Y3K and What Archive?

Saturday, January 16, 2010

JAMES DEUTSHER horoscope ecologiies + We Are Building A Civilized Space Here

Wellness Architecture - despite being the name of a naturopathy clinic in Meleno Park California - is as ambiguous as any other attempt at labeling a style. Arguably the flagship examples of Wellness Architecture are Mario Botta’s Tschuggen Bergoase Wellness Centre at Arosa and Matteo Thun’s Vigilius Mountain Resort in Italy’s Alto Adige region. Botta’s - with its leaf-life skylights protruding from the mountainside under which the cool calm elemental grey surfaces of the bathing/healing pool sit - produces a complete space for the practice of wellness. The origin of the Wellness Centre is one of homemade architecture, horoscopes, ecology, bamboo screens, and chanting mantras. From the Maldives to Daylesford via Alto Adige, Wellness Architecture is a culture of homemade architecture, where seagrass matting, bamboo screening, polished river rocks and dribbling 12-volt fountains sit modestly, minimally and effortlessly within awkward and adoring architectural pastiches of Eurasian parentage, and sleek white-moulded plastic subterranean interiors of carefully lit pools and corridors are uncomfortably influenced by a combination of Japanese bathhouses and contemporary prisons. From a space where fisherman’s pants and prAna shirts T’ai Chi the rising sun, to one where crisp white shirts and black aprons serve life changing Goji Matcha tea on mirror pools overlooking coral reefs. The plain and simple nature of recent Wellness Architecture has its obvious links to modernism but it is the homemadeness of these spaces that provides the healing aura. It is not a quaint folksy homemadeness, quite the opposite in fact. Even the most amateur and frugal wellness architect relies on a history and culture of meaning constructed by a sleight of hand use of materials to produce a sensory subterfuge. This is a culture of the self-made, the self-guided. It is about changing circumstances by subscribing possibilities that are conventionally awkward and culturally irresponsible.

January 2010
Jarrod Rawlins

Thursday, November 5, 2009

SWA? MEETING Paris, Saturday 14 November at Etienne's office in the 19eme

TO:

aconstructedworld/SWA?

c/o
Geoff Lowe + Jacqueline Riva
15 rue Gutenberg
Paris 75015
FRANCE

SENDER:

James Deutsher

c/o
Y3K
205 Young St.
Fitzroy Melbourne
Australia
3065

Dear Geo and Jac and SPEECH and What Archive? crew,
I hope the day is good. This package is for the meeting in Paris, Saturday 14 November at Etienne's office in the 19eme.
It is a piece of core flute, some really shit architectural material, and had been folded in two (who knows how many times it has been folded by the postal service, Geoff said Colissimo post really sucks). If you cut it along the brown tape, it should fold open again quite easily to show some blank posters for you to perhaps use for the meeting. Of course do not be precious about these things. So maybe you can tape the core flute to the wall along with the other posters that I am thinking will be involved in the meeting and that is that.
Also there are some loose A4 photocopies in the package. Mostly they are from Zheng Guogu, the Chinese artist, and mostly they are of his architectural practice. Architecture informs the lived experience so carefully and creates personal memory archive as well as physical space with lived memory and experience. In some way similar to sending the poster board from Melbourne for you to use rather than you just using the regular method for the posters. Some unspoken presence. There are also two photocopies from work of New Zealand artist Tahi Moor.
It would be good for the package once used to be taped back up and sent back, so I can in some way experience the day. And if you do get to dancing, YouTube this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdlIzwXNceg&feature=rec-HM-r2
Bests,
James Deutsher, 6TH November 2009
http://y3kgallery.blogspot.com
www.evergreenterrace.info/jamesdeutsher.html
M:+61 401 12 12 12
SKYPE ID: jamesdeutsher