Idea/statement

Introduction:
Build your own England project investigates characteristics of english housing architecture.

What catches foreigner’s eyes when entering the country for the first time is its architecture uniformity. In comparison to other countries, especially Eastern European, english architecture over the years managed to preserve a distinguishable style and visual order in public space. This phenomenon is expressed by a set of characteristic common for the most of housing including not only shapes of the houses, dimensions (height, width, number of floors), sizes, materials used (brick, stone, wood etc.) but also abstract values such as the rhythm they create.

Context and medium:
Starting point of the project was a check list of elements and objects which distinct english urban space. On the one hand official buildings like charity shops, churches, inns and fish&chips bars were taken into consideration. On the other elements surrounding houses: doors, windows, fences and hedges. To relate the project to the question of public and privates space number of examined aspects was reduced to windows of private houses.

Windows create boundaries between the public and private space. They also illustrate how the general homogeneity turns into very personal section when altered by an individual. Moreover windows owning to their transparency can either let the observer enter the house or create a barrier reflecting the indistinguishable environment surrounding every house.

Themes investigated by the book are commonly explored in contemporary arts. Artists have always been fascinated with the topic of windows and reflections, owning to countless ambiguous meanings they carry. Window is also a very important symbol in Silesian culture. Painted either green or red it has become signifier of this region, explored widely in polish art and cinematography by authors such as Kazimierz Kutz, Lech Majewski and Jan Szmatloch. Problems of multiplication, symmetry, module, colour, rhythm and visual order are of the basic ones, every artist and designer has to struggle with, at least at the beginning of art education. In many cases they became main motifs of works of art or ideology behind them, not only in fine arts (De Stijl, constructivism) but also in design represented by its most influential and significant school – Swiss Design.

The project consist of a book with collection of windows reflecting the space houses are surrounded with, all the pictures in exactly the same scale. The pages are divided into 4 stripes turning themselves independently. It creates an opportunity to combine entirely new examples of those elements randomly. The book is accompanied with wooden blocks wrapped around with alike pictures. Along with the book, they give a chance of making endless variations of architectural elements, not necessarily following their the real structure. This lets creating abstract compositions out of book and blocks, expanded vertically, not limited with the two dimensional book and number of stripes within it, either with blocks placed on the book or next to it.