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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SECTION HOUSE

Section House - The Cloud Collective, 2010.

The Cloud Collective's Section House, located on a public green strip in Oisterwijk is just that: a physical, dense section through a typical house. It seems to exist halfway between building site and ruin, halfway between house and playground, halfway between real and unreal.

Ghost - Rachel Whiteread.

It recalls Whiteread's Ghost- though what is given material presence is not negative space, but the cut of the section. We feel, in it, the resistance of lost matter meeting matter. The drawing is firmly in control of the material - the projected slice is given weight beyond itself.

 Catherine Ingraham , in an essay titled Losing It in Architecture has called the architectural drawing a lament. Here, indeed, we see the architect's marks stand in for his absent object, calling it into presence. At the same time, the structure breaks no rules, rather, the logic is misapplied, drawn out from itself. The delight is in what the conventional can allow when we engage with it critically.

The Section House acts as an operator, what Stan Allen might call a 'transaction' between the abstract realm of geometry and the material stuff of building. 

DESCENT INTO LIMBO

Anish Kapoor, Descent into Limbo, 1992

...the void manifests itself as a force field in which materiality becomes immaterial, the solidity of objects is negated by recessive and vanishing spaces, and the finite is punctured with apertures indicating the infinite. Once inside the event horizon of each work, the viewer is invited to reflect closely on the micro-physics of viewing: this yields up a disturbingly intense self-awareness. Kapoor’s works oblige the viewer to become sensitive to the continuous processes of cognition and imagination, instinct and dream, sensation and inference, by which the mind constructs the world. Indeed in such an act of aesthetic response, the mind has a sudden and uncanny experience of looking at itself. 

- Nancy Adajania, The Mind Viewing Itself

CELLO IN THE CHARRED CHAPEL

Sometimes you come across someone doing something that makes you sigh. 

German-Korean musician Isang Enders' rendition of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 within the sacred, charred interior of Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus Field Chapel is one of those moments you can't help but wish was quietly, selfishly your own. 

It's been a long time since I list picked up a bow and drew it across the strings of my cello. Re-establishing my love for playing that deep, aching instrument has been on my list for quite a while now. But the things that make cellos so human - their size, weight, and equal parts fragility and strength, also make them cumbersome additions to the life of a 25-year old who rents her home and doesn't know where she may move to next.

So in the cello-less meantime, playing the piano in some of my most revered architectural spaces seems like a bucket list worth pursuing. The trick is just going to be getting myself, and the piano, there. 

After that, those encompassing forever moments will come easy.

THE APARTMENT

There is something elusive about spaces which are curated  and lived  at the same time. We are forever trying to create them, while knowing that in part, they must create themselves. 

Of course The Line manage it with quintessential ease in The Apartment: a space for gatherings, launches, and workshops. 

Just perfect.

VIOLA

Because you can't not have seen it.

PAUL HIMMEL

 Paul Himmel. A beautiful, beautiful eye for space, movement, and contrast.