The unavoidable and unsettling points of view in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, leading diagonals, the eyes wide staring symmetries, more here
Jan van Eyck - The Arnolfini Portrait
So many questions, was the wife actually dead when the portrait was painted, is the painting a legal document, can all items be read as symbolic? In any case one of the first oil paintings in western art and one of the first realistic depictions of space and light.
David Hockney in his book Secret Knowledge claims that the painting was probably created with the help of a mirror lense, that is a concave mirror which can focus an upside down image onto a panel. The impressive chandelier apparently was painted without any underdrawing, very unusual for such a dramatically foreshortened form. The telling clue of course is the convex mirror on the far wall which is just the right size if reversed to do the job.
Ennis Brown House as featured in Bladerunner and over twenty other movies, now for sale for $15 million.
Some interesting thoughts here
There was a time when I experienced architecture without thinking about it. Sometimes I can almost feel a one particular door handle in my hand, a piece of metal shaped like the back of a spoon. I used to take hold of it when I went into my aunt’s garden. That door handle still seems like a special sign of entry into a world of different moods and smells. I remember the sound of the gravel under my feet, the soft gleam of the waxed oak staircase, I can hear the heavy front door closing behind me as I walk along the dark corridor and enter the kitchen, the only really bright room in the house. Looking back, it seems as if there this were the only room in the house in which the ceiling did not disappear into twilight; the small hexagonal tiles of the floor, dark red and fitted so tightly together that the cracks between them were almost imperceptible, were hard and unyielding under my feet, and a smell of oil paint issued form the kitchen cupboard.
Everything about this kitchen wad typical of a traditional kitchen. There was nothing special about it. But perhaps it was just the fact that it was so very much, so very naturally, a kitchen that has imprinted its memory indelibly on my mind. The atmosphere of this room is insolubly linked with my idea of a kitchen.
From ‘A Way of Looking at Things’ by Peter Zumthor. Published in A+U.
Everything about this kitchen wad typical of a traditional kitchen. There was nothing special about it. But perhaps it was just the fact that it was so very much, so very naturally, a kitchen that has imprinted its memory indelibly on my mind. The atmosphere of this room is insolubly linked with my idea of a kitchen.
From ‘A Way of Looking at Things’ by Peter Zumthor. Published in A+U.
"How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect."
Gaston Bachelard - The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard - The Poetics of Space
Charles Sheeler's curious interior views, mostly of his own house that he seemed mildly obsessed with, an American spin on cubism? His commercial photography and his interest in industrial architecture seeps into the abstracted still lifes of his own home. The point of view is also somewhat abstracted and almost a dazed daydream....
Space
"When nothing arrests our gaze, it carries a very long way. But if it meets with nothing, it sees nothing, it sees only what it meets. Space is what arrests our gaze, what our sight stumbles over: the obstacle, bricks, an angle, a vanishing point. Space is when it makes an angle, when it stops, when we have to turn for it to start off again. There's nothing ectoplasmic about space; it has edges, it doesn't go off in all directions, it does all that needs to be done for railway lines to meet well short of infinity."
Georges Perec - Species of Spaces and other pieces
"When nothing arrests our gaze, it carries a very long way. But if it meets with nothing, it sees nothing, it sees only what it meets. Space is what arrests our gaze, what our sight stumbles over: the obstacle, bricks, an angle, a vanishing point. Space is when it makes an angle, when it stops, when we have to turn for it to start off again. There's nothing ectoplasmic about space; it has edges, it doesn't go off in all directions, it does all that needs to be done for railway lines to meet well short of infinity."
Georges Perec - Species of Spaces and other pieces
Thank you to all those who came to the launch of "Now What" at Richview last night. There were many interesting workshops and I think there is a good opportunity for different groups to work together. This workshop will be working in partnership with Workshop # 7 - Multiplex.
The first meeting of the group will be in Richview on the evening of Friday the 17th of July. Generally we will meet for about 90 minutes twice a week on Tuesday and Friday evenings with a drink afterwards. Also we will visit galleries at weekends (times to be arranged to suit people)
The imagined output from the workshop is one image, in any medium, per person.
The first meeting of the group will be in Richview on the evening of Friday the 17th of July. Generally we will meet for about 90 minutes twice a week on Tuesday and Friday evenings with a drink afterwards. Also we will visit galleries at weekends (times to be arranged to suit people)
The imagined output from the workshop is one image, in any medium, per person.
This is a workshop about images of interiors. In the last 10 years computer visualisation has become commonplace, and yet it still seems as though it has to find its own voice. It is usually commissioned for quite specific purposes; to sell, to persuade, to impress. The medium operates within the environment of tight budgets, impending deadlines and is commissioned to order, it is not involved in the architecturally more engaged discussion that occurs between photographers and architects at the building’s completion.
Now, with less selling to be done, I’d like to explore the possibility of visualisation being used to express some of the core ideas of the architecture and to uncover or suggest some of the future qualities of the spaces. At present internal images are often relegated to a secondary supporting role in architectural presentations, one slowly collects one’s impression of a scheme through plans, sections and concept models. Strong internal images can highlight the experience of a building, a method of working that involves internal exploration can reduce “object-like” architectural design. Computers have been criticized for allowing architects to work like product designers, but there is another side to those new tools.
I would like to explore how best to create a truly rich image with layers of meaning and suggestion, using all the tools and mediums at our disposal to tell more about the fundamental ideas of a project. So expanding on Louis Kahn’s interest in the room as the starting point, this will mean concentrating on the creation of a single strong internal image of an unbuilt building. The Dutch parallel between internal space and psychological space will also be explored.
One common problem in this area is that while buried among the technical difficulties involved in crafting a working image, often one feels one loses sight of how the image will be seen. Guest critics will be invited to explain their work and contribute to the group’s discussion. We will also of course be burying ourselves in technicalities.
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