online: 23 march 2009 modified: 11, 19, 26 march 2009 10 march 2009 cave or bower
stone and glass in a seascape
...after scanning notes written since early december i realise that i'm distracted from new resolves as my attention drops (no, rises!) from abstract ideas to physical realities...
...today i am neglecting the idea of a collective fiction as my thoughts and senses revert to the view of the distant sky and sea as seen through a narrow granite-framed window of a cave-like bedroom... i tried writing in the bower-like dayroom (with its curved glass wall of too much glare) but found words ready to appear only after moving back into this cavelike enclosure where my attention goes immediately to the large granite stones that frame the window in a wall that is about 2 feet or 60 centimetres thick... and where at last I feel at home in immobility...
...yet here i am able to see a slit of sky and sea crossed by the four or five lines of wind-blown power cables which bring expensive heat to the floorslabs beneath this permanent-looking holiday house with a panoramic view of rocks and islands which disappear twice a day beneath the tides...
...i owe this idea of architecture as being either cave or bower (or a mixture of each) to Robert Woods Kennedy whose book The House and the Art of its Design was published in the 1950s or 60s and i have been recommending it ever since... not only for this perception but for his idea of doors and windows as female, chimneys as male, and the house, the client, the architect and the client's wife as locked in a romantic/economic rectangle of love and hate and wish and rising cost...
...Woods Kennedy has also written an erotic novel about a young man whose mother set him up with an apartment in Paris from which to become sexually educated... i can't help thinking that architects, despite their limitations as designers of the lives of others, are able to design and live their own lives with an enthusiasm and joy that is missing from the works of other professionals... perhaps because architects are trained to be professional amateurs, in love with their work as a way to engage with 'the whole' despite (or even because of?) lack of purely specialist knowledge?
...and as i remember now my liking for architects i wonder if it is time to extend the idea of architecture from the shaping of buildings to the enlivening of all the other professions that shape our collective life... in the inhuman forms it has taken since the industrial era began...
...just think what might become possible if all the other things we do for money were perceived as opportunities to transform industrial life from the exploitative and stressful activities we know to the releasive and joyous and powerful activities that might evolve, given the empowerment of everyone by opensource software... by 'the education of everyone' in the architecture of life as it can be, or already is, if we learn to let go of our likes and dislikes and of our desire to control?...
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