i.
The library that holds itself.
A reading room whose west wall, viewed from inside, is the east wall of a room that does not exist. Patrons frequently report a draft.
no. 01 · spring · mmlxxiii
okurairi.net
a quarterly journal
okurairi
A surrealist magazine from a parallel 1973, in which Magritte became creative director of a Japanese architecture journal.
02
editorial
Editorial
A note from a city that never quite existed.
Welcome, dear reader, to the seventh volume of okurairi. The magazine you hold — or scroll, or perhaps remember — was first published in the spring of nineteen seventy three, in a city that has since proved difficult to locate on any contemporary map. Our cartographers have not given up; they have merely changed their methods.
This issue concerns itself with the architecture of impossible places: the column that supports nothing, the door that opens onto its own back, the staircase whose ascent is also a return. We have arranged the spreads as one might arrange a small museum, with quiet corridors between the rooms, and a polite request that you do not photograph the exhibits.
Should you discover, between these pages, a building you recognise from a dream you have not yet had, do write to us. We collect such coincidences carefully, and file them in a drawer that occasionally hums.
— The editors, in the colonnade.
03
catalogue raisonné
Catalogue Raisonné
Three impossible structures, photographed without a camera.
ii.
The orbiting reliquary.
An iron sphere that circles a marble plinth at a distance of seven feet, regardless of the observer's position. It pauses, briefly, when addressed in classical Japanese.
iii.
The pavilion of recurring afternoons.
A small wooden structure inside which it is always quarter past three in the afternoon of June 14, 1973. The light is golden. A teacup steams on the windowsill.
04
foldout
Foldout
The Bauhaus and the shrine
The Bauhaus and the shrine
met at a vanishing point
just east of the future.
Of the merger
In our timeline, the Bauhaus closed in 1933. In the timeline of okurairi, it relocated to a small mountain town in Nagano in 1934, where its remaining masters met a collective of Shinto shrine-builders who had spent four hundred years refining the same problem of joinery.
Of the synthesis
The two schools did not merge so much as politely surround one another. Their first joint commission was a teahouse with no walls, only proportions; visitors reported that the absence of walls felt structurally significant.
Of the legacy
Today, this magazine is published from a building they designed in 1957: a six-storey structure that, viewed from above, is also a single horizontal line. We have chosen to take this on faith.
05
margin notes
On the rooms that arrange themselves while no one is looking.
It was reported, in the autumn of 1972, that several rooms in the museum had begun to rearrange themselves overnight. The director, a calm woman in a navy cardigan, did not consider this alarming. She had studied at both schools and recognised the behaviour: the rooms were settling into a more honest configuration.
By morning, the long gallery was three meters longer, and the small annex containing the porcelain had relocated itself entirely — not to the floor above, but to a position adjacent to nothing in particular. Visitors reached it by walking past it, then turning back.
We document the phenomenon here without explanation. The reader is invited to consult the marginalia, which record the observations of those whose patience exceeded their need for certainty. The annotations have not been corrected; their disagreement is, we believe, part of the record.
One thing only is consistent. The porcelain has never been broken. Whatever moves the rooms moves them, it seems, with care.
06
night plate
Night Plate
The hours after the magazine has been put down.
At night, the building changes its mind about which floor is the ground floor. The lift, instructed to descend, considers the request, then quietly does so, opening on the same hallway from which it left. We have learnt, by now, to thank it.
The drawings on the third floor — or what is currently called the third floor — rearrange themselves in their frames. By morning, no plate is exactly where the curator left it, but each is somewhere it belongs. The error, if it is one, is always corrected gently.
— The night editor, in the rotunda.
07
index
Index
A partial inventory
A partial inventory
of impossible nouns.
- Annex, the disappearing42
- Bauhaus-shrine, the17
- Colonnade, sleeping88
- Door that opens onto itself31
- Echo, courteous59
- Floor, undecided12
- Garden, rectangular but rounder71
- Hour, recurring afternoon25
- Index, this07
- Joinery, four-hundred-year17
- Lift, considerate06
- Moon, observed politely06
- Porcelain, the moving05
- Rotunda, hours unaccounted06
- Staircase, recursive02
08
colophon
Colophon
This issue of okurairi was set in Playfair Display, Source Serif 4, and Crimson Pro, all chosen for their patient, slightly nineteenth-century manners.
The illustrations are constructed in vector geometry from the muted palette of a Kodachrome slide left in a sunlit drawer for fifty years. No photographs were consulted, though several were imagined.
Editors keep correspondence in a wooden box that sometimes contains letters not yet written. Subscriptions are not currently available; the magazine will arrive when it intends to.
— fin —