I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.
Even a dwelling is a device that generates a distinct pattern of daily activities and their relationships. Some buildings are explicitly built for ritual, but the repetition of any activity, either mundane or religious, tends to ritualize them, and by facilitating this, an architectural structure can turn gradually – sometimes even unnoticeably – into an instrument of ritual.
The association of comfort with people and place are reinforced by the ritualized use of a place. Using a place at a set time and in a specific manner creates a constancy as dependable as the place itself. It establishes, in time and behavior, a definition of place as strong as any architectural spatial definition, such as an aedicula, might be. Ritualized use can do more than reinforce the affection for a place. Through ritual, a place becomes an essential element in the customs of a people.
The ruin [at Marfa] itself, in fact, set the terms for the kinds of solutions Irwin would propose, since its absent roof and floor, and its shockingly wide-open sequences of windows, which overlap and align with one another from different points of view on the site, already presented a rich, thoroughly keyed-up set of perceptual events before Irwin ever considered the project. It was already one of those sites that, in Irwin's words, "stands up and hums" thanks to the rich quality of their perceptual phenomena.