project47

When we went to Museum of London, one of the photographs Cathy ( sorry if I remembered her name wrong) showed us in her presentation was the view of the museum from above. Theo pointed out a small building that was sitting rather awkwardly, and it was surrounded by the building of the museum. The small building couldn’t be removed and the museum had to somehow build itself around it. Looking back that image now, while reading a chapter from Timothy Mitchell’s Colonizing Egypt, the relation between this small building and the museum appears to be quite significant.

Mitchell questions “our own assumption about the nature of order by contrasting them with a kind of order whose assumptions are different”. He does so by looking at housings in pre-modern Cairo.

“The orientation of building, of worshipping, and of receiving guests, the direction of Mecca, the path of the sun, the forces of the zodiac and properties of the prevailing winds were all precisely correlated. With larger houses, the interior space carved out as courtyard and rooms aligned precisely with such ‘polar’ directions and forces, rather than with the street or with neighbouring buildings. The house, or the shared housing in the case of poorer dwellings, then expanded around this enclosure, in whatever shape and size the presence of neighbouring buildings allowed. Its generally blank and irregular exterior seldom corresponded to the shape, or represented the purpose, of its carefully oriented interior. In this sense, there was no exteriors, and the city was never a framework of streets on which structures were placed.”

Therefore “ the town was not built as a series of structures located in a space. The spacing was the building, and such spacing, in the city as much as in the village, was always polarised”. This implies an absence of planning and coordinating. He describes this spacing created by ‘polar’ directions and forces as “ balancing or tending” with potentiality of life. The beautiful expression I found in this essay was that “ the house is caught up in the life-and-death”.

This is a different way of composing a house ( or a house being composed) from the one we have here. Housings here are structured with framing that coordinate and order, rather than embracing life and death. It’s not an active housing, but it’s a deactivating housing. And museums are no exception to this. In this context, Museum of London that was built around this small house shows an unique state of spacing.

I am interested in comparing this to how Olympic sites are planned and organised. Olympic sites are the opposite to the pre-modern Cairo; the sites are cleared as a white canvas on which new building can be built. They are not caught up in the life-and-death, but rather they determine the life-and-death. I can’t quite remember who it was ( perhaps Paul?), but somebody from Museum group mentioned about a possibility of building a temporary structure ( a museum) around the Olympic sites. And, I can imagine that the temporality will be an interesting resisting forces against the Olympic sites. It’s a contrasting way of embracing life.

Just a thought.