I have used concrete consistently to indicate certain things. One thing is that it goes from liquid to a solid in its naturalness. And concrete is universal.
Architecture is about resolutions and combining physically--[pause]--I’ll get it. Architecture is about bringing things to-
gether, like floors to ceiling and floors to walls. Relationships. I felt that if I wanted to expand this information, that I would The jar of water I call Hundred Year Old Water because I was told by an antique dealer that the object that the water came from was one hundred years old, so I call it my Hundred Year Old Water.
I have a collection of jars. I can’t remember whether--I could probably tell by looking at the water whether it was here or elsewhere.
take off the trim, which is the precious thing that architecture was about. It’s about trim and joining and selecting and all that sort of stuff. I wanted to just--people say, “Oh, look, you can see all the window weights.” That didn’t interest me as much as the idea that we’ve caused people to pay attention to this particular detail...
The window was broken, and I felt I didn’t want to necessarily repair it, but it’s the--I wanted a material that communi-
cates the inside and outside. You know, there’s a tape that goes with this. Did I play the tape for you? What I did on the tape is to describe the view. A sort of loop, it keeps going.
Excerpts from David Ireland, Inside 500 Capp Street: An Oral History of David Ireland’s House, an oral history conducted in 2001-2002, by Suzanne B. Riess, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2003.