The House of Dust by Alison Knowles
INHABITED BY PEOPLE WHO LOVE TO READ
Nina Safainia, A House of Paper, 2016
For this exhibition, the Parisian architect has interpreted the following quatrain from The House of Dust:
A HOUSE OF PAPER ON AN ISLAND
USING ALL AVAILABLE LIGHTENINGS
INHABITED BY PEOPLE SPEAKING MANY
LANGUAGES
WEARING LITTLE OR NO CLOTHING
Using journals and the two publications that gather the history of The House of Dust, this structure aimed to be activated, recombined, and modified in sympathy with Alison Knowles’s ideas as well as those of radical architects from the post-war period. This house–partially built and partially in ruin was a reading and conversation room that also served as a home for a number of Knowles’s artworks, continuing the relationship of language, architectural inhabitation, and the tactile aspects of publications. The orientation of the work against the Manhattan grid recalled the compass of Knowles’s Proposition IV (Squid), which was aimed to be reactivated by the public in the gallery space.