The term, ‘heterotopia’, was used by Michel Foucault in a brief text – titled ‘Of other spaces’ – published in Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité (October, 1984; translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec). It is a richly suggestive text, although academics who can’t deal with poststructuralist thinkers’ complex writings have generally derogated it with all kinds […]
space
Posted inEnvironment, General, Media
Literature, art, space, and the secret of life
It never ceases to amaze me that the arts – foremost among them literature, sculpture, architecture, music, painting and cinema – are able to capture in their respective medium(s) virtually everything that makes life worth living; in a phrase, the ‘secret of life’. My recent re-reading of all my favourite John Fowles novels is what […]
Posted inGeneral
The pleasure of mountains
We walk past the iconic bear at the entrance to the Seoroksan National Park near Sokcho, South Korea, towards the diverging forested paths beckoning lovers of mountains. Each one of these takes one to a specific trail where one can indulge your love of mountains in various ways. Some meander along the side of a […]
Posted inGeneral
Astronaut slams ‘Banting in space’
SPACE (Field Reporter) US astronaut Scott Kelly is not happy with the red romaine lettuce served on board the International Space Station. Speaking from space, a clearly emotional Kelly declared the dish “an insult to anyone who’s ever worn a space suit”. “I didn’t come to space to lose weight,” he said. Kelly (43) said […]
Posted inEquality, General
Crime, capital and economic apartheid
In the book Blank: Architecture, Apartheid and After (edited by H Judin and I Vladislavic; David Philip Publishers, Cape Town 1998), Lindsay Bremner’s contribution, “Crime and the emerging landscape of post-apartheid Johannesburg” (pp. 48-63) uncovered the roots of racial segregation in the origins of Johannesburg as a gold mining camp in 1886. During the apartheid […]
Posted inGeneral, Tech
Florence, Siena and the ‘space of flows’
We are in Florence for a conference, in what is to my mind the most enchanting part of Italy, namely Tuscany. Because I have always been interested in art and architecture, and in principle we don’t take taxis, but walk everywhere we go, we have already seen the most beautiful buildings and urban landscapes, framed […]
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle
Finding nirvana in the bosom of the mountain spirit
It is our second visit to Korea, less than two years after the first, and my initial (favourable) impressions of the country have been confirmed on more than one occasion already. I have been invited here by a colleague to present a paper at a conference on science fiction, but because we wanted to investigate […]
Posted inGeneral, Tech
Exploring space…
Space – a word with so many meanings, literal and figurative. I need my space. Is there space in the lounge for the new table? Headspace is essential for psychic growth. Deep space. Newtonian space, Einsteinian space. Space-time. Cyberspace. Virtual space. Space of flows. Space – the final frontier (any Trekkie would recognise this one). […]
Posted inGeneral
Familiar places and foreign spaces
After a particularly strenuous semester, particularly regarding postgraduate students’ work, and on the eve of a much-needed overseas trip to a conference in Europe, I am reminded, again, of Michel de Certeau’s wonderful exploration of spatial practices in The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1988), on which I have written here before […]
Posted inBusiness, General, Lifestyle, Media
The shopping mall as consumer architecture
Referring to the moment, in Plato’s Symposium, where the lover supposedly beholds a completely disembodied, atemporal “beauty”, in the process conforming to the character of this abstraction, Kaja Silverman says (World Spectators, 2000: 10): “This deindividuation of the look represents a crucial feature of the process through which Socrates negates phenomenal forms. This is because […]