in-depth research into this genre, with the intention of locating its currency for contemporary spatial practice. Initial design exercises consisted of the construction and documentation of still life ensembles using a variety of media. Particular attention was paid to material selections, composition, observation, and the impact this collection of forms had on its immediate environment. This paper draws attention to the significant role objects play in the formation and occupation of the interior, highlighting how quotidian objects can be studied to excavate their spatial potential.
Silent Witness examines the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library, (1996-2000), a ... more Silent Witness examines the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library, (1996-2000), a holocaust memorial in Judenplatz Square, Vienna. For this project, the artist designed an inverted library in concrete, whose proportions were derived from those found in a room surrounding the square. While the majority of critics refer to this memorial as an ‘inside out’ library, this paper argues that Whiteread’s design is not so easily understood. It will identify the ways in which her design complicates relationships between sculpture and architecture, container and contained, private and public, interior and façade, as well as domestic and civic scales. The work is placed within a ‘counter monumental’ tradition of memorialisation, as articulated by James E. Young, which demonstrates a radical re-making of memorial sculpture after the Holocaust. It is argued that this site-specific memorial, partially cloned from the urban context in which it is placed, commemorates a loss that is beyond words. Nameless Library utilises architectural operations and details to evoke a disquieting atmosphere in urban space, borrowing from the local to inculcate neighbouring structures as silent witnesses to past atrocities. The memorial is compared to the casemate fortifications on the Atlantic wall; the defensible spaces of bunkers, described by Paul Virilio in his book Bunker Archaeology as ‘survival machines’. It is argued that Whiteread’s careful detailing of Nameless Library is designed to keep memory alive. Under Whiteread’s direction, the typological form of the bunker is transformed into a structure of both physical and psychic defense. The memorial has been specifically designed to resist attack by vandals and also functions as a defence against entropy, taking into itself and holding onto lost loved ones, preserving their memory.
On Wednesday, March 25 at 11.59 pm, 2020, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern placed Aotearoa (New Zeal... more On Wednesday, March 25 at 11.59 pm, 2020, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern placed Aotearoa (New Zealand) into lockdown to shelter citizens from the catastrophic impacts of the Covid-19 global pandemic. Entire households were placed in isolation, permitted only to travel locally to access food or medical supplies. The media messaging was resoundingly clear: stay at home. This contemporary context contributes to an analysis of sculptor Michael Parekowhai's The Lighthouse: Tu Whenua-a-Kura (2017), a full-scale model of a State House building typology. State Houses have been lauded as symbols of Aotearoa's ongoing commitment to the principles of egalitarianism. First produced in the 1930s under the leadership of Michael Joseph Savage's Labour government, they were intended to house those unable to afford their own homes. However, in recent years this form of social housing and, in particular, those who have access to it have been the subject of vociferous political debate. A current housing shortage has exacerbated matters as exponential increases in accommodation costs have coincided with increases in homeless numbers in the city. These developments make Parekowhai's public sculpture particularly timely. Sited at the terminus of Queens Wharf on the Waitemata Harbour in Tamaki Makaurau (Auckland), the sculpture contains a single room and a single man: the eighteenth-century English explorer Captain James Cook. He is larger than life-size and adopts a penitent deportment. Cook's heroic legacy has been questioned by revisionist historians and Maori scholars who have identified a plethora of negative impacts colonization had and continues to have on indigenous communities. Cook is now under house arrest, quarantined in a prototypical State House, appearing to reflect on his actions. This paper examines how the artist assiduously reinvents this housing typology as a beacon on a prime piece of real estate. The familiarity of the exterior form is belied by the sculpture's provocative interior contents, where the artist manipulates an elaborate suite of figurative and abstract forms rendered in an array of dazzling surface treatments to shed light, both literally and metaphorically on troubling aspects of our colonial history and access to the provision of land and housing in Aotearoa. Here, at the end of the wharf, we lose our footing;we have to consider where we stand in relation to our colonial past and our contemporary relationship to whenua (land). As calamitous events unfold on the global stage that make us all turn toward our domestic interiors, the conceptual ideas that underpin The Lighthouse: Tu Whenua-a-Kura make one consider what it means to stay at home now in Aotearoa.
George Perec's novel, Life A Users Manual (1978) focuses particular attention upon domestic a... more George Perec's novel, Life A Users Manual (1978) focuses particular attention upon domestic artefacts that shape and influence our experience of the interior. Chapter by chapter, room by room, the novel describes a Parisian apartment building, whose facade has been peeled away to expose a cross section of the interior, leaving rooms and residents (both past and present) simultaneously visible. Perec regulates the elements to be described in each chapter: they include inventories of objects, characters, actions, and allusions to other texts. The author employs elaborate organisational principles that are analogous to a structural armature, containing his luxuriant forays into documenting the minutiae of everyday life. This paper argues that Life invites designers to take particular account of how objects occupy the interior. In the novel, objects serve to activate rooms and occupation. They serve to radically remodel and re imagine the interior, offering ways to consider how one ...
