The materialization of a dream

"Never ending house"

http://www.oltremarephoto.com/pages/siredward/siredward.html

From a psychological point of view, Gaston Bachelard states that is not enough to consider the house as an object. Walls may lose importance, liberating the interior space. “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box”… “Inhabited space trascends geometrical space” (Gaston Bachelard, 1994).

“The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows us to dream in peace. ….Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. It derives direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming, reconstitute themselves in a new daydream,…..” (pag 6, Gaston Bachelard. The emphasis on words is original from the author).

Let us remind Jorge Luis Borges' story, "The Circular Ruins". It develops the idea of recursivity, repetition. The circle notion and recursivity are not only given in the architectural conformations shown in the story, but also in the actions that happen inside the same story. At the end, the narrator informs us that the magician is the dream of other, and that these recurrent processes of dreams happen infinitely. Suddenly, the use of the term "circular" becomes highly significant, it becomes much more complex, in its definition.

Borges should have liked Sir Edwards James’ neverending house. Sr James was an eccentric, noble English man who lived more than twenty years in Xilitla, a lost village in the west of Mexico. One day, he was bathing in a stream’s pond, in the jungle, when suddenly, he was covered by vermillion butterflies. Moved by this fantastic situation, he built the house of his oniric imagination in that very place. The house is the materialization of Hescher’s drawings, there is no rational order, stairways leads to anywhere, the roof opens and mixes with nature, sculptures are located inside-outside…. Currently, it has become part of the vegetation that wraps –in words of Axel Cipollini -the non-house. It is a never-finished house which boundaries are not defined, as exterior-interior space combine in a whole vision. The attention of its creation was on the richness of the details; there is no rule for the generation of the building, the process is hidden to the observer.

Sometimes it is not so easy to build the house of our dreams. Or maybe I should say, sometimes the house never materializes in the expectation of the owner’s dream.

The completion of the house means the end of the dream. In Sir James’ case, this is a neverending house. The construction is an excuse for the family illusions, a combination of sensory data with their beliefs and expectations.

"Never ending house"

http://www.oltremarephoto.com/pages/siredward/siredward.html

Me, the embarrassed architect in So Cal

As soon as I arrived at California, my husband asked me to help a very nice Mexican contractor to resolve an issue with some plans submitted at the City Hall. I said that I did not what to say, I did not even know what the project was about. And my husband said, " Go and be helpful". So, I tried to be patient and went to the City of Whittier together with the contractor.

-Are you the designer? The plan checker asked.

-"Yes", I lied.

-"Why did you take out the washers?"

- "Sorry.......hmmmmmmm the wash....".

My face was becoming reddish, and the contractor, tried to help, saying " the wachas Myriam, the wachas", in a vernacular Spanish translation. What made things even worst for me.

I've downloaded this picture to give you an idea of what a " washer " is. In Spanish, it is called "arandelas". Of course I know what an arandela is, but couldn't figure out it as a washer. Though, I've been working many years in construction, I was not an expert in technical English (and I'm still learning).

Then, the plan checker said, -" why did you use these bars for the concrete?" Showing me a note on plans that except for a couple of numbers seemed Chinese to me. That was a structural note, in Engineer's language and symbols, so different from our own notations in Argentina.

So, the plan checker took his time to explain to me, laughing at me, of course, what it meant.

-"when you build a slab you use a grid of iron bars.....separated,....etc".

A lesson from the second year of University.

My face was not reddish any more, it was completely red with embarassment. I went out with the Mexican contractor, who drove me home, but as soon as he turned off the truck engine, a "padrino" of him called to his cell phone, asking him " who is this lady with you in the truck???".

Now, I was laughing and the contractor was the embarrassed one!

