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Dissertation Medal Winner 2018

Species of Nooks and Other Niches

Part 1 Dissertation 2018
Rosemary Milne
 Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture | UK
Species of Nooks and Other Niches explores, simultaneously, the architecture of nooks and nooks in architecture, examining nooks as spaces which conceal against nakes as spaces which reveal. Citing architectural, phenomenological, philosophical, literary, poetic, and cinematic examples, this study excavates and defends the capacity of the hidden, the compressed and the complex in a world where rules of transparency, efficiency and simplicity threaten to become tyrannies tending towards architectural reductionism.

Tutor(s)
Dr. Dorian Wiszniewski
2018
Every nook is a house: at once attic, cellar and ground floor, a ‘corner house’ in Le Corbusier’s Petite Maison au bord du Lac Léman, 1923. Photograph: Martin-Gambier, Olivier. 2005. Petite maison au bord du lac Léman, Corseaux, Switzerland. Reproduced
Le Corbusier with his mother and her dog Nora in her house at Vevey, ca. 1930. Reproduced by Weber, Nicolas Fox. “Le Corbusier with his mother and her dog Nora.” 19 June 2013. http://www.nicholasfoxweber.com/le-corbusier-with-his-mother-and-her-dog-nora
Le Corbusier concentrating in a concentrated corner at 20 Rue Jacob, Late 1920s. Photograph By Brassai Paris, Late 1920’s. Reproduced in Benton, Tim. Le Corbusier Le Grand, 200. London: Phaidon Press, 2008.
Making nakes - comparing sketches and stills. Left - Eisenstein, Sergei. 1928. Sketch for a Glass House. Reproduced in Eisenstein, S.M. Glass House – Du projet de film au film comme projet, 48. Edited by Alexandre Laumonier. Les Presses du Réel, 2009.
Three characters emerge in Eisenstein’s Glass House: The Poet, The Robot and the Architect. The subversion of these characters as synonymous with the naking of the nook. Stills from: Bellof, Zoe. 2015. “Glass House.” A World Redrawn. 21:01. http://aworl
Three ‘marginal grotesque’ snails/birds/snail-birds - visual nooks inhabiting the margins of manuscripts. Here nest and snail are simultaneous, as with cellar and attic in Corbusier’s corners. Grotesques from: The Luttrell Psalter. ca. 1325-40. The Brit
Creating marginalia as textual-visual nooks in the dissertation. Author’s photographs.
Shell niches; loculi; tiny memory theatres. Photographs: el Fakharan, Fawzi. “Semi-Dome Decoration in Graeco-Roman Egypt.” American Journal of Archaeology Vol. 69, No. 1. January1965. Plate 15.
Specimens of shells. Author’s collection and photograph.
The suicide of the Poet; the result of a naking of the nook. Still from: Bellof, Zoe. 2015. “Glass House.” A World Redrawn. 21:01. http://aworldredrawn.com/glass.html.
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