HOUSE IN THE TUHINJ VALLEY
Sometime in the Autumn of 2020, I came across this photo of the detail of a wooden house near Kamnik in the Tuhinj Valley in Slovenia. It had been posted on social media by Jože Kozjek who works as a forester there, and is committed to photograph and document what he sees as remarkable testimonies to the cultural heritage of his region and country.
This house and many others related are extraordinary pieces of design, moving tributes to human inventiveness as it is played out within (or around) a traditional form.
These are of course words of ‘now’, written in admiration towards a process which was conducted with such fluency and ease that it could only be derived from embodied shared knowledge. We might now tend to call it ‘tradition’ which is a somewhat deadening word to pin onto something so alive, virtuosic and exuberant.
Being both related and totally foreign to my work on violins, it was fascinating for me to try to figure out how these angled joints might be designed and cut.
