Forms of Absence

Definition

Forms of absence are the uninhabited natural forms — the empty shell, the empty nest — that Bachelard reads, and Goulthorpe redeploys, as "images of the function of habitation." The empty shell "carries an unknowing impulsion, a trauma": it is "left in the air blindly as the trace of a convulsive absence, the smooth and lustrous internal carapace then exfoliating in its depth of exposure to the air, a temporal crustation" (Goulthorpe 2002/2006, p. 134). The empty nest is the same figure in softer material: "as if an interminable and complex three-dimensional weaving had been interrupted" (pp. 135–136). Goulthorpe's thesis: "Such forms of absence, as images of the function of habitation, offer a cultural correlative to the temporal generative processes of evolutionary architecture, outlined by Frazer in essentially rational terms" (p. 136) — the absent, uninhabited form is what the computed form must be measured against.

The concept has three structural parts:

1. Impulsion. The form demands "an appreciation of an impulsion, a force of egress, which is somehow trapped in the geology of the form, a latent trauma" (p. 134). The shell's force is "that it is exuded from within, the secretion of an organism; it is not fabricated from without as an idealised form" (p. 134). Formation, not form, is the mysterious term: "The created object itself is highly intelligible; it is the formation, not the form, that remains mysterious" (Bachelard, quoted p. 134). The epistemological ground is Bergson's distinction (note 4): "we might usefully separate geological from geometric form, where the geological manifests a temporal dimension, as if trapping time in its very materiality, sensed as such" (p. 136) — the geological form traps time, and the impulsion is that trapped time reading as a force still pushing outward.

2. Grotesques. Faced with the shell's "indifferent beauty," poetic imagination "involuntarily conjures endless series of grotesques, emergent forms that slide expansively in/out of the curvaceous yet inexpressive void" (p. 134) — the imaginary population that absence generates. The "process of formation is left as a mental material residue that then bends imagination to its logic; which would be the fully cultural wager, the poetic, of such improbable forms" (p. 134). Frazer's grotesques fail the test: they "provoke no such traumatic impulsion, lacking a cultural qualification other than their technical feasibility" (p. 134).

3. The nest's imprint. Bachelard's nest is "an intricate imprint of the inhabiting body, adjusted continually as a soft cocoon that outlines the aura of movement of the bird's rounded breast" (p. 135) — the absence here is the missing occupant whose body-shaped void the form records. The nest raises "the spectre of an environment adapting to our bodies and continually recalibrated to suit the vulnerability of our relation to the environment" (p. 135) — the alloplastic relation.

The concept's evaluative force: when shell-form becomes technically feasible (as it now has, in digitally fabricated thin shells), grotesqueness arrives "not… by an impelled imagination, but simply as an abridged evolution, never attaining the force of image" (p. 135; Bachelard: "In order to achieve grotesqueness, it suffices to abridge an evolution," p. 136). The fabricated shell is the abridged shell — the form without the impulsion, the image without the absence.

Key Thinkers

• Gaston Bachelard — the concept's source: the "Shells" and "Nests" chapters of The Poetics of Space (1958), the formation/form distinction, the mollusc's motto ("one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in!" — quoted p. 134), and the abridged-evolution aphorism.
• Mark Goulthorpe — the concept's redeployer: the shell and nest reread "from the perspective of a discourse of bodily desire" as the cultural correlative of evolutionary architecture's rational processes (2002/2006).
• Henri Bergson — the concept's time-theory: geological vs geometric form, the form that "traps time in its very materiality, sensed as such" (via note 4).
• John Frazer — the concept's rational counter-case: An Evolutionary Architecture's generated forms as grotesques without impulsion (1995). Not yet paged (see log).

Related Concepts

• Function of Inhabiting — what the forms of absence are images of: Bachelard's "image of the function of inhabiting" against the mere "will to shell-form."
• Evolutionary Architecture — the concept's rational counterpart: generated forms as "abridged evolutions" measured against the absence-forms' cultural correlative (p. 136).
• Alloplastic Space — the relation the nest's imprint implies: the environment adapting to the body's vulnerability.
• Trauma — the form's affective register: the "latent trauma" trapped in the geology of the form; the "unknowing impulsion" of the interrupted weaving.
• Temporality — the concept's time-structure: "temporal crustation," geological form as time made material.
• Poetic Image — the standard of success: only an image that carries the impulsion has "the force of image."
• Inside/Outside Dialectic — the shell as the dialectic's natural form: the smooth inner carapace exposed to air, the inside exfoliating as an outside.
• Digital Fabrication — the concept's contemporary test: the shell "not fabricated from without as an idealised form" is the exact counter-definition of the fabrication register.
• Surrealist Object — the shell's cousin: the concealing shell that displaces vision from the true object (concealment); both traditions make the shell the figure of a hidden interior.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Notes on Digital Nesting: A Poetics of Evolutionary Form (Goulthorpe 2002/2006) — the concept's source: the empty shell's "trace of a convulsive absence" and "temporal crustation" (p. 134); the impulsion/latent-trauma formulation (p. 134); the grotesques and the residue that "bends imagination to its logic" (p. 134); the nest's interrupted "three-dimensional weaving" and the "images of the function of habitation" thesis (pp. 135–136); the abridged-evolution warning (p. 135); Bergson's geological form (note 4, p. 136).
• Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration (Macken 2018) — the concept's interior-architectural counterpart: the preserved studio as a built form of absence — "The space becomes defined as a physical container of absence; the studio-museum becomes a vessel of a former creative dynamism." Where Bachelard/Goulthorpe's absent forms are shells and nests whose impulsion reads as trapped force, Macken's is a room whose absent occupant is the impulsion's residue: "With the original inhabitant absent, the power of territory and ownership has gone: the space no longer exudes a presence" — the form of absence that no longer exudes, and whose "then and now" photographs (differing only by the artist's presence) make the absence the only index of time. See spatial-document, trace, thickened-present.

Open Questions

• Can absence be designed? The forms of absence are found (empty shell, empty nest) — is a built interior's absence legible as an image of habitation, or does the moment a room is built it becomes an "abridged evolution" of the absence it replaces?
• Is the impulsion a property of organic formation only (secretion, weaving by a living body) — in which case no computational or constructed form can ever carry it — or is it a property of temporal depth that any slowly-formed thing (geology, patina, the alteration tradition's buildings) can hold?
• Goulthorpe's "forms of absence" indict digitally fabricated shells as "abridged evolutions" — but Garófalo-Khan's thin-shell grottos claim the digital fabrication lineage precisely as the grotto's return. Do the fabricated shells of the 2010s carry impulsion or merely its geometry?
• The nest's imprint implies an occupant-shaped void: does the interior-design practice of tracing occupants' lives (interior-as-biography, the occupied desk, the house museum) constitute a designed form of absence — and if so, does it attain "the force of image"?