THEME 2012 - RESIDENCES OF PAKISTAN

Shells and doorknobs, closets and attics, old towers and peasant huts are pleasant memories of our childhood…..or are they memories of “the home”. As per  Bachelard (in his book Poetics of Space) admits that every house is first a geometrical object of planes and right angles, but ask his reader to ponder how such rectilinearity so welcomes human complexity, idiosyncrasy and how the house adapts to its inhabitants.

How does the body, not merely the mind remember the feel of the latch in a long-forsaken childhood home? If the house is the first universe for its young children, the first cosmos, how does its space shape all subsequent knowledge of other space, of any larger cosmos? Is a house “a group of organic habits” or even something deeper, the shelter of the imagination itself?

As we listen to the geometry of built spaces, the echoes dignifying and distinguishing every old house, every experienced house, the probe is the impact of human habitation on geometrical forms, and the impact of the form upon human inhabitants.

So how do we sum it; a house is a nest for dreaming, a shelter for imagining or is always a container, sometimes contained, the house serves as the portal to metaphors and imagination. From time immemorial hoses have had a mystifying curious appeal, each into his own, especially when architects try to define a house, an abode a shelter

-          “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.”

-            All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the person in that space.

-          "The house is a machine for living in." (Vers une architecture, 1923)

-          Houses are built to live in, not to look on; therefore, let use be preferred before uniformity, except where both may be had. Francis Bacon, Essays of Buildings

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-          "The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines." Frank Lloyd Wight New York Times Magazine (4 Oct. 1953).

-          I believe that architects should design gardens to be used, as much as the houses they build, to develop a sense of beauty and the taste and inclination toward the fine arts and other spiritual values.  Luis Barragan

-           These cities of 20 million and 30 million people, with densities of thousands of families per acre, they require new inventions to humanize that mega-scale, to find a way in which, though we live densely and though we live one on top of each other, we still want nature, and we still want sunlight and we still want the garden, and we still want all the qualities that make a place humane. And that's our responsibility. Moshie Safdie