Rachel Whiteread's soundings of architecture

Abstract

This thesis takes a series of soundings of the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s architectural casts, drawings, and prints produced between 1991-2004. A sounding venture is undertaken to mould a series of contours between Whiteread’s sculptures and architectural discourse. The concept of sounding is employed to explore the manifold ways in which Whiteread plumbs the depths of a selection of interior spaces and architectural typologies. Through her representational practices, Whiteread attempts to get to the bottom of something, to fathom unexplored depths or levels of understanding in regard to the architectural interior and its contents. The artist employs her signature casting practice to render negative space as solid, positive form. Her subjects include plinths, floors, furniture, staircases, rooms, apartments, a Victorian terrace house, a water tower, and a holocaust memorial. By filling in space and casting the viewer out of architecture, Whiteread draws attention to the indexical traces of inhabitation left on its interior surfaces. Architectural theorists who have commented on Whiteread’s practice have often overlooked these traces, and their implications for architecture. When we compare her works to those of modern architects, certain repressions and disavowals in regard to the particularities of the artist’s practice are revealed and these are discussed within the thesis. Whiteread’s works are considered in relation to a selection of works by post-war architects including Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Alison and Peter Smithson, and Luigi Moretti. Each chapter in the thesis explores a different work or series of works that together build the case that the artist has been involved in projects of ever-increasing scale and technical complexity, producing sculptures in collaboration with building and engineering specialists that approach architecture. Many of the artist’s recent works highlight the interdisciplinary anxiety that lies in wait when sculpture approaches architecture. A series of soundings are taken in order to explore the complex ways in which Whiteread enlists architectural drawing and modelling practices to shed light on the rich interior lives of quotidian spaces and typological structures frequently overlooked.