Repairing Urban Fracture

Abstract

Current emerging question(s):

How an understanding of cultural value and object relations contribute to the restoration of a UK post-industrial landscape? How can the cultural value of Stoke-on-Trent be preserved through the actions of architects and the process of making? What is the relationship between material culture and cultural value?

These research questions will be addressed through a material culture and autoethnographic methodological approach, in studying the tangible and intangible associations of heritage through embodied memory and spatiality in a long-form essay estimated to be 3,000-5,000 words. The author of this proposed work is a Master of Architecture student and aspiring ceramicist, exploring their own ontological and epistemological of clay as a material utilised within construction and as an artistic material within ceramics and the making of pottery. The author will consider their own lived experience and connectivity to the material, to empathetically engage with Stoke-on-Trent; architecturally, materialistically and societally. Clay is a finite natural resource. For centuries humans have exploited, excavated, and mined the mineral resource for the advancement of human life. There is a continuity, an understanding of a collective being, within the world that is shared by all humans in earth’s temporal horizons (Patočka, et al., 2016). The proposed work will explore the Japanese ceramic mending practice; kintsugi. Here, I make the case we should turn to ceramics in seeking guidance, learning from the way a material takes on a new life and materiality and thus function. This can, therefore, be utilised to understand a design approach which celebrates the traumas of a lived-experience, the past. I will draw upon literary discussions surrounding object identification, relation, cultural value, sentimentality, environmental embodied memory (environmentality), and phenomenology, which looks to posit the human central to the making of things, and our own subjective connectivity to an object and or place. The main literary critiques will be centred around:

Aledia Assman = ethical repair in histories and collective trauma. Walter Benjamin = Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Edmund Hurssel = Sensori-experience, Invisibility in the Visible, Intentionality Tao DuFour = Environmentality

This research will employ material culture, ethnographic and autoethnographic methodological approaches. It will consider the lived experiences of people who inhabit these spaces every day; aiming to uncover and protect hidden ethnographic heritages tied to the built environment and its objects. An autoethnographic approach draws on the experiences of the researcher, able to highlight the significance of cultural preservation, craft and making The proposed research will, relate our human interactions on a micro, interpersonal scale with material objects and artefacts, thus reflected within architectural remains of a city’s legacy; as artefacts and objects carrying embodied, ethnographic memories. I hope this proposal might offer an insight, and inspire others to look more broadly across other disciplines, such as ceramics, as a way-of-life.