The latest to raise my ire is of the second type. I am a fan of adaptive reuse, an admirer of new work sensitively added to the historic, of high architecture extracted from an apparent adoption of the vernacular, of clever, tight planning, of direct craftsman-like use of natural materials, everything that seems to have gone into French architect Loïc Picquet's conversion of an old farm building into a rural guesthouse in the Alsace. It is instructive to view the article for the delightful, if far from comprehensive photos, but also for how little is the text that the editors have seen fit to attach to them.
I would have let it go, as I usually do, until one moment of pure irritation. Disconnected from the image I reproduce below is the fragment of text that informs us "Floors are also wooden, while stable doors separate bedrooms from bathrooms and timber-framed cubbyholes contain extra beds and storage areas."
Those cubbyholes were for me the 'Aha!' moment when I was sure that the qualities I enumerate above were the stance from which Picquet is working. After all, how often (outside Japan) do you see someone giving such literal form to Bachelard's most intimate proposition in his seminal 1958 book, The Poetics of Space? It is something to be celebrated; from it flows the responsibility to to theorize the project, to at least critique it. I don't really expect the on-line zeens to get better at this, though ones like Inhabitat sometimes surprise me.But sometimes, I just have to get my frustration off my chest.
View the original article here:
http://www.dezeen.com/2013/05/15/farmhouse-renovation-by-loic-picquet/
