Ghost Stories

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

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