Maison Bordeaux

The Maison Bordeaux is a private residence of three floors on a cape-like hill overlooking Bordeaux.
The lower level is a series of caverns carved out from the hill, designed for the most intimate life of the
family; the ground floor on garden level is a glass room half inside, half outside for living; and the
upper floor is divided into a children's and a parents' area. The heart of the house is a 3x3.5m elevator
platform that moves freely between the three floors, becoming part of the living space or kitchen or
transforming itself into an intimate office space, and granting access to books, artwork, and the wine
cellar.

A couple lived in a very old, beautiful house in Bordeaux. They wanted a new house, maybe a very
simple house. They were looking at different architects. Then the husband had a car accident. He almost
died, but he survived. Now he needs a wheelchair.

Two years later, the couple began to think about the house again. Now the new house could liberate the
husband from the prison that their old house and the medieval city had become. "Contrary to what you
would expect," he told the architect, "I do not want a simple house. I want a complex house, because
the house will define my world..." They bought land on a hill with panoramic views over the city.

The architect proposed a house or actually three houses on top of each other. The man had his own
'room', or rather 'station': the elevator platform. The movement of the elevator continuously changes
the achitecture of the house. A machine is its heart.

Sursa: http://oma.eu/projects/maison-a-bordeaux

OMA - Office of Metropolitan Architecture. Maison

a Bordeaux
The Maison a Bordeaux is a private residence of three floors on a cape-like hill overlooking Bordeaux.
The lower level is a series of caverns carved out from the hill, designed for the most intimate life of the
family; the ground floor on garden level is a glass room half inside, half outside for living; and the
upper floor is divided into a children's and a parents' area. The heart of the house is a 3x3.5m elevator
platform that moves freely between the three floors, becoming part of the living space or kitchen or
transforming itself into an intimate office space, and granting access to books, artwork, and the wine
cellar.

A couple lived in a very old, beautiful house in Bordeaux. They wanted a new house, maybe a very
simple house. They were looking at different architects. Then the husband had a car accident. He almost
died, but he survived. Now he needs a wheelchair.

Two years later, the couple began to think about the house again. Now the new house could liberate the
husband from the prison that their old house and the medieval city had become. "Contrary to what you
would expect," he told the architect, "I do not want a simple house. I want a complex house, because
the house will define my world..." They bought land on a hill with panoramic views over the city.
The architect proposed a house or actually three houses on top of each other. The man had his own
'room', or rather 'station': the elevator platform. The movement of the elevator continuously changes
the architecture of the house. A machine is its heart.

Program: 5 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms (main house); 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms

total area: 500m2

Awards: 1999 Le prix L'Equerre d'Argent, 1998 TIME Magazine Best Design of the year

Sursa: https://divisare.com/projects/302583-oma-office-of-metropolitan-architecture-maison-a-
bordeaux

Rockbottom: Villa by OMA

une condition trs ahum, ahum, ahum intressante, the voice booms in a big brick warehouse,
between broken bodies swinging suspended from the rafters and immense steel spiders loitering
around childrens bedrooms. Above, in the galleries surrounding the big space, are tight phalanxes of
youth concentrating on television sets, themselves being watched over by severely dressed art femmes.
This is not the new Metallica video. Rem Koolhaas is giving a lecture at the opening of the OMA
exhibition Living, in the Centre dArchitecture Arc en Rve in the Muse dArt Contemporain de
Bordeaux, which is currently running a show by Louise Bourgeois, the French artist responsible for some
of the most unsettling images in contemporary art. A thousand people have shown up. A hundred are
sitting in the actual lecture hall; the rest have to make do with televised Koolhaas. The exhibition
features four villas and an apartment project, all of which have been built and are lived in. The main
feature, the reason that the place is teeming with foreign critics and curators and French politicians, is to
be found somewhere else.

For that you have to leave the building, take a left, follow the heavy traffic to the north over the quay,
where the cars, trucks, gas stations, and discotheques are incoherently juxtaposed against the elegant
Louis XV sandstone river front. Then take the bridge over the river; follow it for a couple of kilometers,
drive inland through a sprawl of identical suburban houses and industrial buildings; take a winding road
up the leafy hill until you reach a private dirt road that brings you further up. To your left lies a pasture
with a ruin of an 18th-century tempietto, behind it an elegant neoclassical mansion, and in front of you,
on the top of the hill, a reddish brown box punctured with holes. On top of the box lies an I-beam that
sticks out on one side and is connected to the hill by a spidery steel rod, making the box look like a
balloon tethered so it wont drift away on the wind. As you come closer, the box appears to hover over a
cut stone perimeter wall. The dirt road is carved into the hill and burrows its way underneath the wall
into the courtyard.

The gradual unveiling of OMAs long-awaited Maison Bordeaux reaches its climax here. As a model,
the house was published a couple of years ago. The model can be seen in the exhibition, but now the
house can be visited with the architect and the client. Later, at a right moment, OMAdisplaying the
fastidiousness about images that seems to be an unavoidable part of architectural dinosaurdomwill
allow the world to see a small selection of glamor pics, bringing even more visitors up the dirt road. But
now, this afternoon, there is the extraordinary opportunity to see for the first time what the real house
looks like and simultaneously be there.

But if the whole sequence of events resonates with house, living, being there, and other similar feelings
of closeness to architecture, then why, at the vernissage, does Koolhaas lecture about Chinas
nonspecific, non-architectural, far-away, depersonalized, non-authentic, quantity-based, not-there post-
urban conditions? Why does he sardonically state that in China architects produce ten times as much,
ten times as fast and do it ten times as cheaply as their European counterparts and therefore can be said
to be a thousand times as good, and say this at the opening of an exhibition of projects that have taken
an ungodly amount of design time, for small fees, only to make something desperately unique, utterly
authentic, personal, and seriously Architectural?

Does this have anything to do with the post-S,M,L,XL Remchasm between practice and theory? With the
fact that right after finishing work on the big book, Koolhaas took a teaching position at Harvard on the
condition of not having to teach design, so he could undertake huge fact-finding expeditions into the
Pearl River Delta, Shopping, and Africa? After the meshing of seeing, writing, designing, and building in
his baroque gem of a book, he now imposes a stark distance between writing about things and making
things. The concentration on making hyper-specific buildings and the obsessive curiosity about the
world are now presented as two separate, sometimes conflicting fields of action. This is a dramatic
departure from the formula that has made this architect a star: by letting the descriptions and readings
of Manhattan, Singapore, or Lille meld with urbanistic designs or even architectural objects, a kind of
architectural and theoretical parallel universe was created: Remworld, paranoid-critically coherent,
accessible, imitable, exciting.

Well, kids, Remworld has shut its gates! You are invited back to reality, back to life. The stuff happening
in Shenzen, Sudan, or a shopping mall is there, for real, completely unaffected by our or anyones
interpretation. At the same time, the projects that are presented are not the models of a semifictional
urbanoid future, but are here, now, in your face and under your arse. The discrepancy between the two
destroys any hope for a coherent philosophical, methodological, or even narrative system out there that
might connect them. We have hit rock bottom. Now its for real.

Living

The house has been built for a wealthy publisher, his family, their guests, and some cars. The publisher
was paralyzed from the waist down after a car crasha rubber-burning, steel-twisting, bone-splintering,
marrow-leaking, nerve-splitting car crash. The design is, among other things, a monumental
accommodation to this fact. In no way does the architecture attempt to glaze over the minutiae of
everyday life with architectural elegance and solemnity, as so often happens in villa design. What
actually happened is that Rem Koolhaas has feverishly imagined architectural potential in this particular
familys life. He saw the limp lower body of the husbandsupported by a whole arsenal of trusses,
carts, beltsas architecture. He extrapolated this in a single, huge, heavy-duty contraption that
provides the man with a way of moving through the house. Subsequently this contraption was made
into the houses organizational core (A machine was its heart1): going up, going down, going up,
down, up . In counterpoint to this hydraulic simplicity, the beautiful and lithe wife moves through the
house at will, negotiating between the armpits and crotches of the house and its dematerialized,
entropic, smooth, modernistic planes. Koolhaas also saw architectural potential in his constructionally
counterintuitive decision to place the chromium tube on which the box-house lies off center, so that a
huge beam had to be placed and then anchored in the ground with a big rock, to stop the house from
toppling over.

Visitors cannot look at the house as an architectural model that can be separated from its specific usage.
The usual gaze of historians, critics, or architects wont do. In fact, you are investigating the most
intimate and personal details of this specific familys life; the gaze is that of the babysitter wandering
through the rooms, opening the drawers and looking in the medicine chest. At the same time, because
in a way the familys life has become architecture, the villa becomes strangely inclusive: a design
equivalent of MTVs soap vrit, The Real World. Lastly, the specific demands and wishes of this family
are dealt with not so much on an architectural level as on a planning and engineering level, emphasizing
infrastructure, technical facilities, zoning, and routing. The familys life has been treated as an urban
program that makes the house into a New Town and makes a visit to it an unexpectedly civic
experience. The mode of description that this house seems to ask for is therefore a combination of
abject speculation by a voyeur about the private lives of his desired objects and an urbanistic scenario in
which different propositions are linked together by a hypothetical sequence or route.

A day in the life: Early in the morning; after he has been lifted out of the automobile and placed in his
wheelchair, the glass wall slides open, and he moves into the kitchen, passes the monolithic concrete
stove, and slips behind his desk set in a lofty skylit space. Behind him, a sea-green resin bookcase goes
up three stories. A knobless door opens into a dark cavern containing the bottles of claret. On the desk
lies an industrial remote control device, a telephone, a newspaper, and a workbook for learning
Mandarin. He pushes the remote control, and the room moves up; he slides past the bookcase. It is
possible to stop at any point and take out a bookfor instance, S,M,L,XL.

After a couple of meters, the room locks into the floor of a stunningly glassy glass house, the metallic
floor flush with the hill. The man looks down into the parking space in between the perimeter wall; he
looks the other way over Bordeaux and the river; he looks around and sees some furniture, and also a
huge chromium cylinder and a thin rod, both connected to the big box floating above the living room.
He drives off the platform toward the view, goes into the garden where the path burrows into the
ground, and looks inside a flower. He drives back in, maneuvers himself behind his desk, and makes his
room go further up. He locks into the third floor; through the bookshelves he sees the terrace. Next to
him Gilbert & Georges Lifehead looks apotheotically skyward.

He moves away again and passes a number of physiotherapy contraptions, crosses the terrace, and goes
into the master bedroom. His wife is still sleeping. He quietly passes the bathtub, goes past the white
resin washing slab: a face floating by in the mirror. Back in his study, he sits a while behind his desk. One
porthole in the wall is precisely positioned to give him a view of the horizon; another is aimed
downward to give him a view of the hill. A therapist arrives and gives him a workout. His wife helps him
get into a different wheelchair for his shower. The water disappears in the cracks between the
floorboards. From where he sits with water running over him, he looks in the split separating the adult
half of the top house from the childrens part and sees himself reflected twice in the glass. Then his wife
dries him off and helps him into the hospital bed for a nap.

She takes a bath, gets dressed, and crosses the metal grate bridge between the two parts of the top
house into the childrens quarters. This half of the box is divided by diagonally placed walls that
strangely remind you of the folded door/walls around Louise Bourgeoiss childrens bedrooms at the
exhibition and, like those, seem saturated with memories and nightmares. She wakes some kids, springs
open some of the glass plates covering the portholes, and takes a medievally tight and dark spiral
staircasehidden in the chromium tubedown two stories into the TV room. She follows the curve of
the wall into the kitchen, makes herself some coffee and a croissant, takes it back in front of the TV, and
watches the Breakfast Show. She then gets up and enters a strange uteruslike staircase that takes her to
the living room.

Now she is surrounded only by huge glass walls; she slides away some of them and walks over to the
end of the metallic floor, where she looks out over smog-covered Bordeaux. In the middle of the living
room is a big square hole with a hydraulic steel shaft supporting the platform, which is now locked into
the top house of the house. Through the hole she peers into the kitchen. She walks back behind the
bookcase where her desk stands. She settles down to look at her e-mail; the wires of her PowerMac
sway in the wind. After a while, when the children are all ready, she rushes up the concrete stairs glued
to the bookcase and wakes her husband. He and the children will leave for the afternoon; she will
receive the architect and a group of guests who are extremely impatient to inspect every nook and
cranny of her home.

The house demonstrates the Paranoid Critical Method as a radical way of deploying the heat-oppressed
brain in architecture. Explained in (pop)Kantian terms, the P.C.M. can be understood as a psychologically
charged relationship between the world as it exists by itself, regardless of whether there is a human
observer to interact with itnoumenaand the world as it appears to us humansphenomena.
Koolhaass Paranoid Critical glare makes the noumena acquire such an obsessive intensity in the way
they manifest themselves in the brain of the beholderas phenomenathat they can be turned into
architectural facts and returned to the world as new noumena loaded with fear, love, disgust, angst,
ennui, lust. The reality of this family has become hyperreal in architecture. The product is what we might
call a concentration of phenomenally noumenal phenomena, or noumenally phenomenal noumena.

The Attack of the Haptic Experimentalists

However, in January 1998, Dutch architects Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos published a critical article
about Rem Koolhaass work in the magazine Archis, in which they set off Rems semantic-analytical
approach against the Haptic Experimental line taken by Zaera Polo and kindred architects (which they
also follow, as do Greg Lynn, Jeffrey Kipnis, Sanford Kwinter, et al.). Now that the more experimental
approach is rapidly on the risewitness, for instance, Gehrys Guggenheim Museum in Bilbaoit is
feasible that Koolhaass influence may decline in the coming years.2 There are two extremely peculiar
ideas in this little quote: first, to hoist poor old Frank up on the table and make him King of the Haptic
Experimentalists; second, to prophesy a backlash against Koolhaas by starting it. This is why they stress
the feasibility of Koolhaass decline instead of its possibility.

It is no wonder that as soon as Rem Koolhaas broke up the quasi-theoretical limbo in which even his
built work seemed to linger, and his work could no longer be seen as diagrams, models, or icons of his or
anyone elses writing, the rift between him and his Haptic Experimentalist counterparts opened wide.
The economy of avant-garde architecture in American universities requires a certain homogeneity of
writing, design technique, and architectural form. But Koolhaas seems to have abandoned this. His
jumping off the bandwagon is a gesture that can be taken as an omen for some radical changes in the
critical landscape of architecture and thought, changes that maybe not everyone can adapt to. A decline
in the influence of Rem Koolhaas would at this point perhaps be comforting to the Haptic
Experimentalists. (But whether trying to effectuate this decline is the best way to secure their future
remains doubtful.)

The harsh criticism by Van Berkel and Bos is partly fallout from the ANYhow conference in Rotterdam in
the summer of 1997, where Haptic Experimentalism tried to manifest itself as the new avant-garde with
a non-manifest manifesto, hesitatingly read by Sanford Kwinter. Koolhaas then launched repeated
attacks against the introverted formalism of this group. The line taken by Haptic Experimentalism is
that there can be real life, or real intelligence, or real excitement in the morphogenesis or emergence of
form brought about by experimental design techniques, computers, datascapes, mapping, etc. H.E.s
even go so far as to say that architects thinking lies entirely in the semi-autonomous design process: in
the model, the computer screen, or the crayon on paper.

To people who are not theosophically or otherwise mystically inclined to believe that there is
intelligence in the semi-autonomous production of blobs and lines inside computers, it is hard to find
any thinking at all in the architecture of Haptic Experimentalism. As becomes apparent from Van Berkel
and Boss article, the line holds that Rem Koolhaas applies techniques like folding and collage so rigidly
that they remain verbal constructs, and only acquire three-dimensional identity at a much later
date. The only way to define the future importance of Rem Koolhaass oeuvre is to subject it to a
formalist research, to divorce the formal manipulations from the verbal constructs. The hypothesis
seems to be that when OMA buildings are not surrounded by Rem Koolhaas rhetoric, they will appear
not to be so interesting after all.

Picking apart Van Berkel and Boss novel approach to Koolhaas helps us to focus on the tragic and
morally uplifting beauties of the villa in Bordeaux. First, Van Berkel and Boss argument that Koolhaas
uses collage and folding in a rigid way means that they understand content and visuality as architectural
form, as is indeed apparent from their own work. They see even the Paranoid Critical Method as a
historical architectural motif having to do with form. As classic art historians, they present a set of
stylistic attributes, call these formal manipulations, and designate these as the critical center of the
oeuvre. In other words, Van Berkel and Bos place the identity of the work in the way the design
techniques become directly visible, much as Bernard Berenson located the identity of the master of a
15th-century panel in the brushstroke. This was an important part of Berensons theatrical performance
as the connoisseur and the basis on which he could sell the panel to American art collectors. Maybe a
similar way of thinking about architecture also makes sense to the Haptic Experimentalists, as a basis on
which to sell their particular avant-gardist styles to state universities.

Second, saying that Rem Koolhaass architecture is semantic implies that he uses signs to denote well,
that which is denoted. How can we understand this? Is the moving platform a sign for the crippled man?
Is the superpositioning of the houses a sign of collage, of superpositioning things? Is the house a sign of
living? Is the whole design a three-dimensional diagram of a linguistic formula denoting the life of the
family? I think not. Just because the Paranoid Critical Method is expressed in language and is also
implemented in architecture does not mean that the architecture is a piece of language. And because
the house presents itself and is presented in terms of program does not mean that the house denotes
the program.

What makes the house is that it is a bit of world in your face; the world is neither denoted, as Van Berkel
and Bos imply, nor broken down into data and fed into an interiorized process of formal manipulations,
as is the case in designs by Van Berkel and Bos and their fellow H.E.s. The world has become
architecture, not by abstraction but by inclusion or rather intrusion. To put it in the terms of the great
theoretician of form and believer in the real, Gilles Deleuze (a philosopher often quoted by H.E.s), the
fact that the guy is crippled, or rather that a car crashed, is the difference that is given, the intensity
that actualizes the virtual form that is the house: a form that did not, even as a possibility, exist
before.

Gary Bates, architect at OMA, confessed that when he saw the house for the first time, he was fucking
scared, because it raises the stakes even higher. It does. It raises the stakes of how far OMA dares to let
the real in. After this house the world cannot as easily be censored before being let into architecture:
radical-chic caricatures of life can no longer be so easily translated into formally inventive masterpieces.
It is one thing to present innovative architectural ideas against the backdrop of Far Eastern statistics and
an ever-expanding, ever-progressing generic metropolis. Engaging the small, the personal, the painful
and the sad, and doing it beautifully, is another thing. Here is an architecture that has more to do with
steel spiders, broken bodies, and childrens bedrooms than with its own vocabulary of form or with a
parallel universe of imminent hypermodernization. During ANYhow, Rem Koolhaas asked Greg Lynn:
Are you a mystic? We eagerly ask Koolhaas: Are you a humanist?
1. Office for Metropolitan Architecture/Rem Koolhaas, Maison Bordeaux, OMA, Rotterdam, 1997.

2. Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, Formal Manipulations: OMAs Educatorium, Archis 1 (1998): 815.

Wouter Vanstiphout is an architectural historian and one of the founders of the Rotterdam research and design
firm Crimson. Together with Cassandra Wilkins and Michael A. Speaks, he is editor of Dutch Moral Modernism,
forthcoming from 010 Publishers.

Sursa: http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/5/rockbottom-villa-by-oma

Maison Bordeaux: A textile revisitation

This article was originally published in Domus 966 / February 2013

1 In the 1990s, Rem Koolhaas designed a house near Bordeaux for the Lemone publishing dynasty. The
500-square-metre building, completed in 1998, counts among the most important contemporary
buildings. Its exaggerated use of technology a huge platform hovering vertically through the different
storeys of the building responded directly to a personal tragedy: the family had already begun design
discussions with several architects when the client was involved in a serious car crash, leaving him
paralysed from the waist down. The building had to be adapted to the needs of a wheelchair user.

2 While some architects attempted to avoid the problem through a strict, horizontal arrangement of
rooms, Koolhaas chose to highlight and even intensify the problem; he made it the central aesthetic
gesture of his design solution. Through the building's three storeys, an expansive platform would rise as
a "room" with a vertically mobile floor. Floating past cupboards, wine racks and bookshelves, the (now
deceased) client enjoyed better access to high shelves and surfaces than a non-disabled person would in
a normal interior context. This effortless relationship with verticality, usually beyond reach for
wheelchair users, was spectacular. Koolhaas turned disaster into triumph: the floor glides and floats
between levels as if by magic.
3 The idea of literally moving the most fundamental of all construction elements the floorshould be
kept in mind when trying to understand how the artist Petra Blaisse, emphasising the inherent imagery
of the building, its imagination d'une vie, radicalises the idea
of dissolving boundaries and mobilising formerly static
elements in her design interventions in the house.
According to Gottfried Sempers clothing theory, which claimed
that the first room partitions were clothing, architecture did not
entail grafting wood or piling stone but rather spanning openings
with fabric

4 The Lemone home essentially consists of three houses piled on top of one another. One sinks into the
ground; the second is almost immaterial and light, entirely glazed, opening out to wide views over the
forest, across the Garonne and onto the old towers of Bordeaux; a third encapsulates the private
sleeping quarters and bathrooms with a concrete wall, punctuated with small portholes, merging an
atmosphere of immersion and shelter with a sensation of permeability. The wall becomes a rather
textile-like coating of the house, a sponge that allows the surrounding world to infiltrate the building
gently.

