From John Tom Joel: The Blog of Ike Kligerman Barkley Architects
There’s an episode of the 1990s British television comedy “Absolutely Fabulous” in which Edina Monsoon’s kitchen burns. She needs to rebuild it, and after pleading aloud the title of this entry, she has a design epiphany. She and best friend Patsy spontaneously hop on the Concorde to steal, or at least photograph, a doorknob in the lobby of New York City’s Four Seasons Hotel. Edina’s extravagant pilgrimage to capture the essence of a whole project in an absurdly minor object hits close to home. In architecture, we’re often wagging the dog by the tail. Metonymy, or the projection of the possibilities of a small fragment to inform the whole, can be so important when designing.
