Geoffrey Smedley has been invited to participate in an exhibit, "At Work," at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. This is part of his response to the CCA.
“I am, for better or worse, conditioned to work. I do so partially in order to find out what I am doing. Drawing, making machines, photographing and writing are processes of exploration, discovery and invention that are conditioned by thought, intuition, improvisation, blunders, accidents, pleasure and luck. About everything there is an unbounded zone, a penumbra; the soliloquy goes - well yes, possibly, but then there is this, and that- and by the way there is...
“I work reasonably but not rationally. I am in sympathy with Hamlet’s tactic Let us by indirection find direction out. My way of working is sometimes rigorous, and sometimes not, often straightforward yet frequently oblique - I shall provide a number of studies, maquettes, and drawings to illustrate this.
“As to the substance of my undertaking I reckon that like Pound’s Cantos my work has a long rhythm. I did not foresee that it would be so in the earlier stages of the project (Descartes Clown). In hindsight I have come to realize that the whole undertaking concerns the dissection of the idea we have of ourselves, in other words is a process of taking to pieces what might be called the Architecture of Man.”