ISSUE NO. 61

A November Issue

There’s a vacancy built into existence, an internal echo that keeps us in motion. Desire pushes us forward, promising a sense of wholeness that never fully arrives.

Each time we approach satisfaction, the center moves, and the absence returns in another form. As Sartre suggested, consciousness is defined by this very lack—it reaches toward what it can never fully become.

ARCHITECTURALLY CURIOUS

The Center Holds

The courtyard feels like the home’s first breath — a quiet exhale between walls. Light folds softly across travertine as branches sketch fleeting patterns over pale plaster. Every element orbits the tree at its center; the walls don’t confine, they compose stillness. Even the bench, carved from a single piece of wood, invites pause rather than movement. The architecture lives not in its structure, but in the rhythm of air passing through it.

Measured Void

The stairway rises in deliberate silence, its steps catching the day’s light at uneven intervals. Each landing feels like a beat in an architectural metronome—steady, grounded, intentional. The void above expands with restraint, neither ornamental nor cold. Here, space itself performs the design, holding light and sound in perfect suspension. The walls frame absence as though it were a material of its own.

Tree of Life

The tree’s reflection drifts across glass, its branches bending gently toward the geometry that surrounds it. Every line of the house seems to defer to it, acknowledging its quiet authority. Within this balance of stillness and growth, the architecture fulfills its purpose—to create the conditions for nature to speak.

GLOBAL GLIMPSE

In Feminine Form—Slightly

A pink gradient artwork glows quietly above the fireplace, softening the linear rhythm of the built-in shelving beside it. Books, sculptural forms, and a few deliberate absences give the wall a sense of breath—each object part of a personal choreography.

The armchair in deep cocoa leather anchors the space, its low frame inviting rest rather than posture. Nothing here tries too hard; it’s a lesson in restraint as an act of care.

a table for few

It’s a compact space, so the eye drifts toward the center of the room with ease. At the heart of the home, light moves through the kitchen and lands on marble with a blush undertone—subtle but disarming. The round table beside it feels like a stage for solitude and company alike; its blackened finish absorbs the warmth of morning.

A trio of chairs—woven, leather, and sculpted wood—speak different dialects of comfort. Above, a powder-pink pendant draws the eye without demanding attention, proving that femininity can be structured, balanced, and deliberate.

Shadow as Energy

The walls hold the late-afternoon light in long ribbons, washing over the tactile grain of the side table and the soft weave of the headboard. Every element here feels considered but unperformed—a sanctuary that doesn’t rely on excess to feel whole. Even the shadows seem intentional, marking time gently across the room.

VISUAL COMFORT

The Weight of Distance

The canvas feels almost like silence—vast, red, and heavy with breath. At its center, a small gathering of color—figures huddled together—suggests both presence and disappearance. It’s as though Diab paints the in-between: the geography of exile, the distance between memory and the body. The expanse of crimson swallows everything but them, turning absence into architecture. What remains is not the crowd itself, but the void that frames their belonging.

In contrast, Dina Nur Satti’s ceramics rise like quiet monuments—totemic, blackened forms that seem to listen more than speak. Their surfaces hold traces of hand and fire, echoing ancient rituals of making that tether craft to cosmology. Each vessel feels like an offering to continuity—part ritual object, part archive. The void between their ridges reads as breath, a space for lineage to pass through. Together, they remind that creation, in its truest form, is a form of remembering—an act of shaping silence into permanence.

MUSICAL INTERLUDE

What I'm Listening to in November

Lacan later called it manque-à-être, the “lack of being,” framing desire as the structure of our incompleteness. Meaning, then, isn’t found by sealing the void but by learning to live beside it, allowing that emptiness to shape creation, connection, and the quiet pursuit of joy—I’ll see you next week, my friend.

Warmly,
/shane