About
The measured room
Brandt Asay is an architect and photographer in Baton Rouge. Field Notes is where the two practices share a desk.
I learned to trust a room by standing in it longer than is polite. Architecture trained the standing. Photography gave me a reason to stay. In Baton Rouge the light is not a metaphor. It is a weather system with a schedule. By three in the afternoon a west window has opinions, and the porch is the only room that can negotiate with them.
People ask which came first, the drawing or the camera. They arrived as the same habit. A plan is a bet about how a body moves. A photograph is the bet collected. When I draw, I am trying to leave a path for light and for the person who will cross it. When I photograph, I am checking whether the path survived contact with furniture, humidity, and somebody’s actual Tuesday.
This journal is called Field Notes because that is the honest unit of the work. Not a manifesto. A note made after walking a house, or after standing at the levee when the river is the color of a nickel, or after emptying a drawer that had become a junk room in miniature. The subjects repeat: photography, architecture, interiors, and the plain discipline of putting things where a hand can find them. I do not think of organizing as a lesser art. A drawer is a plan at a smaller scale. If the drawer is confused, the house will perform confusion at a larger size.
I live and work in Baton Rouge. The houses I pay attention to are often ordinary: raised cottages, shotguns asked to live a life they were not drawn for, bungalows with a good porch and a tired kitchen, new rooms set beside old ones. The pictures I care about can explain those rooms without flattering them into a catalog. I would rather a photograph tell you where the afternoon goes than convince you the sofa was expensive.
The portrait on this page is the photograph I use when a page needs a person instead of a scene. The pictures inside the journal are a different instrument. They put a body in a room so the note has a witness. Read them with the essay they sit in.
If you came for a list of firms, license numbers, and finished addresses, that list is blank on purpose. The work page is a record of how the practice thinks: the porch, the drawing, the print, the drawer. Specific projects can be added when they are ready to be named. Until then, the notes are the work I am willing to show.
Write from the contact page if a room is stuck, or if you want to argue with a note. I answer slowly, and on purpose.