Pym's Rest

At the urging of a friend and former student of mine, I recently updated the Stormhouse once again for a design competition which potentially has a small prize. This resulted in some new renderings, which may be tediously similar to ones that already appeared in previous entries.

That is, as you probably suspected, a copy of a famous portrait of Poe, near the end of his tragic life, in the foreground of the interior rendering. The portrait on the wall over the desk in the background is that of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Poe's literary successor and author of At the Mountains of Madness, a sympathetic and Antarctic sequel to Poe's enigmatic and Antarctic The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

I've quite suddenly arrived at the notion (it's almost like it came from somewhere other than my own mind) that if I earn anything from this activity and thereby convert my subjective value for the project into something objective and monetary, I should apply the proceeds to a trip to the Antarctic. If I stand on the putative site of the Stormhouse, this project for a house where one could await the end of the world, will the world end, or would I have to build the Stormhouse first?

I think this will be the last time I will do any more work on this. I'm thoroughly tired of it after nearly a year, and anyway my Stormhouse project seems to have passed beyond my exclusive control.

Needless to say, the modeling and rendering program that this video is advertising was not used by me in either the creation of my design or the original illustrations of it, although you wouldn't know that from the narration. At least they gave me credit "for the model." I have no intention of objecting to this use of my design or demanding compensation, assuming I have any kind of recourse for doing so (through my own naivety in such matters---if it can be called naivety or carelessness, as opposed to a kind of fate for any sort of idea that can translated to a digital medium--I don't believe I do).

Incidentally, the Stormhouse and the Pavilion for Oblivion do make legitimate cameo appearances in a book published the other day: SketchUp: the Missing Manual, by Chris Grover for O'Reilly. Chris graciously asked to use my projects to illustrate several didactic points and I did give him explicit permission to use images of my work, for which explicitly I expect no compensation at all.

Storming Again

To be very brief about it, I was asked to supply some potential cover illustrations for a course catalog...and suffering from a bit of "designer's block" I modified my old Stormhouse project yet again to fit the required graphic constraints. I was very tempted to throw in some Edgar Allan Poe references or perhaps some visual hints of Caspar David Friedrich, but in the end decided against both.



And a graphically harsher alternate version:



I can't imagine that either one of these will actually appear on the catalog...the idea is simply too far beyond the pale for an architecture school's advertisement for its continuing education program.

DNT

Despite my increasingly cynical view of the value of the architectural education and training I received, one of my steadiest employments is as an instructor at an architecture school. I'm hoping that I am doing something more valuable than preparing the architectural equivalent of cannon fodder for the local firms, but I have many doubts. It is possible that the no matter what my own motivations, the regime of architectural education and internship has—not an ulterior motive, which would be some scheme nefarious on my part or the part of other educators—but an exterior one, independent of the impetus of any particular member or institution of the great industry that relentlessly cranks out ever more graduates and interns suitable (or perhaps not) for eventual employment as architects. I have little doubt that the exterior motivation has nothing in it akin to the best interests of those who would become part of the profession. Still, there I am in front of a podium and whiteboard, and I tell myself that I am doing my best to help my students while wondering constantly if there was something else entirely I could do with my life that wouldn't leave me feeling like—despite the best of intentions—I have made an accommodation with something subtly monstrous.

So recently I was asked to teach a course optimistically labeled "3D Modeling and Design." Of course, by Design we mean the sort of things architecture students are tasked to develop in school (unlike in the real world, mainly, where they will probably never be asked to design much of anything soon unless they are strong-willed enough to flout convention and their legally-enforceable status as interns-serfs). And 3D means of course "using computers", still a scandalous notion in a Luddite-infested profession where computers have only begun to be viewed (grudgingly) as a cost-effective tool for production (creating construction documents, in other words), permitting the use of ever fewer of those ignorant, expensive intern-serfs. With this in mind, I tried to recall how the use of computer technology had seemed helpful or even interesting in my own education, ten years ago when I decided in a fit of unwarranted optimism in early middle age to change professions and go to architecture school myself. Whatever facility I have with computers came despite my own educational requirements, because at the time no such courses as I am now asked to teach were really available and no real opportunity was provided for learning such despised technical subjects outside of the formal curriculum.

