James Casebere

Characters, temporalized by narrative, are fleeting inhabitants of an architecture larger than their lives. They are phantoms on the walls of the cave. After they have come and gone, the structure remains primary. Their specificity, like legal precedent, makes them mortal. If law is the mere shadow of justice, and if we place the concept of character into the shadow position in the equation, what does that make architecture?

(Source: Chris Chang, "Grand Illusion" in James Casebere: The Spatial Uncanny)

Dormitory (after Topkapi Palace) (2006)

Tunnel #2 (2003)

Turning Hallway (2003)

The Car Park and the Corridor

Here are just a few photos I took in Arthur's Quay car park after closing and a couple more from the corridor outside my apartment. I took some of them out of focus cos I was trying to emphasize the objective optical-technical view over subjective human perception in an attempt to further dehumanize these already inhuman spaces. Here's a passage I found inspiring, taken from Gertrud Koch, "The Richter-Scale of Blur", in October Files: Gerhard Richter:

. . . this is . . . a moment of trickery, of illusion, of a state of perception in which the spatial coordinates temporarily dissolve and blur to become a diffuse impression. This blurring is therefore both subjective act and objective state at one and the same time. In phenomenological terms, it can be conceived of as a mental state in which the relation to the world of objects blurs and the act of blurring causes that world to appear particularly threatening—to appear as an impenetrable presence.

  

Non-Places

My project is based on what the French anthropologist Marc Augé calls "non-places", i.e. car parks, shopping centres, airport departure lounges, motorways, etc. Spaces that are without cultural or social value, are characterized by transcience and the fleeting presence of people.