can be moved by a small crane from site to site, with no need for plumbing or electrical hook-ups. It can occupy a back garden, a grove of trees or a promontory overlooking a landscape. The huge windows in the front direct your attention constantly outward, to the landscape and the weather. The Weather Room is an architectural way to heighten one’s senses, to become more aware of the things around us. I often think of the painter Antonio López García’s attempt, over the course of one autumn, to capture in paint the light filtering through a quince tree in his back yard, depicted in the film Dream of Light . After weeks and weeks of dedication and frustration, the weather finally turns against him and he gives up. Instead, he paints the quinces fallen from the tree as they rot into the ground. One wonders whether his project was the production of a great painting, or an attempt to notice with exactness the small transformations undergone by a single tree over a single season. It is this kind of precise observation that the Weather Room allows one to capture. v
Like these examples, the Weather Room is a small one-room space for concentration – a structure through which one can witness the changing seasons or the changing colour of the day. The main wall is a 15 x 10-foot plate glass window facing out toward a field. The proportions of the window are the same as a 3:2 film frame. The opposite wall contains a set of built-in bookshelves. A built-in bed serves as a place to sit and to rest, at the foot end of which is a built-in sofa that can be converted to a writing desk. A skylight has for views through the tree cover above where the leaves perennially change colour, disappear and reappear again. The Weather Room, as the name implies, is fundamentally a space for the appreciation of the weather, at a slight remove, unencumbered by blinking screens, inputs of data and the beeps, buzzes and whirrs of contemporary life. The Weather Room is built from heavily insulated 2x8 framing, but could also be fabricated from structural insulated panels. It is intended to be an extremely inexpensive construction, able to be assembled in a few days. It is simple and light enough that it
this page, above: the Weather Room, tentative site in eastern Washington. right: basic structure and three prospects of the natural world.
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On Site review 23
Small Things
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