Raum
Imagine entering a room, experiencing light, water, matter and smell.
You take off your shoes, step carefully over the threshold: light is space, matter is space, proportions are space, silence is space, smell is space, if only you let them appear.
Cedar walls and floor, in their form are a precisely shaped background, allowing for the senses to perceive attentively.
The projection of moving light – entirely daylight – its intensity defines continuously changing relations between light and shade. The given shape of the sun’s projection crosses the room.
At times the light is dispersed. As the sun moves from east to west, consequent relationships between form identities, optic, volume and surface appear.
The room is defined by the vertical rhythm of the cedar matter. The vertical direction is identified with contem-
plation, the direction of development, the direction of tree growth. On one of the walls, vertical stains of water leave signs of being watered and drying up – the traces of the ritual of pouring life-giving water. The cedar reveals its hidden essence through the discreet smell of the forest.
The connection between the Raum and the garden.
“One of first needs of man is finding shelter within the surrounding nature. The house appears to be the reconciling element between man and nature. Its building material is first extracted from the earth – stone, clay, wood – to be reassembled again into a new form in a selected site. The elements of the house can be derived only from nature: the primary datum of the wall-separated space is the unlimited mass of the earth with the limitless space above it; so the limited mass of the walls must also be drawn from the earth in order to withdraw a limited piece of space from the space of nature.”*
The connection of the cedar room to the garden is a relation of such a reconciliation.
The physical linking of the interior with the garden indirectly brings its image to our consideration.
Air is directed underground from the garden into the gallery space. The contact with the earth gives the air an adequate humidity and temperature which activate the smell of natural matter in the interior. The unconventional window design intentionally frames the sky, its location and configuration let’s the light to reveal a fragment of the wet wall and acts as a dimmer inviting for inward looking and contemplation.
– – –
“We cannot discuss nature, without mentioning ourselves.”** Man is made of humus. Nature is an equilibrium of relationships, of which the observer is the integral part and in which no part is more or less important than others.
The Raum wants to be the perception of this equilibrium, thus its lack of objects. Penetrating the boundaries of categories a new vision of reality is formed. By replacing scientific dogma of solid concepts with mutually related phenomena, the reality becomes the circular process of fluidity and change.
The coexistence of relationships is motivating our urge for continuous development. Their separation no longer functions. It has been replaced by an ever changing network of relations, without which the perception of
the w h o l e would be not possible.
In architecture, or sculpture this distinction may prove to be on its way to termination.
Joanna Przybyła, Claudio Silvestrin, 2005
* Alberto Ferlenga, Paopla Verde, Dom Hans van der Laan, Works and words, Architectura Natura Press, 2001, p 162
** Werner Heisenberg / in Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Phisics, Rebis Publishing, House Ltd. Poznan, 2001, p. 340