ABOUT APHORISMS AND REALITY KF
Somehow all this reminds me of something else I like about your writing, because you are very good at aphorisms. And I remember one that I think should be put over the entrance of every architecture school: “Architects don’t invent anything, they transform reality.” I think it’s such a telling observation. And it brings up the question of what is real?
ÁS When we spoke about method, I talked about making a lot of sketches to start with, often somewhat crazy ones. Now, if we speak about reality there are many, many interpretations or ways of looking at or capturing what it is exactly. And the reason I make many sketches is precisely this effort of trying to capture something more than the immediately evident, because the immediately evident is rather poor in the end; it’s too obvious and limiting.
ABOUT THE BODY KF
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The first time I had a sauna was in the small prefabricated house of Kristian Gullichsen, and I remember thinking that I hardly knew these people, yet everyone was taking their clothes off, also with the help of a little alcohol. So, step by step, everybody became naked, and we’re also a little drunk, right? And that’s in my memory, anyway. This actually reminds me of something else, of when you say this beautiful thing about the body. I wrote here that the idea of existence and the body is very important in your drawings. And you say somewhere that one’s body doesn’t end with one’s body, but rather extends into the body of others. You make a point about an unavoidable collectivity in this way, though you don’t use this word. But I love this idea that the body and the mind don’t end with the individual, but go on into another body and mind. You say something like that.
ÁS Well, the body is the reference, the measure for us, for architects. When we make a stair we have to adapt it so that it’s comfortable, we have to measure how high it is, and so on. When we make a room it’s the same. Not only the furniture but also how we move. And then there’s the relationship between the different spaces. So in fact the body commands everything in architecture. The proportions, too, and it’s Leonardo da Vinci who makes that famous drawing of the proportions. Another thing about the body someone told me about to do with the design of now, I don’t know which project, is that it seemed like a face. And then I thought about it and I remembered that in many Palladian buildings you look and you see a face complete with eyes and nose and mouth, and so on. So, I’m sure we are entirely impressed by this continuous presence of the body, of our bodies and other bodies, and that everything begins with use, with bodily needs, with how we use a house or a chair, that everything is in fact commanded by the body.