by Shou Jie Eng
There is a tension, a gap between this ocularcentrism and the body of dwelling—a productive space that bears revisiting.
I’ve been eyeing a carriage house, she tells me, late one night. I see a house in the dark, full of carts, without horses or humans. There is a painter on the second floor who is moving out. He is not there when we visit, but the space still has his scent. Whites and blues on the plywood floors, paced uncertainly into greys in parts. Tape marks on the walls. Racks, nearly empty, out of two-by-fours with their lumber stamps left on.
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Six parking bays for the five apartments in the main house
and the one in the carriage house
a historic house the John D. Hopkins House
the carriage house is in the record too
the stair that leads to the second floor
is only accessible from the face
invisible from the street.
/
She wants me to draw up the apartment for her. It will be on the second floor of the carriage house. She wants a large kitchen to cook in, and for friends to be with her as she cooks for them. She wants a six-foot tub with a good back, so that she can soak fully and sit up. She wants to replace the hanging fluorescent work lights. She wants to keep the heavy timber frame. She wants the light from the three p.m. sun to fall on the curve of her back, where her spine dips between her shoulders, on the weekends, when she is at her desk.
/
There is no gas line to the carriage house. And no hot water heater, either. How did the painter wash his brushes? I wonder silently.
/
The second floor is not large, which is why it has not sold. I show her two options for a bedroom, given the limited space. In response, she surprises me by asking about flexible living environments. She surprises me by bringing up critical Italian architecture from the 1960s. I remember a time when she used to hate talking about architecture and architects. You’re all so full of shit, she told me once, in the middle of an argument. You’re so full of shit, she meant. We talk, now, about soft surfaces and bedrooms. The give that a mattress has when you sit down on it, heavily, and let yourself fall backwards in frustration, I want to say, but do not.
/
We go back to the carriage house to take measurements for my drawings. She busies herself with the realtor while I set up. The smell of the painter is nearly gone. She knows that I prefer working in the vacancy of a space that has recently sold. The old stories are faint, and the new ones have yet to move in. I make a quick sketch of the apartment, pulling my tape from column centre to column centre, and filling my sheet with dimensions. The red spot of my laser measure dances across the clear span of the roof beams and lands on a white plaster surface. Somewhere below, a door closes. The laser catches her shoulder as she comes up the stairs. A shoulder I know well. Trapezius, deltoid, acromion, clavicle, the clavicular and sternocostal heads of the pectoralis major. Can you forget a body?—Often, I find myself recalling, with great fondness, a parapet detail, a ledger, a scupper. Occasionally: the clients to whose projects they belong.
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Every client is not a lover. Not every client is a lover. But in some way, all clients are lovers.
/
Towards the end, around our last argument, we did not speak. In hindsight, it seems our problems arose because I do not speak. My gestures, however, spoke volubly. We separated, I moved away, and then she did too. Four years ago, I was surprised when she sent me an email, saying that she had seen me through a window as I was passing by on the street. What are you doing in town again?
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A friend tells me that the painter probably washed his brushes in jars of turpentine and brush cleaner. That he probably saved the dregs in a container, taking it to a facility periodically. As I work on my drawings, I see the painter and his pail of runoff, both getting murkier over time.
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In a flexible living space, millwork becomes key. Cabinets become closets become tables become shelves become screens. You walk through a door, you walk into a wall. We start to talk about folding, turning, hiding, reciprocity. The language of everyday things gets loaded with meanings. We find ourselves face to face with our selves in a mirror when we close a door-wall, unable to look away. We pause, remembering, in the pantry-hall.
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Some parts of the timber frame will have to be swallowed up by the insulation, padded on the inside surfaces of the walls. We agree to mark the locations of the hidden columns with a piece of trim, a vertical detail, an annotation in space that says, at regular intervals, that something lived here.
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She tells me that she will build out the interior herself. She lays out and frames the stud walls, toe nailing each member to the bottom plate, heading out the doors and tying the assembly together with the top plate. The pencil in her hand marks a piece of spruce-pine-fir; the circular saw pauses, its foot resting on top of the lumber as she sights her mark. Her finger closes on the trigger, and the blade springs to life.
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Before she became a carpenter, she used to work at a wine distributor’s. They gave her bottles as gifts on occasion. I remember that a hundred bottles, give or take, would lie about her apartment, hidden behind furniture like cats. We would drink one and two more would watch us. They will need a home in the carriage house too.
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The trades rough in as she works on the millwork at her shop. Lines of water, supply and waste, gas lines, junction boxes. Blue board hung and taped at the seams, and a skim coat of plaster. Hands of hands unknown. I help to receive a plywood delivery at the shop, loading the sheets on a cart and moving them to the table saw. She lays each sheet down on the cross-cut sled, halving an eight-foot panel into two four-by-fours. Her hand grips the crank that raises the blade and turns. Teeth emerge from the throat of the saw. The language of the saw is an uncomfortable thing. The throat is a hole that does not really exist. Look in any manual. You will find the throat plate covering up the gap. You will find every last set screw described with a name and part number. But you will not find the void itself.
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Superstudio and Archizoom are the collectives most people think of when they think of critical Italian architecture from the 1960s. That is, if they think of critical Italian architecture, or if they think of Italian architecture, or simply, of architecture. The work of Superstudio is a work of figures and grids. Bodies—naked and clothed, cities, dogs and cows, friends, families, one child or many, parties, protests—are enmeshed in hashes of lines intersecting at right angles. The unit of the grid is practically scaleless, ranging from three centimetres to thirty metres, and the grid itself runs on to infinity. In one proposal, Superstudio dreamed of turning off the flow on the American side of the Niagara Falls, temporarily, as the Army Corps of Engineers did in the summer of 1969, to build a rectangular basin with a mirrored, stainless steel finish. The flow would then be restored, and water would thunder back into the basin, filling it up in 33 minutes, no seconds, and 94 hundredths [1]. During that time, water and reflected sky touch, throatless.
[1] Superstudio, ‘Niagara or the Reflected Architecture,’ 1970. In Superstudio: Life Without Objects, by Peter Lang and William Menking, 84, Milan, Italy: Skira, 2003.
I think, often, about the history of the specular that is embedded in speculation, from the links between sight and early modern science, to the algorithmic seeing of our present and future lives. There is a tension, a gap between this ocularcentrism and the body of dwelling—a productive space that bears revisiting. In a time where bodies and their worlds have become constantly framed and viewed, whether through glazed windows, Zoom screens, or political associations, I find myself returning to this space again and again, seized by the way that a detail, a line, or a thought can effect a change in scale and occupy the difference between senses. For it is not only that the “door handle is the handshake of the building,” as Juhani Pallasmaa writes; it is also that it says here I am, it is through me that you must pass.
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Shou Jie Eng is an architectural designer, researcher, and writer, whose work examines the relationships between spaces, bodies, and the material histories and cultures of craft. He runs Left Field Projects, a design studio located in Hartford, CT. His work has been published or is forthcoming in CARTHA and Paprika! and has been exhibited at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, WY.