The House of Writing

“When people ask me what I think is my best work, it’s the bus. There are lots of books, but there’s only one bus.” — Ken Kesey

Montaigne in his tower and Montaigne on the move. After a long period of seclusion, the author of the Essays set off on ceaseless travels, where aimless wandering suddenly became for him another way of self-knowledge — through constant friction with the world.

The vehicle, the road, the book as journey. The Merry Pranksters’ bus crisscrossing the United States is Ken Kesey replaying On the Road with his troupe — with none other than Neil Cassady, Jack Kerouac’s alter ego, at the wheel. The road becomes orchestrated as performance and rewriting. The writer’s residence is everywhere; paradoxically, a writer “in residence” becomes by definition a traveling writer.

A suspended cabin, like a Renaissance studiolo, isolates the author from the continuity of daily life and worldly time — the solitary nights with curtains drawn, like Honoré de Balzac. Suspension suggests a precarious structure, a research in progress like a literary essay, while the vehicle hints at a transient station: everything seems frozen, as though the image could suddenly unroll and resume its movement.

The bus (Saurer Alpenwagen, 1951) is a found object elevated to the status of icon through suspension, acquiring the attributes of an artwork — a Duchampian ready-made. Its streamlined lines contrast strongly with the canopy and the surrounding houses: a secondary object, even a mobile, evoking a scale model through its ambiguous proportion, amplified by the figurative abstraction of the canopy. Inside, the space is organized as a white topography accommodating the minimal domestic functions. Strata of molded Corian simulate schematic contour lines, subtly defining spatial units like a Sophie Taeuber-Arp relief, while integrating furniture into an organic whole, reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller’s prefabricated modules.

This proposal situates itself within the formal tradition of futuristic prefabricated housing of the 1970s, itself rooted in earlier reflections such as the Smithsons’ 1956 exhibition prototype House of the Future. Housing projected as utopia becomes a form of prospective narration akin to science fiction — suggesting alternative ways of life and parallel worlds.

The monk’s cell is considered the proper scale for study and isolated life, with the house, its shared spaces, and the surrounding landscape providing proportioned decompression. The Convent of La Tourette, for example, offers analogous measures and conditions.

Through quantitative reduction, one could multiply the number of potential residences. Above all, the constraint of the Existenzminimum itself becomes productive, by fusing or interweaving domestic functions within a compact and organic spatial scenario. Writing at a desk, in bed, in a bathtub, at any hour; blending genres to open dwelling itself to interpretation, without continuity of solution.

“There is nothing more convenient than a text. We have only books to put into books. But when a book must put reality inside itself — and on a second level, when reality must contain reality…” — Film Socialisme, Jean-Luc Godard