"Never ending house"
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"
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