Lots of cool photos to accompany Colomina’s “Split Wall.” Fascinating stuff!
“The look is directed . . . in such deliberate manner as to suggest the reading of these houses as frames for a view.”
— Beatriz Colomina, “Split Wall”
“But with all the interrogation of the word feminine, one sometimes forgets that in France in the late 1960s, it was the word écriture (writing) that was the common denominator for a wide range of explosive practices and publications.
—Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism, “Introduction to Hélène Cixous”
“My architecture is not conceived in plans, but in spaces (cubes). I do not design floor plans, facades, sections. I design spaces. For me, there is no ground floor, first floor etc…. For me, there are only contiguous, continual spaces, rooms, anterooms, terraces etc. Stories merge and spaces relate to each other. Every space requires a different height: the dining room is surely higher than the pantry, thus the ceilings are set at different levels. To join these spaces in such a way that the rise and fall are not only unobservable but also practical, in this I see what is for others the great secret, although it is for me a great matter of course. Coming back to your question, it is just this spatial interaction and spatial austerity that thus far I have best been able to realize in Dr Müller’s house.”
–Adolf Loos, Shorthand record of a conversation in Plzeň (Pilsen), 1930
Kubernesis 