Sara Orsi

“Among the elements of traditional Japanese architecture is a space called engawa, a raised wooden platform along the façade of a house under the eaves of the roof. According to Tadao Ando it connects the interior and the exterior, and is as much a psychological entity as a physical one. This empty space becomes an extension of the doorstep, which ceases to function merely as a threshold and becomes a place in which to linger. When we speak of homes, the interior/exterior relationship seems so clear-cut due to the walls which separate them, and yet Gaston Bachelard (2008), in his explorations of this dialectic, proposes a series of additional oppositions which go beyond the common perception of inside and outside to include being vs. not being,open vs. closed or this side vs. beyond. In these oppositions, the door as a cosmos of the ajarrepresents a relationship which can be extended to the window – an open window is both a landscape framed, and intimacy revealed. In this light, the design of a façade is a painstaking exercise in revelation and concealment, synthesised in a surface which takes the form of a visage with which the home presents itself to the world. A visage which, by force of being inhabited, ceases to be a two-dimensional surface and becomes instead a dense relationship”