1995

Similarly, their description of the house connects two formerly distinct types of life. "Ces deux formules de vie: la formule "camping" qui répond à un besoin accidentel d'extériorisation, et la formule normale qui tend à fournir à l'individu un centre indépendant et isolé où il puisse développer ses puissances profondes." Ironically, she tends to associate the exterior formula with furniture and the interior formula with the architecture worked traditionally as frame. Inside and outside are inverted as both are incorporated on the walls, floors, and elements between. Architecture's constants and furniture's variables are renegotiated. It is another kind of doubled language. Minor furniture is rendered major, associated with the exterior. A portable tea table is reproduced in Architecture Vivante positioned both indoors and out. Its exteriorization is rendered purposeful through the unusual placement of a carpet underneath it on the balcony. The exterior edge is transformed into a living center.

The camping and normale are not strict geometric formulas of regulating lines. They are life formulas, growing, shifting all the time to accommodate both privacy and the flexibility demanded by a public life. Rooms are thus isolated from one another with doors to establish a "normale" degree of privacy, but these doors are offset so that they are invisible from the house's more public, outside(r) spaces. "Gr‰ce à la disposition de cette chambre [par désaxement] les portes sont invisibles de l'intérieur" (Gray & Badovici, 34).The rooms thus appear to flow uninterrupted one to the next. The house's greatest secret is that it provides space for secrets, layers of interiors inside its interiors (as the storage cabinets buried within the interior partitions of the stair). The kitchen creates a kind of second house for the servant. One must go out of doors to access it, even though its form is embedded in the main body of the house. Here, then, we find and exterior concealed within an interior. The servant spaces, registered on the plan soleil with a different kind of arrow (dashed as opposed to smooth) pose yet another layer of minor critique. Within such a reading, the owner-occupied, public portions of the house are constructed as major.

This back and forth reading of the house as major/minor, constant/variable, creates movement. Valery's Socrates asks: "Did you not live in a mobile edifice, incessantly renewed and reconstructed within itself, and entirely dedicated to the transformations of a soul none other than the soul of extension itself?" (Valery, 94). Each room has several entrances. The house, also, opens itself onto the context through multiple doors. Multiple paths are accommodated, varied linkages between uses are encoded. "One never goes in again by the same door" (Valery, 96).

Individual elements within the house further contribute to this mobile edifice. They not only foster the motion of the inhabitant, but themselves assume variable positions and functions. Desks transformed into cabinets, chairs into step-ladders. Drawers and tables were designed with pivots. Windows and shutters also sometimes pivoted, in addition to sliding. Movement is accommodated by mechanical devices that engage the laws of geometry. The golden proportion is utilized several times in the plan, though without consistency, as a proposition rather than rule. Within Valery's dialogue, there is "No geometry without the word" (Valery, xiii). The human voice is inserted into a mathematical system. Dialogic architecture fosters communication between man and machine. The mechanical aspect of Gray's furniture is extended from the skin of the house [shutters, windows] to the walls that are carved into cupboards. "Que les meubles mêmes, perdant leur individualité propre, se fondent dans l'ensemble architectural!" Furnishing transforms into architecture. Each element of the house, along Valery's terms, "changes and transforms itself into itself" (Valery, 105).