LA FABRICA

In Residence: Ricardo Bofill on Nowness.com

It's a strange thing, seeing photographs you have poured over so many times you are certain you understand their deepest intricacies begin to move before you.

Yet, Albert Moya has done a beautiful job of transforming the sequence of images - stills, almost stills, and slow pans - into a sense of the quality and sequencing of the space. This short film outdoes the images in ways I could not even have imagined.

Within the raw shell - those curtains, that lush greenness, the furnishing! Suddenly Bofill's place has a denseness to it - it is full of space and possibility.
Bofill says it best himself:

It’s here where I know how to live, here where I know how to work
Where I start to think and project, my life is always made up of projections,
because the profession of architecture leads you to project the future,
so this influences your own mind
My life is always a project moving forward,
more than a story from the past

The idea of a space which helps you to understand what it means to march through life as yourself - a space which just fits  - that's a fairly wonderful thing to search for.

NAKAO

"Architecture must now immediately abandon its mythical function of protecting the interior from the exterior and seek rather, through its original function as edge, to protect the exterior from the interior. Instead of hastily repairing the unexpected hole found in the heart of the interior, it must give the hole firm edges so that it will not be filled. Since providing edges or contour is a means of producing a dimension of depth, architecture, by adhering to this trait of character, can make an abrupt dent in, or open a hollow in, our uniformly interiorized, glue-like environment. Architecture will make spaces like puddles in the dips of a paved road, not only altering our monotonous walking rhythm, but also moving us to get our feet wet, cheerfully, in a child-like way. At such a time, our physical bodies might attain that almost cruel brightness of the tram, at the end of Kafka's 'Metamorphosis,' when it carries the family that has set out for the suburbs, leaving the maid to clean up Gregor's dried remains." Hiroshi Nakao, 1998
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