A growing (?) neighborhood in Buenos Aires

Aerial picture of my neighborbhood in San Martin, Buenos Aires

I've grown up in an immigrants neighborhood in Gran Buenos Aires, it means outside Downtown. My immigrants neighbours were mostly Italian, then Yugoslavian and Spanish. Though my father's friends were mostly first generation of Italians, he used to complain saying that the neighborhood did not grow, because of the Italian habits. For a Spanish thinker, the houses MUST grow high, in a second floor. And he struggled long years to finalize the construction of a two stories house. What we never discussed is that Italians made adjacent additions  to the back of the properties, as the families were arranged one next to the other. See I say " arranged" because it was like a family obligation. For Yugoslavian, it was one in front of the other, or pretty close, for Spanish, pretty close, let's say a couple of blocks away. Maybe what he meant was that the neighborhood never changed its physiognomy, unless you see it in an aerial picture. As we can see in the picture, lots are covered as much as possible, except for my parent's house (look at the center with the trees), that keeps a great part of the lot for landscape and vegetables cultivation.

My conclusion is that immigrants neighborhoods grow per the majority of inhabitants' needs, which are based on their culture and identity.

Phenomenology: E. Allan Poe's example

Fig. 01 Downloaded from Internet

The well known Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is an excellent example to illuminate our topic on phenomenology in Architecture. Poe was influenced by John Locke’s Empiricism, in the idea that all knowledge was gained by experiences through the senses. Locke stated that mind was a “tabula rasa” (a paper in white, without ideas) where knowledge was imprinted. Man’s senses allow him to learn from the external world (experience) and inner reflexion also provides ideas as part of the world within us. It is opposite to Rationalism that states man has innate ideas (inborn knowledge).

This theory was sustained by Romantic writers of the 19th Century.

In this story, a man is visiting a former good school companion, after many years since he has not seen him. And this is his first impression at arriving his house (fig 01):

“with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible”……..”with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium-“……. “What was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?” (p. 171)

After this glooming impression, reinforced by the decaying and pestilent landscape which creates a peculiar atmosphere “that had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn” (p. 172), he arrives at the unsatisfactory conclusion “that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us”.(p.171)

Here we see how his five senses, including smell, collaborate in the perception. The black, white and grays are seen outside and inside; the description of the stone textures are accurate in the analogy: “the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old woodwork which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of external air” (p.173); the pestilent smell, the inquietude of silence …..

Trying to recover himself, he decides to rationalize the whole situation: “shaking off my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building”. So, a tiny description of fungus, fissures, textures, goes on and he finally arrives at the conclusion that the house is closely related to the decay of the family, as a collateral issue for the only line of blood maintained in the family for centuries. His extreme thought is to personify the house in Mr Roderick Usher –the owner- “upon the vacant eyes windows” and his unhealthy body.

Locke’s idea that the objects themselves also produce in us sensations, that are not in the objects but constitute the qualities – the underlaying substratum- we associate with them, is implied in the impression the man suffers while walking in the dark, intricate passages of the house. The familiar objects he knows since childhood, are not familiar anymore, they look hostile and depressing: “Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me …….were but matters to which….I have been accustomed from my infancy –while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this- I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up……….I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.” (p. 173).

The same construction of feelings and posterior ideas arises from Mr R. Usher, who explains that “He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling” (p.175). For fear, he has not ventured through the house, in many years.

The form and substance of the house had influences over his spirit and the morale of his existence. Like the writer, Mr R. Usher at last looks for a rational explanation : “He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin –to the severe and long continued illness….- of a tenderly beloved sister” (p.175)

Regardless the phylosophical background, the story is a clear example of immateriality in architecture, in the sense we take. And we want to emphasize the importance of the environment and objects in all scales. After finding the clues of imminent death even before entering the house, the writer wonders how his imagination could torture him beyond the sublime?.

