Macken, Marian
Macken, Marian
Bio Sketch
Marian Macken is an architect, academic, and researcher of architectural documentation whose work treats the book, the drawing, and the model as spatial practices and asks how interiors and spaces are documented across time (web-verified via OpenAlex: ORCID 0000-0002-5312-5064; affiliations Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, 2014–2016, and the University of Auckland, 2019–2023; PhD University of Sydney, "The Book as Site: Alternative Modes of Representing and Documenting Architecture," 2012). Her "post factum documentation" line — the room, the reconstruction, and the model read as documents made after the event — grounds the Interior Architecture Reader's chapter on the artist's studio-museum and Thomas Demand's photographs. She is the author of Binding Space: The Book as Spatial Practice (Routledge, 2018) and of "Solidifying the Shadow: Post Factum Documentation and the Design Process" (Architectural Theory Review 14.3, 2009), the chapter's own cited precedent for reading the reconstructed Barcelona Pavilion as a full-scale, post factum model.
Key Works
- *"Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration"* (2018) — Chapter 36 of Marinic's The Interior Architecture Reader: the Brett Whiteley Studio and Thomas Demand's photographs as spatial documents of interiority; the full-scale, post factum model; the thickened present; the archive's temporal simultaneity.
- "Solidifying the Shadow: Post Factum Documentation and the Design Process," Architectural Theory Review 14.3 (2009): 333–343 — the chapter's cited precedent: the Barcelona Pavilion reconstruction as full-scale, post factum model (not yet ingested).
- Binding Space: The Book as Spatial Practice (Routledge, 2018) — the book as an alternative architectural practice: site, sequence, and temporality in bound form (not yet ingested).
- "The Book as Site: Alternative Modes of Representing and Documenting Architecture" (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2012) — the founding study of the documentation programme (not yet ingested).
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
- Spatial Document — her central coinage: the preserved interior as "a spatial document, or spatial archive, that serves as evidence of a course of events… more specifically a document of interiority."
- Post Factum Model (Full-Scale) — her analytical instrument: the reconstructed Barcelona Pavilion and the studio-museum as full-scale models built after the event, which "question the inherent authenticity that the full-scale space demands."
- Thickened Present — her durational condition (via Husserl and Kern): the visitor's "two presents" — the preserved moment of inhabitation and the current present — held in one room.
- House Museum — the artist's studio-museum as the typology's third subcategory, beside the Freud houses' re-creation and the architect's house museum's biography.
- Trace — "the room is a trace left by the past"; the spatial document as trace-carrier rather than evidence-carrier.
- Temporality — "distending time," deferred temporality (via Merewether), and the disrupted past–present–future sequence; "temporal simultaneity" in the archive.
- Interiority — interiority as documentable: the interior's innerness preserved as "observable but not occupiable" residue.
- Interior as Biography — Whiteley's 1975 museum-prophecy: a room ten feet wide and a mile long, "walk down someone's life chronologically."
Relevance to Geoffrey's Research
Macken's chapter extends the wiki's museal-interior cluster (Spankie's Freud houses; Downey's architect's house museums) with its third pole — the artist's studio-museum — and, more importantly, supplies the cluster's theory of documentation: the interior preserved not as evidence (Demand: "not evidence or proof, but… traces of a process") but as trace, and the preserved room read as a temporal document whose pastness is held in an "ever-ongoing present." Her three instruments — the spatial document, the post factum model, the thickened present — bridge the wiki's temporality cluster (Massey's plurality of befores and afters; Hannah's event-space; Hedges's waiting room) to its house-museum cluster, and her Demand register connects interior documentation to the authenticity/simulation debates (truth-and-illusion, simulation-hyperreality).
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