Looking back through my student portfolio, I find it oddly prescient that the very first project I undertook with a digital modeling program was roughly inspired by Matta's 1946 painted scene, A Grave Situation:


Original image location: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bb/A_Grave_Situation.jpg

The Chilean artist Roberto Antonio Sebastián Matta Echaurren (1911-2002) was an architect who even worked with Le Corbusier before becoming disenchanted with the field and abandoning it for Surrealist painting (almost the opposite of my own professional trajectory, in fact!). I doubt I am the only one to interpret A Grave Situation as a kind of apocalyptic explosion in a mid-Twentieth Century "International Style" office, a maelstrom of planar tectonics and chromed steel tubing surrounding the central figure. Was the figure an alien visitor, whose presence disrupted the staid predictability of the International Style environment? Or was the mid-century Modernism somehow responsible for the distortion of the figure? In other words, was it a normal human somehow transmogrified by his Modernist surroundings into a frozen faceless alien?

Does it matter?







For a summer-term seminar that almost no other student seemed to take seriously, I used a CNC mill to carve a portion of the alien figure from my homage to Matta into a block of polyurethane foam treated to look like rusting steel.





The letters "DNT" were a last-minute, bitter addition to the cutting-path for the CNC mill. Some educator had earlier called me a "Deluded No-Talent" during an astonishingly unhelpful critique of a more standard architectural school production (a police station "design"), and the almost whimsical pointlessness of the comment led me to incorporate its abbreviation into my "artifact."



Whether or not I am in fact a DNT, some of the computer-assisted products of my architectural education that I still find interesting are available here, in a web gallery of examples I prepared for my own students. And a comprehensive gallery of the work of Roberto Matta is available here.

Well of Vision

While looking for something else entirely—or rather, while sitting here in front of a computer monitor and trusting an advertising-funded idiot-savant-of-a-search-engine to provide me with digital photographs on a certain topic—I “found” (or rather, was served—by the same corporate search engine) an image of a different if not completely-unrelated structure.

This photo is part of the collection of a website called The Megalithic Portal. Original image location: http://www.megalithic.co.uk/a558/a312/gallery/scotland/Angus/P6220082.JPG

First glance: this strange granite monument seems to consist of a tripled (“six-legged”) Gothic arch, holding a crowned cross, over a natural spring in the middle of an uninhabited, treeless valley set among barren low peaks.

How astonishing!

Clearly not a pointless landmark, even if it isn't doing anything in a pragmatic sense, not even providing a shelter over the spring (which looks muddy, from the various photos I have since "found", as if grazing animals were trampling around its margin.) To use the jargon of architectural educators, the stonework “encloses space,” but it in fact does not protect or shelter the contents of the space in the least. Why? There was a symbolic reason for this ineffective enclosure. But do I know it? And why is there a religious symbol, or perhaps a symbol of monarchs ruling in the name of religion, suspended over the water? For just a moment, until I do a more thorough “search” (and follow some hyperlinks), it's all a mystery. But there was meaning: the builders meant to indicate some fact or facts, something of great importance to them, most specifically with a set of symbols that held transparent values for them.

Does it matter that I don't know what the builder or designer of this structure really meant? And (ignoring for a few more minutes the fact that in seconds the idiot intelligence of the Internet could provide me with more information than I need or trust) that I can't sprint across the intervening damp years and desolate mountain peaks and find out from them?

I have previously asserted (and even had a project dealing with the topic published, after a fashion) that a sort of revenant of the lost meaning, which I called the ghost of intent, can survive the designers, builders, and even the pragmatic purposes of a work of architecture. That sort of architectural "parapsychology" is in fact what leads me to search for information on—and sometimes visit, in my non-virtual flesh—such mysterious structures as neolithic tombs, stone rings, and and other ruins or near-ruins.

It is my personal, biased, and largely unsubstantiated opinion that the presence of this ghost is more important than any of the other considerations that might or might not qualify something as a "work of architecture", as opposed to a lesser and easier-to-dismiss "work of building," no matter how concurrently well-made, valuable, and otherwise program-satisfying a work of building might be.

But how do you invoke and tie down to a single work such an intangible, ineffable trace? To painfully extend the metaphor, it is like the opposite of an exorcism. I'd like my work to be the vessel for odd, mysterious, and subtle if not invisible impulses...how do I entrap these things and bind them to an idea for a building, when all of architectural culture—education and training—seems to have been relentlessly devoted to robbing me of the capability to do so? Once again, I strongly suspect myself to have been crippled as an architect, by the years of demands for clear paths ("partis") and pragmatic operations, for precedent, typologies, and pointless quibbling disguised as “critical analysis.”

