Kisses Make Architecture — Perspective Magazine

This month I was asked by Perspective magazine to write a short piece on where I find my inspiration from. Here's a slightly longer version.

The Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli says that “we don't understand the world as made by stones — by things. We understand the world made by kisses, or things like kisses: happenings.” This captures something about where I find my inspiration — in a world of events and not in what we wrongly assume are static objects; the demon was Descartes all along — the universes fizzes with happenings. I find my inspiration in things that come and go, ebb and flow, that may not be here tomorrow — or may; a finely woven mesh of suspense.

I am, by training, an architect; some say I’d lost my way, a wandering sheep. I say, I found it; wondering. I found it long before it was proclaimed missing by the border police of discourse patrol – why do we keep giving a fuck about what they say? The border, as Rosi Bradotti says is where all the action is at. The moment of loss? an absence full of presence; fragments of a gentle kiss; found in the former Haçienda nightclub in Manchester. The interiors, designed by Ben Kelly in 1982 changed nightclub design. Everyday materials and iconography used to create a kind of urban stage set — a theater for a thousand mini — often wild and exuberant — happenings.  

The demon stopped whispering on the dance-floor. An immanent revelation. Damascus road, with no blinding light and no booming voice. Stones were no longer stones. Silly really, ‘off your tits’ – as it was called – nineteen-ninety-something-or-other, cutting shapes through smoke and light, thinking about architecture and atoms and realising that it is kisses that makes for interesting architecture.