PARADISE : Ávila
Told across several books of text and images, including The PARADISE Guide to Ávila and The Instaurative House, the PARADISE project – a research hotel, a retreat, a garden – is a concrete proposal for a place that will exist in the mind as much as in steel and wood.
PARADISE : Plan at Lower Level
THE INSTAURATIVE HOUSE
You had read that the PARADISE complex by the river at Ávila was conceived as a unifying initiative for the brain sciences, based on Francis Bacon’s vision of Salomon’s House in his Great Instauration. The unashamed grandeur, the bathos of this, amused you. Now you are here, another layer of irony has occurred to you: this PARADISE garden, this Eden, is a minutely calibrated machine – a construct – with metal and concrete, arms, armatures and measuring devices … and all these combine to create something, how can you put it? Natural? No, perhaps unexpected would be better. Like the infant brains your team has been building a picture of over the years, this under-specified system has produced a network of staggering complexity, its pools and lattices overgrown with the fecundity of life.
Garden, Zone 01, Pool 04 : Summer, AM
SUMMER
It is summer at the House on the river. You know this because the ambient noise is so intense. Anyone who spends time near water becomes accustomed to the fact that the layered hiss surrounding the smallest stagnant puddle will assault the ear more powerfully than any rushing torrent. There are bees, of course, but also many other insects; the noise of reeds brushing one another is unceasing, soft leaves of the canopy above flop repeatedly against branches. Only the river surface is still, so aggressively still that even the imagined sound of innumerable water boatmen is overwhelming. All it takes is time spent listening to it, trying to pick out individual sounds, or simply letting it penetrate your head. Thinking of time, it must have been hours since you last moved, and so you open your eyes. At first, everything seems bleached, whiteness gripping it, but slowly yellows and then greens filter through, meandering tendrils of colour define themselves as edges: sky/foliage; nets/shore; charred wood and steel; reflections. Attempting the slightest start, your fingers meet resistance: you are in an old wooden deckchair; the dry wood has sucked the moisture from your fingers, binding them fast to its grain. It is hot, and the heat beats in your limbs like the hands of a clock, the timepiece which you are sitting in, ticking over gently into the afternoon.
House 04, Patio : Summer, PM
THE CHESSBOARD HOUSE
Dr M- is PARADISE’s most frequent visitors. His work on the autism of mathematician Grigori Perelman is legendary, although many suggest – behind his back, of course – that his success in teasing the recluse into discourse is down to the sociopathic similarities between the two. In the course of his stays here, he has used every room, slept in every bed. Whether through chance or the Housekeeper’s design you are unsure, for it is in Dr M-’s nature to pick a favourite and stick to it. Nothing about this overgrown maze is suitable to his tastes, which are fastidious and quite up-to-date. The ever-changing processes of growth, decay and renewal seem to him to be purposeless, a nuisance and worse: arbitrary. Every chance encounter is a hazard, a distraction, to be negotiated with his legendary brusqueness; every variation in the building’s routines frustrates his attempts at an orderly pattern; each meeting of paths provides another opportunity for others to ambush him, interrogate him with their questions. Subordinated to the greater vision of PARADISE, Dr M- is a prisoner, a pawn on a chessboard of a complexity he will never desire to comprehend.
Library, Entrance from Garden : Dusk
THE NARCISSUS MACHINE
Relative to Madrid city nights, the darkness at PARADISE is stark and unambiguous. Where light pours out, the contrast that is drawn marks these points clearly, enabling a precise tally to be made. This conglomeration of lips, erosions and apertures has been refined to a series of enumerated points by the abolition of extraneous details. Yet these are not the comforting symbols of habitation, of the presence of others. Alone in a building and seated behind the only powered bulb directly behind you, these illuminations present questions: whence their cause; whether cause suggests agency. In this artificial landscape, what false apparitions are being set to deceive?
