The
Language of Your Architecture.
Written for
Daniel Hall at Cake Artspace
Stop
where you are
and take a moment to look around you. Where are you? How
are you using the space that’s been allotted you for this
one, special evening? How did you get to this exact point?
Did the building usher you in nicely or were you squeezed
up a flight of stairs and along a dark passage? Did you
enjoy it either way? Like the work around you you’ve been
allotted a space within these spaces. A conceptual approach
to architecture where form follows fiction could be seen as
a world of follies. Uncovering a sculptural architecture
that moves with people, responds to their movements,
filters them, Daniel Hall is following people. It looks
like he is on a lone, neurotic quest combining perspective
with the introspective. You wont find these follies in a
country park or grand garden for they are more like set
designs for a science fiction fantasy or a dream. If I look
closely I can almost see his hand moving so slowly over the
page building up minute strokes and lines repeating and
folding back on themselves. In turn my visual journey
starts folding back on me as I attempt to follow their
forms giving me deja vu just looking at the page.
Devices deceive us and lead us into the trap of believing
it should all make sense. Ways in or out are indicated but
the mechanism doesn’t really configure so we navigate our
way through with a kind of certainty that as long as we
maintain the illusion we may make it out alive. It’s the
kind of labyrinth I’d like to get lost in for a while,
amidst the architecture of Hall’s language. Site scales and
compass bearings draw me in on steel rods into a landscape
littered with remains and fragments. Isometric details and
topographical views reveal internal spatial qualities where
a system device unfolds. Threads attached to the component
below using latex membrane being pulled taught from the
passing of the fisherman’s boat show me where the central
action will rotate. I wander around the idea of a building
that has its foundations embedded in the encroaching nature
that covers up the traces of its industrial past. Out here
in the white intermediary world of the gallery I feel too
big to be looking at these things. My eyes aren’t small
enough to take in the detail. I spot the tiny figure of the
Virgin Mary and my faith in the restorative quality of
drawing is confirmed. I’m going to have to go home and
sharpen all my pencils.