Blackwell: A Response Edmund de Waal
‘It is a painful thing for an architect to design
a mantelpiece for which he dares not hope to choose the
ornaments, and which may become a resting place for he knows
not what atrocities in china and glass.’
Baillie Scott – The Studio, vol 6 1896 p105
I have only seen Blackwell in sun. They say there is other
weather, but for me it is a house that I have explored,
thought about and made for, negotiated only by the shifting
patterns of sun and shade. It is a strange series of dynamic
spaces: a house that reveals itself in different tempi,
long slow corridors, unexpected openings, deferred thresholds.
Over the last two years on my visits to the house I have
been obsessing, quietly but insistently, about the ways
in which the house uses light and shade, how we are manipulated
in our movements through the building by the placing of
windows. In a more conventional house we rarely think of
their placement. At Blackwell it is different. We are in
spaces lit through stained glass windows so that we cannot
see out or in corridors, perplexed by the height of the
window sills. Some windows are almost fiercely geometric,
others wilfully odd. Some frame views over Windermere as
if to challenge anyone to compete pictorially, others frame
views into the building itself. You can find yourself looking
into the building through a window. Large passages and volumes
of space are yoked together with intimate interstices, windowseats,
squints and ledges. Then there are mirrors to pick up fragments
of light. And then there are the great fireplaces, powerful
statements of a type of which the architect M H Baillie
Scott, in his seminal book Houses and Gardens of 1906, wrote
‘In the house the fire is practically a substitute
for the sun, and it bears the same relation to the household
as the sun does to the landscape.’ So light comes
in; it also radiates out. It is, quite simply, a house of
great and perplexing beauty.
I was asked to work with the house, rather than just provide
an exhibition of pots.
-download pdf
file
