Being at home, Peter Smithson

“These descriptions, like those in the earlier descriptions called “Empooling” register a turn in our life: from insights gained through building which, somehow, indicate what one should try to do next … to a new condition of becoming more of a servant of another’s insights. It is a record of eleven years of work, small steps, each step of change, asking, in time, for another change. […]

Since 1986 we have been working with a person who has as clear ideas of the dwelling arrangements he needs as did Truus Schoder-Schräder. To work with such a person is to receive notions, strongly felt and expressed, which are the beginning of a spacial transformation. Each gives what the other needs. […]

The owners of this Hansel and Gretel house – the person and his cat – felt they were not, when inside their house, appreciating enough of the quality of the woods surrounding their house.

At first they thought they wanted a porch to open fully and give them – like the French windows that they already had – a wide opening into the wood. Then they remembered they never left anything open in summer because of the flies.

So Axel’s Porch as built, re-uses the two halves of the original French windows and their special weather sealing ironmongery, this time as single doors on the two desire routes out of the porch whose frame supports the all-around glass that is as a built part of the wood; two built-trees whose branches cannot move with the season. […]

More extravagantly, over the slope down towards the Weser, a Hexenbesenraum (Witches’ broom room) has been added. A tiny pavilion on stilts sitting amongst the trees and reached over a bridge from the Hexenhaus. It is a place of retreat … a place to watch the sun go down in the river Weser … a place to look back to the Hexenhaus, to look down the forest floor, to look up to the leafy canopy of the trees and to the sky. It is a place to lie and watch the stars … a place to think in. […]”