“‘I see earth. It is so beautiful.’ “Dawn asks, ‘What does the water surface look like?’ ‘Darkish, with faintly gleaming spots.’ ‘Do you get the feeling that our planet is round?’” A selective reading of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s exchanges with ground control during the 108-minute space flight of Vostok I, launched on April 12, 1961, the first human orbit of earth in history. Seven short essays discuss the making of buildings, the making of machines, and that of time pieces under the titles “earth,” “hut,” “yard,” ‘paper,” “scissors,” and “rock.” Tomás de Paor is founder and principal of a practice based in Dublin, Ireland. Concerned with perception and construction, his work has been extensively published and exhibited. An elected Fellow of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland, de Paor was voted Young Architect of the Year by Building Design/Corus in 2003, and was nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Prize in 2005 and 2007 and the BSI Swiss Architecture Award in 2014. In 2015 he was elected a member of Aosdána, and in 2016 was elected International Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
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