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It seems somewhat in-genuine, to claim that our project is in anyway monocultural. For from the outset, we admitted our inadequacy/incapacity to control the project. We understood, that while we aimed to engrave quite distinct responses within the architecture, the building would remain elusive to us, and respond to things that we had not foreseen.
In essence we understood that our relationship with the student housing was one of empathy. For empathy is, in our understanding, a doing word. One does not have empathy if they simply ‘understand’, but only if their physical attempt to understand is empathy enacted. And if anything, as we have to start somewhere, our student housing is an attempt at making a space, where this quite physical act of care could take place. And it was not just an empathy for humans that we wanted to create, but an empathy for everything.
It is here that we arrived at the garden for its apparent acceptance of all things. The soil, but more widely the ground in general, allowed for everything to find their place, and exist in time. A Wendell Berry quote comes to mind…
“I think of the country as a kind of palimpsest scrawled over with the comings and goings of people, the erasure of time already in process even as the marks of passage are being put down.”
Our site study maps these moments of negotiation between paver, pipe, drain and weed. In the soil and the ground, we found our tradition and documented what was open to our perception.
We then understood that the room of the student, was a room for everything and that the garden, as a typology, allowed for this. The student is very much sitting with themselves, but so is the bedsheet, bucket, book. There is a distinct understanding of ‘being’ to be found in the way this room can be occupied. I think it was passed down second hand, from Peter Handke’s understanding of Heidegger…
“He was obliged to take the environing world seriously in the least of it’s forms- a groove in the rock, a change of colour in the mud, a windblown pile of sand at the foot of a plant- as seriously as only a child can do, in order to keep himself, who scarcely belonged anywhere, who was nowhere at home, together, for whom he had no idea; there were times when this cost him a furious effort at self-conquest.”
There is also a question of “why is this room appealing?”. This question is marked by a certain pragmatism, almost even a certain real-estateness. But it is a hard question for us, and that is what makes it an important one, and we answer it with a quote by Luiza Mello and Valentijn Bjvanck, in their introduction to the show on the Amazon rain forest…
“The Amazon wilderness (is)- moist, damp, sticky, deafening, breathtaking… the pressure of the environment is so powerful and hypnotic that it propels us into a dream state… Not a dream state in the Western sense of the word, in which a dream is the negative of reality, but in the sense of a dream that forms a direct extension of reality so as to become a part, and even an intensification of reality.”
We do not mark our project with the same amount of dogma, that has been given to the effect of the Amazon, but it was our aim for a certain discomfort. As the room section shows, a perforated concrete slab so water can drip from the ceiling indiscriminately from the room above.
The room and the corridor are no extension of each other. The corridor is not intimate but contained, functionalist in its intention of circulation. All services are exposed and brought together to construct a space where by all that needs to be circulated are, water, air, students, gas. We are reminded of the French composer Elain Radigue, who’s exceptionally tiresome compositions were the result of layered slow synthesisers, gradually becoming louder and softer. The soft squeal of water being pulled up though a pipe, a students feet taping on the stair going to lunch, the gas pipe humming bringing warmth to the building.
It is here that we envision, by nature of the social constraint of the building, that the students will take to the site’s landscape. This communal territory is constructed with the same intentions of the room, only on a larger scale whereby the soil, mud, and everything will meet.
It is, how Pierre Huyghe describes many of his installations “precisely in-between city and nature, in-between this place of meetings, signs, and corporations, which is the city, and nature.” Think the side of a house where the water tank is. Both empty and full, it is a half-way house for all that passes through it, but at the scale of a landscape. It is where weeds grow where they can, amongst students forming paths through social rituals.
In the mesh facade is the contradiction of needing to get light into the buildings while also maintaining the slightly diluted asceticism of the rooms, which an overt engagement with the goods-line on the facade would deny. The pitch was an awkward self-conscious decision.
An oversized shed home where the garden is.