B3_#033 // The Waiting Room // Stanislas Turcon :

The space adopts the typology of the Japanese courtyard, which is introspective and calm. It is a means to restore happiness by bringing nature to the core of the private space, and providing a place of contemplation. Waiting evokes a blank space between one desire and the one that follows or between an action and another. But it is most essentially a psychological room which appears in what we call our “free time”: the time liberated from work, the adhesion of the production process. In today’s society, these moments are being occupied by a sequence of distractions and spectacles that aim to make us forget the finite nature of existence. For Aristotle and the antique philosophers, happiness is inseparable from freedom. Not the domestic nor the economic freedom of moving or enjoying material goods, But a political freedom. The latter implies a citizen’s dignity, that cannot exist in a pure economic or business logic. A political equality presuppose that we have enough time to reflect on death and philosophically think about existence and therefore the recognition of it’s finiteness – because within life virtually exists death.

Walter Benjamin talked about the essential nature of the unnecessary. About the child who extends his hand toward the moon to catch it, he wrote : “the gesture is not vain despite the apparences because it nourishes a vital impulse, a bust of emotion and of the mind. […] What would be a child perfectly adapted to the task? Wouldn’t he have lost the naïve joy of existing.”

Stan is a year out student from the Architectural Association