Scaffold/ing A Relational Architectural Concept

Abstract

This essay develops the idea of the scaffold/ing in conjunction with an expanded notion of Julia Kristeva’s abjection. Based on concepts developed in the book Architecture in Abjection: Bodies, Spaces and Their Relations (2017), it explores notions of bodies and spaces as assemblages and vibrating fields of matter. Dissolving their perceived boundaries, we stop identifying bodies and spaces as objects or things, and instead understand them for the vulnerable and unplanned constructions they are. It is within this realm of vulnerable constructions that the scaffold as a potential conceptual support structure emerges. The physical scaffold has always supported vulnerable architectural constructions through their erection, renovation, and maintenance works. Here, the scaffold is considered for how it may also be deployed as a flexible and perpetually shifting support for fields of matter.

Drawing on Céline Condorelli’s Support Structures (2009), I propose the scaffold as an architectural concept, describing the temporal structure or network of connections of processes in bodies. Scaffolds tentatively hold all bodies together, be they human bodies, spatial bodies, or animal bodies, while they are continually undergoing construction and deconstruction. Further, the scaffold is considered as a temporal structure of processes that is inextricably woven into a body, rather than sitting to the outside and being a fixed erected structure in a traditional sense. As this idea of the scaffold is porous and not definitive, matter is able to pass in and out through the process of abjection, and it is abjection that reorganises material compositions.

To illustrate the workings of the scaffold/ing, I discuss the gradual development and shifting of my house and studio in Brisbane. Here written anecdotes, architectural drawings, histories, constructions, and lives lived compound into a vibrating material field.