Julie Rafalski

Architecture as Container

The (Little) Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563

Architecture is a type of framing- a container, a box, a frame, a vessel, a structure.

For space, for objects, for events, for people, for atmospheres, 

Including certain things, excluding others.

...portable telescopes, folded paper maps, receipts printed with purple ink, dry leaves stuck in books, hand gestures for folding envelops, 5 year old boys eating sandwiches, breakfast table spoons, shadows made by dim table lamps, spaces between plants' leaves, stone age tools, plastic bags…
I contain the architecture, because I am looking at it. My perception contains it. Memory later houses these rooms, houses, buildings and their contents- containers in still bigger containers.

These words too, are houses/ containers of those memories, those buildings, those thoughts. So many remembered moments can inhabit the word "house"- can describe my experience, yours, all the others' present and absent, that if all those moments existed all at the same time now- they would surely need to be housed in a structure with walls and rooms as tall and wide as the sky.