The Beginning of Mess, Dirt, Things & Domesticity An Urban Chaos: architecture that is never complacent but challenges the conventional. We tend to associate ‘dirt’ with an offensive stature.13 But such dirt is a part of our daily life. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass merchandising, advertising, and the constant blurring of identities. For the dirty architect, the fiction already exists. It’s then the job of the domesticated human and dirty architect to invent the reality.14 We look towards the life of an obsessional artist. Their studio in a constant state of chaotics. They “sleep there, urinates in the hand basin or out of the window”.15 These are the realities of Mess and Dirt we are confronted with in a true domestic scene. The assemblage of such an architecture is completely disordered, everything appears out of place, but feels comfortable.
In Tour Bois-le-Prêtre, the assemblage of things does not act to decorate spaces which is evident in Miesian forms. These messes of things and artefacts themselves occupy and inhabit space. You begin to immerse yourself in a place of the known; the mundane. A red bucket acts as a plant pot, it’s not a sterile ceramic, it’s humanised, it’s known. It’s presence on the balcony begins to inhabit it. The mop next to the bar fridge in case spills occurs. We notice in the Tour Bois le Pretre the concrete flooring becoming possessed with stains of the everyday. Materiality is a crucial element into communicating the messes of domesticity and a sense of adaptation. There is an objective to admire the impure varieties of the surfaces. To enjoy such impurities when the concrete flooring becomes scuffed, stained, and weathered.16
13 Campkin, B. (2007) Ornament from grime: David Adjaye’s Dirty House, the architectural ‘aesthetic of recycling’ and the Gritty Brits, The Journal of Architecture, 12:4, pp 367-392. 14 15
Allen, S, SANAA’S Dirty Real ism, 2020, pp 58. Campkin, B. 2007, Ornament from Grime. pp 367.
16
Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, pp. 18-19 17
