On Surface and Place: Between Architecture, Textiles and Photography

On Surface and Place is a rich and poetic exploration of surfaces and foregrounds their significance in our understanding and experience of place. Departing from Gottfried Semper’s discussion of correspondences between architecture and textiles, the study emerges from the reading of photographs, a swatch of Harris Tweed and curtain wall façade juxtaposed. In juxtaposing the fabric of the city with the weave of Harris Tweed the book charts an original course across a range of connected ideas and questions, combining many different themes, writers and disciplines. It presents integrated and innovative re-thinkings on a number of fundamental relationships, including correlations between body and building, word and image, and between the rural and the metropolitan, and the hand-crafted and the mass-reproduced. In doing so, it seeks to foreground the very interrelationship of surface and place, as it makes a claim for the relational nature of the world in which we live.