Week 08_ 1/2: the architecture of Rick Joy

Use of materials and building/ respecting fundamental basics.

In the foreword of “desert works”, Holl describes Joy’s techniques as “thickening the light”. Even though his use of materials is certainly different than Holl’s,  he is clearly inspired by phenomenology in terms of time, space and materiality.

If you try googling Rick Joy, the images next to each other create a sense of collage made mainly out of brown, oranges and yellows (occasional reds and purples).  That tells a lot about the rustic effect he was after while describing each of his projects. But is this enough to make his buildings “sensual and soulful” ?

Let’s take a look at Tubac house. The rustic volume communicates well with the nature, not only his color is blending to the background, but his horizontality (only from one side) creates a subtle melting into the horizon. It is barely there, present. Its presence does not add to the surrounding landscape, it extends it from the vast immensity and roughness of the desert, to extreme intimacy. “His buildings are not architectural objects: they are existential instruments that frame, condition, and articulate the realm of experience”.  I find the use of thick walls, high at places, lower at other angles extremely helpful for the task of framing and articulating one’s spatial experience.  A house does not have to be architecturally empty or esthetically exaggerated to be noticed.

 

In order to answer the second question, let’s look further to Tubac House. Using Joy’s own words, beauty can’t be targeted; it is always a by-product of other, often very ordinary, pursuits. Joy is describing the beauty he had set as a goal for his projects, where the architecture is not reduced to an object, but does have a minimum presence to “enable us to confront the beauty of natural phenomena”.

In order to create beauty, I think Joy was referring always to function, clients comfort and site’s potential. All of this is directly related to sustainability. You can clearly see that from the other side of Tubac Residence, where the tilted roof enable sunshine, the glass wall permits visibility, and with recessing that wall he creates shade and an architectural moment of moving from the outside to the inside. The materials he used are not necessarily traditional, but the way he used them by mixing traditional shapes and adding modern details create a sense of an eternal architecture. His care to details must have come from his work as a carpenter.

Grace Aaraj