As part of the deep mapping project around Saint Augustin, I set out to better understand how building a new site in the 12th century might have unfolded. Instead of relying on written sources alone, I chose to explore this through making.
Not far from the location I was documenting, I constructed a larger-scale sculpture: an attempt to reconstruct the principles of medieval building practices. It began with gathering materials, transporting them, stacking, disassembling, adjusting. Working with weight and balance, volume and void.
As the process continued, immaterial aspects revealed themselves naturally: orientation, the position of the sun, shadows, the play of light, the connection to the landscape. These were not decisions made in advance but responses to conditions on site.
Clockwise from top left (click to enlarge):
EAST: “The painter sketches to paint, the sculptor draws to carve, and the architect draws to build.” — Louis I. Kahn
NORTH: a hilltop village under construction
SOUTH: “At the end of the day I was inventing shapes and placing buildings in different relationships than they were.” — Louis I. Kahn
WEST: “A space can never reach its place in architecture without natural light. The structure is a design in light.” — Louis I. Kahn
I used only what was at hand: stones, tree stumps, branches. Slowly, the structure began to resemble a hilltop village — Gordes serving as a model. A small architecture, assembled by hand, guided by observation.
Sometimes the best way to understand history is to let your hands ask the questions.
Interesting link:
References to thinking through making and quotes by anthropologist Tim Ingold, janvanboeckel.com
It has been customary in the western tradition to think of making as a bringing together of a preconceived, ideal form, in the mind of the maker, with an initially formless mass of raw material. And for those who encounter the finished object, the thought can only be recovered by reading back from the work to an idea in the mind of the maker. Ingold presents an alternative account of making, as an inherently mindful activity in which the forms of things are ever-emergent from the correspondence of sensory awareness and material flows in a process of life.
Tim Ingold
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