House for Quasi Phantom Regions

Country House with Hip Roof B 8090
(Oils on canvas on wood, 50,3 x 62,8cm)

This house is for the lover of open country, but with no need for the flora and fauna usually associated with it. It is a house for the Frommian necrophiliac. This country lies on the surface of a planet roughly the size of Earth, but much heavier and with a very thick, almost water-like foggy atmosphere. Consequently the ground resembles the deep sea floor on Earth. A hint of some form of vegetation, either aquatic or coniferous can be surmised or easily dismissed in the milky background. Tastefully arranged on the premises are one replicated Silurian nautilus shell, various simplified crystal sculptures made of polymethylmethacrylate coated with transparent SiO2 thin films in hues of yellow, pink, and green, and several geometric primitives of synthetic plaster. The house itself is the sparsely ornamented, simplified version of a terranean postmodern country house catering for the aspiring single person or couple in the lower medium affluent income range and has the catalog number B 8090. It is especially suited for the writer of semi-popular fantasy novels. Note that it comes without garage, as such is not necessary on a planet without any destinations to travel to. The windows, though ostensibly made of some glass-like material, are either covered from the inside with blue boards, or the whole house might be filled with some blue tinted medium or nutritive solution. The inside of the house might be dark, artificially illuminated, or not existing. The owner or owners of the house might be immaterial, but still in need of spiritual nourishment, provided by the large space crystal floating in the dense, soup-like sky. This atmospheric painting © 2021 by Torsten Slama and the Fantasy Society

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Haus am Horn – A System House for the Modern Couple

Georg Muche, Haus am Horn, 1923
(A3; 42×29,7cm)

This house, a monument to the phallic guilt complex of modern patriarchal architecture, lives in a place of rich historical meaning for a certain variety of people. The hypothetical new owners, formers employees of the local financial institute which co-financed the costly renovation and restoration of this model building for the system family, exerting their ownership rights and overriding certain restrictive laws concerning historical hallmark structures, tried to add to the concept by painting the building a strange variety of pink, and placing a gaily painted totem pole of western American red cedar in the style of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast of North America on the premises. A nice wooden smell wafts through the area which is repellent to the common clothes moth, tineola bisselliella.

Looking at photographs of the original edifice, one is befallen by a baffling mixture of internal reactions. The masculinity of the design coexists with a maternal womb-like character achieved. The legend of the immortal uterus turned into stone. A 1923 drawing by Farkas Molnár, entitled “Georg and El Muche and the Haus am Horn” reveals a certain hetero-erotic dream aspect of the original concept. Before the erection (sic!) of the building, the land served as a vegetable garden for the local school for architects. Look at this 2016 drawing. Discern the different symbolic items distributed over the picture. A pole, a hose, a ball, a wall, a building. Generic vegetation. A Mark 1 inoculator floating in the sky above the chimney.Atmospheric rendering © 2021 by Torsten Slama and the International Wedding Ring

House for the Successful Magician’s Third Spouse

House for Successful Magician’s Third Spouse (with Benz Motorbike) [42×29,7cm, 2013]

The story behind this picture is not entirely satisfactory and has a few ethical issues. Possible implications concerning the Successful Magician’s domestic situation are based on one specific, questionable kind of speculation. The contained symbolism is subject to internal debate. Success is oftentimes but the wealth and authority associated with successful mendacity, hypocrisy, manipulation. This is the Successful Magician’s kind of success. He still finds enough traditionally minded potential spouses of petit-bourgeois origin to have his pick. His first chosen partner was maybe a mistake, the second one not mistaken enough, the third spouse-partner-wife seems by virtue of her young age and natural breeding suitable to give rise to his long wished for successor (to make success complete), and also take care of his finances. The story could be so changed that all protagonists are of the opposite (or same) sex. All gender and age combinations are possible and would produce stories of a similarly or differently perceived character. In the above described form, it is also a story which will soon be outmoded, or, if it occurs, will be rightfully seen as highly unusual and freakish, hinting at possible abuse.

© 2017 by the Torsten Slama Historical Society

Bungalow for the Magician

Bungalow for the Magician, 42×27,9cm (DIN A3),
pencil and coloured pencil on paper

A temporary country home for the Magician. The Magician specializes in making people vanish. His spells are potent only in that way. In all other ways he is a very unassuming, normal type of person. Working his spells draws on his overall spiritual energy, leaves him exhausted. Lacking any formal education, he has to rely on his spells to sustain him economically. He saves enough money through appearances in hotels and at festivities in small-town multi-purpose centres during the holiday season or through engagements on cruise ships to be able to afford a simple country retreat for his free time. The cellarless and easily relocatable building features a miniature pool and fitness related equipments to allow him to replenish lost energies through careful, peaceful training in solitude, meditating on a wild nomadic tellurian future. Other items related to spirituality (the stylized magician’s hat as protective cover for very delicate saplings), and sexuality (the orgonic sea-shell) are also part of the basic lay-out.

The house is available in similar form for all people interested in country retreats in wooded regions off the coastal areas, where lot prices are affordable and bird sounds and occasional appearances of badgers, ferrets, or racoons delight the well-honed biophile sensitivities of the gentleman tramp.© 2021 by Herma Ecdysone, Kurt Schessmanweil, Torsten Slama

19th Century Farmhouse Revival Unit

Black Forest House with (51) Pegasi B Square Tubing Sculpture
297x420mm, pencil, coloured pencil, copper leaf

Drawing of a  synthetic housing unit in the 19th century farmhouse revival style, located in Furtwangen, Schönenbach/Schwarzwald, with a mid-sized modernist sculpture in the foreground. The building hides its stilted construction under a deceptively massive outer hull made from  shingle and plaster, replicated in hard foam.

