“Certainly gardens are a kind of rendition of the unfettered wild” – P. Dougherty
Patrick Dougherty’s work inspires me. I love the way he articulates the cultivated and the wild. Also, his discussion of Japanese artists like Tadashi Kawamata and the Japanese perception of space is fascinating. What they have in common is an abiding connection to site and the tectonics of expression. I think there must be a similar voice running through Southwestern and traditional Japanese architecture.
I often find myself rebelling against those seemingly strangulated and coerced geometries that many architects, both of the land and the built environment create (for me?) …everything all in rows and boxes and crisp clean orthogonal lines. I love his idea of freeing the surface. Really! And of having it flow and surge with purposeful logic! These concepts remind me of the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and of our national psyche. There is freedom in the American back yard. It is a place to do what you want. Is there such a thing as a typology of experience not form?
Some would argue there is not. But if there is, Dougherty’s work and thoughts about tracing humanity’s presence with a process of familiarization is it.
I own a lot next to my house and one of the ways I got through my Master’s degree was by walking through it. There, within the chain link and block boundaries, was a tangled cultural landscape that exists here in New Mexico but is barely recognized as such- ragweed forests, piles of brush and pinon stumps, several appliances, a road sign and some old lawn chairs all clumped together and sprawling over a city lot barely contained by the wooden gate that kept blowing over. This was paradise to me. Something that the world of architecture, a world that I was immersed in night and day, couldn’t touch.
I also like the backyards visible from the train as it leaves Albuquerque traveling north. This is where living is familiar; messy some say. I listen to people’s comments during my journeys to Santa Fe.
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Carolina,
ReplyDeleteFreedom and forms. I wonder often how we understand the graphics of gesture making and the rationality of form. Pondering the orthagonal and the necessities of objects. Would a free form bed please as much as a tightly sheeted one? Would a labyrinthian house please as much as an open loft space? Bounded somewhere, culture seems to agree on. Bounded where, morphs from culture to culture. Useful forms, are they different from aesthetic forms?
Thank you for your thoughts.
Catherine
I love that you were drawn to this space of chaos from this space of volitional order. Finding peace there, solitude, without an urge or desire to manipulate, build, fix, change. As you let it be, so it let you be. And so it was and is a relationship. That is what I sense in Patrick's work, this bridge between this certain perceived reality into this freedom playground of the perceived reality. Giving us a new way to view our perception of reality....
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