Objects for an Empty House

The exhibition brings together a selection of objects conceived for a house that has no inhabitants yet.

None of these ideas is new, and probably none is exclusive to any one trade. But they are easily lost when there is a hurry, a tight budget or expectations about how things should look. That is why it is worth writing them down from time to time: not as a rule, but as a reminder of what we wanted to do when everything was still possible. The notes that follow are just that, a reminder, and like all reminders they serve mostly the person who writes them.

When you look at a space for long enough, it stops being a set of walls and becomes a succession of hours. The same room is a different room first thing in the morning, when the light comes in sideways and makes the edges visible, than in the afternoon, when everything flattens and the materials seem quieter. To design with this in mind is to accept that no decision is final: an object that works at ten in the morning may disappear at seven in the evening, and the other way round. That is why it pays to work with few things, well chosen, and to let time do the rest of the work.

Each piece is shown as if the space were waiting for it: without context, only with the light that belongs to it.

The route is short and can be done in about fifteen minutes.

Materials have a memory. Wood darkens where the hand rests every day, metal turns more matt over the years, and glass keeps, in a way you can barely see, the way it has been cleaned. A project that takes this into account does not try to stop wear, but lets it in as one more collaborator. The result is never exactly what was drawn, and that difference, looked at properly, tends to be the most alive part of the work.