Author Description

Enclosures is Gil Even-Tsur's book of meditation, a prayer book of sorts, or what the spiritual exercises (exercices spirituels) of a practicing architect might look like.Probing his emotional relationship to space (including the spaces he creates), approaching the mysterious interaction of the material and the ethereal, taking stock of the habits of inhabitation, Even-Tsur ventures an at times melancholic, at other times frolicsome, experiment in cross-medial expression. Here the architect ponders the pleasures of enclosure through word and image, leaving tracing paper and protractor behind. Unintentionally, he also shows us how enclosures frame theworld beyond him, and thus invites us into our own meta-meditations. Striking for a contemporary architect who builds things-and teaches others how to do the same-he doesn't make a pretense of wanting to work with form, or to change the world; he seeks something much less ambitious, and yet sufficiently elemental that his apparently personal project implicates us all. At first glance, and indeed upon further reflection, Enclosures may not be recognized as a bookof architecture, but it is, we could say, a book for architecture.