It is not without irony that in an age characterised by the dissolution of certainty - a consequence of digital dematerialisation and the catastrophic destabilisation of our social institutions and natural world - architecture, for so long the repository for our myths and the vessel for our intangible narratives and rituals, has been stripped bare. Increasingly preoccupied with the physical, material and measurable, architecture has forfeited its original purpose as a mediating link between the tacit and the tangible. Drawing on the current resurgence and our enduring cultural fascination with the ethereal and uncanny, this AD frames the spectral as a deconstructive gesture that undermines the fixedness and certainties of binary logics, a means to develop new practices and positions from which to address our contemporary uncertainties. Gathering a body of work that explores and speculates on architecture’s long romance with the incorporeal, the issue is intended as a catalyst through which latency, contingency and indeterminacy, inherent characteristics of the architectural condition, can once more be valued, cultivated and nurtured.
Contributors: Kirsty Badenoch; Michael Chapman;Nat Chard;Oliver G Goche and Peter P Goché; Perry Kulper; Ifigeneia Liangi and Daniel Dream; Eva Menuhin; Mark Morris; Mike Phillips; Ian Ritchie; Chris Speed, and Cameron Stebbing
Featured architects and designers: Captivate: Spatial Modelling Research Group, Daniel Libeskind, Night Kitchen Studio, Michael Sandle, and Ritchie Studio
Table of Contents
About the Guest-Editor 5
Peter J Baldwin
Introduction 6
I Ain’t Afraid Of No Ghosts …
Peter J Baldwin
Syncopated Chronologies 16
Architectural Conservation and Spectral Documentation
Cameron Stebbing
Imaging Uncertainty 26
Layers of Time and Meaning in a Sacred Space
Eva Menuhin
Haunted Houses 34
Architecture and Large Language Models
Chris Speed
Phantoms of a Five-Day Forest 40
Kirsty Badenoch
Designing Absence 48
The Invisible Bridge and the Ghost Barn
Ian Ritchie
Solid Shadows 58
Presencing Memory, Manifesting Memorial
Peter J Baldwin
Ghost Horizons 64
Scaffold and Syntax
Oliver G Goché and Peter P Goché
Chasing Paradoxical Shadows 74
Nat Chard
Diaphanous Bodies 84
A Hauntology of the Mediating Image
Peter J Baldwin
All Visualisations Have Crooked Tales/Tails 92
Perry Kulper
A Tailored Reality 102
Inside In Here
Ifigeneia Liangi and Daniel Dream
Digital Ectoplasm and the Infinite Architecture of the Fulldome 110
Mike Phillips
Piranesi 118
An Unsettling World of Architecture
Mark Morris
Hard Spirits 126
Architectural Apparitions in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away
Michael Chapman
From Another Perspective 134
Beyond the Realms of Death
Neil Spiller
‘Evident throughout human history, the relationship between architecture and the immaterial has long been established’
- Peter J Baldwin
Contributors 142
