Laundry / Rooftop laundry
Location: Prague, Czech Republic
“The late works of Siegfried Morkowitz are best represented by his poem Sentence recently published in the B O D Y Magazine. The melancholy fills the space while the poem is read. For us it worked better than any client specification. Our task was clear at the first sight, we needed to keep the soul of the space, while building a retreat for the creative mind. The disused laundry at the top of a 19th century mestansky dum had it all. In the very heart of the Prague’s Jewish quarters, hidden in the attic, five stories above the havoc of the Old Town. In the very center, though touching the sky. Years of labour soaked up in the walls created the perfect foundation for our design of a poets study.”
Architect:
COLL COLL (Markéta Součková, Krištof Hanzlík, Eliška Martínková, Vavřinec Veselý, Martin Gaberle) – www.collaborativecollective.cc
Model:
Siegfried Mortkowitz
Conversion is part of The Emerald by Urbanium Concept - www.the-emerald-prague.com
INCOMPLETE SENTENCE
sometimes at night, just before I turn off the lights
and shut myself in the night, before I read
that magazine piece about an excentric artist
working on an exact replica of the whole world < or googled the symptoms of some rare fatal disease,
just to be sure I am still immortal,
before I have checked on the whereabouts <17 of the cat, to see if he has climbed
into that >
when the trash bin was open
or was not locked out on the balcony
but after I have smoked my last cigarette and
made a mental note to buy more wine soon,
after I checked my sleeping son, to make sure
he is still breathing, though he is always
after I locked the front door ,
after I took my false teeth
and brushed the real ones,
after I have contemplated my half-toothless grin in the mirror
and compared it favorably to a baboon's butt,
after I have examined the nigh t for stars and found none,
just a sheet of ammoniac light plastered against the sky
by the gaseous metropolis in which I now live,
and after I have asked myself again
if it would not
wherever there is,
and after I remember it
, for no reason at all,
that night we parked our old Rambler in a field
of wildflowers not far from where you now live
and a storm erupted that took us in its violent fist
and we clung to each other for dear life
as all lovers do -
about Christ, all the years that have passed
since the days we spent inside each other's skin
in a single night's dream.
SIEGFRIED MORTKOWITZ
works as a free-lance journalist and lives in Prague.