Returning to the mysterious structure which prompted this musing, it is quite possible to find out who built this, and why. There, I've done it in an instant with a few keystrokes: the Queen's Well, (originally the Prince's Well) in a place called Glen Mark in Scotland. Quite a few people have visited and photographed the structure, which is not in quite so out-of-the-way a place as I imagined. In fact, I'm a bit disappointed to "find" photographs that show a trace of habitation—a cottage of some kind, behind some anomalous trees in this heathery valley—quite near to the Well. And it was trivial enough to “locate” a reference to the designer (who was probably not the famous inventor of the seismograph), the client, and the monarch this commemorates.

Original image location: http://www.londonancestor.com/iln/prince-well.htm

But is the mystery and charm gone, now that I have done more "research"? I don't think so...it yet abides. The ghost is there.

Which leads me to another idea for yet another "project." I'll add it to the list of things I want to finish...and call it another fantasy because I see nothing wrong with the category given the current state of reality. I'll try to invoke and bind that ghost, in a Lewis-idealized version of the Well, stripped of its explicit history and context.

A structure that doe not even shelter a spring...why would a spring need a shelter?...on a hillside that no one deliberately visits...

Eschewing the pointless and deliberately-debilitating combination of cross-examination and self-doubt that the powers-that-be would have me label “the design process,” what image first comes to mind?

Three roofs with greenery growing on them—corrugated roofs that do not join—are elaborately supported in such a complex way that they cannot provide shelter. These almost-pillars, which might be or mighnt not be construed as nonfigurative telamons, stand not over the spring but in a pool created by it. The spring is hidden by the pool, and is thus not only unsheltered but invisible unless you happen to be staring straight down into the greenish water from right above.

The pool itself lays in a sort of not-very-high artificial crater of lined stonework. This crater has a sort of ditch-moat of its own, which receives the spillover from the pool proper and guides it to a streambed that takes the water away and down the vale. The moat is covered by wide rusty cattle-grates that permits access for (careful) humans to the steps up the crater-walls but presumably keeps the local grazing creatures from further fouling the not-very-pure water of the pool.

Right below the surface of the pool are dangerous paths composed of large blocks of stones, a nearly hidden labyrinth that will undoubtedly grow more treacherous over the years. Since the water is not particularly clear, the paths' presence is only indicated by a tangle of oxidizing steel rails that loop and twist around standard railing height above the pool surface.

The point of this? Risking an unintentional, cold and slimy bath, the visitor can walk out onto the water and navigate to the central point of the crater, where (as noted), it is under the right circumstances possible to stare down into the green depths at the source of the water. I don't imagine that it is, really, much of a depth...three or so feet, at best. The up-flow of the water keeps this one point relatively free of drifting algae.

There. That's the vision, unencumbered by the crippling intellectual detritus of a pointless career in architecture.

But a vision exactly of what? Why should I or anyone want this, and why is there a watery ineffable thing in the “murky deeps” of that completely imaginary construct? I can't answer. Yet. But the ridiculously depressing immediate task is to convert those four descriptive paragraphs into a structure both visual and build-able.

Titles

It seems that I am to write a little piece here about titles and their metaphysical independence from the entitled. I have no idea why I feel obligated to do so. It's as if  I'm possessed by a spirit which read Borges in a truly loose translation and (only vaguely comprehending the philosophic principals--namely, Idealism--that seem to lie behind the master's fictions) decided to cynically hammer Borgesian motifs into an unlikely ontological schema derived from the practice of architectural design.

Wait...What? 

Anyway....a few years back I had access to a fabrication lab and several capable computer-numerically-controlled subtractive machines, the most important of which for this parable was a water jet that cut--well, nearly anything under it--with a highspeed fluid chocked full of abrasive corundum sand. As a graduate student in architecture in an astonishingly exclusive program, as part of a course dealing with the concepts involved with "craftsmanship," I had been given a fairly nebulous assignment to develop a technique involving the process of "inlay" in some form.

