We get a study/ research week
in January from CIT/CCAD and I spent mine in Paris researching a residency I
was applying for. Nobody believed me- but I actually was researching! I spent
most of my time at Cité de
l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, which is a museum of architecture in a
stunning crescent shaped building in Trocadero, orientated so that the
exhibition spaces have views of the Eiffel tower.
Eiffel Tower, the view from every window.
There is a postcard I saw
years ago that has an image of a 1950’s housewife in a new kitchen with the
caption “I’m so excited I could puke”. Its very unprofessional on a
professional blog page to include such a thought, but that phrase kept going
through my head. I could not keep the smile from my face.
On the ground floor they have
various size models of many famous French buildings, churches mostly, where you
are shown the details of their construction, a section of Notre Dame ceiling
turned on its roof, details and angles that you would never be able to see in
the real building. You can look straight through a window that in reality would be hundreds of feet off the ground.
Ceiling, Notre Dame, Paris
Model of a concert hall room
1864
Eugène-Emmanuel
Viollet-le-Duc.
The model is displayed alongside the drawings.
I kept imagining what these
models would look like as a photograph, made using a large format camera to
make use of the camera movements to be able to place the focus, and orchestrate
the composition, in a way that the real building would not allow.
Upstairs there were models of more
contemporary buildings, including those ‘non realisee’. I didn’t understand the
text on the walls, I didn’t want the interpretative headset, I wanted my
experience to be a purely visual one. The battery on my 'sketchbook camera' was exhausted, and even that freed me to just look, not record.
There is a full size
reconstruction of Le Corbusier’s Marseille Unité d'Habitation, the outside left with the method of construction
showing. The kitchen sink unit looked like it was moulded from one piece of
metal- a beautiful sculptural object.
Unité
d'Habitation, Marseille, Le Corbusier 1947-1952
I
won’t go on, but it felt like my jigsaw piece fitted right in this place, these
vessels for containing light, these explanations that often brought more
questions into my mind than answers.
I
will get back to spend more time there, if my application for the residency is
successful or not- I want to make work in that space, an interrogation of
perception and scale, understanding, beauty and a consideration of unknowing.
I
left Paris, to fly to Belfast to present a paper at the All Ireland
Architecture Research Group (AIARG) annual conference. Judging by my
overwhelming emotional response to the ‘Cite’ I feel secure in the fact that my
work is firmly positioned in the conversation between photography and
architecture, and now I am filled with excitement as to where that conversation
will lead me.
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