Sunday Morning

It is a fine, sunny morning. Cool and crisp, though it will likely head towards 25C and be heavy with humidity. Someone will be in their own world, their own season, and be wearing a coat.

I am generally flooded with memories of past trips, more this time than any other. I'm not sure why. Perhaps I somehow want to classify this place, or come to some understanding of it. Yesterday, I sniffed the air. Hong Kong. There is probably a more Proustian way of describing it. It had the charming and undeniably attractive redolence of the previous day's sweat of frenetic football, topped with dispassionately burnt tango, the kind that faintly begins with the colour of a cool red fire and heats up to other, invisible colours, then slow-cooked and bubbled by the steamy torrents of South Atlantic humidity, and chilled, as if in the coldest fridge of political negotiations, served upside-down.

Friday, it was decided, was the day to head out to La Plata. It was a long and tiring day, mostly because the getting-lost time was under-estimated and over-fulfilled, but I am wondering if I should do it again.

I head out first to the Retiro bus terminal. I imagine the local zoo is more organized than this nebulous flurry of concentrated exchange and movement. If there should be a modern composition in need of a name, that is about an hour's length, two major movements with a bridge in between, consisting of an emphatically loose system of random and chaotic notes, jumbles of phrasing in each their key, each phrase stopping for the other according to the primordial rule of 'me first', while interspersed with unmarked but critical moments of silence, which provide the nourishment and reason for being for the entire piece, it should be named Retiro.

I visit Casa Curutchet, yet another house designed by someone in Europe who never came to see the house designed. However, while it is possible to simply visit a physical site, it is not possible to buy a ticket and visit the mind of Le Corbusier, which would be an infinitely more interesting journey. It was a very moving experience. To feel lifted off the ground and feel as if in a cloud forest, to truly be confused but definitively placed between distinct spaces, to feel actively alive in a place that was measurably breathing and calmly growing, to accept the limitations of the framework but still maintain and produce a sense of connection to and abundance from within and without. It was a place that seemed to me completely resolved.

It is a little difficult to see the place through drawings. My one suggestion is to imagine yourself as one of the two trees in the house, to get a sense of it. After years of simply heading out with some architectural guidebook, standing across the road armed with only an address for direction and producing only a cloudy but large question mark above my head as to what I am supposed to be looking for, this house, within which I had the luxury of poking through for an hour, I could get. The question mark moved to the parti wall, emboldened and pointed to its neighbour. I think that that was how Corbusier considered how the Casa respectfully related to its surroundings.