2025.02.14
ON SUBJECT-OBJECT
This text is an exploration of an ongoing project and its place in architectural meaning, as part of Sotirios Kotoulas‘s theory course Deep Space, at the University of Manitoba.
This project mines architecture as a hyper-object, where the distinction between subject and object is expelled to illustrate the object’s presence and memory (or the relation to all events leading up to a single instance of perception, a present-memory). This exploration considers the human subject as transient being and places significance on the non-human.
The site of this project is the Elim Chapel on 546 Portage Avenue in Winnipeg. The chapel’s acclaimed tyndall stone walls are gutted by fire in 1974, the date at which this project shall take place. It is these charred walls that are fitted with a new monastery of carpenters—an astelier1—where the so-called monk inhabitants devote themselves to false idols: subject-object and present-memory.
Tyndall Stone and Kitchen Tables
The genesis of our cosmos saw fit the collision of ancient-ylem planets. One such impact caused her core to writhe and tear apart landscapes. She is a master worldbuilder of glacial freeze and thaw, nurturing life to only return home, and hardening her skin to support footfalls of a new epoch, where biped warred and broke her body to build a chapel. This chapel keeps ephemeral bipeds under the shadow of God, so they may devote their souls to the deception of eternity, ignorant of their own presence within this fortress of those that came before them.
A germinating seed turned mighty elm is felled by the hands of this same biped. With shut eyes she is dismembered and transformed into a kitchen table. It is when her eyes open that she sees her own afterlife, where wildness dies into domesticity. The warm bodies of these bipeds eat their fill in the presence of her grotesque body. It is by her identity—table, tree, and tekton—that she will remember nesting birds, raging storms, shining suns, felling axes, shaving shaves, clinking plates, and dwelling humans. This is the program.
These subject-objects differ only by their makers, one who rejects mortality and lives in shadow and one who dwells in being and transforms in building, to one day return home so that he may transform once more. The latter defines the members of a new monastery, of which I am a member.
It is this transformation of perception that allows all subjects to be seen, and space is activated. Within this space of new perception that the psychic vision of present-memory transcends the reception of light, so that monks shall no longer fear the shadow of God.
1. "Atelier," Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/atelier. The reference is to the earlier sense of the word from Old French astelier, meaning "carpenter’s workshop," derived from astele, "splinter" or "chip of wood."