I was already fascinated but dismissive of architectural numerology, which had not been annointed as "generative" or "algorithmic" design then and largely manifested itself in many of my fellow students and our supposed instructors as a bizarre near-religious reverence for certain mathematical relationships that were to "be found in nature," most notably "the Golden Section" or phi.  I held then (as now) that you could establish that any kind of mathematical relationship had a consecrating "basis in natural forms"--if only you looked long and hard enough. It wasn't the particular magic numbers that mattered...it was the maniacal stance that one assumed in pursuing them. Therefore I was always postulating (but not publicly, lest I be branded a heretic) that certain numbers were Really Important in Odd Ways. For instance (and I still like to do this) I would decide that the number 17 was an Evil Number because no one really likes it and therefore designs that had angular and linear measurements derived in cryptic ways from the number 17 would be Om-in-nous and Dis-turb-ing.  Of course, you couldn't just use multiples or divisions of 17 for these relationships. There were special rules.  For instance, the first Evil Multiple of 17 was 33, not 34...because no one really likes the number 33. And etc.--I would develop whole frameworks of contrived portentousness that could be used to secretly justify this, that, or the other choice in any architectural design quandary. 

I took some arrangement of rectangles proportioned according to some such instantly and callously sanctified mathematical relationship, copied the grid three times, and finally skewed each copy according to some equally arbitrary but instantly hallowed corollary to my numerological conceit. (I'm delighted to admit that, having analyzed the resulting geometry again tonight, for the first time in years, I find it absolutely impossible to reconstruct from the ratios of my measurements the particular numerological system that I used for this, although I clearly remember developing one! Ah, the ghost of intent!)

For my project I developed the notion that I would overlap (once again, according to some arbitrary rule system) these skewed grids; combine the results using a system of "perverse" Boolean operations; and finally use these--and a convenient circle with a diameter determined by the shortest length of the water jet's cutting bed--as tool paths for cutting four different sorts of materials so that the resulting different-thickness and differently-textured fragments could be layered and registered in a way consistent of with my arbitrary system...in other words, inlaid.

Initially I had in mind as a subjects for this heretical mathematical surgery some sheet steel, half-inch plywood, some quarter-inch marble tile, and a piece of concrete cast in a half-ovoid "dome" with  the flat underside fitting into the cutting-bed-limited circle.  

A few tests with the jet indicated that the thicker of my various targets would not cut with enough cleanness for me to risk expensive, new-bought materials, nor could the tool itself be trusted not to make random extensions or other unexpected modifications to the cutting paths.  So I filled a crate with various pieces of sheet-good trash pulled from construction sites and tested the contents in turn against the jet. In the end, the inlay process was accomplished with a piece of warped exterior siding; some corroded galvanized duct-metal; some hundred-year-old fir that had once been sub-flooring in a Victorian house; cementious backing board; and a thick ovoid "dome" of plaster of Paris (as opposed to concrete--and cast in a milled form made of inexpensive coarse-cell expanded polystyrene foam that gave it a texture of either bone or coarse-cell e.p.s. foam, depending on your generosity of spirit).  Given the less-than-immaculate conditions of the materials, the inaccuracies and accidental erosion resulting from the jet's action are not apparent.  It all seems deliberate.  Which is of course the real secret to a successful design undertaking: make it look like you meant for that (whatever accident "that" is) to happen all along.

As I glued it all up, I added some oxidized Dutch-metal "fake gold" leaf on the lowest wooden surface to give the piece that extra, nearly-hidden dollop of degraded Byzantine glamour. I had already decided that after the assignment was completed and reviewed that I would treat my assembled artifact as an objet d'art and hang it on a (sturdy) wall somewhere.  (I should explain that architecture school--largely a prolonged and painful hazing ritual--was all about doing pointless, fad-ish, complex things that consumed much time or much material or both while holding no lasting aesthetic, pragmatic, or experiential value for the student or anyone else. Consequently, at every opportunity and with varying degrees of success, I strove to subvert the whole pointless rite-of-passage and produce designs and objects which could be secretly re-purposed to something other than the detritus of an architectural education.)

In terms of technique I more than met the requirements of the course, but even here there were questions from the instructor and the other students about "the design" when I presented the product of my effort. This was a small, unpopular seminar, and the instructor was decidedly not one of those narcissistic, insecure martinets (the recognized or self-proclaimed luminaries of the field) that one tended to find in the more sought-after courses and studios. As I was approaching the end of my degree, and I had a sense that I had wasted huge sums of my savings on my tuition and even more valuable years of my life, I for once had little qualms in admitting that I had cynically developed a unique numerology as an artifice for proceeding with my work. To my surprise, no one was offended or accused me of abrogating my "responsibilities" as a "designer." I suspect that was because the seminar was shared between the graduate school of architecture and the very foreign (to us) graduate school of art...provision had been made for the artists who were perfectly used to assuming ulterior, exterior, cynical, and entirely provisional strategies for the creation of objects without any value other than aesthetics and personal symbolism. OR perhaps no one understood my explanation. OR they instantly dismissed me as mad. (One can never rule out the last.)

