The Absurd Enspaced

Abstract

The contradictions between the ideal-reality, solid-void, and inside-outside are just a few of architecture’s most fundamental and accepted incompatibilities. Not exclusive to architecture, contradiction is ultimately a result of our human condition to seek out meaning and order in a meaningless, disorderly world. Albert Camus refers to this basic conflict between us and the universe as “absurdism” and lends only two solutions: a suicide or an acceptance. The purpose of this research is to enspace the absurd, which is to realize in architecture an acceptance of absurdity. This effort establishes that the opposing roles within contradiction are not two independent, separate forces up for casual omission (suicide) to ease complexity, but rather that these opposing roles are in fact two intimately entwined roles of the same part. The absurd is explored through Camus’ collected works as well as through precedents of absurd demonstration from literature to the arts and toward architecture. Undertaking the contradiction as the clearest articulation of the absurd and upon recognizing the threshold as the purest contradiction in architecture, this work finds the absurdity in architecture to be the threshold. Out of our human condition to search for reason and order, we separate spaces (functions) within architecture so we may make sense of them. The separation, the attempt to reason, forms the “here” and “there” and the threshold, the absurd, exists between them—where you may be here and there simultaneously. The threshold is therefore the absurd enspaced as it is contradiction manifested as architecture.The contradictions between the ideal-reality, solid-void, and inside-outside are just a few of architecture’s most fundamental and accepted incompatibilities. Not exclusive to architecture, contradiction is ultimately a result of our human condition to seek out meaning and order in a meaningless, disorderly world. Albert Camus refers to this basic conflict between us and the universe as “absurdism” and lends only two solutions: a suicide or an acceptance. The purpose of this research is to enspace the absurd, which is to realize in architecture an acceptance of absurdity. This effort establishes that the opposing roles within contradiction are not two independent, separate forces up for casual omission (suicide) to ease complexity, but rather that these opposing roles are in fact two intimately entwined roles of the same part. The absurd is explored through Camus’ collected works as well as through precedents of absurd demonstration from literature to the arts and toward architecture. Undertaking the contradiction as the clearest articulation of the absurd and upon recognizing the threshold as the purest contradiction in architecture, this work finds the absurdity in architecture to be the threshold. Out of our human condition to search for reason and order, we separate spaces (functions) within architecture so we may make sense of them. The separation, the attempt to reason, forms the “here” and “there” and the threshold, the absurd, exists between them—where you may be here and there simultaneously. The threshold is therefore the absurd enspaced as it is contradiction manifested as architecture.The contradictions between the ideal-reality, solid-void, and inside-outside are just a few of architecture’s most fundamental and accepted incompatibilities. Not exclusive to architecture, contradiction is ultimately a result of our human condition to seek out meaning and order in a meaningless, disorderly world. Albert Camus refers to this basic conflict between us and the universe as “absurdism” and lends only two solutions: a suicide or an acceptance. The purpose of this research is to enspace the absurd, which is to realize in architecture an acceptance of absurdity. This effort establishes that the opposing roles within contradiction are not two independent, separate forces up for casual omission (suicide) to ease complexity, but rather that these opposing roles are in fact two intimately entwined roles of the same part. The absurd is explored through Camus’ collected works as well as through precedents of absurd demonstration from literature to the arts and toward architecture. Undertaking the contradiction as the clearest articulation of the absurd and upon recognizing the threshold as the purest contradiction in architecture, this work finds the absurdity in architecture to be the threshold. Out of our human condition to search for reason and order, we separate spaces (functions) within architecture so we may make sense of them. The separation, the attempt to reason, forms the “here” and “there” and the threshold, the absurd, exists between them—where you may be here and there simultaneously. The threshold is therefore the absurd enspaced as it is contradiction manifested as architecture.