Mette Barfod is the founder and editor-in-chief of Ark Journal. The biannual magazine is based in Copenhagen and celebrates Scandinavian architecture, design and art. Through Ark Journal, Mette and her team hope to explore the spaces around us, the objects we put in them, and the people who make them.
Which three books would you recommend?
The Poetics of SpaceGaston Bachelard
The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, whose 1958 book The Poetics of Space, is in the architectural canon. For Bachelard, our first memories of home underpin an experienced reality that we keep drawing on as adults. “The house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind... It is body and soul. It is the human being's first world.” Bachelard equates daydreaming with creativity and says a great many of our memories are “housed. If the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges… All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams.”
Landscapes of Modern Architecture:Marc Treib
I have always had an interest in the relationship between the building and the surroundings, and I have always had an admiration for specially architects like Barragán, Aalto, Mies, Neutra and Wright. Landscapes of Modern Architecture is an authoritative study of the interrelationship between modern architecture, landscape, and site strategy as viewed through the work of these five prominent architects.
Freeing ArchitectureJunya Ishigami
Freeing Architecture is the manifesto of an architect who makes dreams come true: his and those of a society that never stopped believing that functionalism isn’t the only answer. Lightness, transparency, simplicity, and communion with nature are Japanese architect Junya Ishigami’s watchwords. In his architectural masterworks, which he compares to landscapes, he eliminates the boundaries between exterior and interior space.
Whose reading list are you most curious about?
Peter Steffensen, Editor-in-chief of Plethora Magazine and, Niels Strøyer Christoffersen, Founder of Frama.