Maison à Bordeaux: A textile revisitation

This article was originally published in Domus 966 / February 2013

1 In the 1990s, Rem Koolhaas designed a house near Bordeaux for the Lemoîne publishing dynasty. The 500-square-metre building, completed in 1998, counts among the most important contemporary buildings. Its exaggerated use of technology — a huge platform hovering vertically through the different storeys of the building — responded directly to a personal tragedy: the family had already begun design discussions with several architects when the client was involved in a serious car crash, leaving him paralysed from the waist down. The building had to be adapted to the needs of a wheelchair user.

2 While some architects attempted to avoid the problem through a strict, horizontal arrangement of rooms, Koolhaas chose to highlight and even intensify the problem; he made it the central aesthetic gesture of his design solution. Through the building's three storeys, an expansive platform would rise as a "room" with a vertically mobile floor. Floating past cupboards, wine racks and bookshelves, the (now deceased) client enjoyed better access to high shelves and surfaces than a non-disabled person would in a normal interior context. This effortless relationship with verticality, usually beyond reach for wheelchair users, was spectacular. Koolhaas turned disaster into triumph: the floor glides and floats between levels as if by magic.

3 The idea of literally moving the most fundamental of all construction elements — the floor—should be kept in mind when trying to understand how the artist Petra Blaisse, emphasising the inherent imagery of the building, its imagination d'une vie, radicalises the idea of dissolving boundaries and mobilising formerly static elements in her design interventions in the house.

4 The Lemoîne home essentially consists of three houses piled on top of one another. One sinks into the ground; the second is almost immaterial and light, entirely glazed, opening out to wide views over the forest, across the Garonne and onto the old towers of Bordeaux; a third encapsulates the private sleeping quarters and bathrooms with a concrete wall, punctuated with small portholes, merging an atmosphere of immersion and shelter with a sensation of permeability. The wall becomes a rather textile-like coating of the house, a sponge that allows the surrounding world to infiltrate the building gently.

5 In the central, lightest and almost entirely glazed structure, Petra Blaisse adds white, lightweight curtains and a grey, net-like membrane. They do not merely form a filter in front of the glass, but can also be drawn outside to encircle the spacious terrace, where the massive concrete slab overhead balances heavily on a mirror-clad column. The effect is amazing: a room comes into being, its textile walls constantly changing shape in the wind. The walls swell and curve, blowing close to those who sit around. Under its rock-like, concrete ceiling, the house performs an improbably light "dance of the curtain walls" that seems to defy statics: the heaviest component appears to rest on the lightest, melting into thin air the notionally unalterable laws of statics that once tormented the disabled inhabitant.

6 An intrinsic aesthetic of the impossible moulds the house, and this same inspiring tactic is echoed and pursued in Petra Blaisse's textile installation. The trompe l'oeil effect of a light cloth is heightened by the fact that the fabric, which actually covers the glass, itself contains a circular plastic window in which the view to the forest appears as a picture, like the darkness of the sea seen through the porthole of a cosy ship's cabin.
In another room, square reinforcements carried by the light gauze of the curtain come to a halt in front of the concrete wall's portholes. When closed, the square patches appear as back-lit abstract sculptures. The curtain, formerly a twodimensional layer, gains depth; the former plane of the curtain wall deepens into a space.

7 Just as an architect uses a pencil to sketch a floor plan, one can create an ephemeral room by drawing a very long, light curtain along the ceiling, through the open space of the loggia. In this large expanse in the Bordeaux villa, exterior space can be turned into an interior room with one simple, easy gesture that changes, in an act of delicate spatiophagie, outside to inside, like the shoreline and the sea — a phenomenon reflected in the name of Petra Blaisse's studio, Inside Outside. This room is temporary, like a tent, constructed with quiet gestures. It is an inside space from which the outside is visually excluded, but in which wind, moisture, heat and cold can be felt. The outside is still present and, while screened from sight, highlighted even more as a sensual experience. Again, Petra Blaisse's work echoes and alters an idea of permeability inherent in Rem Koolhaas's architecture for a disabled inhabitant.

8 As with her carpets for the Seattle Central Library (2000–2004), Blaisse uses materials and colours, in themselves subtle echoes and amplifiers of spatial atmospheres, to create a totally different mood, as in the bedrooms for children and guests. While the curtains for the central floor are featherlight, like blown-away Bauhaus ghosts, the groundfloor guest bedroom features a dark-brown silk that echoes the darker shades of the earth and forest.

9 In the former children's bedrooms, however, the curtains are made of a shiny, slightly reflective light-blue material, reminiscent of oilskin or 1970s children's toys. The materiality is unusual for an interior space: it brings to mind the deformed surfaces of a glossy object, or a car. The curtain reflects its surroundings, mirroring them slightly. At times functioning as a wall, the curtain suddenly takes on the qualities of a mirror as a space-dissolving and space-unfolding object. A slit appears in the cloth; the curtains seem to float in space, with the same improbable fragility as the house hovering above the ground. Light hits the floor below the hem, drawing a meandering line. The boundary between interior and exterior is loose, open, wandering, not clearly delineated.

10 The boundaries between ephemeral and static form become fluid. The classic modern idea of the "curtain wall" is pulled from the metaphoric into the literal: the wall dances, a foil and a folly. Rooms are drawn in space with the same improbable lightness as an architect drawing a line on a white sheet of paper.

