03.19.2004
this is not my beautiful house
2Blowhard's current elsewhere post includes a link to an article about Junker House. Actually it's a piece of an article... frustratingly it ends in the middle of a sentence. The article is from something called Raw Vision, and there are links for buying a copy of issue 41, which contains the entire article. I'm sorely tempted; the author of the article has apparently written much about outsider art.
Junker House was built and lived in by an architect who was apparently schizophrenic (though not, I think, medically diagnosed. How long has schizophrenia been a known medical condition?) This house, from the pictures I'm seeing, is something I'd love to see. I'm tempted to say I'd love to live there, even.
"Once inside, the visitor would find himself literally surrounded by Junker’s masterwork – the huge vestibule, in which all of his architectural motifs were brought together in a brilliantly illuminated cage-like space from which the flight of stairs opens. The outer walls of the vestibule are almost entirely glass, while the inside walls consist largely of doors or panels. This entrance hall is one of the most inventive, illogical, and beautiful spaces in the house. The wall surfaces and doors are ornamented all over with wooden relief patterns, and slashes of paint similar to those which cover every plain surface throughout the whole house. Junker was not aiming at refinement! The carving is crude, mere whittling. Nails are used everywhere with no attempt at concealment. The overwhelming detail, and crammed surfaces recall the experience of horror vacui*."
Whatever condition I have (pack-ratism?) has to be just a shimmy to the left of something like schizophrenia, judging by my attraction to this house and the way I tend to arrange myself in my spaces.
A couple of better (larger) pictures here.
Information in German at junkerhaus.de.
(around and around I go...) An entry from a blog called lemonodor has other images, a little information, but mostly from the above linked article. The best part of this entry for me, though is this, from the first comment: "Have you ever seen some of Gaudi's stuff? He wasn't crazy, just inspired, but some of it has the same feel of intricacy and detail to the brink of insanity."
Pure gibberish: not crazy, just inspired. I think I tend to reflect the opposite of that idea. (I'm not really exactly joking.) But really there's no difference.
A brief bio of Karl Junker, from the art brut connaissance & diffusion website.
* - Horror Vacui -- apparently related to the idea that nature abhors a vacuum. I've never heard this expression; a google search turned up some weird stuff, and a definition in german which I helpfully translated with Googles' "translate" thingy -- "Horror vacui (lat.: abhorrence before the emptiness) designates the hypothesis that nature back-frightens forwards empty areas."
(A note about the title of this entry: we still haven't gotten to the closing date on our house yet. The title's not supposed to mean anything about that. Except that we didn't buy the Junker House in Lemgo, Germany.)
