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The Space of Ritual is intended as
a method of ‘seeing’ for architectural research. Operating as a
focusing device, the camera has been used to magnify and slow-down the
rhythms of the city, working as part of what Henri Lefebvre terms the
‘rhythmanalytical project’. [1]
Rhythmanalysis
(2004) sets as its intent the establishment of a supposed ‘science’
studying the interconnections of the rhythms of everyday life – a
proposal to draw together the conceptions of time and space into a
singularity of idea and understanding. Setting the basis for the
‘rhythmanalytical project’ in experiences centred on the body and its
relationship to time and space, Lefebvre proposed a corporeal and
intellectual attunement with the rhythms of the quotidian as a means of
‘seeing’ the rhythms of everyday life.
Opening with a quote on architectural hierarchy from Mies van der Rohe [2], The Space of Ritual draws
on Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis and Jean Paul Sartre’s
existentialist novel, Nausea
(1965) [3] in order
to construct a narrative that operates as a
filmic essay, bringing into focus the powerful rhythmic elements that
construct the experience of the everyday in cities, and how these
moments are subverted on occasion.
Drawing explicitly on the techniques used by Patrick Keiller in the
films London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997), the
camera has been allowed to capture the daily activities of the people
of Cardiff, observing the everyday rhythms of the city during the
Christmas period, and recording moments of ‘event’ within the city that
disturb the ‘normal’ rhythms of the town.
Accompanied by a narration by Rowan Sloss, the film traces a series of
interconnected, yet also disparate, events in a cities life through a
text that weaves in repetitive aural motifs from Nausea and supported by Lefebvre’s
discussion of urban moments and architectural elements that form the
physical representations of a lived space, in The Production of Space (1974) [4]
By slowing down the normal movement through the city streets, the
serial vision of walking is removed and we are allowed to watch
individual scenes. We can allow these scenes to unfold within a
static frame, encouraging a consideration of the small, the overlooked,
and the supposedly insignificant moments that form the living fabric of
the city.
With thanks to:
Rowan Sloss for narration
The AHRC
Dr. Adam Sharr, Welsh School of Architecture
Samuel Austin
Stuart Hatcher
[2] BBC Radio 3 (2005) <http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/>
[accessed 14
March 2005]
[3]
Sartre, Jean-Paul Nausea.
Translated by Robert Baldick. Middlesex: Penguin, 1965
[4] Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space.
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwells, 1991.
See film
stills and text from The Space of Ritual
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