Searching For Secrets
“Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams. A psychoanalyst should, therefore, turn his attention to this simple localisation of our memories. I should like to give the name of topoanalysis to this auxiliary of psychoanalysis. Topoanalysis, then would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.”
―Gaston Bachelard
Saule House, one of our latest projects to receive planning is a poetic home of deep symbolic meaning. The project is the result of listening deeply to our clients’ memories of childhood from a distant northern land.
Sometimes the only way to make an emotional architecture is to listen deeply to these memories and also to the rituals and cultures of the places we are from. In this case Latvia. As Bachelard suggests this is perhaps a sort of ‘topoanalysis’.
But the ultimate question remains - how can these ideas and experiences, those that define our identity, those we hold so dear to ourselves. How can these experiences be woven into a coherent language of architecture that elicits emotion? These are the questions we seek.
To create a work of architecture that is both abstract and beautiful in its reading on a surface level; yet with a little prodding, beneath the surface - our work attempts to reveal a profoundly moving idea or notion to those who wish to know its secrets.
—