Greylight Projects - A Façade for an Artist Studio

Ben Weir designed and built this new façade to one of our guest artist’s studio during his residency at Greylight Projects, during the Borderland Residencies. The façade functions as a display for his publication, a structure from where the studio can be observed and separator between the corridor and the studio space

Formerly part of a the entrance hall to a school, the studio required more enclosure and privacy, whilst still allowing daylight into the adjacent hallway. A beam with a metal post spans the large opening, from which everything else either hangs or rests upon. The structure integrates two existing curved walls leftover from the building’s Vrijeschool (Steiner school) history.

If you would like to see more of Ben’s work you can have a look at his website:: https://benweir.eu

[ANNEXE]

PS: we hyphen tú
by Roy Voragen

. . . words words words some words remain words some get set in stone and some stones morph morph and some stones become transmodern some stones liquify transform stones in other stones in other words and some stones take beatings, use crack, get compounded and/or terminated (with tender devotion), in short with shortness of breath, words aplenty for them stones, stones come and go with names familiar names alien names contradictory names and family resemblances – similarities overlapping and criss-crossing, similarities crop up and dissolve – words and stones are used re-used abused unused and in the process, meaning/s processed and salvaged for a next cycle of a building inside a building inside a building and what a building is is a collaboration to build upon to enclose space to utilize beams frames nails bricks (which brick is needed to support a building?) and beams frames nails bricks age, don’t age well weather wither and when time is up runs out torn up, we cannot dwell inside machines inside machines inside machines but we can trace the lines out of the shadows and visit re-visit stories storied stories, narratives narrated narratives about pasts about pasts and their specters about pasts and their longue durée and past tense of past and genealogy and archaeology and we build cities on top of cities on top of cities on top of discourses on cities (until we would go nuclear but that that is for a different age when AI-powered machines have become sentient until then we muddle muddle through), we consult poets philosophers priests, we consult artists architects, we consult junkies juvenile junkies and we politely demand just beautified meaning/s and in return we receive the request to pay up to pay it forward, in short, with intense tightening tightness in the chest, my mijn mianach monnies are requested to storm city hall . . .

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Ben Weir (Belfast, 1991) is a Irish-British artist-architect based in Schiedam, the Netherlands. He was a Borderland Residencies artist at Greylight Projects in Heerlen, the Netherlands, in 2022.

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Roy Voragen is a poet and curator.

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Optional notes:

The section on family resemblances is from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
For transmodernity see here, transmodernity urges us to decolonize and transform modernity to create worlds in worlds (and for the idea of liquid modernity, which is characterized by uncertainties, see Zygmunt Bauman) (reflexive modernity is a term by Ulrich Beck, i.e. modernity is turned against itself, see also Anthony Giddens´ second modernity).
The question ´which brick is needed to support a building?´ is a reference to Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities.
Le Corbusier wrote in Toward an Architecture: “Une maison est une machine-à-habiter” (“A house is a machine for living in”); Weir´s critique of modernism is that the scientific method – specifically that all of life can be quantified – cannot be the solution for all problems (what a problem is should be open to ethical and political debates; and we need the speculative arts in such debates).
The specter refers to the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (and Jacques Derrida´s subsequent book Specters of Marx reflexively re-works this treaties): ¨A specter is haunting Europe […].¨
Longue durée is a term by Fernand Baudel.
Genealogy and archaeology refer to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault respectively.
The used writing form in above text is a homage to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, a mode of modernist writing that applies well to the idea that transmodern time & space are liquid.
This text was written at Schunck, a building designed by Frits Peutz and built in 1935 and renovated under auspices of Jo Coenen and repurposed as a library and museum.