F. Eight Houses of
In 2015, starting with the production of eight bases cut from a piece of salvaged timber, I decided I would make some works that were more overtly architectural than the sets of models I had been making post 2007. Inventing and rejecting a few alternative ideas, I settled on a collection of refurbished titles which had antecedents over a decade old, and which had variously been called either temples or chambers. They now manifested under the rubric of ‘House of …’ as it seemed a term of greater ambiguity and flexibility. As previously, and subsequently, the entertainment of generating titles results in excess.
Ruminations about titles draws attention to the reality that the title provides a broad brief for the work. Having decided to build something with a given title, in each instance I needed some concept of what one might be if I was to make a model at least loosely deriving from it. This was more-or-less a return to the strategies I employed in the Prelude set of pavilions.
The architectural input varied from exploring a period of architecture – for example Arts and Crafts – to quotes from particular buildings, to deriving characteristics from one building or type. Mostly the title preceded any form-giving, but there were also instances of formal ideas in search of a title or evolving and refining together.
31 House of Lost Concepts
Naked unattached concepts, freely flying in search of places to preen and roost were initially conjured. Boxes with tailored openings might house them. Perhaps a single structure might contain an appropriate array based on the model of the ‘Hôtel à incectes’ from a garden outside Strasbourg which Marion and I visited in 2012. It provided differently dimensioned holes and habitats for the insects necessary for that garden. Concepts could be similar and, if thinking of architectural concepts, one arrives easily at Le Corbusier. Hence there are allusions to the Unité d’Habitation, Marseille; Palace of Assembly, Chandigarh; the Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp; and initially the Carpenter Centre for the Visual Arts at Harvard. The Unité d’Habitation, Marseille met with something from Morphosis Architects, and a homage to Donald Judd sculptures in the form of dark cubes of gifted Wenge appeared obliquely.
This list is intended to promote a viewer’s thinking. There are no exact quotations; ideas wove through my processes, but nothing was carefully borrowed. Whatever started out as a generative source was manipulated into a form serving the purposes of the whole. Some, like pilotis, were simplified, others derived from several inputs: the Chandigarh-shaped roof was influenced not only by its prototype but by the drum of Japanese Cedar from which it was formed.
Base: 126mm x 102mm. Model: 137mm x 102mm. Height: 117mm.
Initiated: 22 April 2015. Constructed: 20 May 2015 – 16 December 2015.