LOST LOVES

“Identity is a graveyard of lost loves and former identifications. ”

— Freud, once upon a time.

Recently, I've dug up some old sectional drawings which eke out the bodily blur. I always find that sections are especially revealing of such identifications - they let us see through things, beyond the physical constraints, and to understand the thinness of time. The bruised pages conjure the act of production - my hands remember working over and over the paper. The physicality of the craft, the sense of self while enacting the drawing. It's inescapable. 

These drawings are graveyards of old loves, in more ways than one. 

FREDERIK VERCRUYSSE

From 'Tempo Polveroso' - Personal work produced during an Artist in Residency project at Vila Lena, Tuscany. 

Frederik Vercruysse's photographic work is an absolute joy.

From the architectural to the personal, his photographic images skilfully integrate a material clarity with atmospheric mystique. Each series draws us into a narrative with assuredness and quiet poise.  And the tones: I just can't get enough. 

See more of Frederik Vercruysse's work here. 

From B&B Shelter 7 - Apartment in Ghent by Belgian Designer Raymond Jaquemyns. Frederik Vercruysse

From 'Portrait of a House' - A photo project developed in collaboration with Buyse Seghers Architects. Featured in Architectural Digest Germany.

FAYLAND HOUSE

Slung over a sloped field of open ground poised to bloom with wildflowers, David Chipperfield’s Fayland House begins with a concern for context and history. Looking closely, however, the house transcends those qualities in search of a classic timelessness. 

Living spaces languish alongside one another on the front, opening to the view, while ancillary spaces tucked behind rejoice in light from the courtyards. The resulting quiet interplay of interior space and varied landscapes is captured as the camera pans, silently through space in the film. The overlap of view and frame lends a quiet expansiveness to the project. 

But it is the unmodulated run of circular columns along the front of the house which most intrigues us. The chalky, mortar-sponged white-brick is heavy and full and of the earth; with a generosity which extends the house outwards to the sky. Somehow regular and yet surprising, the columns express a classicism which is beyond perception. In an article in Architectural Review, Ellis Woodman perceptively suggested the effect of the columns is similar to the effects cultivated by the work of artist Donald Judd. He concluded his thoughts with a grace so deserved by the building that I cannot help but defer to him here:

“The abiding impression is therefore one of invitation to movement. It is a house where one lives on one’s feet and takes pleasure in the constantly shifting relationship to the landscape beyond. ”

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DEMOLITION

This poem by Sarah Jane Barnett deftly captures a life: holds us tight to its time, to its real possibility, before throwing us back to check our own proof of life. We are left aching.

But the poem itself is as ephemeral as its content. Reworked through various states and phases, republished in different forms, when a poem entitled Demolition refuses to be finished, rejects its very thingness, what can you do?

The collection of words is so insistent that you have to go with it, allow the evolution, let go of the old. Poems like this become sites - occupied, demolished, built upon, sites of criticism and containers of heartbreak. Palimpsests of life.

Other poems which capture lives with a richness beyond words:
Robert Hass 
Or which wrap buildings, cities, and sites up with human life:
Robert Lowell 

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LA FABRICA

A film by Albert Moya via NOWNESS 

It's a strange thing, seeing photographs you have poured over so many times that you are certain you have discovered their deepest intricacies begin to shift before you eyes.

Albert Moya has done a simply beautiful job of transforming one of my favourite collections of images - stills, almost stills, and slow panning shots - into a sense of the quality and sequencing of this immense space. This short film outdoes photographs in ways I could not have imagined.

Within the raw shell - those curtains, that lush greenness, the furnishing! Suddenly Bofill's place has a denseness to it. It is full of space and possibility.

Bofill says it best himself:

“It’s here where I know how to live, here where I know how to work
Where I start to think and project, my life is always made up of projections,
because the profession of architecture leads you to project the future,
so this influences your own mind
My life is always a project moving forward,
more than a story from the past”

The idea of a space which helps you to understand what it means to march through life as yourself - a space which just fits - that's a fairly wonderful thing to be searching for.

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AFTER FOG, ARCHITECTURE

Light Walls House / mA-style Architects / Toyokawa, Japan / 2013

Monday morning, we awoke to a deep fog, and moved our bodies best we could through the narrow visible space by slowly identifying known objects. Door, handle, car, tree trunk, car. For a long while, the sky escaped us.

Later, as the office bathed in the sun of deep winter, the sensation of objects set within thick air stayed with me. I thought about thick space overhead, about articulated ceiling planes and limitless horizons. It's something the Japanese seem to do well, carefully placing discrete, often white cuboids beneath these billowing man-made skies.

Towada Community Plaza/ Kengo Kuma / Towada / 2014

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COS x Snarkitecture

“In celebration of Salone del Mobile”

In celebration of this year's Salone del Mobile, modern-classic Swedish clothing brand COS have partnered with New York-based Snarkitecture to produce an ethereal installation. Inspired by the Spring/Summer 2015 COS Collection, the installation takes the form of a kind of cavern, inverting space and form. Rather than focusing on the ground, or our eye-level, Snarkitecture have hung individually cut ribbons as if from the sky, removing the ceiling plane from our view. In their thousands, the white ribbons describe a hovering mass, while their different lengths generate an undulating and porous surface which flows above and around the occupants. As our space for occupation is squeezed between the horizontal floor and this undulating surface, it gains definition - we are aware of it.

At times transparent, at times opaque, our relationship with the material of the ribbons also changes based on our proximity. The softly hanging ribbons generate a porosity which invites engagement. Our movements through the 'rooms' of space cause the boundaries of the installation to become blurred. As we walk past each ribbon, the surface can't help but shudder. Each ribbon is understood individually, then as part of a surface, and then becomes invisible as we align our bodies to it.  

The experience is immersive, and our reactions to it are primal and ethereal at once. We feel as if we have been here before. We move as if we know it well.

IN THE LANDSCAPE

“The volumetric and monolithic basic principle was emphasised by the exclusive usage of the white exterior rendering. The main focus lies therefore on the exterior’s elementary colour and the slight nuances achieved by the aggregates in the plaster.”

— Frank Oberlerchner, Pedevilla Architects.

The off-white monolithic form of House at Mill Creek appears as object set within and against the landscape. At different proximities, the building reveals itself differently: the triangulated plan, the carefully located square windows set deep and black in the facades, and the subtle depth of texture to the external render. The facade comes alive as light moves across it, echoing the textural density of the forest-clad mountains behind. 

The house reminds us of the mountains, but perhaps more-so of other familiar architectures of the area. The gable roof, articulated eave, and rendered form express known ways of making and being in this landscape, each slightly reconfigured to bring us a composition which warms us with its clarity and sense of the new.