It turns out that everything I come across keeps connecting and fleshing out ideas, which is no surprise. The silly fun of searching for the right word in response to The Selby’s gorgeous plays on personal space and expressions of character again led to the notion of creating relationship with space, feeling the utopian impulse, and the persistent desire for home, for incomprehensible, impossible, irrelevant, irresistible origins.

Of course all of this swirls around my concern for Capi and her little boatload of children. The Caprice‘s real crowding radiates from the hyperperson that is Capi, her intellect, anarchy, defiance, hardtack, remoteness, and relentless search for place to which, it turns out, it does not seem to matter that she is not indigenous. Whose concern is it that here she has an ancestral experience, a glimpse of meaning? (Well, mine, for the purpose of writing this paper. And I have to leave here and go there in earnest for the next little while.)

So interacting with place, or space, becomes key to addressing spatial relationships. In other words, relationship–and its a priori ethical demand–becomes privileged over material conditions. The act of looking at place (his place, our place, your place, their place), or at proximity to place–approaching it, ways of conceiving, planning, respecting, and at last sustaining it; revisiting, revising, revitalizing, revolutionizing it–shifts with the recognition that what exists urgently at the heart of the matter is relationship. The face to face, me plus here, becomes vitally personal.

The following is yet more evidence of these notions unsettled in ways that make me dream of architecture (and like seemingly everything these days further intensifies my desire to quit this popsicle town and hie to Barcelona).

Mark Raymond, “Innovative architecture to ensure a sustainable future.” TED Talk, November 2011.

It is especially intriguing and emotional coming to me fast as it did on the heels of Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

Now, Capi.