ABOUT THE WORK
Portals to an Architecture is a result of the many emotional and intellectual encounters that I had with myself during the time when I was under chemotherapy and radiation treatments to cure a lymphoma. During that time, I became fascinated with the myriad views of the CT scans that were taken of my head. Contemplating these internal bone cavities, I saw them at first as the locus of a disease that could kill me. Then, little by little, I began to realize the beauty and structural economy evident in those images. I realized that they were indeed a beautiful architecture based on strict principles of engineering. My desire for life coupled with the improvement of my health coming at the heels of the daily desperation of whether that morning, noon, or evening, I was to die, transmuted into what I believe to have been an epiphany. Those images taught me once and forever that engineering without architecture was sterile and architecture without engineering, nonsense.
Portals to an Architecture is but a transmutation of the curves and arches of my skull into architectural arches capable of defining space and of completing a larger urban environment. That is, when one walks through those portals, one walks through my skull, and one is further aware of a perspectival, axial space that leads to further space. Space, in this case, turns into a metaphor of my future: going somewhere to reach someplace.
Even more important than being an iconological metaphor, I believe that the arches express the rock-bottom foundations of my future work as an architect: the coming together of architecture and engineering into a whole in which neither of the two could be distinguished from the other. This conception will of course grow and even be altered through the years, but I believe that it will never fundamentally change. Hence, the title of this work: Portals to an Architecture, or, if I may be allowed, Portals to the Life-Work of Steve Preston.
