07.03.00 : starting and storing

At the moment our somwhere is very nebulous, it's just us really - our exchanges - and we are only emerging in that sense. And today I bumped into Kevin and after a brief exchange we had, I found myself realising that for me, some of the difficulty, the tentativeness of beginning is very much a result of that experience of not knowing where you are. It's an obvious point but usually that 'knowing' comes about by orientating yourself in relation to your surroundings (the stuff you encounter) - buildings, streets, fields, objects, people, as well as histories, memories and interactions - however 'here' in this conversation, we can only orientate ourselves in relation to each other and the space of these computers (and soon the web space (whatever that might be constituted by).
So I suppose I was hit by the reflexiveness of what this project is and how because it isn't 'known' (which make me think back to Julie's questions in her/your email), it might make evident things we otherwise take for granted about how we find our place in the world/ our lives.

I also went down today with a group of students to visit High Cross House, a Bauhaus building, purpose built here on the Dartington estate as the home for the first principal of the Dartington School ( an experiment in progressive education), built in 1932 and now housing the archive for the whole estate. On the walls are facsimiles of the original plans for the house, which was designed with extradinary levels of detail by Lescaze, in true modernist ethos - form following function - and I was struck by the strange overlay there of a 'design for living' approach, where even the plans for the kitchen cupboards specified what should be put in them and the audacity of an architectural vision that paid so little heed to the suitability of these houses for this environment (amoung other things).

We talked at length to the administrator there who has known the house for over 30 years, maybe more, and what was equally interesting was how she opened up in her conversations the way that the house had been occupied and used in so many different ways since its building - and only now was being 'restored' to its 'original' design.

These is something in all this for me about preservation/decay - the fear of letting lives lived 'destroy' the building, the idea that it is possible to design a space/house / home? that can contain (but also enable growth) the lives that will occupy it.
And also the idea that some places in being restored are very much 'stored' again, cut out from the vagaries of time and the inveitable progression of change.

Anyway, those are just some thoughts for today, as they say on Radio 4!
I have some things to share about emigration too - things that have been occuring in my mind, but maybe I'll leave that for another day. best to you all, Brigid