Silent Witness examines the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library, (1996-2000), a ... more Silent Witness examines the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library, (1996-2000), a holocaust memorial in Judenplatz Square, Vienna. For her project, the sculptor designed an inverted library in concrete, the proportions being derived from those found in a room surrounding the square. While the majority of critics refer to this memorial as an ‘inside out’ library, this paper argues that Whiteread’s design is not so easily understood. It will identify the ways in which her design complicates relationships between sculpture and architecture, container and contained, private and public, interior and façade, as well as domestic and civic scales. The work is placed within a ‘counter monumental’ tradition of memorialisation, as articulated by James E. Young, which demonstrates a radical re-making of memorial sculpture after the Holocaust. It is argued that this site-specific memorial, partially cloned from the urban context in which it is placed, commemorates a loss that is b...
Silent Witness examines the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library, (1996-2000), a ... more Silent Witness examines the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library, (1996-2000), a holocaust memorial in Judenplatz Square, Vienna. For her project, the sculptor designed an inverted library in concrete, the proportions being derived from those found in a room surrounding the square. While the majority of critics refer to this memorial as an ‘inside out’ library, this paper argues that Whiteread’s design is not so easily understood. It will identify the ways in which her design complicates relationships between sculpture and architecture, container and contained, private and public, interior and façade, as well as domestic and civic scales. The work is placed within a ‘counter monumental’ tradition of memorialisation, as articulated by James E. Young, which demonstrates a radical re-making of memorial sculpture after the Holocaust. It is argued that this site-specific memorial, partially cloned from the urban context in which it is placed, commemorates a loss that is b...
Intended as a dialectic on the theme of preservation from the position of memorial, this paper ex... more Intended as a dialectic on the theme of preservation from the position of memorial, this paper examines how ritualised practices concerned with preserving can be understood in relation to demotic memorials. To preserve is to make a tangible, enduring record of a temporal event. This temporal event may signal a ‘compulsion to repeat’ a culinary tradition and also operate as a prudent strategy to extend the shelf life of seasonal produce. Trench stores and survival packs are examples of how provisions can sustain life during times of mortal danger. The concept of memorial is also evidenced in domestic provisioning where stores can be read as gifts to others: there preciousness afforded by the time and devotion given to their production and display.
We have considered the context of food in relation to memorialisation - that what we provide for others to eat connects us through social memory. Food is poignantly connected to both landscape and memory through material culture, as food is representative of certain rituals, in this case those rituals are associated with preservation of self. Given this preciousness preserves are often forever preserved. Unopened, they become memorials to the everyday, secreted away in kitchen cupboards, away from the degenerative effects of heat and light. They can be seen as memento mori’s that give weight and meaning to the temporality of the seasons, extending their life. They also act as signifiers of personal largesse.
George Perec’s novel, Life A Users Manual (1978) focuses particular attention upon domestic artef... more George Perec’s novel, Life A Users Manual (1978) focuses particular attention upon domestic artefacts that shape and influence our experience of the interior. Chapter by chapter, room by room, the novel describes a Parisian apartment building, whose façade has been peeled away to expose a cross section of the interior, leaving rooms and residents (both past and present) simultaneously visible. Perec regulates the elements to be described in each chapter: they include inventories of objects, characters, actions, and allusions to other texts. The author employs elaborate organisational principles that are analogous to a structural armature, containing his luxuriant forays into documenting the minutiae of everyday life.
This paper argues that Life invites designers to take particular account of how objects occupy the interior. In the novel, objects serve to activate rooms and occupation. They serve to radically remodel and re imagine the interior, offering ways to consider how one might design an interior for occupation through the judicious study and placement of artefacts. The first section of this paper will examine the multivalent ways in which Perec inhabits the interior. The second section of the paper looks at how Perecquian stratagems can be put to work in the architecture and interior design studio and does so by reflecting upon two design studio projects. The first project, Intérieur, required students to critically examine Perec’s novel Life and design an apartment building. Throughout the paper, particular attention was placed on the ways in which the interior was wrought in an array of architectural representations. The studio was designed to foreground the interior over the objectification of building, which often results in the negation of a rich interior experience.
In the second studio, Natura Morta: Architectures of Still Life, students were required to investigate how domestic objects, and the genre of still life painting in particular, could function as catalysts in the formation of innovative interior spaces. Each student conducted in-depth research into this genre, with the intention of locating its currency for contemporary spatial practice. Initial design exercises consisted of the construction and documentation of still life ensembles using a variety of media. Particular attention was paid to material selections, composition, observation, and the impact this collection of forms had on its immediate environment. This paper draws attention to the significant role objects play in the formation and occupation of the interior, highlighting how quotidian objects can be studied to excavate their spatial potential.
