ISSUE NO. 63

A November Issue

Incongruence in the delta between who you are and who you’re performing to be—the law of collapse.

When your lived self and your performed self drift too far apart, the gap becomes structurally unstable. The performance demands energy the real self can’t supply, and the strain shows up as friction: confusion, resentment, burnout, or a sudden refusal to keep acting.

The “law of collapse” is simple: any identity built on sustained incongruence eventually gives out. Not dramatically—just inevitably. Systems always default to what’s true. When the gap becomes too wide to support, the performance fails and the real self breaks through.

ARCHITECTURALLY CURIOUS

Like a First Sentence

The façade feels like a study in editing—vertical timber slats acting as both veil and volume, revealing just enough to pull you in. The geometry is familiar, a pitched outline, but its planes are carved and shifted so the house reads more like a pavilion tuned to wind and light.

The ground-level entry is tucked into the shadow of the upper deck, a quiet threshold before the landscape opens. It’s the kind of exterior that teaches you to look twice: once for form, and again for the rhythm hiding inside the wood grain.

Edge of Shelter, Exposure

Up close, the cladding shifts from tight battens to wider boards, creating a like-for-like language that’s similar enough to be calm but varied enough to feel worked by hand.

The path to the door is intentionally irregular—flagstone stepping pieces that make you slow down and notice the siding’s soft gradient from warm brown to silvery grey.

And the structure lifts and folds, turning the porch into a transition zone where interior life meets weather without hesitation. The house doesn’t assert itself so much as tune itself to the slope, the trees, and the shifting coastal air.

Slatted

Inside the upper deck, the slatted envelope transforms into a lantern—light filtering through each vertical blade, bending across the ceiling’s cedar geometry. The angled roofline guides your eye outward, framing the treetops in a way that makes the horizon feel hand-placed.

Even the staircase listens to the architecture: its curved rail hugs the wall, softening the hard lines and adding a sculptural note in a field of straight edges. It’s here that the idea becomes clear—the home wasn’t redesigned to impress, but to reveal how subtraction, alignment, and careful sightlines can turn an ordinary structure into something that lives differently with its landscape.

GLOBAL GLIMPSE

Excavating the Past

The descent begins under a staircase shaped from weathered steel and heavy timber—materials that still speak in the language of the old factory floor. Light settles low, grazing the concrete and catching the rim of a hand-thrown vessel, turning the room into a quiet archaeological moment.

Nothing is polished; every surface holds a grain of history, a roughness that refuses to be edited out. This is where the project roots itself—by letting the past remain visible, and letting its weight guide the new story.

Demanded Attention

Further in, the atmosphere shifts: woven wall coverings and oak trim wrap the space in a gentler register, like fabric softening metal. A floating linen canopy filters the light, dropping the ceiling just enough to make the room feel gathered rather than exposed. A mirror on anchored legs leans toward the wall, catching and bending the glow of candle flames. It feels like stepping into a reclaimed corridor—industrial bones paired with domestic gestures, each balancing the other.

Still Life of Materials

In the final room, timber shelves, plastered walls, and rough ceramic vessels create a rhythm that’s slow and steady, almost meditative. A bonsai tree curves toward the light, its weathered pot sitting atop a hammered plinth—nature and craft meeting at the same frequency.

Every detail is deliberate: the matte finish on the walls, the open shelving with folded textiles, the soft shadow lines that reveal how the space breathes. What emerges is a room shaped not for display, but for presence—where simplicity becomes a form of devotion, and history settles comfortably into the quiet.

VISUAL COMFORT

Small Things Considered

The first work draws from Agnes Waruguru’s language of light fabrics and plant-based pigments, giving the canvas a soft, translucent quality that mirrors home textiles. Colors bleed into one another like weather on cotton, forming landscapes that feel both remembered and invented. Her use of everyday materials echoes women’s cultural practices—stitching, dyeing, tending—and turns them into quiet meditations on place. The piece slows the viewer down, urging a deeper look at how small marks can hold whole geographies. It’s an invitation to see the familiar with new eyes.

The second piece channels Julie Mehretu’s charged, kinetic mark-making—black strokes that dart across the page like movement caught in tension. Her lines behave like maps of feeling, tracing motion, conflict, and space without offering a fixed destination. Then comes Asemahle Ntlonti’s terrain of deep greens, where cracked paint dissolves into threadlike fibers that build a dense, tactile surface. Her layered textures feel like land growing upward, a material metaphor for resilience and memory. Together, these works form a conversation about movement, matter, and the invisible histories that shape how we see.

MUSICAL INTERLUDE

What I'm Listening to in November

Collapse isn’t failure; it’s reversion. A return to whatever can actually hold your weight—I’ll see you next week, my friend.

Warmly,
/shane