A Frame for Life

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D inDe r Can a building, a space have memories? No. That would be a misunderstanding. Architecture is memory and without memory it is nothing. In its proportions, its use, its materials, its place, in its relationship to other buildings that have come before it, every space and every room is a built manifestation of a moment in culture and is tied, in some occasionally oblique, occasionally explicit manner to centuries of precedents. A good room is not just a space but a story and it is a narrative which needs never to quite finish, which can be added to or subtly changed. We can add our own endings, but we cannot determine that they will remain endings. And that is how it should be. Jerome K. Jerome wrote ‘I want a house that has got over all its troubles; I don’t want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.’ We are drawn to places that have a history, that display the marks of those who have inhabited and used them before us. ‘To live’ wrote Walter Benjamin’ is to leave traces’ as if those signs of wear, of use and inhabitation are ultimately all that is left of our existence. There is a tendency for designers to want to start again, to be fresh, a symptom perhaps of the neophilia we have inherited from a particular strain of modernism, an urge to purge, to strip out and cleanse. The early modernists were reacting exactly against place, theirs was an International Style, global and universally applicable. Modernism revelled in the obliteration of dark spaces, nooks, crannies, cellars – dark places which are the architectural equivalent of the sub-conscious. The aim was to expose everything to the light, to make everything easy to clean – transparent. Contemporary design culture however has acknowledged the value of the old and the existing. Now in architectural discourse, almost any treatment of the historic will feature a spiel about how the new is juxtaposed with the old, everything is contrast. But in this trend to polarise, the delicacy, the subtlety 7

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Above Study Photographed by David Lundberg 10

Above Backstage Photographed by Paul Raeside

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Above DAe Photographed by Magnus Mardin Right DAe Photographed by Paul Raeside 8

Above DAe Photographed by Magnus Mardin

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SoHo HouS e ne W yor k Can a building, a space have memories? No. That would be a misunderstanding. Architecture is memory and without memory it is nothing. In its proportions, its use, its materials, its place, in its relationship to other buildings that have come before it, every space and every room is a built manifestation of a moment in culture and is tied, in some occasionally oblique, occasionally explicit manner to centuries of precedents. A good room is not just a space but a story and it is a narrative which needs never to quite finish, which can be added to or subtly changed. We can add our own endings, but we cannot determine that they will remain endings. And that is how it should be. Jerome K. Jerome wrote ‘I want a house that has got over all its troubles; I don’t want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.’ We are drawn to places that have a history, that display the marks of those who have inhabited and used them before us. ‘To live’ wrote Walter Benjamin’ is to leave traces’ as if those signs of wear, of use and inhabitation are ultimately all that is left of our existence. There is a tendency for designers to want to start again, to be fresh, a symptom perhaps of the neophilia we have inherited from a particular strain of modernism, an urge to purge, to strip out and cleanse. The early modernists were reacting exactly against place, theirs was an International Style, global and universally applicable. Modernism revelled in the obliteration of dark spaces, nooks, crannies, cellars – dark places which are the architectural equivalent of the sub-conscious. The aim was to expose everything to the light, to make everything easy to clean – transparent. Contemporary design culture however has acknowledged the value of the old and the existing. Now in architectural discourse, almost any treatment of the historic will feature a spiel about how the new is juxtaposed with the old, 31

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Above soho House New York Left soho House New York

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D eSign AcADe my einDHov en Can a building, a space have memories? No. That would be a misunderstanding. Architecture is memory and without memory it is nothing. In its proportions, its use, its materials, its place, in its relationship to other buildings that have come before it, every space and every room is a built manifestation of a moment in culture and is tied, in some occasionally oblique, occasionally explicit manner to centuries of precedents. A good room is not just a space but a story and it is a narrative which needs never to quite finish, which can be added to or subtly changed. We can add our own endings, but we cannot determine that they will remain endings. And that is how it should be. Jerome K. Jerome wrote ‘I want a house that has got over all its troubles; I don’t want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.’ We are drawn to places that have a history, that display the marks of those who have inhabited and used them before us. ‘To live’ wrote Walter Benjamin’ is to leave traces’ as if those signs of wear, of use and inhabitation are ultimately all that is left of our existence. There is a tendency for designers to want to start again, to be fresh, a symptom perhaps of the neophilia we have inherited from a particular strain of modernism, an urge to purge, to strip out and cleanse. The early modernists were reacting exactly against place, theirs was an International Style, global and universally applicable. Modernism revelled in the obliteration of dark spaces, nooks, crannies, cellars – dark places which are the architectural equivalent of the sub-conscious. The aim was to expose everything to the light, to make everything easy to clean – transparent. Contemporary design culture however has acknowledged the value of the old and the existing. Now in architectural discourse, almost any treatment of the historic will feature a spiel about how the new is juxtaposed with the old, everything is contrast. But in this trend to polarise, the delicacy, the subtlety 21

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