The Atmospheric Expression
Installation into reality Architecture is the art that has most adepts because it is about real things. 28
Installation is the way of making whose logic of adaptation and reversibility is capable of assimilating the speed and suddenness of fast transformations characteristic of our daily life. It is its reversibility (being provisional) that allows one to settle respectfully in the contexts charged with significance, without suggesting a substitution or irreversible modification of the existing environment. The logic of installation works as a process of a progressive creative dislocation of material culture, that manipulates the signifiers and socializes leisure time through do-it-yourself in our own daily life. In Erskine’s case this form of settling came as a result of the compromise with his surroundings (occupied by things of a certain disposition, men and atmosphere) made after his experience with the Box. Erskine installed, set up, but did not modify his house in Drottningholm. It was the respect for the pre-existing conditions of the site which convinced the local municipal authorities to allow its construction after seven years of struggles. [figure 8] When Erskine drew a tree, a rock or any small topographical change, it was actually there. This careful registration of the site reflected his respect for nature through the respect of physical reality. According to Erskine, only such procedure, as a part of the experience lived by men, was capable of generating a support on which it would be possible to make architecture, exercising with it a profound introspection toward the genesis of architecture as a constitutive action of human environment. 29 This turn towards actuality, which would be adapted by the Team X 29 — See Peter Slorterdijk’s analysis generation, meant for Erskine the recuperation of in Spheres II , especially chapter 3. Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Para una ontología the sensible reality. When things are built sensibly, del espacio cerrado’ (For an ontology human language reflects secondary significations of the enclosed space), in Esferas II (Madrid: Siruela, 2004), 219–282. associated with phenomenological sensations or 28 — Ralph Erskine, ‘What is to be an Architect’, in 63 Perspective Jubilee Edition (Manitoba: University of Manitoba, 1963), quoted in Stefano Ray, Ralph Erskine: architteture di bricolage e partecipazione , 7.
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