"So does it have a title?" someone--an artist, I think--asked.

"Yes, something like 'Abstract with Rotations at Such-and-such Degrees'."

"Really?  That's all?" someone laughed.

And then one of those strange things happened: an idea appeared in my head without prompting, without any clear antecedent. I heard myself say,  "Let's just call it Portrait of Agamemnon, then. Doesn't that change everything?"

And it did, as if some magic had been worked.  

To this day, when I walk by the piece (which hangs at the top of a flight of stairs in my house, as pictured here, close to an item featured in another post), I find myself thinking about royal, arrogant, doomed Agamemnon and his tragic milieu, which I have since felt compelled to study and understand as well as a non-Mycenaean or a non-archaeologist can. I don't find myself, unless I make an effort, thinking about a spurious numerological operation performed on construction debris. As I have noted, I can no longer remember exactly what system I developed for determining the geometrical relationships. It was most certainly not one based on the number 17 (although--no kidding--I later did use exactly that for my Pavilion for Oblivion project!)

I wish I still had access to a water jet. I'd really like to develop a heretical numerology that could cut an Electra companion piece.

Tools

It won't go away.

My Stormhouse project apparently came to the notice of the company that produces one of the higher-end computer modeling and rendering applications, and they quite generously provided me with access to software products that are either more expensive than I would ever purchase for myself or simply unavailable commercially at this point.

And the result? (Compare to the published versions, in this earlier post.)

Startling, as far as I am concerned. I am impressed with the seeming "photorealism"...what an amazing tool.

Now my little apocalyptic fantasy looks build-able, as fresh as a sparkling new toy just out of its shrinkwrap. Fresher than it ever could look, built.

But it was always, even when rendered less realistically, something that could be built, or at least it was close, in terms of design, to that generally sought-after condition. I spent some effort, like a good little architectural designer, on researching materials and building technology. It might not be the most practical item to erect on a storm-strewn, iceberg-threatened Antarctic island's coast, but there is no reason why it wouldn't stand up and provide a certain amount of decent shelter, there or anywhere, until a world-ending Something really did smash it flat.

Should it look build-able, though? Should it be an assembly of things culled from a building supply catalog, given my "program"? As if there is a special chapter in the Sweets catalog for cataclysm-resistant products!

Of course, the Stormhouse program arrived long after the idea for the building, which was (I am almost certain) suggested by a near-ruinous Quonset Hut-style structure I saw fleetingly through the smudged-fingerprints-window of a train I took down the coast nearly a decade ago. I adapted the general form to several programs, initially as a quasi-public boathouse that was part of a poorly-imagined and quite-unlikely project assigned by a callous instructor in a dingy architecture school. Later, after I made my own soul-sucking accommodation with the monstrous agglutination of institutions and "professional" regulations that produces architectural cannon-fodder in my country, I redrew it and reworked it as a callous instructor in a dingy architecture school myself, as a design and illustration example for my tyrannized students. It wasn't until someone (not an architect) saw this rendering of an interim version from three years ago

and wrote me, "What? Is this waiting for the Hurricane?" that I began to understand what I had imagined and the black tide of the Eschaton it was meant to resist.

I'll ask again, Should it look build-able, though?

By "looking build-able," I do not mean to imply that there is anything wrong--at all, at all--with the design and rendering of architectural projects using those not-so-new-fangled computer programs. Only senectitude and fear could lead anyone to spurn tools that allow one to view and adapt a design from inside--from outside--from multiple sides and in multiple ways at once--for the old smeary haptic tools of graphite and ink on ground-up trees. I've come to despise several architects I once admired, after reading their unexpected Luddite diatribes upon the crippling effects of the use of computers in architectural design. The common fear among the supposed greats of learning something new--of adapting to new circumstances and techniques--is simply more crippling, and more fatal, than any tool.

