Sometimes the smallest detail can reveal the deeper meanings in complex and unruly patterns. So it was for me this weekend at the Rose Street Bakery Project, a performance piece presented by Hannah Dennison and Cradle to Grave Arts. Approximately 30 performers dressed as bakers and wearing dust masks ran, stood, stared, sang, worked, played and sometimes literally bounced off the walls of this abandoned building — soon to be converted into 12 units of affordable housing for artists and craftspeople. There was no real beginning or end. Things happened, or didn’t, and one could wander through the performance and building as if it were a museum. 

On the surface, it was an enjoyable, sad, tender, funny interpretation of the history of this building, as well as of the nature of bread, work and human intercourse. At other times, I felt drawn into a dreamlike state that suggested ways we transform artifacts of the past into something else — the endless spiral of history.

Last winter a sprinkler pipe burst and flooded the building. The water swelled the wood floors and, in some rooms, the pressure caused the wood to buckle upwards like a wave. I entered one of these rooms, which was dimly lit from a broken, partially boarded-up window and two candles. Several performers were standing still or engaging in repetitive actions. One then climbed a ladder and carefully sifted flour down onto the face of another.

 Then I saw that a section of the buckled floor had been planted with a row of wheat as if it were a furrow in the ground. Suddenly, I had a vision of this place, and this piece of land. A long time ago it was rock, then glacier, then soil and trees. It was silent except for thunder and lightning. People came and the trees were cleared. Furrows were plowed and things were planted. Structures were built from the trees and changed over the years. Then came bricks, and bread was baked until the ovens were removed; countertops were assembled and traveling salesmen with their suitcases burst forth like seeds in the wind to sell novelties — until they were gone forever and it became silent again. Then a sprinkler pipe burst and created new furrows in the floor, which were then replanted by performers as the building again emerges from a cycle of silence.

From this single detail I began to sense the other currents swirling within a piece that presented itself as just an abstract interpretation of the life and times of a bakery. Without any real beginning or end, and no plot, the piece kept recycling itself, just as this site has seen a series of patterns over its long history.

This performance didn’t just happen, it burrowed into the very fabric of the building. Small niches in brick walls were lit with candles as if they were ovens. Shards of Formica found on the floor were embedded into walls with piles of flour below — or were those piles of gypsum from the deteriorating sheetrock? Old plastic letters were randomly laid in front of a “baker” reading from old recipe books, or arranged into words such as “pan.” Salesman suitcases were packed with bread, and the performers bounced off the walls, emulating the slapping of dough sounds that used to keep the neighbors awake on hot summer nights.

This melding of the performance and the building meant that, even when nothing was happening, something was happening. The melancholic place itself became a performance, with all layers of the past alive and present.

I began to feel somewhat daunted by the task my partner, Robert Duncan, and I have as architects in renovating this poetically peeling place into the next cycle of transformation and activity. In many ways I would like it to remain just the way it is, but I know that it is time for new performers. We will preserve as many of the layers of history that modern codes allow — like the old recipe board drawn onto the metal walls of the mixing room. And I hope we will add a new layer of poetry to the endless cycle of change. 

This article appears in November 22 • 1995.