Mr Bricolage.
1991
Find a hero.
Read everything about them.
Apply it.
Find another. Do it again.
Those were Jay Potts’ instructions. For someone with the capacity to obsess over something for a short period, they still work perfectly.
Jay was my architecture lecturer. Well, he was the one really. Found me a job. Picked me up and put me down plenty — my rendering (colouring in) was “Jeez, that’s god dam awful,” in front of everyone.
Got me into heroes.
Mostly architects, but also musicians, designers, writers, filmmakers, sportsmen, artists. They’re all artists, really. Maradona was an artist.
A recent one was filmmaker Casey Neistat. I’ve done ‘a Jay’ on him over the past few months. To the point where a comment on my last video read: “It’s like someone sent Casey Neistat to architecture school.”
Applied.
Find another. Do it again.
This week I’ve started absorbing the work of artist Tom Sachs.
He has a bricolage thing going on. A word I’d forgotten — it basically means DIY. Indeed, Mr Bricolage is a French B&Q. In art, it means using whatever’s to hand, improvising to make something, not obsessing over perfection.
That’s what appeals. Sometimes you need the actual thing. Often you can make something that does the job. My Grandad used to call it Heath Robinson.
Sachs takes it further. He makes copies of things as a way to learn. Important distinction: copies, not fakes. He’s learning through heroes.
He worked for NASA. Built a full-size sculpture of the moon landing, mostly from plywood. He spoke to Buzz Aldrin about the helmets.
“How did you stop the condensation on the visor?” he asked.
“Oh, that was hell. We couldn’t. But it’s OK, Tom — you can cut a hole in the back of your helmets. They’re not real.”
“But they’re real to me, Buzz.”
Sachs built a ventilation fan into his helmets to solve the problem the actual astronauts couldn’t.
He tackled it as a real problem. Which calls into question what real means.
“It’s just art,” someone said to me this week.
The first question about an extension is always, will it add value to my house — never will it make me feel better. Market value versus use value. The measurable versus the immeasurable.
Architecture is both science and art.
And yet all my heroes are artists in one way or another. They make me feel something. They make me consider the world differently. They give me permission to make what feels real to me.
Find another. Do it again.
All the best
This Week’s Links:
This place fills my heart with joy. Notice the blocks of wood under the bed legs.
This was bound to be made. An AI device to create a ghost.
This is where I’m going tomorrow.
Main Image credit: Painting and making
