on site review 40: the architect's library

ON SITE r e v i e w

t he a rc h i te ct’s l i b ra r y

4 0 : 202 2

WE ME - Barbara Stauffacher Solomon Barbara Stauffacher Solomon WE ME 114 pages 8.75 x 10.5 inches Digital Press on 80lb cover Wire-o binding 1st edition of 200 2022 Once again allowing her minimal typography to dance across the page, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon seems hellbent on asking important questions with an almost lyric joy. WE ME is an examination of the expression of self: How we create our individuality and how we manufacture others, through useful self-deceptions and mass(media)delusions.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (b.1929 in San Francisco) has worked as an artist, designer, and landscape architect across eight decades. Perhaps best known for her invention of Supergraphics, she has also shown her work widely and is represented in the permanent collections of MoMA, LACMA, The Walker Art Center, and many more. $50.00 USD https://www.colpapress.com

Betsy West

Jose Gamez

David Walters

the bookshelf as surrogate self greg snyder

on pages 56-9, with the rest of the shelves on the inside back cover

Michael Swisher

Lee Gray

Linda Samuels

o nce ma de bo o k s

s ma ll b o o ks p rin t f ield n o t es h a n d w o rk t h in gs s a id

stephanie white

Small books about small things: Texas octagonal dance halls, Barcelona’s breakwater fishing platforms, water towers, parks at dusk, highway signs, recipe books, an artist I was taken with who made cardboard casts of everyday things – saws, dictionaries, frying pans. Field notes: short typed explanations, 2 1/4” black and white photos taken with a Rolleicord, all run off on a photocopier, folded and sewn into signatures which were glued to the letterpress cover, pressed and then trimmed on a guillotine. Sections of the coloured proof sheets one used to get when slides were developed were put on the front.

This was before computers lived on every desk.

This was when I read that Virginia and Leonard Woolf started Hogarth Press with a hand press that sat on their dining room table.

I got an ISBN number and a post office book rate number and mailed them out as mail art, something like threedimensional postcards.

Their footprints have been all over On Site review since 2001. c

S W h i te

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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

ON SITE r e v i e w 40: t h e arch it e c t ’s l ibrar y wi nter 2022 On Site review is published by Field Notes Press, which promotes field work in matters architectural, cultural and spatial.

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N O T E S For any and all inquiries, please use the contact form at https://onsitereview.ca/contact-us Canada Post agreement 40042630 ISSN 1481-8280 copyright: On Site review. All rights reserved.

The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise stored in a retrieval system without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of Copyright Law Chapter C-30, RSC1988. back issues: https://onsitereview.ca these are listed in the website menu in three groupings: issues 5-16, 17-34 and 35-39.

contents Stephanie White Barbara Staffaucher Solomon Linda M Just

2 4 8

once made books ME/WE palm readings or, a brief examination of the personal bibliography

Shawn Michelle Smith Paula Szturc Nicole Dextras Barbara Cuerden Tiago Torres-Campos

12 14 18 20 22

reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin liquid architecture obsolescence: encyclopaedia a monument to the end of bookishness spiral constellations: on books, shelves and libraries

Thomas Kohlwein SMSteele Rafael Gomez-Moriana Stephanie White Evelyn Osvath Ivan Hernandez-Quintela Robert G Hill Myron Nebozuk

26 28 30 32 36 40 45 50

a bookish walk around town settled, unsettled, settling stacking crates reading peripheries the architect’s logbook bookshelves, reading and places to read an architecture of books in the company of books you are never alone

Dennis Rovere

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Karen Joan Watson Greg Snyder

56 60

love affairs: four architects and their books for the love of books the bookshelf as surrogate self

editor: Stephanie White design: Black Dog Running

This issue of On Site review was put together in Nanaimo on unceded

printer: Emerson Clarke Printing, Calgary

Snuneymuxw Peoples, and in Calgary under Treaty 7 comprised of the

Coast Salish territory, specifically the traditional territory of the Kainai, Siksika, Piikani, Tsuut’ina and Stoney Nakoda First Nations, the

subscriptions: libraries: EBSCO On-Site review #3371594 at https://ebsco.com individual: https://onsitereview.ca/subscribe

descendents of whom continue to live on this land.

The contributors come from diverse and various places: Canada, the United States and Mexico; Scotland, Austria, Spain and Germany.

On Site review is honoured to have the contributions in this issue.

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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

layout proofs for WE/ ME, a book that questions modernism, screen culture and the role Me has in We. There are 56 pages of searing, searching drawings of words, letters and graphic disturbance.

On page 22 she asks: From De-construction to Re-construction is Modernism an overly indulgent overimprovement con job?

And answers it on page 23: Maybe. But this is what I still do!

