The prince installs himself at the bottom of the lake, stoppering, with his body, the hole in the earth into which the water was draining. The princess loses her weightiness, and once again she’s at risk of zooming out past the reach of oxygen, into the stars. At which point nature fares poorly at the bottom of the drained lake, there appears a sign inscribed with gold letters: LOVE CAN FILL THE DEEPEST GRAVE. The prince falls in love with the princess, but his passion angers the witch who had cursed her at birth, and in retaliation she drains the lake. The princess is in the lake for a long time when, at last, a prince arrives. “Summer and winter it was all the same, only she could not stay quite so long in the water when they had to break the ice to let her in.” “The passion of her life was to get into the water,” the narrator tells us. Then, for some reason, the king thinks it would be humorous to toss his daughter into the lake - and what do you know! The water gives her some weight, and she can float, though there’s no change to her delighted condition and from then on, the princess spends her days in the lake. Neither can help, and still worse, their attempts to resolve her condition are life-threatening. The princess’s father, the king, summons two philosophers who try to cure her: Hum-Drum and Kopy-Keck.
Sometimes, she is tethered to castle grounds with a rope, simply to keep her from drifting up into the air. And not just metaphorically: “Deprived … of all her gravity,” in the storyteller’s words, the princess is unmoored - literally. Three of their stories are fairy tales, including “The Light Princess,” which features a young woman in late adolescence whose mental predicament, on the surface of things, appears to be the opposite of Adela’s existential depression: she has been cursed by a vindictive elder with a lack of seriousness. As part of her cure, some friends and family are formed into a Society of Storytellers it is their sympathetic narration that comprises the bulk of the novel. The main character of George MacDonald’s 1864 literary novel Adela Cathcart is an adolescent girl receiving homeopathic treatment for an illness of the spirit. Kate Bernheimer & Andrew Bernheimer The Light Princess This project presents a new path of inquiry, a new line of flight into architecture as a fantastic, literary realm of becoming. How many architects, young and old, have been inspired by a hero who must imagine new realms and new spaces - new ways of being in this strange world? Houses in fairy tales are never just houses they always contain secrets and dreams.
All drawings and animations by Bernheimer Architecture with Christiana MacGregor and Amanda Park.įairy tales have transfixed readers for thousands of years, and for many reasons one of the most compelling is the promise of a magical home.
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