CELLO IN THE CHARRED CHAPEL

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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.

PRINCESS OF WALES CONSERVATORY

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India Hobson via The Garden Edit

It all comes back. Even the dampness underfoot; even that brings it back. I was in Kew Gardens when I first realised how much everything yearns to grow.  I was just twelve, quietly sure-footed in the world. Afterwards we went back to the apartment, and it was raining lightly, and I stood in the bathtub with the white curtain pulled around, ran a shower, and shaved my armpits for the first time.

H&dM

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THELIMNBLOG-H&DM
In practice, a focus on experience is usually code for irregularity, pure and simple. This was a major discovery of the picturesque: buildings resembling a collision of irregular volumes produce pleasing visual variety. The idea is to disallow a Gestalt reading of a strong form that would get in the way of a non-predetermined unfolding of experience. Herzog & de Meuron rely on a more difficult and dangerous strategy: the Parrish Art Museum needs an initial Gestalt reading — the iconic extrusion set in the landscape — in order to subvert it, creating a sense of surprise upon the discovery of an architecture that is not reducible to a simple figure. It is both a strong form and an experience that cannot be understood in these terms alone. 

Matthew Allen has written a wonderfully delicate, restrained and thoughtful critique of Herzog and de Meuron's Parrish Art Museum for

Domus. 

PRINTS

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 There's something about seeing the hand-prints of others - of people you don't know but who have stood in this same space as you, and in some way share that space with you - which makes you feel more connected to the citizens of the world. It is a little like looking at the stars which men hundreds of years ago used to navigate their way through yet uncharted waters. While some might dislike these marks appearing built surfaces, for me the residue of the human-building relationship  is quite charming.

When I stumbled across the photographs of the Beltgens Fashion Shop by Wiel Arets Architects, in Amsterdam, I couldn't help but be enamoured. Those fingers on corten. But even without the hand-prints overlaid the work is seductive in its simplicity. Wiel Arets continue to produce a range of exquisite work merging the old and new, the rough and fleshy.

MATERIAL DEFORMATIONS

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Having been thinking about the manipulation and opening up of an existing, partially brick building on my site, it has been exciting to tumble through a series of images similar to those which are being constructed on my own drawing board.

Twisted bricks generate an oblique porosity in Studiomake's Dude Cigar Bar.

Increasingly spare steel verticals between horizontals creates a floating weightlessness of an otherwise seemingly 'solid' material in Gijs Van Vaerenbergh's 'Reading between the lines'. The project description and relation to the church typology is particularly compelling.

Back to bricks (or tiles, at least) at Arturo Franco's Warehouse 8B

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