Open House

Up the road from my new place, an architect (Ed Frith) and choreographer (Caroline Salem), their four children and a bunny rabbit live in a work/live/play kind of house in Clarence Mews. It has large south-facing windows. They made it using sustainably manufactured masonite timber columns. The walls breathe. (sprayfilled recycled paper under the cute guise of 'warmcell')

Their 12 year old Benji showed us round:

Benji: "This is the MDF shower. It leaks!"
his mother: "It's not MDF! It's sustainable timber with a heavy varnish gloss! It doesn't leak!"

The architect's office is next to the kitchen is next to a large dance studio. Benji waited whilst a lady performed poi with stripy socks for us. (I hate poi. Hate saying hate but hate is hate and I cannot help but hate everything poi embodies.) Apparently this lady is the architect's assistant in her non-free time.

Upstairs the kids have great movable staircases/storage units, which are placed next to holes in the ceiling which lead to their bedrooms. In the office downstairs, all storage was movable and moved aside to show Ed's Greenwich university students' projects. Based on Perec's 'Life, A Users Manual' they have plotted a similar knight's route over the Medway and it's surrounding areas. The result was a little confusing, as the wall piece showed a chess board with various bits of seemingly arbitrarily connected ephemera.



Anyway, the highlight of this whole endeavour: one student produced a cross-referencing fanzine on the underlying structure of the book's narrative (it's an all-time favourite of mine). Ed let me have one. I haven't been so excited about bits of paper for a little while. It's now somewhere between Hackney and Brighton. It's a little follicle splitting.