B arbara Stau f f ach e r So lo mo n

C hr i s G u nd e r

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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

B arbara Stau f f ach e r So lo mo n

t he b ook s o f B arbara S t a u f f a c h e r S o l om on stephanie white

me to Linda M Just: You mention Barbara Stauffacher Solomon. She sent a picture of the books in her studio – tottering stacks on her desk, a wall of books crammed on shelves. A stack of paper for making the pages of her books, a jar of Elmer’s rubber cement. She sent the proofs of her latest book: fierce and angry, bursting off the pages.

Linda Just to me: Starstrike happens less often to me these days, but I have to admit a little audible gasp at your story, especially with the prominent bottle of Elmer’s rubber cement. Fierce is such an excellent descriptor – the glue in her layouts always reads like the aftermath of battle, and begs the question whether to read the paper cuts as wounds to nurse, or bandages to heal.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, WE/ME. San Francisco: Colpa Press, 2022.

pal m re adi n gs o r, a b r i e f e x a m i n a t i o n o f the personal bibliography

b o o ks o rd erin g co llect io n s p reo ccu p a t io n s co n t a min a t io n

linda m just

One of the first topics that often drifts to the head of a conversation in a room full of architects (after introductions, construction details, nascent plans for one’s next design pilgrimage, or, possibly, dinner options) is books: what you are reading or have formatively read. Eventually, someone will cite, whether in earnest or irony, a conceptual powder keg of a piece. And like magic, measured conversation shifts to passionate, and even rowdy debate, which may call to mind the Jean Savarin epithet about revealing who you are by divulging what you eat.

Following the variation on that theme, I’d thus argue that an architect can be understood in part by their bibliographic tastes – but take it a step further, to a skeptic’s extreme: to really know their inner workings, you need to see their library.

Not just the cache of references they keep in the public-facing studio, for use or exhibition, but the ones they live with privately. Because while those, too, are books that contain practical information, they invoke architecture in the same sense that armour prompts an analogy to fortresses. They’re closer to the skin, and to the heart.

Perhaps these provocations are built upon the premise that, at the broader psychological level, there is a measure of human connotation and comfort that comes from the book as an object. Thus, superficially, they serve as key but token props in every photograph of a well-appointed, realistically staged interior; without them, a room [for Western colonial iconography] can become a peculiar harbour of sadness, absence, scarcity, or even danger no matter how lavish it may be in other terms – culturally signalling a kind of social uncanny valley. There have been entire businesses established solely around the provision of faux libraries for interior designers – books sold by colour, size, shape, and weight – simply to reinforce the spatial and social meanings their presence offers.

But architects have an arguably perennial relationship with printed matter – both in the sense that there is a recognisably established history of so-called paper architecture, and that the relationship has phases of growth and dormancy that follow the phases of design like the cycles of a garden.

Most simply put: architects communicate ‘on paper’ what is ultimately translated into physical space through construction. The development of each designer’s vocabulary

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for that process will be ongoing, but it is ultimately the outcome of a lengthy personal journey. Print thus becomes a benchmark and shorthand for an architect’s influences and conceits; the recitation of a personal reading list [or, just as tellingly – a ban list] outlines the perimeters of one’s creative universe, with this canonical text at the heart of the solar system, and that bit of Apocrypha exerting the gravitational pull of an outlier planet.

At the functional level, there is an echo in a book’s structure and logic that resembles the syntax designers typically pursue in their work. Books are modular, even fractal… like bricks coursed in a wall, which is in turn assembled of smaller parts – their chapters formed of image spreads or paragraphs; of sequences and sentences; of dots, words, glyphs, and gaps… a hypertextual screening of the Eames’ Powers of Ten, a walk through the labyrinths of a Borges novel.

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

the hand and eye. Whether deliberately or subliminally, our shelves take on the character of great internal facades; our somewhat careless piles by nightstands and on studio tables become urban master plans to navigate like parodies of popculture leviathans when we make our way to bed or work. In this dormant condition of an archive, on shelves and stacks, arranged in piles, walls, or enfilades, they still communicate – conveying ideas [and humanness, vis a vis intellectual curiosity and manual craft] in space.

The proximal relationships between spines produce conceptual rebuses, constellations of interests, curiosities and ethics. In this way, rooms with books are perpetually refreshing, since each volume usually carries both the story between its covers and, more intangibly, of its time or purpose of acquisition… the presence of dust or signs of ultraviolet exposure sometimes further marking temporal history or the enduring power of influence.

L i n da M J u s t

Books thus physically manifest the qualities praised in architectural design -- they are tactile, and their sensory engagement prompts a visceral response, perhaps an unnameable feeling of attraction or repulsion. Consider public responses to Brutalist buildings: whether the source of the feeling is readily evident or not – whether the feeling justifies the criticism when the building functions well – and the parallel drawn here becomes more obvious. The tooth of the card stock covers, endpapers, and signatures; the soft relief of typeset on the page; the smell of the ink; the contrast of colour composition in layouts; the diegetic structure of its contents; even the typographic choices, blank space, and margining; all these seemingly small decisions can impact user/reader perception of a story through balance and form, albeit subliminally.

