4 posts tagged “architecture”
At this point in my life, I want a house of my own more than anything else. It is a deep-seated desire that has steadily grown out of proportion. Now I can hardly contain it. I think about houses with the regularity and intensity that a teenage boy thinks about girls. Sometimes I can spend a whole day cruising down the streets looking at homes and remaking them in my mind. It is quite exhausting really.
Last week I neglected my studies considerably after phoning an estate agent just to get an idea of what is for sale and at what price. I ended up looking at one home after the next, until arriving at the one that really struck a chord. It is a quaint looking double story house on a street corner that is actually wonderfully large and spacious inside. It was built in the late 19th century, which explains the generosity of the space allocated to each room, the broad yellow wood floors, the high ceilings, thick walls and heavy wooden fittings. The garden is right beside the house, measuring its width and about one and a half times it’s length. It is flanked on one side by the house and by high walls the rest of the way around. Instead of making the garden feel boxed in though, it kind of wrapped it up and made it feel private and cosy. Despite the size of the house and garden they came together as a compact unit. No matter where I was standing I had a sense of where I was in relation to every other part of the property and this felt incredibly comforting for some reason.
Nancy said she felt the same heartening feeling the moment she walked through the front door. It was so easy to imagine us having a family there. For days afterwards we spoke about the house incessantly and thought of every which way to buy it. But there just wasn’t any, which left us sad and exasperated... Once I am working again next year I will probably be in a position to apply for a home loan and look for a place in earnest, but until then the idea of owning a home just is a dream.
Our project for the Design course method last week coincidentally had to do with housing too. We had to design a portable shelter for a homeless person that had the potential to be produced. My concept was a meter-square box on wheels that is small and light enough to push around. Inside the box are two slightly smaller boxes that can be pulled out like a concertina to create a 2.7-meter long shelter in which to lie down and sleep in. At the back of the meter-square box, a smaller half-meter wide box is attached magnetically and used to store things in. It can also be detached and used separately as a cart.
While I was working on the project I thought about what it must be like to be homeless. Do they even have the desire to own a home? Or is a roof over their head and a warm bed the most they could wish for? I am so caught up in my own world that I never really spare them a thought. They exist on the very periphery of my world, as I do in the world of the rich. As the homeless probably wish they could live in a house, regardless who owns it, I wish I had a house, regardless of how fancy it was.
In keeping with the house theme, I am reading The Architecture of Happiness. Like all Alain de Botton’s books, it is well crafted, thought provoking and beautiful to read.
The house has grown into a knowledgeable witness. It has been party to early seductions, it has watched homework being written, it has observed swaddled babies freshly arrived from the hospital, it has been surprised in the middle of the night by whispered conferences in the kitchen. It has experienced winter evenings when its windows were as cold as bags of frozen peas and midsummer dusks when it’s bricks held the warmth of newly baked bread…Although this house may lack solutions to many of its occupants ills, its rooms nevertheless give evidence of a happiness to which architecture has made its distinctive contribution. (p10 and 11)
“We value certain buildings for their ability to rebalance our
misshapen natures and encourage emotions which our predominant
commitments force us to sacrifice. Feelings of competitiveness, envy
and aggression hardly need elaboration, but feelings of humility amid
an immense and sublime universe, of a desire for calm at the onset of
evening or of an aspiration for gravity and kindness – these form no
correspondingly reliable part of our inner landscape, a rueful absence
which may explain our wish to bind such emotions to the fabric of our
homes.” (p.121)
It was my birthday today. I am now 31 years old. It feels pretty much like being 30 to be honest, which felt identical to being 29, which in turn was not all that different to being 28. Come to think of it I haven’t aged much since I got married. That was the real turning point towards adulthood for me.
Last night I went out with a couple of fellows in my class for drinks at a pub named the Rat and Parrot. We sat around talking about this and that when the conversation turned to women. One of the guys was explaining how he likes a certain girl in our class very much but had to put her off limits because she has a boyfriend. He then delved into this particular dilemma, branching off only to explain how loving someone means putting your heart on the line and how that is what scares him about getting involved in a relationship.
I couldn’t really care less to be honest.
I have been through all this myself countless times. Lord knows I have covered the length and breadth of the topic in a similar environment when I was sick for love myself. But I have long graduated from this kind of predicament. As an adult the whole issue is a lot simpler to me now. If you like a girl, let her know and take it from there. Girls want to be swept off their feet, and if you are a decent guy and treat her right and make her happy, she’ll probably end up being your girl.
In a break during the guy’s monologue I tried to put it to him like that, but to no avail. I came to realise that although we are about the same age, he is still a child and that he will have to grow and solve the mystery of women and relationships for himself. I felt awfully lonely in his company though. I would much rather have been talking to someone like my brother or my cousin about the kind of adjustments one has to make in life when you are intricately involved with someone. That is where I am at now. That is what makes me realise I am an adult.
