BURNT NORTON (No. 1 of ‘ Four Quartets’) by T.S. Eliot

“By treating the landscape as a manifold in which forms are interconnected what is conventionally considered to be the line and the border condition change. Being aware of landscape forms being topological modulations the line that may be drawn becomes less a divisive mark and more a suggestive mark. The line is drawn … to identify areas where ruptures once occurred and from which old territorial conditions may rupture again to bear new understanding and experience of space… a line from which a field of possibilities may emerge. … Reconsidering what the term 'landscape' means can be used as an initial step into producing a line or lines that are also fields of emerging possibilities.”

“... a landscape is a system where a point of change is distributed smoothly across a surface so that its influence cannot be localized at any discrete point... The slow undulations that are built into any landscape surface as hills and valleys do not mobilize space through action but instead through Implied virtual motion ... The landscape can initiate movements across itself without literally moving. The inflections of a landscape present a context of gradient slopes which are enfolded.”

“In the absence of actual collapse, [architects] project. … The rectilinear system of ordering the spaces of the building is projected downward… The fall of the grid would be straight if it were unimpeded, but there are perturbances in the active forces, irregularities in the grid that are amplified by the external forces… as well as accidental collisions between descending vectors. The resulting spatial distortion is evident in the cumulative configuration of trajectory lines. … This new spatial organisation is a territory wide open for speculation.”

In his essay “Negation and Reconciliation” Raimund Abraham writes, "I see the process of architectural creation as one that oscillates between negation and reconciliation: it is a continuous confrontation between ideal and matter, idea and image, intellectual and psychological, technological and spiritual.” This idea that architecture operates in the “between" is an idea that can be traced back to Martin Heidegger in his essay on Johan Peter Hebel: "[man stays] between earth and sky, between birth and death, between joy and pain, between work and word.”

He thought of how this building was like a book written in an unknown language he had not yet learned, how these corridors were like the sentences of a strange language, and the rooms foreign words he had never heard before.

To be in place is to be in time, haunted at once by the past and by the future, by the present and its effects. It is to find oneself in a world under construction by builders we cannot see.