architecture as a form of knowledge
between knowing from seeing and knowing from deducing
INTER-02
Waking up early, you leave your bedroom and make way over a dewy green. On your way to hot coffee and the morning paper, you take in the horizon and the clean air.
Since the Acts of Inclosure, rural land has been governed from economic principles. Oikonomike, being the administration of private space, an organism of fixed relationships. The single political element in the landscape, the boundary, is determined here by economic principles of private ownership. This patchwork of relation between boundary and territory is repeated ad infinitum, leaving little room for public presence. However, some boundaries, are also passages. Public rights of way are invisible structures that represent agreements between people. It is these public rights of way that present an opportunity for public-ness and a new form of habitation.
The boundary is given to physical materiality. Inside, furniture is carved into thick adobe and concrete walls. Outside, niches make cosy resting places for passersby. The material presence the houses and rooms is kept up by the inhabitants, who look after the houses but do not own them. If one is left empty or abandoned, it disintegrates. Internalised spaces, each designated to a single use, provide resting points and places and work places. The body land, the body of the house, having traces and scars inscribed—carved, moulded, cast, its making part of its unmaking, communicate an ever-so-slow motion. These traces are left over from but also generate new relationships and active forces in the place. They are the making of the new culture of the place.
between knowing from seeing and knowing from deducing
the Norman church, a rural vernacular type; an interior publicness; the walls are built up and changed over time, the thickness and materiality telling a story about its making and unmaking
making a space inside a line in the landscape
all the boundaries in Aldermaston, the lines marked in black are also rights of way
a net is cast over the terrain; wherever it interacts with an existing path, a room is built; all adhere to the constraint each one confined to the right of way—all are public
the shapes of the rooms depends on the shape of the path, track, road
the shapes extruded and roofed, walls treated with an internalised poche logic; the space inside the walls—the serving space is the only space
a directionality is found in the connections between the points inside the boundaries, the materiality of the earth beings to influence the inhabitation of the spaces
the space inside the wall
the body of the house, having traces and scars inscribed—carved, moulded, cast, its making part of its unmaking, communicate an ever-so-slow motion; they the new culture of the place