Anexact but Rigorous

The Territorial Delimitations of Sejima and Nishizawa

Abstract

Anexact but Rigorous offers an analytical redrawing of the plans of a series of recent projects by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. It describes generative geometrical operations common to these projects and, in turn, articulates a set of recurring formal families that characterises their work. Far from being ‘doodles’, these formal families constitute rigorously defined boundaries: they install themselves into space as closed, regional subsets of extended territorial surfaces that are incarnated in both the surface of the paper and the surface of the land. This closer inspection of Sejima and Nishizawa’s practices of territorial drawing reveals an underlying tension between Euclidean and non-Euclidean sensibilities, which, tapping into Derrida’s re-reading of Edmund Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry, can best be described as ‘anexact’. On the one hand, drawing is used to delimitate a region of the physical territory with extreme exactitude. On the other hand, the same delimitating operation articulates continuous closed curves, which in turn describe boundaries whose shapes cannot be defined through abstract, idealised geometries (i.e. circles, arcs or squares). With this productive tension in mind, the textual component of this contribution interrogates the development, intentions and outcomes of the aforementioned operations, using the theoretical writings of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky (primarily concerning the nature of line and its spatial value) as its main supporting scaffold. In addition to this, the proposed contribution will speculate on the possibility of a hybrid practice of drawing that situates itself between the Euclidean and the non-Euclidean. In this speculation, Sejima and Nishizawa’s geometrical constructs are discussed through Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘territory’, positing them as modes of spatial demarcation that are simultaneously anexact and rigorous.

Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-02-04-Anexact-but-Rigorous