I am crippled as a designer, but not by my tools. I'm crippled by all those years of dungeon-work in that dingy concrete hell of an architecture school...as a lowly drudge-serf intern in some big firm...as a maker of pretty pictures of steel-framed cathedrals to crony neo-Con theo-Con capitalism! I only think in terms of structural-steel-arch roofing systems and reinforced fiberglass pilings...when I should be thinking of other things entirely. Why would anyone wait for the world to end in something like this? Coast Guard-approved fiberglass pilings? I should be specifying the bones of murdered giants! Steel roofing? It should be woven spiderweb stiffened with a generous coating of mummia, the embalming lacquer used on the corpses of dead Pharaohs.

How do I get the grand dead weight of architecture--soul-crushing education, regulation, institution, profession--out of my imagination?  What computer program will help me work out that?

Typical Conditions

Yet more labyrinth project. Chad Smith, editor of Tropolism, recently suggested to me that reading of a narrative blog can actually be similar to the experience of a work of architecture itself...that "meaning accrues" over time. I strongly suspect I have begun to devote myself to some kind of architectural meta-project with this narration.



There are several landmarks I seem to have preemptively declared necessary for this project, such as the afore-mentioned tower and the "monument to minotaurs." But what of more generic situations? Wandering through a maze or a labyrinth, what conditions (in that italicized architectural sense) does one encounter?

...entrance(s)...
...exit(s)...
...passages (possibly of more than one type, on more than one level)...
...major and minor intersections...
...dead ends (in a maze, not a classical labyrinth)...

(It seems to me that there should be professional "cant" terms for these conditions, and for their variations, similar to the butchered and misapplied French terms that English-speaking architects use to obscure their own craft . Contemplate the term parti, for instance, so often used when the word "scheme" or simply "idea" would do just as well. For that matter, what is the appropriate designation for a designer of mazes and/or labyrinths? A daedalus--a non-proper noun, to make the distinction from the antique Minoan inventor--perhaps?)

What have I not considered? And how should those conditions be demarcated, if at all? I originally began this list of conditions with an idea of understanding my progress, if any, towards some point where I might consider myself reasonably done with this project and therefore free to move on to something else. But what if there are no conditions to typically satisfy? What if every crystalline moment in the Labyrinth--whether the result of a deliberate, strategical move or a twilight-confused wandering--is a unique and previously undefined situation that shares little identity--of the sort usually indicated with the abbreviated adjective "Typ." (for typical) in architectural drawings--with any other ahead or behind. If the sort of Labyrinth I am projecting is in fact a sort of puzzle (a maze) while having a metaphysically unique path like the Labyrinth of Knossos in the myth of Theseus, would it not be a more effective situation to have no typical conditions? Would it not be more effective for conditions to only sometimes--occasionally--seem repetitive or typical, while in fact they are all truly, cryptically unique?

In this case, how will I ever know when I am done?

...or for that matter, when I actually started?



In my own house, at the top of a flight of stairs where a short corridor ends, is a sculpture I made years ago that refers to a place-marker I had noticed in a different sort of maze/labyrinth from any previously discussed. When I made it, I was originally thinking about the kind of minor shrine one finds in (or even over) small squares and intersections in that most labyrinthine of famous cities, Venice. Like this one, from the sestiere of San Polo:



It has occurred to me, very recently, that these sculptures of saints, messiahs, and their mothers are in fact a kind of non-literate way-finding: Here I am under the Madonna of This, as opposed to that calle that runs by the shrine to the Saint of That: an effective technique for deliberately converting the quotidian (an otherwise anonymous and unremarkable urban confluence) to the exceptional (Il Campo della Madonna della ThisThatOrL'otraCosa).



(As an aside, I should note that possibility of that I must design a permanently-inhabited labyrinth--i.e., a city--further immensely complicates my attempt to define the scope of this project...a whole potentially-infinite range of habitation might be required. Does a Labyrinth require homes, shops, markets, public squares, service alleys, hospitals, prisons, cemeteries? Why not parks, pastures, ruins, and wilderness too? Or even unique spaces that are less readily categorized...less typical? )

 

Now, I made that sculpture or relief or whatever it is out of scrap building materials and broken electronic components left at a construction site in 2000, long before I considered this Labyrinth and even before I decided, in my early middle age, to go to architecture school. I don't actually know quite how this sculpture became a replica of some begrimed corner shrine displaced from some technologically-minded medieval period. In my sketchbook it is clear that this began as simply a housing for a stylized mask originally destined for another sculpture but left unused.

Is it possible I was already working on this labyrinth project?



And no, I don't know what it is that I am drawing at the end of the passage, at the dead-end....yet.