Fig. 02. Usher's house by Per O.G. Dahlberg

From the essay ¨Immateriality in Architecture¨. By Myriam B. Mahiques

Exploring on the stage and streets

Fig 01. Downloaded from Hemmer's web page

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Rafael Lozano Hemmer’s creates a kind of “antispectacle”, based on the idea that stage performance does not exist without the viewer’s participation. So, the performance is not hermetic, but something incomplete that needs the viewer to be itself.
The spatial structure is imagined from a point of view, as the viewer is not stationary in relationship to the scene; contrary to conventional settings, the spatial aspects are altered because the different proximities affect the perspective angles. Position is not a sensation per se and only thought can define the space based on the coordinates position is located. To accomplisth the effects, he uses large-scale technologies of amplification, usually reverved for corporate events.
The results are transpositions between interior and exterior space; the public discourse broken in words that follow the participants until they stay written in their bodies or words on buildings that stand as a repository of history (fig 01); the public shadows overlap and project on buildings, everything in a evocation of a social space inside a dynamic agora. All elements have no hierarchy and confuse the boundaries between writings-arts-architecture.
“Indeed, even the now vast literature on the so-called ‘architecture’ of cyberspace invokes immateriality, event-scenes, information atmospheres, trans-localities, forms of transitional or experiential ‘space’, and what might be called ‘haptic’ rather than merely ‘optic’ perspectives”. (Tim Druckrey)By creativity in optic means and public participation, the theatrical work is converted into intangible architecture where the main objective is people’s impressions. To this respect,
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in the City of México, 1967. He graduated in Physics and Chemistry at the Concordia University, in Montreal. He is an electronic artist, and makes High Tech interactive interventions in public spaces. Utilizing robotics, projections, sounds, internet and cellular phones conexions, his installations are “antimonuments”. To this respect, Lozano Hemmer reports that people sometimes feel embarassment when their shadows mix, usually the participant needs a place of his own. (Fig. 02)

Fig. 02. Downloaded from Hemmer's web page.

Immateriality and myth in Kusturica’s film

This picture has been downloaded from Kusturica's web page.

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A literal example of immateriality in architecture is taken from the “ethno cinema”, precisely a scene in Emir Kusturica’s movie “Times of the Gypsies”.
In this case, the arrangement of furniture and family relationships strongly trascend the house that harbors them, which is transformed into an useless “shell”, when the old Gypsie grandmother’s son, in a contemptuous reaction, rises the house with a cable and leaves it suspending, floating in a carnivalesque context, atop its original location.
Curiously, what the “interior space” has been, does not lose its spatial quality and family relationships added to the Gypsies negotiations, are kept in day-to-dayness, regardless of the house pending on their heads. It is funny to discover that the pet, a turkey, does not take the opportunity to escape. It just keep on bouncing among furnitures…….
The movie also features folks beliefs; Kusturica blends reality with fantasy in a barroque atmosphere. Continuing with the example, Perhan, the teenager character, when explaining how limestone (a construction material) is made, to the Gypsie girl Azra, he coldly first exposes technology “The temperature is the most important element. If you can keep the fire hot, the limestone won’t bake properly. Fire is the heart of it…………” (See Goran Gocic, page 13). Immediately, he changes the argument and explains it under a Myth: “Grandma says that limestone is the brother of Mother Stone. But Mother Forest and Mother Stone quarrelled. Mother Forest then bit off Mother Stone’s breast. That is why lime is as white as milk.” (See Goran Gocic, page 13).
Perhan has related experience to myth. It is obvious that for the minimal element in a construction, one may apply a mythical meaning that is beyond tectonics. Thy myth is the vehicle for a normative rule: the house construction.
Fig. above Scene from “Times of the Gypsies” (downloaded from Kusturica’s web page)
The pet also is part of the human relationships“Ethno cinema” is defined by Goran Gocic as a non-western art-house cinema with strong elements of indigenous worldviews –with their respective cultural circles seen together with artistic heritage, pre-modern costums and “exotic” settings.

Immateriality and myth in Kusturica’s film by Myriam B. Mahiques is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

BONUS:

A silver gypsy's house in Romania - © Photo Kisa Lala 2011

¨Walk anywhere in a straight line and pretty soon you'll cross a gate, a fence, a road or come to the end of a field and reach the beginning of a town. It's hard to get lost when every inch of soil is mapped and watched through the cross-hairs of Google earth. Like the pirates of the seas, the Gypsies claim the right to rove. To travel on land is to move through pathways followed by border crossings that only birds ignore because they perch wherever they land. The Gypsies have learned to do the same.¨

From the article by Kisa Lala: The new nomads

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kisa-lala/the-new-nomads_b_929580.html