“When houses come undone is usually through a vague combination of disrepair and memory lapse. [p.13]

“For how we fasten ourselves – our traditions and our values – to the places we live in has all the improbability and vulnerability of the yellow house that was once fastened to its unlikely rock.” [p. 13]

In “Small houses for the Next Century” Duo Dickinson said that family structure today is fragmenting into a variety of house holds that include single parent homes, multigenerational home, home that contain offices, homes that are harbor empty nesters, home for unrelated individuals living together as a family…

NOSTALGIA-> “return migration” (social science)
-> who moved to large urban areas after college, there is a new appeal it seems, in returning to the smaller home towns where they were raised.
-> sense of community
-> extended family (or even just the memory of it)

“Many of us do need a little history in our lives” (1994 survey conducted by Metropolis Magazine)

HOME AND SPACES

morphing spaces:
-> Privacy is no longer necessarily something associated with place -> but is about activity or time.
-> I crowded cities privacy cannot be defined by physical distance, but it is by controlling sound.

bedroom: intersection of solitude and fantasy
kitchen: nourishment (physical and psychological)
living room: design + personality / expression. the most public part of home.
Living: ” How we chose to define ourselves to the others.”

After about two months since I first decided to build the igloo, I finally started. And suddenly, a few hours before I finally face this construction, I realized that I had been living a mental struggle since the beginning of the igloo phase of the project. I was dreaming, thinking, calculating, researching, talking to people in Canada and in Brazil about the construction but never having the courage to star it. I felt excited and at the same time deeply terrified by this challenge. I had done blocks of ice, blocks of snow, hybrid blocks of ice and snow (I even started a cardboard igloo) and, by my different experiments, I kept myself busy and avoiding the “real problem” – the igloo itself. With the cardboard igloo, I knew it. I had to start facing this thing, otherwise I wouldn’t have my tranquility back. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a painful mental process, but I think this struggle with myself, my body and my mind, was the first immersive experience in my work. Putting my dreams, my fears, and my physical (and mental) strength into play was a real challenge of self-knowledge.

But in the morning before I finally give my first step into the site, I realized the richness of this first phase as a whole. Now I think I should call it the Fear Phase, and the Fear Phase was somehow predicted in the proposal, I just hadn’t realized yet how deep it could get inside my mind.

One of the reasons I decided to build an Igloo is because I wanted to explore the feelings that are part of the construction of a home, from a shelter to a place that reflect your life and personality. In my own research I had concluded that this (mental) construction of mixed feelings and emotions related to the place we live starts somehow with the feeling of fear. The unpredictability of the future to come, the doubts when one chooses a dwelling, the ponderation of pros and cons, the decisions one has to make… and then, slowly, the start of the process of appropriation of the place, exploration of the sites, development of you favorite spaces etc…

it always start with some fear mixed with curiosity before you start to actually feel you own a place or belong to a place… In this sense, the Fear Phase couldn’t be more fruitful and self-explanatory.

let’s try to do that in a few days!

Class debate:

#words:

community - difference from NY to LA

control / focus -

sensibility -

boredom -

“the impossibility of neutral gesture”

“skillful looking – make something emerge from the whole”

trainable and ituitive

square corners -> points of focus -> our studio

-> Irwin keep questioning and minimizing and reducing the work – Zen phylosophy

[the questioning is bigger then all of the answers]

IRWIN, Robert. “The Narrows, part I” and “The Narrows, part II” From Lawrence Weschler. Seeing Is Forgetting the Name the Thing One Sees: Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin. Berkeley: UC Press, 2008, pp. 43-117

“Ferus was like a magnet. It was an energy level, a level of conviction, an attitude about art, a general attitude about the significance of the work, a sense that we were all at the right place at just the right time.” p.5

“that it was indeed precisely the abstract expressionist project to fulfill cubism’s initial ambition of collapsing the artificial distinctions between figure and ground” p.9

“…the control of nuance. And the fact that you were meant to hold them meant that they could only be experienced privately, intimately.” p.11

“shapes on a paintirig are just shapes on a canvas unless they start acting on each other and really, in a sense, multiplying” p.12

“That’s what a good Vermeer has, or a raku cup, or a Stonehenge. And when they’ve got it, they just jump off the goddamn wall at you. They just, bam!” p.12

“Here we have the principle of limitation, the only saving principle in the world. The more you limit yourself, the more fertile you become in invention.” Kierkegaard’s young poet p.16

“At first I just placed the two lines intuitively. But then I said to myself, ‘Who really put those two lines on like that?’ Was it really spontaneous intuition or was it rather cultural indoctrination?(…) So when I go up and put two lines on the canvas, did I put them on? Or was I simply reflecting this whole baggage that I’m carrying around?” p.18

“look at them perceptually, you find that your eye ends up suspended in midair, midspace or midstride: time and space seem to blend in the continuum of your presence You lose your bearings for a moment. You finally end up in a totally meditative state. The thing is you cease reading and you cease articulating and you fall into a state where nothing else is going on but the tactile, experiential process.” p.19

“to one who is in fact present. Back at home, you may remember what it felt like to stand before the painting, the texture of the meditative state it put you in, but the canvas itself, its image in your mind, will be

evanescent. That is why for many years Irwin declined to allow his work to be photographed, because the image of the canvas was precisely what the painting was not about.” p.20

“There’s a danger in spelling these recollections out so lucidly that your reader gains the impression that at the t”ime I knew what I was doing and where all this was leading in some sort of intellectual way, You have to make it very clear to anyone who might read your essay, especially any young artist who might” happen to pick it up, that my whole process was really an intuitive activiry in which all of the time [ was only putting one foot in front of the othet, and that each step was not thn resolved. Most of the time I didn’t have any idea where I was going; J had no real intellectual clarity as to what it was I thought I was doing.” p.24PDF=p.89

“the answers seemed to matter less and less: [ was becoming much mote of a question person than an answer person.” p.89

“”The end result in terms of this curved canvas was that on the level of physicality, the curved read as more complex than the flat. But on the level of imagery – well, there was no imagery at  all. In other words, there was no overt sense in which the thing was curved. You didn’t say, ‘Ah, a curved canvas,’ and attach it to an idea. You only picked it up subliminally, this added energy. So in a way that’s a perfect example of what I was talking about, in other words, that I could maximize the energy or the physicality of the situation and minimize the identity or idea or imagery of the situation.” p.94

“What stays in the museum is only the art-object, not valueless, but not the value of art. The art is what has happened to the viewer.” p.95

This is the result: