Plans And Sections Of The Winchester House

...regarding a certain practice of the indoor wild, whereby homes--which are, out of long habit, avowedly definite--lose their drawn lines. The particular horror of squirrels in the ceiling, or a centipede in the kitchen, is the erosion of the drawn line.

Some designers work for grain, work for involution, work for involvement; work to make the sightline reel. No; a true grain may only be purchased through this surrender of control. You purchase it through leaving the last thing and nailing on the next. You can make a corpus this way; nail the feet to the legs, to the hip, to the guts, to the rib. A career like this is a blissful, evolving thing.

A wilderness of rooms is obtained through a surfeit of rooms. Which needn't be the same room each time, needn't be many rooms, only more rooms. Wilderness is only extent, passages and passages and passages. When the habit of building outlasts the habit of economy, these effects will be obtained.

There can be only so many glaring exits from the wild house. Only the long border. The way across the mountains and through the side of the checkpoint. A long border and your feet travelling along it.

Mulberry Leaves

I see you as the mulberry-plant, which:

• Grows gratefully into the niche it is given, even an asphalt scrape at the corner of a yard; or will as readily be a tree in a wide patch of plain.


• Bears resentment, frequently summary removal, from the very ones who would rationally take and enjoy its fruit.


• Is the low and disreputable humus from which the glory of silk proceeds.


• Throws off joy in the form of senseless and profligate leaves.

On Miscellanies

Miscellanies simulate a quick flight through the everyday, obeying a directive for novelty; composing the whole herbal for the vegetal novelty that grows around any wayfaring stranger.

The miscellany's first impulse is to class; second, to array; third, to move safely away. It shies from any full description, for fear of losing its indicial starting point. The miscellany clings by a point to the individual body, making fast an initial contact and forgoing any act of expansion. It draws lines as far as the body's arm will go; and meanwhile that body is running through space, gathering some hundred strands.

The miscellany assumes experience to be data, in the sense of a finite storehouse of datums; in the sense of being given gifts on the mere occasion of asking; in the sense of what can be freely given, and nothing beyond that.

The Domain Of...

Making a domain is a matter of extending one influence evenly throughout a certain tract of space. Starting with a topographically homogeneous area is helpful but not necessary; establishing political sovereignty is helpful if troublesome; minting a new currency is helpful, though not always practical. Re-making the terrain into the shape of one face is satisfying in the short term, but will likely prove counterproductive with time (a face is liable to be mis-attributed).

To start making a domain, incarnate a miniature of the desired domain; that miniature will incorporate all salient features of the domain-to-be and serve as a ready reference for anyone inquiring as to those features. It could be a uniform, with badges; a carved monument; or a reasonably small scale model. It must in any case be on public display.

Next, travel through the planned domain and remove any elements outside of the miniature. Replace those elements by expanding approved elements.

Post signs around the periphery: "This is the domain of ..."

Barn

This was a barn I often visited.

On the left is the ground floor. The wide aperture is where the truck comes in. Just beyond that is where the motorcycle is kept. Both of those spaces are connected to the workshop: table saw, jigsaw, clamps, a radio. There are also stairs with some boxes underneath them. Somewhere in there is a riding mower (not a tractor).



The loft is on the right. It is one open space filled with boxes full of photographs, magazines, and record albums. In front is a small opening for swinging your legs out of. From there you can look over the driveway and the road beyond.

Enlarge

Many persons with their faces along the edge of the frame. By "frame", I mean window.

Why then can they not sleep?

They can't sleep because they are looking out from the window.

...

"I ask you to enlarge the potentate to threaten me boldly." I wrote that down, and asked in the morning what it meant. Well. A bald statement about the prostate?

...

Two ways to enlarge:

-to take an envelope, cut it in pieces, and pry apart the glued edges

-to find a slider that is labeled "enlarge".

...

A disagreement when we had to paint the house. We could either paint it white, and hope for the best; or use off-white and have done with it.

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Vote on a topic. Your choices are: "The Significance of an Upside-Down Cross", "Utility Knife", "Characteristic Indianapolis", "Rigorous Matter of Part-Wholes", and "A Doge for Two Deacons".

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Q: Steps it's too late to walk up?
A: An Olympic podium

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YBDF staffer Joanie opts for "Charateristic Indianapolis"; she doesn't have a single picture to think with in this case. P.J.'s taste runs to "Utility Knife". Rick?...OK, another vote for "Utility Knife". Judith played in a band in her teens and would like to hear more about "The Significance of an Upside-Down Cross". What's a deacon? I'd like "A Doge for Two Deacons".

...

11 things in a row: a house, flowers, a lawn, septic tank, a lawn, rail fence, a lawn, pear tree, a lawn, patio, a house.

...

Q: How do you sleep on top of a pear tree?
A: I'm a bird

Strum And Drum

1.
A common dream--to take up instruments without amplification, and take them to an area void of any need for entertainment, and play music of scrupulous wholeness with its assumed surroundings. Some people venture to sing songs about the nature they perceive, and some essay further, to play trees, grass, and stones. They may rhythmically drop stones in differing depths of water, and tell themselves that a) they are re-enacting a first utterance of human music, b) they are re-enacting the artificial productions of over-bred instruments in a properly primary setting, c) they are embodying through gestures of intentional vagueness a persona redolent to other persons of wholeness, wisdom, and native genius.

2.
The recordings of these activities could be constructed so as to evoke hallowed friendship, sojourns in total communion of understanding; the tape recorder is something of a shy raccoon cocking its head ingenuously at the singular endeavors of the artists.

Then again, the practice could serve as a neat tag and audible badge for a branded group or family of artists.

The Sunlit Hospital

Nature improves and heals the human body. A shaft of sunlight, provided it be distinct, is a healing vector. To obtain consistent shafting, a grove of ample dimensions must be cleared in established forest.

A clear, grassy path of commodious width is made, to lead to a new clearing sprinkled with tall elms. The base plane is composed of a mix of innocuous grasses, fragrant herbs, and florets that dissipate lightly under the heel. One hears throughout the surrounding forest light rustlings and scamperings; this is the sound of ministering priests gathering the necessary ingredients for their poultices, mustards, tisanes, and decoctions. One by one, the priests arrive from the shadows, and return to their pots and teak tables to sort, wash, and stir; when their labors are complete, they summon nurses to administer the arrived-upon herbal aid.

The patients are borne in on canvas biers, then fitted upon stainless-steel armatures that have been driven into the ground at convenient intervals. They gently moan and flirt with great washes of fever, their swathed bodies cool and dappled, until such time as the prescribed cure begins to take hold. They are then issued a single crutch and allowed to depart with soft expressions of gratitude back along the cut path.

"What Means The World To You?"

The world is round and ringed with reference. There are any number of rings to place around it. Each ring holds an index, each at a different scale. Each ring tells you something different about the world.

The world is a choice of the objects that constitute it. If you can form a class of real objects, you have defined the world (for the moment). I see that the world is maple trees, and what interferes with maple trees.

The world was meant to be an arrow but started to bristle too much with feathers. That is, it was sent straightforwardly through time but became distracted with appearances.

The world is a floor laid perpendicular to a wall. You are more akin to the wall than the world.

You can leave the world with some difficulty. Or, your exit is the world's expansion.

Notebooks Out Paysagistes!

An interview conducted with "field architect" Tildy Junco in 1998 for WOOP-Jersey City's Perry Grimm Hour. Transcript presented with permission.

...

One hindrance to a real ecological understanding is this tendency to infer from working maps a simple generation of geometric forms from a unified ground. That the map has presented you with all the necessary information, the bare contours, and already excluded all the unnecessaries between. You need a sense of interpenetration. If your work is hooked into the larger site, if the site is too hooked into the region to even count as a site anymore, if you're hooked enough into the site to be inseparable from that--then!

...

Well, it's about breaking the habit of perception, of setting aside the picture in front of you, no matter how much you're into it. So, in regard to use, you could make some new typological prototypes, prototypes based less on those imperatives, places made from familiar words--park, or garden, or preserve, or yard. In the new prototypes, you would focus more on imaginative extents, places you can't put aside because you can't get a read on them. Really demonstrate that it's possible to apply precedents, to extend them, rather than follow them, or abandon them altogether. To start a project and, when I propose, to be able propose wholly, but without constraints--less for a lack of contexts, you understand, than a lack of inhibitions.

...

Superstructures can be made to fail--to lapse after the fact into a visible trace, a palpable trace. So you could intervene, create a particular form, and then leave it to spread out from that starting point. The nice thing is that it can grow halfway between you and "them".



...

We've made great efforts, but so far we've failed to derive any reasonably correct predictions of that interplay between plan-driven forms and intrinsically unstable material. So instead you see this history of wasteful hydrological, chemical heroics. I think we should try instead to deprecate those coherent borders, and work within better sureties--like stochastic regions.

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How can you challenge static representations without abandoning a common visual language? And how do you extend a representation in time without imposing narrative sequence?

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I think that a better bridge between ecological planning and individual initiatives can be found in middle terms between gardening and landscape practice.

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So make landscapes with intermittency and ways out, where the focus can wander, shift, and lapse. Miniaturize those points, intersperse them across a fabric, and you'll get ornament--natural or no.

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If you want to make infrastructure worth preserving, quote infrastructure in a preserve, and the preserve in infrastructure.

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Writing on a wall is just the first stage of making a haven. It's a mistake to think less of people who want to index their presences, or stake their claims, in the gentlest way possible.

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I'd say do less and indicate more. Imply the armatures you need to make, precisely to enable free action.

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It helps to watch the local conditions expressed in form--like the manifestation and incarnation of a soil in particular plant life.

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I don't retrofit out of constraints, but to have the benefit of constraint.

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I recognize the stipulated ethics of my profession: wealth in harmony, social peace, and the robust health of ecological process. If you can't practice them, you should at least represent them.

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Borderlessness and facelessness are the prime assets of my profession.

Three Black Bottles

On an nearby archipelago, cottagers pass their time making a peculiar sort of black bottle from the volcanic sand. When each bottle is done, they write instructions on a piece of paper, enclose the paper in the bottle with a smear of wax, and place the sealed bottle into the currents that pass near the beaches.

The currents form an unpredictable path of circulation around the island system, one too treacherous for boats. Having been passed about the system for a certain amount of time, the bottle comes to rest on another shore. A recepient finds the bottle in the sand, and is obligated to follows the instructions therein.

The culture of this archipelago, then, is one of mutual deity. Each cottager knows that their fellows author bottles just as they do. Far from debunking the process, this lends a lofty character to the most humble fellow inhabitant. What is more--to receive your own bottle back is not a demystification, but a more intimate relation with acting fate.