it is almost autumn and the wheather is changing. our bathroom is under construction and the heating in our sleeping room does not work. there is a lot of work to do on the fisherman and other projects, but the necessity for a new bathroom and a good worknig hating system grows rapid now that autumn is coming very close.
i liked to build and even designed and built houses for others, but that is lnog ago now. as an architcet, i am inspired by frank gehry and brian murphy but also by fashion dsigners like martin margiela, rei kawakubo and yohji yamamoto.building is inspriing. it good to see how things get done, how the former bathroom slowly disappears and the new bathroom is emerging. the old bathroom was made of light concrete blocks which were years ago a nice way to build: fast, not to heavy, with a flat surface and rather soft.
but as one of our football heroes seems to say: every advantage has its disadvantage and in this case it simply meant that the wall built of the blocks easily split apart and combinations of blocks stood completeley free on top of others. it is alway amazing how a few square meters of wall are easily turned into many, many bags of waste material. our former bathroom has not been very large, but our living room has been full of bags with the ifnal remains.
i like building and do my best to cooperate with others in the realisation of our house. building is always challenging. first of all there is never enough money or time, scond it is always more work then you think and third it always takes longer then you had in mind. building is good for you mind and for your body: it is always a pleasant feeling to see how much you could do on a certain day and it is a nice exercise for all kimnds of muscles from which you did not know that you had them.
in that sense building is very healthy and a nice change for too much work on the computer. independent how many emails you sent in a day, day by day, you will not easily get the same kind of satisfaction as building might offer you.
the challenge with the bathroom now is to find low budget material that are not to difficult to handle, not to expensive to use, not too traditional and too easy to think of but still offer a bathroom that is pleasant to stay in. i have done my best in our house to make every room different from the others. now that most of the work is done i guess that that worked well. our house is colourful, not very traditional, functionally very sound and according to our guests pleasant to visit.
i have been influenced in my work as an architect by luis barragan and rietveld and in later years i by frank gehry and brian murphy a.o. besides those influences i like to play with materials, shapes and forms. but i also found fashion designers martin margiela, rei kawakubo and yohji yamamoto very inspiring. i found that in their design lots of things were not as they normally would be and in our house that is similar: a door might have one doorhandle, but could also have many doorhandles.
the final painting of wooden surfaces might be done in different layers with a final transparent paint so you can see what kind of our treatments the wood received. tiles in a bathroom might be broken and in different colours.
the building of the new bathroom has proceeded slowly but steady the last two months. it is time now to consider the final materials. i am thinking of mixing broken pieces of all kinds of marble, but also dreaming of the very colourful maroc way of plastering interior walls.
i also thought of little pieces of mirror-glas used as tiles on the wall but found it too much work. so far there is still work to do on the hot and cold water pipes and no hurry yet to buy tiles or start with the finishing touch. independent of everyhting however the need for a decent warm bath grows every day.