72 Rooms

The traditional Japanese calendar divided up the year into 24 major seasons. The 24 seasons were later sub-divided into 72 microseasons, in order to dissect the subtleties of the natural world. Each microseason lasts 5 days and is poetically named to reflect notable changes that occur at the time.

This project builds on this ancient concept of 72 seasons through the creation of 72 garden rooms. A wall is a single and simple act of demarcation that can turn wild nature into a cultivated garden. This wall travels the landscape, creating gardens along its way.

Hopefully this project will bring to life the world around us, as we pay careful attention to the endless variety around us.

Please get involved in this project. Have you noticed migrating birds or trees leaves changing to a deeper shade of green, then send me a message about these changes you’ve observed - changes in the weather (temperature, humidity, wind, sights, sounds and smells), insect and animal activity, changes in plants and trees.  Please send dated notes, photos and poems and I will try to incorporate these into the project.  

The intention is to construct the project in different locations around the world, tailored to local conditions.

A place for one's things

Picture an architecture represented solely by the things which furnish the home. An architecture formed of a collection of things that uniquely reflect our personality.

At times the practice of architecture involves the crafting of spaces that has been aptly described as ‘pet-architecture’. The city in this sense forms a collection of exquisitely crafted playthings. There can be no doubt that the most common task of the average architect involves some kind of residential improvement. The architect is commissioned with creating much needed space for the client. Much of this additional space usually provides storage for things or giving a family member a space of their own; a space for their own things. As personal and meaningful as these spaces might be for clients, such tasks might hardly differ from an exercise in ergonomics or a deftly game of Tetris. 

Most of us in our society work in order to earn a wage, so we can maintain or achieve a desired standard of living. The desired standard of living for many of us is invariably manifested in the quality, quantity and range of things we own and experience. The nature of our living is to earn a money (a proxy for choice) in order to support our desired level of consumption. Most of us would quickly shun such overt consumerism, yet we would no less be consumers. The split in our private and public lives is manifest in the split in our places of work and our homes. We work in our offices in order to get a wage and our homes are transformed, though our consumption, into temples displaying the trappings of our incomes. This ‘earning and spending’ lifestyle is at bottom a fragile basis for dwelling and life in general, as the things we horde eventually bore us, our friends or decay. Perhaps this benign architecture of our things and for our things underlies a much deadlier problem.

The medieval guilds provide us with a model of a holistic approach to living, with a focus on production, as opposed to our modern preoccupation with consumption. The focus on production brought out the dignity of workman over the merchant. The end goal of this kind of work was a product benefiting community and not simply a wage. In our modern world, with its radical distinction between public and private, we have become less the workman and more the target of the merchant. In many ways the consumer was the product of the many assembly lines pioneered in the Industrial Revolution. Mass production has been perfectly balanced by an equally irrepressible mass consumption.

Many have traced the roots of architecture not simply to the need of shelter but to the dance; that primal and visceral act of communal interaction, where we gain our identity within the bounds of relationship to the community. The architect Gottfried Semper identified the hearth as the point around which the community gathered; where the ancients came together to give themselves over to the intimacies of community. The ancients withdrew from the community in order to work (produce). We moderns have inverted this most basic of natural processes entirely. We gather to work and withdraw from the group in order to become more ourselves. The home has become a refuge of our private longings, beliefs and desire for intimacy. The new architecture of the home has moved away from the gathering of the community to the gathering of our things. Things which symbolise our individuality but do little to bring us together in community.

The public sphere on the other hand has become distant and removed from the intimacies of community. For most of us, civic spaces are no longer places where community reaffirms its bonds through rites, rituals and festivities. These spaces now represent the faceless nature of our governing, economic and administrative bodies. The public sphere, which formerly affirmed our religious, intellectual and family life, has now been subordinated almost exclusively to economic activity. And the home has become the place in which we primarily affirm our humanity, though not through rituals that bring people together. Therefore, the task of rethinking the place of our things (consumerism) is really rethinking how we will live.

