Kai Daniels
Convivial Relations
Gathering and foraging as an architectural device…
Reclamation of material and private space for communal activity...
Space making as a ritual process of inventory...
“If you haven’t got something to put it in, food will escape you—even something as uncombatitive and unresourceful as an oat”- Ursula Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
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You can see it from Lincoln Park Ave, right past Broadway. It disappears as you head toward Flora Ave right after the the little convenience store market, and suddenly you’ll feel surrounded not only by hills, but by residencies, some more articulated than others. Turning up Flora Ave, it is still shy, pulling up to a patch of grass to park your car, your bike, you butt for a brief rest. Depending on the time of day, you might have some twinkling lights give you further direction, but if you’re me, it might be dawn, or just after midday, and you’ll know to follow the staircase next to the floating wire fence up up up, around a corner, and up some more until you're at last facing the gate that seemed like a vague possibility just a few streets ago.
This landscape continues beyond its fenced boundary, but you’ve been gifted a microcosm, a little bit of undeveloped terrain that has been busy collecting some things. There are piles everywhere. Along the edges metal poles, c-channels, scaffolding, wood, shelled furniture, screens, stones, burrows, and pathways you’ve forged amongst the weeds, small at first, but more defined with trampling, until you cut down the weeds and what has been collected is carved up and territorialized, all at once this container has compartments. You begin to add to the piles, unloading your bundles, a blanket, a pot, your measuring tape and the package that is your notebook and post-its. And then the people come, one after another and you’re not sure how many will make it up that hill, but they all do despite your questionable specificity, and suddenly the container is buzzing. The birds of course are still chirping, and some of the people wander off, up up up nearer to the stones, in order to hear them, but mostly they volley laughter back and forth, making more piles, piles of themselves, of blankets, of food this time, and in their grouping new circulations get layered on the old ones.
And how gorgeous, that in this layering, this periodical convening, the act of spatial differentiation integral to the concept of architecture is immediately legible as we craft ephemeral containers to hold our variance.