The modernist sculpture in the foreground, made from gold-plated square tubing, as used for vent shafts in extrasolar habitats, stays in harmonic contact with the floating space crystal and its recharging unit, thus establishing a meaningful connection between heaven and earth. The harmonies created are those of the rainbow and in a strictly diatonic minor (aeolian) scale. However, an important component of forbidden bulk second-harmonic generation is inseparable from the surface contribution in all practical experimental situations.

Freshly washed linen hanging from a line demonstrates a keen sense of order and cleanliness, balanced with enough taste and humanity to appreciate the beautiful artefacts created by faux decaying plaster and mock age-old brick work exposed which lend the house’s beautifully crafted outer coating its unique charm.© 2023 by Herma Ecdysone, Torsten Slama, Manfred Gorre, International Publications World Wide

Black Forest House with Mossi Figure

Black Forest house “Janus” with Mossi ancestral figure (42×29,7cm, 2011)

A home for the pattern recognition therapist and his family in a mildly crystal-spawning setting, characterized by its gently rolling layer of powdery soil. The place is ideal as a retreat for the Lunar type who wants to escape the Solar world.

Two openings in the basement are permanently accessible to ensure a smooth functioning of the household machinery. The therapist and his wife, who works as a lawyer specialized in copyright infringement and such, and is out during the day, share a bedroom suite and an annexed two sink bathroom under the roof. The children’s quarters, with separate entrance, are located in the back of the first floor. The therapist  his office in the frontal, thatched-roofed, lobe of the first floor. The office is soothingly illuminated through two large multi-colored windows. The entrance for patients is blocked by a large-scale replica of an ancestral figure of the Mossi tribe during sessions. The statue moves only when a secret slot is fed with a magnet card, of which only two copies exist, one for the master, one for the mistress.

The above-described family arrangement is fictional only. In truth the whole house is uninhabited and serves as a giant demonstration of the Jungian model of the human mind, complete with subconscious, atavistic mind, everyday consciousness (Real-I), and the lofty attic (Ideal-I), all separated into Anima- and Animus-dominated parts by a roof which, for reasons opaque to the modern, after-the-fact observer, is divided into a thatched and a shingled section. © 2017 Torsten Slama and International Publications Organisation World Wide

House “Djibi” for the Friend of all Animals

House “Djibi” for the Friend of all Animals. (Oil on canvas-covered panel w/ aluminium coated ornamental frame, 40×53 cm)

House “Djibi” is named after the cat-novel by Felix Salten. Some cats, a dog, and other animals are living and dying and killing each other in the house of an elderly school teacher and his wife. The teacher is grappling with a mild identity crisis, being undecided whether he is too soft of heart, and wishing himself to be stern and unrelenting, before deciding that he is, indeed, a soft sort of man.

Before being assigned its final title, the painting had a working title referring to August Derleth’s house-centered novel “The Lurker at the Threshold”.

The painting tries to look rather encrusted as opposed to smooth. The clouds are trying to look like clouds painted by Walter Leistikow. Flake White Hue and Transparent White were heavily used. Some areas do look like details from Cuthbert Hamilton Ellis’ paintings: rough and unfinished impasto effects prevail in an otherwhise naturalistic but unacademic style.

This is the photographic reproduction authorized by the painter. There exists another photograph of this painting, discernible by ghastly colours and flat lighting, made by a careless professional with a good camera. True appreciation for a given subject in many cases is much better than indifferent technique and superior technology.

See also these verses from “Sophia Trenton: A Moral Poem” (Phi Beta Cappa Poem at Stanford University, June 19, 1920) by Leonard Bacon, as quoted in Donald Knuth’s “The TeXBook”:

Technique! The very word is like the shriek
Of outraged Art. It is the idiot name
Given to effort by those who are too weak,
Too weary, or too dull to play the game.

© 2017 Torsten Slama and International Publications Organisation World Wide

Thatched Half-Timbered Brick House (Frisian Style) with Newtonian Prism

Thatched, half-timbered brick house in the Frisian style, with Newtonian prism, fully synthetic, located in Uurd II

This country home in the Frisian style offers shelter for progressive democrats of the protestant northern variety (deep sunk eyes, long nose, pallor of skin) with a taste for the traditional. The pattern designer living in this house enjoys her Bünting tea with rock candy and cream.

The house features a conventional Space Crystal accompanied by a free-moving prism made of a special ultra-clear aluminium compound, commemorating Newton’s discovery of the fraction of light and his victory over Germany’s Goethe with his idealistic notions about the distribution and nature of colours. The house itself is made of hardened plastic foam blocks in the style of bricks and framework. It is lightweight yet offers superb thermal insulation.

The two trees on the left are of a very rare succulent variety first described by the eminent space plant historian Rick Skrebus: Arborum Astrolobum Uitewaal-Darling.

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The crystals in the foreground are of the urobilin-coloured variety. Urobilins are the breakdown products of the bile pigment bilirubin. Bilirubin is itself a breakdown product of the heme part of hemoglobin from worn-out red blood cells. Alchemists believed them to be a special transmutation of gold. © 2017 Torsten Slama and International Publications Organisation World Wide 

See also the dedicated site for Low Density Settlement Units for Space People. © 2017 Torsten Slama and International Publications Organisation World Wide

Cross Fell House

“Cross Fell House” , Low Density Settlement Unit Designs for Space People‎ (Pencil and colored pencil on paper, A4, 2011)

Cross Fell House is the recreation of a municipal building standing at Crossfell, Bracknell Forest, near Mill Pond, Bracknell, United Kingdom.

 This Design based on the building in its original condition, as featured in the 1972 film The Offence by Sidney Lumet. © 2017 Torsten Slama and International Publications Organisation World Wide