5 In the central, lightest and almost entirely glazed structure, Petra

Blaisse adds white, lightweight curtains and a grey, net-like membrane.
They do not merely form a filter in front of the glass, but can also be
drawn outside to encircle the spacious terrace, where the massive
concrete slab overhead balances heavily on a mirror-clad column. The
effect is amazing: a room comes into being, its textile walls constantly
changing shape in the wind. The walls swell and curve, blowing close to
those who sit around. Under its rock-like, concrete ceiling, the house
performs an improbably light "dance of the curtain walls" that seems to
defy statics: the heaviest component appears to rest on the lightest,
melting into thin air the notionally unalterable laws of statics that once
tormented the disabled inhabitant.
The trompe loeil effect of a light cloth is heightened by the fact that the fabric itself contains a circular window in
which the view to the forest appears as a picture like the darkness of the sea seen through the porthole of a
cosy ships cabin

6 An intrinsic aesthetic of the impossible moulds the house, and this same inspiring tactic is echoed and
pursued in Petra Blaisse's textile installation. The trompe l'oeil effect of a light cloth is heightened by the
fact that the fabric, which actually covers the glass, itself contains a circular plastic window in which the
view to the forest appears as a picture, like the darkness of the sea seen through the porthole of a cosy
ship's cabin.

In another room, square reinforcements carried by the light gauze of the curtain come to a halt in front
of the concrete wall's portholes. When closed, the square patches appear as back-lit abstract sculptures.
The curtain, formerly a twodimensional layer, gains depth; the former plane of the curtain wall deepens
into a space.
7 Just as an architect uses a pencil to sketch a floor plan, one can create an ephemeral room by drawing
a very long, light curtain along the ceiling, through the open space of the loggia. In this large expanse in
the Bordeaux villa, exterior space can be turned into an interior room with one simple, easy gesture that
changes, in an act of delicate spatiophagie, outside to inside, like the shoreline and the sea a
phenomenon reflected in the name of Petra Blaisse's studio, Inside Outside. This room is temporary, like
a tent, constructed with quiet gestures. It is an inside space from which the outside is visually excluded,
but in which wind, moisture, heat and cold can be felt. The outside is still present and, while screened
from sight, highlighted even more as a sensual experience. Again, Petra Blaisse's work echoes and alters
an idea of permeability inherent in Rem Koolhaas's architecture for a disabled inhabitant.

Anyone who enters becomes the object of a mysterious act, where spatial drifts allow new encounters

8 As with her carpets for the Seattle Central Library (20002004), Blaisse uses materials and colours, in
themselves subtle echoes and amplifiers of spatial atmospheres, to create a totally different mood, as in
the bedrooms for children and guests. While the curtains for the central floor are featherlight, like
blown-away Bauhaus ghosts, the groundfloor guest bedroom features a dark-brown silk that echoes the
darker shades of the earth and forest.

9 In the former children's bedrooms, however, the curtains are made of a shiny, slightly reflective light-
blue material, reminiscent of oilskin or 1970s children's toys. The materiality is unusual for an interior
space: it brings to mind the deformed surfaces of a glossy object, or a car. The curtain reflects its
surroundings, mirroring them slightly. At times functioning as a wall, the curtain suddenly takes on the
qualities of a mirror as a space-dissolving and space-unfolding object. A slit appears in the cloth; the
curtains seem to float in space, with the same improbable fragility as the house hovering above the
ground. Light hits the floor below the hem, drawing a meandering line. The boundary between interior
and exterior is loose, open, wandering, not clearly delineated.

10 The boundaries between ephemeral and static form become fluid. The classic modern idea of the
"curtain wall" is pulled from the metaphoric into the literal: the wall dances, a foil and a folly. Rooms are
drawn in space with the same improbable lightness as an architect drawing a line on a white sheet of
paper.

11 It is hard to discern from what material the curtains in Bordeaux are made. As Paul Valry once said,
they are "matire doutes": pulled flat behind a glass pane, with its circular window, the white curtain
resembles a paper wall.

12 One floor up, the fabrics create mirror effects, the building metabolising with shimmering reflections
and wafting walls. Translucent textiles shroud the mirror-surfaced column, which dissolves in reflections
and drapery just as the bedroom's thermofoil-like curtain reflects the exterior as well as the interior
of the room.

