Places that hum
Every Exit is an Entrance by Ariadna Guiteras at Lifting Belly, CentroCentro Madrid 2020. Photographed by Pablo Gómez-Ogando Rodríguez
weather forecaster
A villa on the Mediterranean coast is built in 1929, designed by architect Eileen Gray as a refuge for herself and her lover. She encodes their intertwined initials into the name of the building — the house from its foundations up is inscribed with love. After the couple separate, she watches the building fall into disrepair: inside unwanted murals are painted while from outside bullets perforate its skin. Now as the building undergoes restoration, they channel Eileen’s phantasm - her ideas and her intuitions. Her desire to design a “dwelling as a living organism” invoked to bring life again to its bones. [i]
Modernist architecture practised the embodiment of spirits — the idea that the very essence of social well being and health could be encased in concrete and that detoxification simply required a command of the aesthetics of purity. The edifices of this era, or their remnants, are testimony to the failure of utopian architecture to achieve transcendence. The “joys of self-fulfilment” which Eileen hoped the human being could rediscover through her constructions, remain at large; her own home left incomplete, fractured.[ii] In an arcane spiritualism, the design of our buildings holds hope and vision and promise. Sometimes it holds dread. Sometimes it holds ghosts. Sometimes it expunges them. In E-1027, vacated love leaves stains on the floors.
Beauty speaks like an oracle, and ever since man has heeded its message in an infinite number of ways.
neighbour
In 2014, engineer and ecologist Jessica Green, begins gathering dust samples from a freshly constructed, unused university building in Oregon. Having previously studied the swells of microbial life which circulate through air-conditioned hospital rooms, she finds a disproportionate amount of pathogenic bacteria. The patients, in other words, are stewing in their own microbial juices. Opening a window to the outdoors — a simple act — fertilises the air with harmless drifts of organisms from plants and soil instead, which outgrow the fearful ones and rapidly slow virus levels. Now she turns to this newborn building, as others are studying the bacterial landscapes of human infants, to catalogue its microbiome. She swabs over 300 classrooms, toilets, halls and offices for analysis. Her findings show that every single design choice we make shifts the microbial ecosystem of our architectures.
How large a room is, its occupancy, its ventilation, its shape, its texture, its thresholds and passageways, all make alterations to the demographics of bacterial aggregates — and they, therefore, alter us. The architectural space collapses into us, inhabiting us, contorting our interior worlds. We might describe these phantom communities moving ‘indoors’ with a kind of horror, beyond comprehension and elusive to sensory perception as they are. They wreak havoc with what it means to be an individual and confound the idea that we live amongst discrete benign materials. The walls we build to hold us oscillate with strange life. They hum with a bodily knowledge of a kind we cannot recognise. They are, it appears, possessed.
Serenity is the great and true antidote against anguish and fear, and today, more than ever, it is the architect’s duty to make of it a permanent guest in the home.
diviner
Teresa of Ávila, a famed mystic and Carmelite nun writes El Castillo Interior in 1577. She hosts a vision in which she sees the soul materialise as a castle containing seven successive interior chambers — a journey to faith in which every dwelling place takes you a step closer to God — and reluctantly commits it to words, lamenting the failure of language to capture what she has seen. Her concept of interior life is profound, enclosed as she is by the walls of a monastery within the walled city of Ávila — the indoors seeps into the messages she receives. The architectural space takes on its own sublime purpose, though it stands as much for her containment as it does for freedom. Her body is the medium through which she carries out her divine work, experiencing bliss, pain and ecstatic suffering. It is rumoured that when in a state of rapture, she will occasionally levitate, which causes her great embarrassment.
The transmission of the mystical experience involves a kind of bodily sight. The broadcasting of a knowledge located in the terrain of a sensing body, perpetually open to affective shifts and continuous with an external other. A radical empathy. The spiritual body, as a vessel for collective ideas, produces a knowledge which attempts to get at something beyond reason; to express a profound unknowability.
Only in intimate communion with solitude may man find himself. Solitude is good company and my architecture is not for those who fear or shun it.
healer
In 1941, in an unstable condition of despair after witnessing her lover being taken away to a prison camp, Leonora Carrington flees France for Spain. She begins to fear that her personal choices might cause great rupture in her exterior landscape and amongst the people around her, as though her substance is intimately linked with that of the earth. She writes “I convinced myself that Madrid was the world’s stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring this digestive organ to health.”[iii] In a process of relentless diagnosis, her anxieties and appetite to care reach out beyond her body — the city is sick and she must heal it. She is haunted by the thought that she does not possess her flesh in its entirety. She is committed to an asylum in Santander with delusions.
In her memoir of this time, Leonora exercises a kind of ‘body-writing’ to relay her understanding of penetrability and vulnerability. Her language moves freely between reason, fiction and disorientation, refusing the same romanticisation of female madness which characterised the work of the surrealist artists she is often associated with. The institutional condition of sanity presupposes the self as a thing with tightly defined edges, whole and intact. Possessed with a metaphysical power over the world, Leonora’s body is declared by those around her too fractured, too absorbent, her mind too open to invasion. Her rapturous attunement with the outside, reduced to hysteria. Rather than pathologising her mental state, however, her own writing hovers in a comfortable state of perplexity. She finds joy in uncertainty and, with hesitancy, reaches towards the unexplainable, her words saturated with the felt experience. A holey archive of inner landscapes.
My gardens and homes allow for the interior placid murmur of silence, and in my fountains, silence sings. [iv]
Laura PlantPlaces that hum was written on the occasion of Lifting Belly, an exhibition at CentroCentro Madrid and a publication curated by Laura Plant, Marta Cacciavillani and Lxo Cohen. The project was the culmination of the 2020 edition of the Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid’s Young Curators Residency Programme, coordinated by Alex Alonso Díaz. The exhibition included work by artists and writers Alfonso Borragán, June Crespo, Marina G. Guerreiro, Ariadna Guiteras, Martin Llavaneras, Carlos Monleón, Claudia Pagès, Blanca Pujals, Victor Ruiz Colomer, M Reme Silvestre, and Leticia Ybarra.
Endnotes:
[i] Rowan Moore, Eileen Gray’s E1027: a lost legend of 20th-century architecture is resurrected, The Observer (2015)
[ii] Eileen Gray, L’Architecture Vivante (1929)
[iii] Leonora Carrington, Down Below (1944)
[iv] Luis Barragán’s acceptance speech for the 1980 Pritzker Architecture Prize in italics.