Seated on the lip of concrete that projects over the brackish water and waiting for the reserve gas cylinders to fill, the pressure the House exerts on you to question its nature begins to tell. Grasping for suitable phrases to describe it, you cannot settle on one … Paradise has been empty for some time. The rooms lie with dust gathered in the channels, their windows casting an ash grey pallor over their emptiness. Air that was continually moving is now resting dank under openings that have not been cleared since the last inhabitation; through the clouded surfaces of wax, cracks are visible. PARADISE has gone to rot, you think first, only to assign this woody sentence more appropriately to the previous period of occupation: the paraphernalia outside used to die, decay and be absorbed; now it is merely passing time, treading water, though the water does not tread around the house as it used to. Instead it trickles here and there, introducing mosses and fungi into places they should not be, both mechanical and chemical automata having ceased to persuade them elsewhere. The purity of the house has been disturbed then, although perhaps clarity would be less loaded a term. Yet neither really suffices, because the House never had that kind of intellectual or spiritual purity in the first place. Perhaps it is only in its abandonment that it has attained a holy order. A ruin, then, like any of the abandoned structures that litter all countries, whether it was poverty, war, disease or more mundane factors that emptied them.
House 04, Entrance from Garden : November, Dawn
The algal pools begin to repopulate under their stiffened mechanism. The thought strikes you that it is in your arrival itself that resides this spiritual torpor: trying to don the mantle of ascetic revenant, stepping into the abandoned House in order to put bounds on your solitude, the easier to define it, what emerges is how strongly the lack of such a sacred aura can be felt. And again you stop short of being able to verbalise the situation, realising that this lack should have been easy to anticipate; whatever the House is up to, it is not involved in matters of auras, thoughts, feelings. The very phrase <the pressure the House exerts> is a manifestation of our tendency to assign agency to the merely causative effects of unconscious objects. If mental pages could be torn up, you would do so, in this frustration. Whereas most buildings are at pains to conform to interpretations of themselves and then to confine interpretation to a narrow blank, this construct does not. It is as though the level at which PARADISE operates is only that proper to its station, more concrete than your thought can be. And even here, an ambiguity: maybe it is your fatigue, maybe it is seeing the House so becalmed, but you still cannot shake the feeling that It knows this, and is somehow manipulating your attitude towards it. A heron is sat on the other shore of the river, perhaps it is watching you; in the background the deep thrum runs on.
House 04, Patio : Winter, PM
TOLLUND HOUSE
After the passing of such time, arrival at the House reveals the biota systems in recapitulation. Most life has withdrawn, fallen back. The carefully calibrated flowering that had been cultivated is now hardened; dry and immobile, stems are crusted along pipes and beams in stasis, neither blooming nor feeding the exuberance of others in death. In its dormancy, only the slow thrumming of the generator, operating at its minimum level, gives sign that the building continues to operate.
An inundation has occurred. The House is saturated, the skin turned leather and the innards rotted in fetid tumult. Like a body racked with cancer, organs are turning against one another; infighting among the hives is endemic, tumours of fungi are obscuring frames, coruscating alkalis have sutured stumps so that they are ripe for regeneration. Its delicate hygroscopic balance has been upset as the vegetal patina that made up the House’s features eroded. The puddles are puckered, all meniscus and no surface, violent orifices in a corpse. It is a dwelling without direction, its spinal landscape collapsing toward the jetties.
Departure at the El Dorado : Evening
LOS ESPEJOS
Borges relates one of the more unusual of the Cathar heresies: that mirrors were considered to be ungodly, along with procreation, because they both doubled the world. Here, too, mirrorness is close to godliness. Since the identification of the reflecting neuronal systems on which empathetic bonds are based, the mirror has become one of the stongest metaphors in the neuroscientific discourse. Perhaps it is apt that there are so few places in this Paradise where you are not confronted with your own face, looking back at you. Calvino comes to mind: his city, Valdrada, was built on the shores of a lake, reflected; each action performed in it gained the special dignity of an image. Yet, in the face of the cascade of images in the garden, you are reminded that mirrors also distort and deflect. At times, a mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it. So many of the ideas you have had here about this place have been doubled, and then been denied. One persists, however. It is the possibility that this place, so ready to absorb your changing conception of it and to refract it in myriad directions, is the perfect antidote to the Christian paradise. There is no watchmaker here, just things affecting things. Nothing reinforces your sense of the importance of our discoveries about the brain than this, nothing makes you more satisfied, as you pick your suitcase from the Housekeeper’s desk and start toward the station.
(RE)ADJUSTED TERRITORIES 