Tags

, , , , , ,

There is a science to it, an art, a process. The architecture is concrete, is absolute. Men drill holes and fill the Earth with glue and weight, bearing down, pressing out until everything inside is hard and buried. There is no where to go but up. Space fills and expands, searches for an escape, and discovers within the struggle, a new way to define itself.

It builds windows, then, doors, hallways. It paints itself, a mirror projecting itself out as it draws itself in, further.

It is warm and cold and damp.

There is an architecture to space – what we choose to reveal, what we choose to conceal.

The hidden pulse, the unsaid

defined mysteries

a kind of magic

every time

a switch turns and,

the world is light, red

chords in an alley

stringing along

We are building a house. The ink on the papers has dried. Back dealings with banks and strategies, calling forth favors and friendships, placing bets against an imagined future outlined in little orange flags and dotted lines.

“I hate closed spaces. I hate closets. I hate hallways,” I tell my father, the architect. “I hate entryways too. And columns and too many rooms and doors. You can save money by forgetting the doors.”

He scribbles and scoffs and sighs. This is going to be difficult.

“I like open things,” I tell him. “And light woods that look weathered and blue and grey. I hate red accents.”

There are many things that I hate, I discover. Having never done this before, I am very particular. I know what I like.

Interpretation is like  wave; everything solid becomes fluid within the process. Absolute certainty is interpretation and interpretation is a tide, a washing back and away towards the source.

Physical memory – the houses of my youth. John R. Stilgore writes in the foreword of The Poetics of Space:

…every house is first a geometrical object of planes and right angles, but…[how] such recilinearity so welcomes human complexity, idiosyncrasy, how the house adapts to its inhabitants…Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

We build the house; the house builds us. We all pour out, extend, transform – a series of wires and secret places, attics and crawl spaces, walls and doors – closed or shut, depending.

Old French, light woods, weathered woods, beetle kill, blue accents, cold and white and clean. Make room for chaos, life pours through with the light, like a wave, washing it clean, leaving a mark, and passing on. Like a mirror.

“Like a coffee house. I want to feel like I stepped into an old bookstore in Paris.”

How many secret rooms can you leave unopened? How many secrets can you design?

I desire everything – but only from a distance – in the third person. I project myself and a sheet and watch the wind move me. My origin is a space of conflict – the birth of chaos. It comes as a void. There must be a void for me to persist against all my imagined borders. Rapture and demons – a necessary collaboration.

“And big tall ceilings and windows…everywhere. And each room should connect and no real hallways…as few of those as you can. It could be just one big room with corners spinning off…”

“You want a barn…essentially.”

“Will there be room for a piano?” I ask. “Can you put a piano in a barn?”

I watched a poem the other day in which a young poet sang of shrinking women – how she has been taught to shrink and the house has grown, fed by all that space. I want to begin with enough space to grow. I can expand out, then, to fill it, and when I get too big – I can open a window.