The Handmade House by Geraldine Bedell

Author:Geraldine Bedell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2005-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

In House VI, the experience of the physical environment does not lead to any mental structure – the experience is, in fact, quite the reverse. Once the conceptual structure is understood, it detaches itself from the initial physical experience… In House VI, a particular juxtaposition of solids and voids produces a situation that is only resolved by the mind’s finding the need to change the position of the elements.

It is not entirely clear what he means here, but I think it’s that he put things in the ‘wrong’ place to make us think about whether the ‘right’ place is merely culturally conditioned. Too bad, of course, if it isn’t. Too bad if the right place has been arrived at by experience, because the wrong one is bloody uncomfortable.

Joyce and Ferhan were of course strictly form-follows-function architects: there would be no staircases going nowhere to make us ponder the idea of a staircase in our house, no doors that didn’t close the opening to the master bedroom, simply to be the sign of a door, to make us think about doors. Even so, we had stopped worrying about how we’d feel if the house was all about us and people didn’t like it, and moved on to what it would be like if the house was all about Joyce and Ferhan and we didn’t like it.

How much did they know about us anyway? Ferhan once told me that she’d always thought of me as a very sexy woman, which marked her out as a person of great insight and discernment, although I suspected she just thought this because I’d told her I had an underwear weakness and needed plenty of space for my lingerie.

Just as we could never have turned the confusion of our dreams and anxieties into three-dimensional space (even if Charlie did buy an architect’s pencil, identical to Ferhan’s, and brought it to meetings), they couldn’t know us from the inside. Dwelling, says Ivan Illich in The Mirror of the Past, ‘is an activity that lies beyond the reach of the architect not only because it is a popular art; not only because it goes on and on in waves that escape his control; not only because it is of a tender complexity outside of the horizon of mere biologists and systems analysts; but above all because no two communities dwell alike’.

I loved the detailing stage of the design, looking forward to meetings at which I was invariably presented with something that opened up possibilities of a new way of living – a bench along the kitchen wall, where the family would sit and talk to me while I was cooking; floor lights that would glow softly when I came in on dusky winter evenings; a trough in our bathroom in which we would grow tall bamboo. But at the same time, the experience I was most reminded of was being on a camel in the Sinai which bolted down an enormous sand dune.

While we were waiting for the

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