Ben Spong

First and second supervisors 

• Prof Nat Chard
• Prof Penelope Haralambidou
   

Abstract

Painted with an unnerving attention to the play of light, the jug in Willem Kalf’s Still Life with a Silver jug and a Porcelain Bowls c.1655-1660 appeals equally to the conditions of perception as to the content of the object. Based on a virtuosic piece of silverware by Christian van Vianen, Kalf’s rendering simultaneously extends the limits of what was pictorially and materially possible by inventing objects which could not be made yet painting them with a clarity that proclaims the opposite. In offering up the projective realm to experience in this way, Kalf induces a tension between reality and representation that disrupts the familiarity of the scene, threatening the substantiality of both the objects and the observer.  

Moving between the pictorial and the material, the design-projects within this research draw from the loss yet entangled nature of ontological and spatial distinctions which Kalf’s painting brings to light. By drawing analogies between the assemblage capacities of still-life and architecture, the work explores how multiple, often incommensurable spatial and temporal conditions are gathered within design and to what degree their undecidable nature can be maintained in the material realm, positioning them as a means of putting reality itself into question. With this comes an emphasis on fabrication as a poetic and practical interlocutor between the worlds which architecture engages. In this light, the term fabrication adopts its more expanded definition as that which is invented, and that which is made. 

Set between contemporary forms of imaging and fabrication, the research methods are established through the production of quotidian objects and images which are arranged to form larger scale architectural assemblies. These investigations, grounded in the everyday, aim to generate moments of oscillation between shifting registers of space, allowing differences of perception to influence their resolution and the realities they suggest. 

Taken together, these methods and propositions advocate for a form of ecological thinking within architectural production, where the thresholds of design, fabrication, and phenomenological experience are understood as interdependent and recursive. They propose ways to maintain the undecidability of each, allowing them to benefit from the generative potential of difference. 

Biography

Ben is an architect, and a lecturer based in London. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Brighton, masters at The Bartlett and his Part 3 at the Architectural Association.

He has a keen interest in fabrication and imaging technologies which intersect in his teaching and research. He co-runs units on the MArch Architecture (PG23), MArch Design for Manufacture and Bsc Architecture (UG6) programmes at The Bartlett while also working in B-made.

Image: Ben Spong