A house in the Amazon, after the monastic masters
Clausura is the old word for the part of a monastery the world does not enter. It was never a bunker. It was the wall that made the silence possible, and the silence was the point. This house takes the word literally. It stands on a concrete plinth above the Amazon with one door, few openings and a roof that is a single plane of solar cells, so it asks nothing of anyone outside. Its security is the monastic kind. It closes to the approach and opens entirely to the one direction from which nobody comes: a thirty-foot wall of glass facing a river valley and nothing else.
Inside, the discipline is the one the cloisters kept. There are few materials: charred black cypress underfoot, olive-sage lime plaster troweled by hand, board-formed concrete overhead, and bronze. There are fewer colours. Oxblood appears on one sofa and one chair seat. Ochre appears on one throw and one glazed bowl. Everything else is there to be looked through, towards the light.
The film is one walk. Each shot ends on the exact frame the next begins from, so the house never cuts away from itself between the door and the glass. The stations below are those frames.
A single long volume on a ridge, its roof one black plane of photovoltaics behind a concrete parapet. Beside the entry, a walled court of raked gravel holds a single stone. The glass end is the only open face, and it faces the valley.
After Ryōan-ji
A four-metre bronze pivot door. In the low vestibule, a blade of light falls on a basalt tsukubai, the basin a guest must stoop to reach. In a deep niche, a small gold-leaf icon of a standing monk sits by one beeswax candle.
After Mount Athos · the tea garden
The kitchen runs along the right: one six-metre monolith of honed soapstone, a single shelf of hand-thrown stoneware and unlacquered brass. The table is bleached oak and seats a community. Slot skylights rake light down the plaster the way it rakes the bare stone of a Cistercian nave.
After Le Thoronet
The room is thirty feet high and ends in thirty feet of glass. It holds one oxblood sofa, a pair of cane chairs of the Chandigarh type and a low table cut from a single block of travertine. On the plaster hangs a monumental canvas of maroon over black, painted to be sat with rather than looked at.
After the Rothko Chapel
At the glass stand two bronzes. One is a life-size standing figure, worn thin, facing the same way the house does. The other is a polished ovoid on a rough block, the whole form with nothing left to take away. The river is below.
After Giacometti · Brancusi
The loft is a cell with a library: one long oak desk, one chair, one lamp and walls of books. It looks over a blackened-steel rail into the room below and out to the same valley. It is a place for one person working.
After La Tourette
At night the skylights go dark and the room is lit from the floor up, by candles on an iron candelabrum and a lamp. A storm crosses the valley and runs down the glass. This is what the enclosure is for.
After the night office
From the jungle, in rain, only the glass end shows: a lit room on a stone base. The rest of the house is wall.
The enclosure holdsNothing here is quoted. From each master the house takes one decision and nothing else.
He found the plastic number, ρ ≈ 1.3247, the real root of x³ = x + 1, and built an abbey from it. Every dimension of this house is the glass wall divided by a power of ρ. The sheet below prints the arithmetic.
The Cistercians forbade ornament, so the light became the ornament, raking across bare stone. Here the slot skylights do the same across lime plaster, and the plaster is left rough enough to catch it.
A community of individual cells cast in raw concrete, each with its own view. The loft library is one cell, and the ceiling keeps the board marks of its formwork.
Fifteen stones in raked white gravel behind an earthen wall. The court at the entry keeps the wall and the gravel and reduces the stones to one.
You meet the icon first, with a flame before it. The niche in the vestibule is the first thing the house shows anyone who comes in, and the only gold in the building.
Dark fields painted for a room built to hold them, an interior made for waiting. The canvas in the great room is maroon over black and hung low, to be sat with.
| Floor | Shou sugi ban cypress, charred and oiledYakisugi: burned to protect it. The char is the finish. |
|---|---|
| Walls | Hand-troweled lime plaster, olive-sageLeft rough enough to hold the light the skylights rake across it |
| Structure | Board-formed concrete and bronze-black steelThe plinth, the roof slab, the loft and the mullions |
| Glazing | A thirty-foot curtain wall, laminated9.14 × 9.14 m, a square: as wide as it is tall |
| Energy | One photovoltaic plane, flush behind the parapetThe roof reads as a single dark stone from the air |
| Kitchen | A monolith of honed soapstone and unlacquered brassThe brass is left to darken |
| Objects | A standing bronze, a bronze ovoid, a gold-leaf icon, a basalt basin, a maroon-and-black canvas, stoneware, beeswax |
| Colour | Oxblood on two pieces: the sofa and the loft chair seat. Ochre on two: one throw and one bowl.Accent colour is spent, not scattered. Repeat it and it stops being an accent. |
The drawing the film walks. The eight camera stations are plotted on the plan in the order the film visits them. Every measure on the sheet is computed from the plastic number rather than typed.
