Habitus Magazine | Issue 10

The English philosopher, R.G. Collingwood, famously distinguished between art and craft. A craftsman, he said, makes a product and knows right at the beginning how it will look at the end. But with art, we don’t know the end in the beginning – it is a journey of exploration.

And before you start protesting that craft is not always like that, let me say that the exceptions prove the rule. A great example would be the tribal rugs of Central Asia where the weavers work to a template, but constantly vary it, spontaneously working in individual gestures. This is what makes these rugs collectors’ items – in fact, it makes them art. Once you have lived with such a rug, you will never again want one of those over-designed machine woven rugs associated with Middle Eastern rug shops.

In architectural circles there is a lot of nonsense pedalled about how architecture is art. It may well be, but it is habitation first. Louis Kahn went to the heart of the matter when he spoke of a building wanting to discover what it wants to be. It is precisely this process which puts the art into architecture, not notions of architecture as sculpture.

The ‘artness’ of a house can be embodied in its materials, in its planning and in the way it interacts with its site and context. The materials generate what the Finnish architectural philosopher, Juhani Pallasmaa calls the haptic or experiential quality of a house. The planning can create that sense of constant re-discovery, where moving through a house is like a never-ending adventure and process of continual discovery.

In this issue of Habitus look particularly at Kitchai Jitkhajornwanich’s house in Bangkok with its fluid spaces and changes of level. Look at Dave Strachan’s remarkable but simple house on Waiheke Island in New Zealand which uses inexpensive but satisfying materials and creates a constant sense of re-discovering both the inside and the outside. Philip Vivian’s house near the beach in Perth is very different – an elegant, modernist exercise, but exquisitely detailed and composed from a sequence of spaces which seem to transform from one into the other just by a change in the light.

As for Studio Mumbai’s Utsav House in India – well, it is breath-taking. Its use of materials is like a piece of music by Bach, its connection to its site, just outside of Mumbai, a superb harmony of inside and outside, its spatial sequencing and subtly shifting levels almost polyphonic in its simple complexity.

And that’s just a sample! I haven’t said anything about our ‘creatives’ up at the front end of the book or the many juicy products we have unearthed since Habitus #9.

PAUL MCGILLICK | EDITOR