BJones,
I've been thinking about our discussion, and the question of that "nothingness" in defining architecture in relationship to poetry or novel, ie. "what is not said". Perhaps when we narrarate our projects we have a problematic tendancy in describing to much. Maybe what we are interested in are 'episodes' or 'frames' which narrate the space, then in a way the architecture is given to us. This is sort of in the terms of our discussion about not being so quick to title everything, but maybe instead leaving clues which may or may not lead to the underlying structure.
This is a narrative about my room,
2:08 am. Cigarette, Coffee. Marylin’s eyes temping me and I gaze back into them, a black and white photo I ripped out of a magazine years ago. A solo piano trickles in the backround and fills the small, dim room behind my desk.
3 comments:
I think this is similar to how Alex talks about ruins. Fragments are so beautiful to us because there is a void for us to fill. We fill the void, it is not handed to us. When it is handed to us we can choose to accept it or not accept it. When one needs to fill the void himself/herself, the filling requires an immediate acceptance in order to participate in the act of filling. This "acceptance" is maybe curiousity. I don't know...
I just read an amazing quote by Klee. He was very into masks. He says that art is the mask on the face of the artist...
As architects, when we present our work, language is the doorway into our projects for others and I think rather that when we narrate our own work we tend not to describe enough because the inner workings of our projects are so deeply imbedded in our own minds we do not realize what others see. In your resistance to avoid "being so quick to title everything" the brief words of your narrative sprint through a moment that seems to me like it should be long and thoughtful. If you gaze longingly into the eyes of the woman in the photograph, I should have to gaze longingly into the words on your page. That conveys experience. To be convincing, you would have to write many more episodes to narrate the space and in the end you would probably end up describing quite a bit anyway...as it stands the single narrative proposes a non-descript desk in a shadowy formless realm that does not give me your architecture. Rather it gives me a nearly blank slate upon which i must create my own architecture. As an architect, it is your privilege to impose form upon the world. Ultimately, it is up to the inhabitant how they interpret themselves within that form, but you must still give them something true and defined. We must be careful not to hide in the shadows of our own intellects.
I like photography because in my hands the camera becomes an extension of my intellect and my ability to communicate to others. I could write pages and pages and pages about my best photographs. As a body of work "April Is," the photographs of the field beside the lake, a larger landscape is suggested by the richness of each image. While it is ultimately up to the viewer to project their own memories into the voids between the photographs, the projection is ultimately a response to the provided stimulus. If you provide too much stimulus, there is no room to project, if you provide too little, you hand over a blank canvas, and your brushes...
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