Of the materials which construct our sense of place, dust is the most visceral and ignored. Dust is the trace of the body, micro-fragments of our perpetually disintegrating fabric.

For the Urban Shanty builder, the detritus of the slowly rendering organism presents an opportunity to construct home. Like the transformation of sunlight into a red sky with mythological significance. As a material for the Urban Shanty it is both plentiful and renewable.

Photo by Jo Hallington

In the domestic setting, the bodily dust blends with the dust of other carbon decays, especially for the bibliophile, where bodies of knowledge and living bodies settle only to be sucked and dumped into a damp landfill. Damp is the antithesis of dust.

The Dust House is a traditional Urban Shanty Form which privileges light. The construction of static inducing surfaces and sensuous fronds slowly collate and archive the dust fragments resource of dust with its wealth of embodied experience. Whilst the light tower utilises Moorish architectural principles of air circulation to lift the settling dust into the illuminated void space, whilst absorbing and focusing light down into that space.

Picture by Matt Hawthorn

Dust marks our presence and our absence, like Rodinsky’s dust left in abeyance for two decades.

The scene opens with the slowly twisting bodies of a man and a woman, ethnicities are blurred into silver as the dust settles. Settling dust is the ontology of despair, not the ecstasy of the flash in 1945 or the trepid expectation of the crash in 2001 but the slow decaying aftermath. The settling of dust, the filling of lungs, the

We whisper secrets into the dust to be embodied in the material memory. In the hope that one day the wind will release them like Midas’s reeds.

I know only too well the perpetual rendering of the skin, lively textured flesh transformed into a deathly silver.