Hands have no tears to flow,

Description

In the short story “Allal,” Paul Bowles describes how a young man is roused from sleep, feeling a light weight on his chest. It is a coiled-up, red-gold snake which, lying on his body, rises and falls to the rhythm of his breathing and whose eyes are looking at him as if he were the one looking at himself. Several breaths later it is actually the case then: The young man’s consciousness has glided into the snake; he rises and falls within it, still to the rhythm of his previous own breath, and looks back at his deserted body. Ten years earlier, around 1968, a photo can be dated that shows the half-kneeling Charles Eames in a close-up with his face hidden by a medium format camera, not as if he were taking pictures, but as if he were scanning, measuring or analyzing the young man, sleeping with open eyes, lying in front of him.

Both scenes, “Allal” and the kneeling architect, have a hypnotizing character. Both are magical, both suggest a moment of transition. And both can be used as evidence. The architect does not examine buildings anymore, but rather sleeping people. In “Allal,” identity and consciousness, like heat in a heat exchanger, glide from one subject onto another. Can the same apply to architecture? Can – or must – the rulebook of the architecture of buildings be “swapped” to bodies? Could these absorb the functions of buildings? And is the construction site then no longer the building, but the body itself? And how will our building component warehouse develop?

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¹ taken from COUNTERBLAST by Marshall McLuhan (1954 edition), based on the Dylan Thomas poem “The Hand That Signed the Paper.”

TWA, 2012