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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SECTION HOUSE

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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. 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. 

Whiteread, Ghost