Robert Hutchison builds houses to house memories. What inhabits these houses are spirits of memories of very specific things. The architect has just inaugurated the exhibition Memory Houses at Jardín 17 (an annex of Casa Barragán), which is already a space full of nooks and crannies to evoke. In the house built at the back of the bushes and floriponds are his drawings, plans and small models of 16 houses built on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, overlooking the Wye River.
In reality, none of these memory houses exist; Hutchison says that architecture is also that which is not yet built. All the exercises (plans, models, projections) of the 16 projects that make up Memory Houses are generous shelters for the ghosts of his familiar memory to live in. There is a House for locomotives, a Lighthouse for memories, a House for bells or a House for a widow.
The walls of the house in Jardín 17 have scale drawings and plans of each of these houses. There are also small ceramic models of what they would look like in volume, a collaboration with the Suro ceramic workshop in Tlaquepaque; a video that mixes 14 drawings by Tristan Walker superimposed on photographs of the land where the houses would be built; and finally, a half-scale model of one of the houses on the roof.
In 2015, Hutchison's father reached the point of senile dementia when memories fade. So the architect decided to revisit the project they had worked on together 25 years earlier: a design on Maryland's Eastern Shore, overlooking the Wye River. Each of these imaginary houses forms the exhibition; and although in the architectural plans the lines are straight - almost solid - and forceful, Memory Houses leaves plenty of room for the mind to wander.
The small brochures with the room text end with a quote from Stephen Dunn: "What is the past if not unfinished work, swampy, fecund, seductively revisable". And it is fortunate that this exhibition lives in Garden 17 -built by Barragán and restored by Alberto Kalach-where the light is clean, almost everything has a serene green color and one does not hear the road axis that is a few meters away. This is how all spaces to remember should be.
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