POUSSIERE LINGUISTIQUE
HOUSE_HOUSE
"And to destroy all these limits that structure representation, other 'gestures' have to be found and the secret of other 'intonations' [...]" --Jacques Derrida, "To Unsense the Subjectile" [1986], in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud
I /
Two houses, apparently separate, but linked (conjoined) below ground, communicating ... Three to three-and-one-half storey seaside villas sharing a common garden (ground) ... The roof tiles and the sea share the same pattern, color, and texture, changing in changeable weather, mimicking one another's mood (mind), similar in spirit to Proust's description of the steeple of the church at Combray, in Remembrance of Things Past.
The fenestration of each is similar and dissimilar, cut (carved) from the thick, plastered walls. The asymmetry is 'symmetrical', each secretly mirroring the other by the seemingly random parity of the poché, the suggestive, figural balance and play of planar surface and shadowy recess.
The two buildings are taller than wide (or long) -- a vertical, cubic, stacked mass -- and tower-like. A passage is formed up the middle by virtue of their proximity and typological resemblance. As one passes along the joined facades (joined by the gap), the angles and forms shift, not unlike Czech cubist villas (in Prague), betraying a morphological anxiety, at once suggesting the interiors are wholly similar in this perplexing affectivity -- a sign of instability within a tectonic stability (complexity within apparent singularity), as each is rooted (sunk) into the earth, planted by telluric (gravitational and magnetic) forces, emphatically marking the site and non-site, place and space, between here and there, an architectural gnomon (as ancient as runic script, and as indecipherable as Etruscan inscription, a now-lost, now-found language of form writing the space between thing and not-thing, object and relation, form and content, self and not-self, something and some-thing else).The garden is framed (formed) by a low wall running in a rectilinear fashion around the twin structures, running into the sea beyond, disappearing ... There is but one entrance, at the front (which is also a back), and one exit, at the back (which is also a front), except that the exit is the sea itself.
II /No one could know, rationally, that these two houses are one house without entering one or the other. The communicating passage, below, is unmarked (unremarkable, unremarked) above ground. The passage links the half-submerged fourth floors, the missing one-half of the three-and-one-half storey elevations, not unlike rumored (apocryphal) underground corridors linking Baroque-era palaces in Prague's Mala Strana.
The exterior(s) of the villas resemble the chaste, ur-formalist compositions of the foremost architect of the last 'turning point', Adolf Loos. The irregularity of the fenestration suggests an interior (interiors) 'wrapped/swirling about itself' in the vague territoriality (lackadaisical ambition) of raum plan. Loos' Villa Muller comes to and leaves the mind, as does Villa Karma. Yet these are somehow townhouses without a town. Neither Villa Muller nor Villa Karma is quite right, then, as the analogical spirit of these two houses (one house_house) lies elsewhere in the ravages of the ultra-dialectical struggle between milieux and anti-milieux, the consummate struggle (battleground) of modernist architectural ideology and the quest for the Absolute (the empty sign, master-signifier, of autonomy and 'presence'). Marked, here, the then-troubled syrrhesis of form and anti-form, thing and its Other (milieu), object and its entourage, writ (im)modestly as two-things-into-one-thing, a conceptual sign (perhaps) of the immanent nature of modernity (immodernity) and the present-present as its time.
III /
And there are uncertainties ... It is not clear if the two houses are parallel, or if they are slightly askew to one another. The rooflines may or may not be articulated, an optical surplus that suggests patterns that may or may not be volumetric -- an irresolute condition similar to how the face of bricks when they are placed at an angle in a wall, receding, appear as parallelograms. The garden in the front (the back?) is non-descript; it is not a garden in any conventional sense, but a garden defined by its enclosure and its contiguity with the villas. There might be a single tree, though this tree appears only when the moon is full (or nearly-full). The houses infer a loss and a finding, a place and a non-place, insofar as they appear rooted and uprooted -- uprooted (adrift) in the sense that they have no precise coordinates in time and space; they are nowhere. The seemingly universal aspects of their composition imply a timeless timeliness. The archaic relation to the sea, the internal volumetric ambiguity, and the spectacular yet mostly unarticulated (almost abstract) mise en scène place the villas in uncertain geo-physical proximity to the nature of nature, a nature indistinct and forever provisional.GK (12/10/03)
