[The writing group exercise this week: list two buildings or places; list words associated with them; and what is unusual or unexpected that happens in those buildings?...]
It's about a humanity in them, a sort of organic life: it's why, despite disparaging remarks from my sister and most other respectable artists, I love certain kinds of Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, Modernismo. Guimard, Gaudí, Mackintosh... what I wouldn't give to live in a house like that.
Which will never, of course, happen – the older houses are museums; and nobody carves like that now, it would take too long for anybody in the modern age. Nobody would shape the branches and leaves of a Guimard chair; nobody would even bother with the plainer ornaments of a Frank Lloyd Wright table. Costs too much, ultimately; workmen want to get in and get out, that's the way it is.
And those strange handmade houses of the seventies – wooden or earth, often eco-creations or hand-built, out in the forests – I was a bit young to get to live in one of those. It even seems hard to find them these days....
So the only way to indulge my passion for rounded corners, aside from occasional museum trips, is in my dreams. Those dream buildings: not only are they often complex, asymmetrical, sculptural, carved; they also have the advantage of all dream things – they can change shapes at will. In fact they can actually flow, not just appear to do so: as you turn your head the wall melts, a winding wooden staircase, with small windows that let in the late afternoon sun, leads in large, increasingly irregular curves down into a small room with a rocking chair and a double shelf of books. And perhaps if you look out the window you will see that this room is out on a hill, a steep one, and you look down into a valley filled with trees....
But then there are those other buildings in dreams: high, intricate ones, with many windows. Buildings with some symmetry, but a strange and complex one: they lean over, literally over, as parts are cantilevered out into a twilight lit up with flashes of lightning. And as you climb there are more rooms to traverse, and your goal seems to move further and further from you. Their green-gray stone keeps metamorphosing, at first when you are not looking, but with increasing contempt for your opinions about the appropriate behavior of granite and steel, in front of your face: mocking, they multiply, overlap and expand, while sirens and explosions wail up from the dark streets far below.
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