47 Black

Black Interiors:

To the turn of black: to hell?  Or to heavens lament!

Riding into the dark on a rollercoaster ride.

Up the coal elevator to a giant robot.

Some welcome; piercing our hopes with dots and dashes.

Hiding behind in the Tenerife dark, the Lord Jesus with a book.

'Ah, well lord?'

'Yes thank you' he replied.

And then into a mirrored maze of dark with coloured fluorescent tubes.

A viewing platform to see another nature filled planet, and the Earth in the background; maybe just a vision of the future: so lush and green.

Beyond the maze like viewing platform, a light.

A strong white light, family and friends to arrive and greet us.

Suddenly a doorway onto the peak of Mount Tiede, Tenerife.

Shimmer down the mountain with them, then jump from a hundred foot precipice into the sea; cold and fresh.

I am upside down walking on a moving piece of rock.

Fish in my mouth.

A quick gasp of breath, then dive in.

The spirits ask, 'what would you like to be?'

'A great leader', I reply.

'Well how about Germany', the spirits say.

See you there.

Now I am back refreshed to know it.

But perhaps it keeps changing?

We are only fields of energy.

We thrust ourselves forward from past energy = drive.

The black space is inherently equivocal of the mind in the dark we see visions, plentiful.  There are animate and inanimate vestiges of gold from our mind rocking in time.  Rolling to a glazed over likeness of smokers delight, carrying in the bath water, from a rain drenched supinate hand on day.  We create subordinate soliloquies in a hesitant blaze of fire to overcome the past and struggle.  But literally the mind is in the dark.  The light coming in from the visual ocular trajectory of light in the eyes.  Until the black interior reminds us of something at the back of the mind.

The subconscious allows access through the wake of entombment.  But it is fresh too, to be surrounded by a colour that, like the skin, of a black person, absorbs both red and blue light: all colours of the spectrum.  To reflect makes a mirage of no gain, the gloss in the paint.  A black interior, in matt black, is so absorbing it takes over the elitist dimension of a seed to reflect nothing but itself, for the emotion of calm.

Towards Tenerife lie a number of buildings that denigrate the speciality of dark and reflective light. These include:  Magma Art and Congress, The Holy Redeemer Church, El Tanque Cultural Gallery, and MM House, the home of the Architect: Fernando Menis.  Menis' pervasion is to characterise the rocky landscape of the island through its architecture.  Like a theatre, all of these spaces allow a frequency of reflection.  Beginning at the beginning of time in their modernity of materiality and free form visceral grounding to the beat.

They sit up like hungry children waiting in escape mode to be imprisoned on the high chair, the dweller is in a cool vestige of a rarely built nature: one of healing the mind.  A return to the Earth.  There is an expanse of space at Magma that reaches a global audience.  A volume of dark concrete, with a piercing blade light cross, at the Church.  An ordinal, oracle space in the round at El Tanque, and a personal plight in space making through atmosphere at the House.

Another famous Architect who prides himself on black space is David Adjaye of Adjaye Associates.  His better known black spaces often decked in ebony timber on the outside with cool fresh modern white interiors, yet black through his persuasion. Dirty House, Sunken House, Lost House, and Pitch Black.  All four residences ameliorate space into black sectional belonging through a black identity.  Making spaces envelop the dweller as one unravels its united grace into invention.  All spaces are modern to a degree of calm much like the buildings in Tenerife, making a demand on the user to find the black persuasion or like Lost House, the black interior, a useful tool of contemplative trajection.

The theatre sits at the centre of this listless enterprise of black intentions.  To perform sex, cooking, eating, writing and drawing in an absorbing black interior makes life a dramatic culmination of time and space making in the everyday, and at night-time a supplanted vision on all four walls of these aqua deep days, of diving space; glowing in the corner is a hot body already exotic in its diving for callow Christ.

An alluvial submerged rock sits on the ground, designed to sit proud of its boundary walls.  Amongst the green: the black timber looks organic.  A small door and passageway floods with light to the entrance and the stair leads up to an open roof light on floor 1.  The kitchen sits at the helm, simple yet versatile.  Inside four main spaces make up the dark matter.  Giving into a credence of its relative outdoors that the terminology for it is utterly earth born, yet alien in its heavenly being.  It projects a future of the unknown: hope in black.  The dark is offset by light, and allows a proclamation in good timekeeping to create such precise storage and furniture, and other homemade earthly possessions.  We can be nowhere else other than a timber carved rock.  (On Sunken House.)

The kitchen, the bathroom and the utility spaces exude black for their function of work, they are ignatius in rising out of the house as places of preparation to face the day the right way, with good intention.  Making them shadowy, makes them poignant when a spotlight or strip lightens the space to see the matt black surface in all its glory.  The portends of stripping a space bare, a black interior is to take away the top layer and reveal a new paradigm in making of struggle to bare all, as we read on, (Mythologies by Roland Barthes, Vintage books, London, UK, 2009, p.97):

'Striptease - at least Parisian striptease - is based on a contradiction: woman is desexualised at the very moment when she is stripped naked.  We may therefore say that we are dealing in a sense, with a spectacle based on fear, or rather the pretence of fear, as if eroticism here went no further than a sort of delicious terror, whose ritual signs have only to be announced to evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration.'

The striptease is often in a black box, but the architect in conjuring the terror of the striptease allows a naked innocence.  To reveal ebony, outside or in, or as we discovered an interior can be a black persuasion, evokes certainty not necessarily exotic to begin with, quite mute to start out, but it becomes exotic in its analysis and delivery of the immutable striptease of eroticism.  There is a kind of hell and heaven in black, to be forced to contemplate, but as we know now a black interior may just be regulation of line, light and shadow.  To get over black, we come back to it as a reference of great prolation to define people, culture; a world's heritage, and now architectural interiors as black, means we are in with a fighting chance of continuing the path to equality of living in any known colour, other than our modernist reprieve for White, all the time.