Talking House

I pull a white handcart through the streets of Tel Aviv, stop at an abandoned bus station by the sea, pull out a series of boards that are part of a box, lay them on the ground and disassemble the handcart. All components lay around. I reassemble them, join wooden feet with bars to a rack, mount the box, the former case of the cart on top of the rack and attach the boards around it. I put one board after the other into place and fix it with screws and a screwdriver.

There it is: A white cabin with two compartments, each for one person. It contains two compartments, one is painted red, the other blue. an enclosed space of minimal dimension, equipped with an entrance with two doors, one seat and a backrest. It measures 1,50 m × 0,9 m × 1,20 m. Standing on four adjustable feet, it may be adjusted to any terrain. The size of the opening is 50 × 60 cm and requires a certain mobility and exercise of the person entering.

I welcome the guest. A short conversation, some instructions and the guest enters a compartment of his choice, with his legs first. I enter the other side. We sit next to each other, a plywood wall between us obscures the view. The material, 1mm thick, made of cross-laminated timber, is flexible and opaque, allowing a small amount of direct sunlight, sound and heat to pass through. We sit and whisper. The noise of the urban space penetrates the inside, our whispered conversation can only be heard in the immediate vicinity due to its low volume. The outside temperature rises in the inside. The heat of the bodies can be felt through the dividing wall.

After on hour we leave the Talking House, stiff from the motionless posture and dazzled from the sun. The guest is walking off, while I demount all pieces, transform the House into a handcart again and pull it into the lively streets of Tel Aviv.

Talking House consists of a series of buildings, each conceived as an experimental apparatus to study the phenomenon of proximity.

The CA2RE Delft conference allowed me to see and understand my work in a new context. Responding to the framework of the conference, based at the Faculty of Architecture at TU Delft, I presented my project from a more applied and architectonical perspective (My PhD is originally part of an artistic research program at Angewandte/Vienna). This enabled me to reconnect with my experience as a craftsman, architect and teaching architect.

My practice draws from the building process. I’m interested in the building process itself, to study the impact of the built space on those that use and inhabit it. Talking House is a design-driven PhD that departs from (a) building-as-research that originates in the field of architecture. This recontextualization caused a significant shift in my research focus. The building process and the “buildings” themselves as mediums for research have moved to the centre stage of my project. Their function is to enable me to study proximity:

What is proximity? How can it be described, constructed, defined from a design and architectonic perspective? What are the intrinsic qualities of built situations that allow for proximity? How to build a situation that allows for proximity between two strangers? How is proximity experienced in different spatial configurations?

In order to respond to these questions, like a scientist, I devise an apparatus – an experimental ensemble of immaterial and material qualities with specific characteristics. I call this type of apparatus Talking house. Each talking house bears a specific inherent knowledge, that speaks for itself but also allows to communicate in specific ways. “Buildings” provide a limitation and framing through material, structure, size, orientation, lighting, etc. Talking House explores these boundaries and limitations to study spatial behaviour. Here I borrow methods from the field of proxemics. The concept of proxemics was coined and developed by the anthropologist Edward T. Hall1 suggesting that “people will maintain differing degrees of personal distance depending on the social setting and their cultural backgrounds.” Hall’s theory differentiates between four distance zones (intimate, personal, social, public). For Talking House, my aim is to develop my own system of built metrics and protocol to describe proximity.

The modalities of construction, the tacit knowledge of building as well as the dimension of in-built knowledge and its impact on those who inhabit spaces are usually underrepresented in architectural education. By reconsidering these topics and looking at them as actual practices, Talking House hopes to actively contribute to the discourse on design-driven research in the field of architecture.