Silent Witness examines the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library, (1996-2000), a ... more Silent Witness examines the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library, (1996-2000), a holocaust memorial in Judenplatz Square, Vienna. For this project, the artist designed an inverted library in concrete, whose proportions were derived from those found in a room surrounding the square. While the majority of critics refer to this memorial as an ‘inside out’ library, this paper argues that Whiteread’s design is not so easily understood. It will identify the ways in which her design complicates relationships between sculpture and architecture, container and contained, private and public, interior and façade, as well as domestic and civic scales. The work is placed within a ‘counter monumental’ tradition of memorialisation, as articulated by James E. Young, which demonstrates a radical re-making of memorial sculpture after the Holocaust. It is argued that this site-specific memorial, partially cloned from the urban context in which it is placed, commemorates a loss that is beyond words. Nameless Library utilises architectural operations and details to evoke a disquieting atmosphere in urban space, borrowing from the local to inculcate neighbouring structures as silent witnesses to past atrocities. The memorial is compared to the casemate fortifications on the Atlantic wall; the defensible spaces of bunkers, described by Paul Virilio in his book Bunker Archaeology as ‘survival machines’. It is argued that Whiteread’s careful detailing of Nameless Library is designed to keep memory alive. Under Whiteread’s direction, the typological form of the bunker is transformed into a structure of both physical and psychic defense. The memorial has been specifically designed to resist attack by vandals and also functions as a defence against entropy, taking into itself and holding onto lost loved ones, preserving their memory.
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Papers by Rachel Carley
We have considered the context of food in relation to memorialisation - that what we provide for others to eat connects us through social memory. Food is poignantly connected to both landscape and memory through material culture, as food is representative of certain rituals, in this case those rituals are associated with preservation of self. Given this preciousness preserves are often forever preserved. Unopened, they become memorials to the everyday, secreted away in kitchen cupboards, away from the degenerative effects of heat and light. They can be seen as memento mori’s that give weight and meaning to the temporality of the seasons, extending their life. They also act as signifiers of personal largesse.
This paper argues that Life invites designers to take particular account of how objects occupy the interior. In the novel, objects serve to activate rooms and occupation. They serve to radically remodel and re imagine the interior, offering ways to consider how one might design an interior for occupation through the judicious study and placement of artefacts.
The first section of this paper will examine the multivalent ways in which Perec inhabits the interior. The second section of the paper looks at how Perecquian stratagems can be put to work in the architecture and interior design studio and does so by reflecting upon two design studio projects. The first project, Intérieur, required students to critically examine Perec’s novel Life and design an apartment building. Throughout the paper, particular attention was placed on the ways in which the interior was wrought in an array of architectural representations. The studio was designed to foreground the interior over the objectification of building, which often results in the negation of a rich interior experience.
In the second studio, Natura Morta: Architectures of Still Life, students were required to investigate how domestic objects, and the genre of still life painting in particular, could function as catalysts in the formation of innovative interior spaces. Each student conducted in-depth research into this genre, with the intention of locating its currency for contemporary spatial practice. Initial design exercises consisted of the construction and documentation of still life ensembles using a variety of media. Particular attention was paid to material selections, composition, observation, and the impact this collection of forms had on its immediate environment. This paper draws attention to the significant role objects play in the formation and occupation of the interior, highlighting how quotidian objects can be studied to excavate their spatial potential.
We have considered the context of food in relation to memorialisation - that what we provide for others to eat connects us through social memory. Food is poignantly connected to both landscape and memory through material culture, as food is representative of certain rituals, in this case those rituals are associated with preservation of self. Given this preciousness preserves are often forever preserved. Unopened, they become memorials to the everyday, secreted away in kitchen cupboards, away from the degenerative effects of heat and light. They can be seen as memento mori’s that give weight and meaning to the temporality of the seasons, extending their life. They also act as signifiers of personal largesse.
This paper argues that Life invites designers to take particular account of how objects occupy the interior. In the novel, objects serve to activate rooms and occupation. They serve to radically remodel and re imagine the interior, offering ways to consider how one might design an interior for occupation through the judicious study and placement of artefacts.
The first section of this paper will examine the multivalent ways in which Perec inhabits the interior. The second section of the paper looks at how Perecquian stratagems can be put to work in the architecture and interior design studio and does so by reflecting upon two design studio projects. The first project, Intérieur, required students to critically examine Perec’s novel Life and design an apartment building. Throughout the paper, particular attention was placed on the ways in which the interior was wrought in an array of architectural representations. The studio was designed to foreground the interior over the objectification of building, which often results in the negation of a rich interior experience.
In the second studio, Natura Morta: Architectures of Still Life, students were required to investigate how domestic objects, and the genre of still life painting in particular, could function as catalysts in the formation of innovative interior spaces. Each student conducted in-depth research into this genre, with the intention of locating its currency for contemporary spatial practice. Initial design exercises consisted of the construction and documentation of still life ensembles using a variety of media. Particular attention was paid to material selections, composition, observation, and the impact this collection of forms had on its immediate environment. This paper draws attention to the significant role objects play in the formation and occupation of the interior, highlighting how quotidian objects can be studied to excavate their spatial potential.