For my birthday today I went cycling around Grahamstown taking photos of some of the homes in the area. They are average homes, modest even, but very homely. Many of the homes are date back to the nineteenth century when Grahamstown was stronghold town for the British settlers. In some areas all the houses are in the region of 100 years old. The gardens around them are equally established with such tall shady trees that it was actually difficult to photograph the houses nesting in the background.
I love Grahamstown. It is a wonderfully clean, tidy and peaceful little town. My wife, Nancy asked me today how I am enjoying it down here and I told that it has surpassed all my expectations - that it really agrees with me. If I were to be offered a post at one of the beautiful schools in the area, I would feel hard pressed to decline it.
Anyway, after looking at so many houses today I really wish I had one of my own. It needn’t be anything large or fancy, just a little place in a good spot that I can lovingly restore and turn into a home. My desire to own a home is nothing new to me. It has been growing steadily over the past few years. In Taipei, Nancy and I came very close buying property. Once we actually signed the papers and put down a deposit on a place before changing our minds about it at the very last second. I guess wanting a home is also a part of being an adult - In the standard order of things it is what comes next after getting married. Besides, at 31 I think it is high time that I had some property behind my name.
Slowly but surely I am starting to find my way around Grahamstown. It is just small enough to get to know inside out,but just big enough for that to take a while.
This morning I set off on foot from Hill 60, the area I live in, to the Education department at Rhodes University. It was a pleasant 30-minute walk along grassy sidewalks past some gorgeous nineteenth century buildings like St. Andrews school, which is solidly built of stone.
I had my camera with me to take some shots of the historical architecture about town, but the weather was not particularly obliging. For the past few days the sky has been a deep cerulean blue that brought out the colour of everything beneath it, but today it was a murky white because of a thick blanket of fog hanging over the town.It makes the sky look blown out in photos. Hopefully tomorrow the weather will clear a bit so that I can capture what it is that I so love about this town: the buildings.
One of my favourite authors is Alain de Botton. He writes philosophical books on a range of topics that most of us think about in some depth, like what makes one person fall in love with another, why we feel it is important to have status and what motivates us to travel to far away places. The first book of his that I read was The Art of Travel, which was a unique, original look at what people expect to gain from their travel experience. I loved it so much that I immediately bought How Proust Can Change Your Life followed by Status Anxiety. Both very readable and life changing in their own right. Now I have become aware of another book of his called The Architecture of Happiness. It deals with the influence of ones living environment on on one’s sense of well-being and happiness. The central question in the book, I believe, is what makes a home perfect? On a recent TV show called The Perfect Home, which is based on the book and presented by De Botton, he showed different homes of different architectural styles in an attempt to narrow down the essence of a perfect home. To some it was a place that was clean, uncluttered and functional, like a Le Corbusier designed home. To others is was something that felt warm and cozy, like a cottage style home.
For the program De Botton travels across the globe, stopping in places like the United Arab Emirates, England and Japan to compare ideas and standards of beauty. It really is a fascinating. I can well understand how some people consider an ornate building regal, while others consider it garish. So too can I understand why some might find a smooth steel and glass building modern and inspiring while others find it cold and clinical. It would seem then that there is no single answer to the question about a perfect home, except that it depends on who lives in it.
I would love to know what De Botton would make of Taiwan though. It truly is unlike any other place I have been to or know of in that the majority its people don’t place much emphasis on their homes. The outside walls are inevitably left to age and decay under a build up of sticky black soot and muck. Bits and pieces, like burglar proofing and awnings are added on without any sense of design or care creating a messy jumbled up corrugated iron scrap yard look. The inside of Taiwanese homes are not much better. I have never once been in a place that felt remotely homely. Walls are white washed in cheap industrial paint, bare neon rods provide harsh lighting, plastic chairs, fold up tables, sofas with the plastic left on and appliances with the stickers left on are the norm across the board.
I remember thinking that “ A home is one’s castle” doesn’t apply in Taiwan. Instead it is just a place to watch TV and keep out of the rain. No matter what conclusion De Botton draws at the end of his exploration on architecture and the factors that make up a perfect home, it won’t apply to Taiwan because despite the flickering of enlightenment that that can be seen in the current construction of apartment blocks in Taipei, the island as a whole is still 50 years from adopting this universal concept in their own way of life.
Walking about Grahamstown today was a delightful experience because in this part of the world people do care about the spaces in which they live. It may not be nearly as wealthy or modern as it is in Taipei, but it is infinitely more attractive. Even the poorest people living up on the hills far on the outskirts of the town have thoughtfully painted their homes in cheerful colours and tried to make them pretty in a way that De Botton would understand.
Sidewalks, gardens, tree-lined streets and homes that are cared after are essential to my sense of well-being. I am so relieved to be in a place once more where I can put my eyes onto something beautiful again. I have been starved of this pleasure for years.
