We like iteration. These gates sit among various models, drawings, and pieces of writing in our archive, occasionally cloned, separated, and remade. We produced earlier versions for a friend’s series of drone workshops in 2021–22. Each workshop was marked by a new gate. People were invited to generate sustained notes, over an hour, via instruments or their voices, accompanied by about ten others. The atmospheres were intermittently harmonious and discordant. At the time, we were edging into architecture, having met in our first year. We had previously studied and practised fine art and writing, especially painting and poetry. As such, we frequently discussed compositional technique. We imagined how we might sling architecture along an interdisciplinary tightrope, between fine art and writing, encouraging our preferred inhabitants of those castles to wobble out and over. Due to a shared interest in antiquity, we began focusing on ekphrasis, basing our investigations on Michael Squire’s contemporary summary of the technique: “summoning up—through words—an impression of a visual stimulus, object, or scene.”¹ These gates are spatial and graphic examples. They are impressions summoned up from work by Carlo Scarpa, Sergio Los, Carlo Maschietto, Sean Godsell, Giuseppe Terragni, and Pietro Lingeri.

Since that early point, we have continued to approach ideation and design with ekphrasis in mind, whether we are observing, speculating, modelmaking, drawing, writing, or producing ostensibly prosaic deliverables at work, like construction documents and schedules. The stimuli we contemplate and the impressions we extract seem increasingly less disconnected. Moreover, adjacent methods of contemplation and extraction, of envisioning and prosecuting design, seem to have fused: word is walk, is pencil, mouse-click, sunbeam, birdsong, folded card. We suspect the term “ekphrasis” will therefore always feel appropriate, because it elicits simultaneity. It prompts new, interdisciplinary acts of “summoning up” while itself summoning, like enveloping vapour, an ancient, disputed history of observation, absorption, incorporation, and expulsion: many energetic past millennia, suspended amid the ekphrastic moment.² Likewise, architecture promises perennial novelty, but remains old and contested. Consequently, in our view, both the term “ekphrasis” and the field of architecture encourage a refreshing mixture of flexibility and abnegation. All is possible, but all occurs within such vastness that any one person’s particularities dissolve into continuous soup, overwhelmed by aesthetic multivalence, the mists of previous peoples and, for architecture, the persistent, obliterative wonders of geometry and context. Word is walk, is pencil, mouse-click, sunbeam, birdsong, folded card; is flora, earth, wind, water, light, sound. We felt bad, in the world. We found a gate. We walked through, seeing half-sunk in expansive sands many different artefacts, and a flat rock for their arrangement; and we will stay there, growing old.

¹ Michael Squire, “Ekphrasis,” in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Tim Whitmarsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.2365.

² Ibid.