Rethinking how we live is no less than rethinking what it means to be human. If we think ourselves no different to machines or animals, then our destiny may be the production line or the storehouse. If, however, we think ourselves “a little lower than the angles” then our homes cannot merely be an exercise in ergonomics. If we find fulfilment in relationships, we would seek to build for ourselves homes that allow us to more fully express our humanity in relationship with others.

The Co-ordinates of White

The term White Cube calls to mind images of barren art galleries stripped of any visual stimuli deemed threatening to the attention of the viewer. The White Cube is thought of as a 'neutral space' designed to 'free' the art object from the external world by creating an idealised setting for its viewing. We would be justified in asking the question; why white? Why not yellow or red or even purple? It would seem that white carries inherently within it a property conducive to our conceptions of what we consider to be the ideal.

The ability of white to create an idealised environment is captured in Daniel Buren's analysis of the architecture of museums:

“Placing/exhibiting a work of art in a baker's will no way change the function of the aforementioned baker's, which will never change the work of art into a bit of bread either.

Placing/exhibiting a bit of bread in a museum will in no way change the function of the aforementioned museum, but the later will change the bit of bread into a work of art, at least for the duration of its exhibition.

Now let's exhibit a bit of bread in a baker's and it will be very difficult, if not impossible to distinguish it from the other bits of bread. Now let's exhibit a work of art - of any kind - in a museum: can we really distinguish it from other works of art? ”

Such is the power of white, that in its use in configuring space, it creates such a purity in milieu, so as to give an aura of dignity to any object it contains, even a bit of bread. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Remarks on Colour, persuasively demonstrates our conceptual difficulties with white. He argues that just as there exists a conceptual difference between gold and yellow, so too white differs conceptually from other colours. Not only is it the only colour that cannot be diluted, just as it dilutes other colours, it appears to be the only colour which cannot be transparent.

And on a different note, Herman Melville writes, “... is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour, and at the same time the concrete of all colours.” It is precisely through its otherness demonstrated by Wittgenstein and its mute emptiness described by Melville that we are able to invest, in such a receptive colour as white, a plethora of meanings. The colour is has come to be associated with the divine, timelessness, innocence, purity, virginity, clarity, cleanliness and perhaps oddly enough, death, amongst other things.

In 1999, the artist Anish Kapoor created a monumental six square meter swatch of vivid yellow on a gallery wall, within which a gaping concave form recedes into the depths of the wall. The piece, made of fibreglass and encrusted in pigment, was aptly titled Yellow. Kapoor's intension for Yellow, like his other pigment pieces, is to reveal the physical autonomy of colour beyond its common characteristic as surface treatment. Kapoor achieves this through the flawless surface and seamless curvature of the cavernous form. The effect of standing in front of the piece is a blurring of any divisions between colour, material and form. It achieves a near-perfect amalgam of its physical properties.

Just as Kapoor's Yellow attempts to give body to colour in its synthesis of material, surface and form, so too the architect's use of white is an attempt to give body to the abstract, timeless and idyllic qualities of the colour. Or perhaps conversely, the architect imbues his creations with the qualities of ideal Platonic Forms, the properties of which we seem so ready to associate with white.

Imagine two cubes identical in size. The first, constructed from a textured material such as plywood and the other seamlessly whitewashed, revealing no textures or jointing. The whitewashed cube more closely reflects the idea of a geometrically perfect cube in the mind of the observer, devoid of any associations to material or texture. It too, like the art gallery, is free from distracting visual stimuli.

Baptised in white, the cube is almost purely a cube, and not merely a wooden cube but much closer to our abstracted idea of a cube. Its seamlessness reveals nothing of its materiality and effaces any evidence of its construction. Like Kapoor's pigment pieces, its whiteness gives body to the idea of a geometrically perfect cube, by collapsing all notions surface, texture, material and form.

The whitewashed house, chair or indeed mp3 player all attempt to bring the concrete object closer to the the abstracted world of the ideal. Our desire for the ideal may also reflect our quest for perfection and permanence in our rebellion against the inevitable entropy of our temporal existence.