11 It is hard to discern from what material the curtains in Bordeaux are made. As Paul Valéry once said, they are "matière à doutes": pulled flat behind a glass pane, with its circular window, the white curtain resembles a paper wall.

12 One floor up, the fabrics create mirror effects, the building metabolising with shimmering reflections and wafting walls. Translucent textiles shroud the mirror-surfaced column, which dissolves in reflections and drapery — just as the bedroom's thermofoil-like curtain reflects the exterior as well as the interior of the room.

13 The concepts of public and private, inside and outside are softened, and the paradoxical motif of the threshold as labyrinth emerges. While the classical tradition of European construction tends to demarcate the boundary between public and private with a door in a wall — a barrier that must be opened and overcome to intrude upon the inside space — the labyrinth constitutes a soft boundary. A dense space created by layers of textile constitutes a subtle obstacle; it has neither doors nor any indication of the precise location of the boundary.
The phenomenon of the barrier-free barrier is known from Northern African countries: towards the street (which, in the souk, is often covered with fabric to protect the space from the sun, already forming a kind of interior space), goods such as rugs or clothing are hung in tight rows; behind them, a storage space gives access through a curtain to more private spaces like the kitchen, where family members sit together. The transition between the private and public zone is extremely fluid. There is rarely a door, instead a thicket of curtains and stacks; nevertheless, no stranger would dare to intrude on these private areas, simply because he or she would get lost in this forest of objects and labyrinthine layers.

14 The German architect Gottfried Semper was one of the first to comment systematically on the etymology of architectural terms and the possible implications of their textile metaphors. In German, the word Decke refers to both a blanket and a ceiling; Zaun ("fence") has the same etymological origin as Saum ("hem"); Gewand, the word for "garment", contains the word Wand, or "wall". In Semper's view, these terms were not only metaphors but also vestiges of a textile origin of architecture. According to his "clothing theory", which claimed that the first room partitions were "clothing", architecture did not entail grafting wood or piling stone but rather spanning openings with fabric.

15 Bizarre as Semper's anthropomorphic architectural history may seem today, it did enable the mental model that a facade could be light, temporary and removable, an ephemeral form of clothing. Petra Blaisse's ongoing process of reclothing the Bordeaux house seems to play with this figure of thought. Wafting in and out, the curtains and the porous, rust-brown concrete wall are the image of a social ideal: the building is not an exclusive bunker but a filter through which the world pervades the home. The building is a social machine; the curtain wall is the curtain of a stage, of a space that stages a new kind of social relationship.

16 This social dynamic of an unstable, constantly metabolising space was most recently enacted by Petra Blaisse in the Dutch Pavilion at the 2012 Architecture Biennale in Venice. If the buildings of the baroque era, like Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, seem to change their shape as a person walks through them, the Venice installation takes a thrust reversal: the viewer stops and stands still, immobilised amid constantly shifting curtains that run on complex tracks in the ceiling. New rooms are constantly being formed, curving wildly through the empty building like the ghostly autonomous dresses worn by Isadora Duncan or Loie Fuller, the famous Belle Époque dancers.
Blaisse's studio spent three months drawing traces in the room, dividing and forming groups. This was not merely an inhabitable sculpture; it was a model for treating empty, dysfunctional spaces, in which light, ephemeral interventions — curtains or cloth panels — enable new collective experiences. Like every good building, the installation achieved something outside the normative framework in which space is thought, designed and described.

17 The turbulence of the architecture, creating ever-new rooms in an empty shell through relatively simple means, makes the building an experimental stage for a new form of collectivity; anyone who enters becomes the object of a mysterious act, an activist architecture whose dynamic spatial drifts allow new encounters, situations and ephemeral configurations to arise. The textile architecture enfolding the life of a family in Bordeaux expands into textile urbanism in Venice.

18 Almost all public activities are framed by acts of buying and selling: pedestrian zones, shopping streets and public space are created by amassing shops, cafe tables and cinemas. These facilities prefigure activity in public space as a sequence of consumer actions executed in a passive, seated position: one buys a pair of shoes, tries on a pullover, orders a coffee or takes a seat in the cinema.

19 Petra Blaisse's pavilion creates a counterexperience. It is a space without letters, without messages, without preset activities. There is nothing to buy, just a space of collective détour and deviation, a stage inviting one to evade and linger, look, talk and intersect with strangers. Maybe this could be the raw material for a new narrative of public life. Niklas Maak, Berlin-based writer and art critic of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Ten inside & outside curtains and two red carpets for Villa Floirac, 2012
Design Architects: Inside Outside/Petra Blaisse
Design Team: Petra Blaisse, Peter Niessen with Barbara Pais, Francesca Sartori
Curtain Manufacturer: Gerriets GmbH; Atelier de Babou — Isabelle Hautefeuille and Anne Vergeron Carpet Manufacturer: Lifestyle Carpets
Materials: Indian Douppion silk and Habutai silk (guesthouse and caretaker's house); Antung-Honan silk (bathroom and master bedroom); PVC (balcony); high-gloss film (PVC), clear glass film (PVC), faux leather (PVC), black-out fabric (PC, PL, CO) (children's bedrooms); cotton + clear glass film (living room); synthetic mesh (polyethylene) (outdoor terrace)
Completion: 11/2012