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"This exquisitely designed publication is itself an aesthetic domain, understated and carefully considered. Its cover is subtly seductive. All illustrations are of a young women adapting, assimilating, and blending into various environments. They are hauntingly beautiful and are important to the craft and message of the book, yet they are also mysterious. All we are told is that they are the work of 'the late Francesca Woodman.' One suspects that there is further meaning that is hidden -- perhaps through camouflage." Architectural Record
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We human beings are governed by the urge to conform and blend in with our surroundings. We follow fashion. We become part of cultures of conformity--religious communities, military groups, sports teams; we take on corporate identities. Likewise, we seem to have the capacity to grow into our built environment, to familiarize ourselves with it, and eventually to find ourselves at home there. We have a chameleonlike urge to adapt, and, given the increasing mobility of contemporary life, we are constantly having to do so.The desire for camouflage is a desire to feel connected--to find our place in the world and to feel at home. In Camouflage Neil Leach analyzes this desire and its consequences for architectural concerns. Design, Leach argues, can aid the process of assimilation we go through when we adapt to our surroundings. Design can provide a form of connectivity--a mediation between us and our environment--and it can contribute to a sense of belonging. Architecture, and indeed all forms of design and creativity--fashion, art, cinema, and others--can be an effective realm for forging a sense of belonging and establishing an identity.Camouflage offers a range of overlapping and intersecting theoretical perspectives--from an overview of psychoanalytic insights to an account of the magical properties of architectural models--that together suggest a way to rethink our relationship to the world and the role that design plays in that relationship.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I was seduced by Francesca Woodman's excellently enigmatic photographs as she was a truly great artist. So five stars for those. But, oh dear... minus four stars for the text as this is not for the faint-hearted or easily confused. The point of this book is very well camouflaged. The breakdown point for me as a botanist was the really weirdly undefined re-use of the term "rhizome". "Dazzled and deceived" it truly is for this reader, on which topic try the book of same title published in 2009 by Yale. The contrast could not be more explicit.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Making Connections
7 July 2007
Format:Paperback
I was recently at the Tate Modern in London, and came across a remarkable room of images by Francesca Woodman ... which reminded me that I had intended to write a review of Neil Leach's book 'Camouflage'. This elegant tome is illustrated wholly with images of Woodman's - photographs of herself, of her Self, perhaps, to contemplate the negotiation that is happening between self and space. The room of images at the Tate Modern resonated strongly with Leach's skillful analysis of the various tropes of camouflage, most poignantly with the love hate relationship with one's space. I had long been fascinated with the notion of camouflage, most potently evoked in the essay by Roger Caillois ("Mimicry and Legendary Psycasthenia") which plumbs the depths of the phenomenological of space relationships. Leach eloquently excavates this material, and presents a kind of psychoanalysis of architectural space which is left unresolved, problematised, dangling ... deliciously so. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in architectural theory, and particularly anyone who relishes the excitement that occurs when discourses 'infect' one another, as here in the domains of natural history, psychoanalysis, and architecture - a splendid counter to the anti-intellectual stance that hangs around like a black cloud in design theory.
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