A note on The Gentle Hand + The Greedy Eye: an everyday baroque practice in architecture

This book by architect, artist and academic, Rachel Hurst (now Dr), was made as a subtle challenge to the prescribed digital format for her PhD dissertation submission (RMIT, Australia). The book required special dispensation to be submitted as an artefact, but was permitted on the basis that the content of the PhD was about haptic experiences in design. It formed a central component to the candidate’s exhibition.

‘The Gentle Hand + The Greedy Eye: an everyday baroque practice in architecture’, consistent with its title, is intended to sit gently in the hand as a tactile object, to satisfy the greedy eye with copious illustration and to allow a reading journey both straightforward and wandering. Like a manual or cookbook, it can be read episodically; each project analysis is of digestible length, there are self-contained elements, miniature essays or digressions which do not interrupt the narrative, but provide baroque diversions.
 
To facilitate a non-linear journey, the volume is designed with operative cues and devices so that the reader can navigate easily backwards and forwards between each of the sections, as they weave and connect through the dissertation. Haptic devices assist in way-finding — varied paper stocks, formats, and silky bookmarks — to make the ordinary act of reading a sensory pleasure — with the final embellishment a mapping and exhibition souvenir slipped into the back pocket on the eve of examination: a performance to standing ovation.

The underlying grid a table setting: structural elements placed around the edges, the typographic and image content spatially organised. The handling of typefaces, Tiempos Text and Akkurat, is intended as classic, bookish, yet expressive, evident in the titling, where the bounds of space are pushed. Each of the 380+ pages carefully composed and balanced — the conceptual overview and physical objectivity held acutely in mind: 

Abstract — 
“This research responds to discourse on the everyday in architecture (and cross-disciplinary areas of interior architecture, and art) concerning the multi-sensorial and embodied aspects of architectural perception, thinking and production. 

A major premise is that there are instinctive, complex and significant patterns and typologies in the way we use space in ordinary, intimate settings, and that these can give insights to larger, more public spaces traditionally handled by the architectural profession. The argument is that by virtue of their subtlety and familiarity, some of these fundamental patterns – both physical and occupational – have been overlooked by the shapers of our built environment in favour of conventional agenda, such as formal, functional, theoretical or political schema. Alternatively, they may be present but invisible or unrecognised, their profundity dismissed as trivial. The PhD addresses these observations as relevant spatial and material content for an architectural approach redefined by theories of the everyday. 

A further argument is that everyday architecture, because of its evolved, interstitial, diverse nature, is inherently multi-sensory and contingent in the way it operates, as opposed to a tendency toward the rational, ocularcentric and definitive in orthodox architectural practice. The PhD addresses these ideas as relevant to the process of an architectural approach influenced by the everyday. 

Through a hybrid practice of creative works, curation, critical writing and education, the PhD investigates specific everyday settings, notably the table, to deepen the understanding of potential spatial and operational analogies for architecture. Three publicly-exhibited major suites form the spine of the research. They are TIMES/TABLES_ Tabulations, Manual: inscriptions of the everyday and [re]situating: the Goodbye Table Road Trip. Each has multiple components, uses different media, scales and forms of collaborative practice, and is supported by a raft of secondary creative endeavours and explorations. In this way the PhD aims to demonstrate ways to use the everyday as a productive source for architectural analysis, response, and ultimately as an agent for an expanded model of practice.” — Dr Rachel Hurst (‘The Gentle Hand + The Greedy Eye’)

A baroque practice in the art of the book ... this is a conversation of deep understanding — an 18-month long-distance journey — between architect and author, typographer and designer.

— RH + CG / 2016