One's otherness of one's self...

Dermot Boyd

A phenomenological review; words transcribed at the lecture given by Patrick Lynch to the Architectural Association of Ireland on 13th February 2003.

The Introduction
A golden book
An astute critic
A beautiful speaker
The son of an Irish contractor

The Lecture
Learn from unexpected sources
Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space
A house in their heart
Images from art cinema and poetry
Images we can share
House as humanity
Three dogs in a 19th century Naples shopping arcade
William Denby Dance Forms in Motion and Thought- imagination to connect and direct
Alison and Peter Smithson Italian Thoughts- harnessing the senses
James Turrell Roden Crater- enable and encourage sensory perception
Robert Smithson- The relationship of order and time
Encounters between here and there
To cleave
The capacity for empathy for other peoples' experience of space
Surprises and mistakes
Making something mechanical out of something intuitive
Thematic work
Light to transform space
Material to transform space
Form to transform space
Wanderings in a city
The subconscious of the city
Spaces are implied but not seen
The unfolding of Robert Venturi's language of home
The use of a physiological condition
The shoring of ground
Leaving a stable situation
You are thrown into the landscape
A parallelogram repeated in section
The home stretched and made tense
A false perspective in the windows
A red concrete cave
It is three times the size of an ordinary table
Exterior rooms
Red Brick
White larch
White glass
A Tudor structure
The architect and the power Structure
The tide
A bungalow
The weaver
The pond
To be naked emotionally
Physiologically you move into the garden
The oculus
Humour
An angular shape
The plan and section deals with the roof shape
The form is a hand
Let the architecture speak for itself
To express the desire for intimacy
To navigate the territory
A ruthless passion
One's otherness of one's self
Renewing and continuity
Horizontal- living
Vertical- dreaming
A ship to take me home
A ship to take me away from home
The desire to finish the form
The Baroque style of becoming and being

"Being myself a philosopher of adjectives, I am caught up in the perplexing dialectics of deep and large; of the infinitely diminished that deepens, or the large that extends beyond all limits." Gaston Bachelard

Dermot Boyd is a partner in Boyd Cody Architects. He teaches Theory and Design of Architecture at the Dublin Institute of Technology.