13 The concepts of public and private, inside and outside are softened, and the paradoxical motif of the
threshold as labyrinth emerges. While the classical tradition of European construction tends to
demarcate the boundary between public and private with a door in a wall a barrier that must be
opened and overcome to intrude upon the inside space the labyrinth constitutes a soft boundary. A
dense space created by layers of textile constitutes a subtle obstacle; it has neither doors nor any
indication of the precise location of the boundary.
The phenomenon of the barrier-free barrier is known from Northern African countries: towards the
street (which, in the souk, is often covered with fabric to protect the space from the sun, already
forming a kind of interior space), goods such as rugs or clothing are hung in tight rows; behind them, a
storage space gives access through a curtain to more private spaces like the kitchen, where family
members sit together. The transition between the private and public zone is extremely fluid. There is
rarely a door, instead a thicket of curtains and stacks; nevertheless, no stranger would dare to intrude
on these private areas, simply because he or she would get lost in this forest of objects and labyrinthine
layers.

14 The German architect Gottfried Semper was one of the first to comment systematically on the
etymology of architectural terms and the possible implications of their textile metaphors. In German,
the word Decke refers to both a blanket and a ceiling; Zaun ("fence") has the same etymological origin
as Saum ("hem"); Gewand, the word for "garment", contains the word Wand, or "wall". In Semper's
view, these terms were not only metaphors but also vestiges of a textile origin of architecture.
According to his "clothing theory", which claimed that the first room partitions were "clothing",
architecture did not entail grafting wood or piling stone but rather spanning openings with fabric.

15 Bizarre as Semper's anthropomorphic architectural history may seem today, it did enable the mental
model that a facade could be light, temporary and removable, an ephemeral form of clothing. Petra
Blaisse's ongoing process of reclothing the Bordeaux house seems to play with this figure of thought.
Wafting in and out, the curtains and the porous, rust-brown concrete wall are the image of a social
ideal: the building is not an exclusive bunker but a filter through which the world pervades the home.
The building is a social machine; the curtain wall is the curtain of a stage, of a space that stages a new
kind of social relationship.

16 This social dynamic of an unstable, constantly metabolising space was most recently enacted by Petra
Blaisse in the Dutch Pavilion at the 2012 Architecture Biennale in Venice. If the buildings of the baroque
era, like Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, seem to change their shape as a person walks
through them, the Venice installation takes a thrust reversal: the viewer stops and stands still,
immobilised amid constantly shifting curtains that run on complex tracks in the ceiling. New rooms are
constantly being formed, curving wildly through the empty building like the ghostly autonomous dresses
worn by Isadora Duncan or Loie Fuller, the famous Belle poque dancers.

Blaisse's studio spent three months drawing traces in the room, dividing and forming groups. This was
not merely an inhabitable sculpture; it was a model for treating empty, dysfunctional spaces, in which
light, ephemeral interventions curtains or cloth panels enable new collective experiences. Like
every good building, the installation achieved something outside the normative framework in which
space is thought, designed and described.

17 The turbulence of the architecture, creating ever-new rooms in an empty shell through relatively
simple means, makes the building an experimental stage for a new form of collectivity; anyone who
enters becomes the object of a mysterious act, an activist architecture whose dynamic spatial drifts
allow new encounters, situations and ephemeral configurations to arise. The textile architecture
enfolding the life of a family in Bordeaux expands into textile urbanism in Venice.

18 Almost all public activities are framed by acts of buying and selling: pedestrian zones, shopping
streets and public space are created by amassing shops, cafe tables and cinemas. These facilities
prefigure activity in public space as a sequence of consumer actions executed in a passive, seated
position: one buys a pair of shoes, tries on a pullover, orders a coffee or takes a seat in the cinema.

19 Petra Blaisse's pavilion creates a counterexperience. It is a space without letters, without messages,
without preset activities. There is nothing to buy, just a space of collective dtour and deviation, a stage
inviting one to evade and linger, look, talk and intersect with strangers. Maybe this could be the raw
material for a new narrative of public life. Niklas Maak, Berlin-based writer and art critic of Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung

Ten inside & outside curtains and two red carpets for Villa Floirac, 2012

Sursa: https://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2013/03/25/maison-a-bordeaux-a-textile-
revisitation.html