Ephraim Joris :

Methods (5) an offset of a trajectory

A fifth chapter does install the start of something new. Maybe even a new practice; at least it is a new project. Analysis and review of the previous work and practice-strategies revealed a need for - and nurtured a strong believe in a project that I currently name ‘The Post Representational House’.

The project finds its origin through different anecdotes.

Two ears ago my parents became a client of Architecture Project; the site for a small size renovation project was my childhood home. Through the working of the project, playing with composing moments of demolition and new built, the need to take into account a personal history, as part of a family memory, became increasingly more important. This meant that the repositioning of a window (for example) did unlock the repositioning or part erasure of multiple storeys where a view out of that window played an important role. The storeys as intrinsically attached to parts of the house and objects in the house revealed themselves as part-building blocs in the construction of newly designed spaces. Elizabeth Spelman (2008) describes these objects as ‘scaffoldings for memory, as guiding structures through which the past is recalled’. Fascinating how childhood homes provide an architecture of memory, a place where past and present simultaneously exist or as Gaston Bachelard (1958) describes it; ‘a land of motionless childhood’ describing a place that only exist in time. Here an interest to take into account these immaterial structures in the design of material form was born. We designed new spaces for my old family home and failed tremendously in designing through these memory scaffoldings.

A few weeks after my grandmother died we agreed to meet as a family at her house. My grandmother had lived with her family in the house for more then 20 years. She continued to live there after her son left the house and even after her husband died. More than 50 years of dwelling. More than 50 years of care and inhabitation accumulated in these small spaces. The day of the family gathering I drove for more than 6 hours, crossing the English Channel by boat to get at the small village of Booischot to eventually arrive two hours late. The house was still more or less like my grandmother had left it when she suddenly became unwell and made her way to the hospital for a doctor’s visit. As I walked through the front porch, family member sat around talking about what to take home before the house would be emptied and cleaned.

Aware of this immanent erasure of the mnemonic properties of this previous home I walked away from the conversations and tried to visit all the places in the house and garden that held childhood memories. Strolling around these places, places with almost ghostly properties connecting my world with the world of my childhood, I understood how the house and garden with all its objects acted as the actualization of the ghostly properties of an intangible past. As a child I visited the house with my sisters almost every weekend to help with growing vegetables and holding animals on the surrounding land. I remember the moments helping on the land, fantasising about leaving the garden to escape the work and play in the surrounding forest or daydream about my grandmothers’ dinner that would celebrate a day of work. As I walked through the garden I though about Bachelard’s ‘land of Motionless childhood’ where he describes the childhood home as an embodiment of dreams; a place where the child learns to daydream. My grandmother’s garden certainly held memories of daydreaming as the living room and kitchen held the material of a nostalgia for these once lush family dinners.

Both storeys unlocked an interest in what Kevin Hetherington (2001) describes as objects and spaces imbued with ghostly properties. He describes such objects and spaces as products of a “time out of time – connecting different worlds within the simultaneity of space”. The description of a place for Hetherington is the result of composing spaces, objects and times. This is related to what Marc Auge describes as the anthropological place; a place of social demarcation, a place of connected narratives between previous and current inhabitants.

In both storeys I relate to very personal narrative in my description of the home as dream catcher or memory scaffolding. However similarly, as Akiko Bush (1999) describes in her Geography of Homes, through the history of domestic architecture, objects and components have been shifting from a functional use to a more symbolic use; such as bell towers, front porches and formal dining rooms. The accumulation of such symbolic components, as integrated in domestic architecture, allow the house to perform as an anthropological place established through the representation of a social memory.

It is this understanding that ignited the idea of ‘The Post Representational House’ as a project or practice. Henri Lefebvre describes spatial practice as the production and reproduction of locations and spatial characteristics particular to certain social formations ensuring continuity in the creation of what h describes as social space. He describes such practice to take place through different representations of space, as modes of production, taking into account signs and codes implicit to the relevant social formations, as such resulting in representational spaces embodying complex symbolic structures.

The post representational house starts as a search in restabilising and questioning such social structures.

(the how and what of this project will be posted soon)