Even at the macro-scale, as an object with agency and exerting Thing Power, books have an appealing tectonic parity: they lend themselves to rational assembly, scaled to

All of these manifested qualities, independently and certainly when assembled in concert, are so arresting, it begs the question of how architects would not be drawn to books, as media… as design objects in their own right? We will move our favourite specimens – amassed, culled, and curated – across continents, in checked luggage on planes, in cartons packed in moving vans. What we choose to keep surely bears some higher meaning and value… · I say all this at least in part from a place of self-indulgent introspection: for I recognise the habit in myself.

While I am a staunch advocate of public libraries [I’m certain I have to be – both my parents worked in libraries at one time, and I spent most of my childhood in them], I’ve gradually accumulated a loosely curated and generously loaned collection of print artefacts over the last two decades, at first, and primarily, of things you couldn’t find in your average community institution. It has grown slowly, like an amateur gardener’s indulgent unruly hothouse, and I have moved it halfway across the country three times – its storage cartons usually exceeding the volume of my other, comparatively stoic, inventory of domestic belongings. On the one occasion I had to store my things during an extended period of transience, it was my books that I missed most, like an extension of self and the way I had always imagined a phantom limb must feel.

It was only with their eventual retrieval that home felt like Home, even though I’d settled into a flat months earlier.

Though seeds of the collection appeared well before, its proper groundwork was prompted by a theory paper on unbuilt projects, which I was assigned as an undergraduate architecture student in 2001. I drew what my peers thought then was the short and very obscure straw for a topic: John Hejduk’s Berlin Masque. It was a fateful choice, since I could not know how that project would haunt my academic career, and notably shape my disciplinary interests and understanding. It was the waking, recurrent dream set in an unknown place where one does not speak the language but strives to learn at each visit.

With less than three weeks to research and write it, and deep dives of the internet yielding no particularly helpful returns, I found my only primary source in the university library stacks.

I checked out Mask of Medusa, Rizzoli’s famous first imprint of Hejduk’s architectural oeuvre, and puzzled over the cryptic imaginary landscapes it contained, which were presented in an aleatoric format, full of poetry, interviews, scattered metaphors, ghostly drawings and spidery captions.

I revisited the book again and again over the next six years of study – the obscure references, the emotional design intention, the permutations of media used to communicate, and the means of documenting it all had perhaps eclipsed the projects themselves – until one day it could no longer be checked out: it had been placed in Special Collections, with limited access for students and no access granted to even newly-minted alumnae. Public libraries did not have it, and I quickly realised that sourcing a personal copy of an out-ofprint, oversized monograph was unimaginable on an intern’s salary.

While I did eventually acquire a second-hand copy, bought with, of all things, frequent flyer miles gifted by a globetrotting employer one Christmas during the last economic crash, I had by then also collected other volumes that struck the same jarring chords as Hejduk’s work. And not just design monographs and technical manuals – but a heavy dose of literature by authors who deftly framed their settings with the rigour of an architect, creating vehicles, plot instruments and stages upon which their dramas unfolded. For some reason, the Mask had affirmed that it was all right to mix genres and contaminate the purity of one’s academic readings.

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This isn’t particularly unusual – personal collections often wander more generously outside the confines of design proper or even the medium of books – they may contain fiction or prose, broadsheets or zines, photographic prints or slides.

But I suppose at that stage in a field I had embarked upon with coltish naïvety and subsequently approached with the grave resolution of a novitiate, I needed that invitation to embrace a measure of deviance.

To the aforementioned collection, I added photo essays and acoustics primers, a book of Eastern European Secession artwork from the 1960s which my father had rescued from the trash of a library making shelf space. There are graphic design imprints by Beatriz Colomina and Barbara Stauffacher Solomon [on designing graphic design for imprints and architecture] and pieces collected more for the physicality and structure of the book than the subject [I write that with all apologies to The Wooden Crate]. There are a few beloved childhood picture books and science fiction novels from my mother, which are illustrated by Diane and Leo Dillon and whose surreal watercolours are simultaneously so abstract and intricately detailed that the captivated viewer is informed by a single vignette, even as it leaves just as much to the imagination. Essays on the diegetics and montage in the films of Lynch and Tarkovsky are slipped amongst the novels of Calvino, Rushdie, LeGuin and Pamuk. Vinyl has crept into the shelves, partly because I work to music and sound has been an enduring preoccupation in my design motifs, but also because I find the serial format of sleeves and the graphic/ tactile presence that laces together several sensory stimuli conceptually interesting. I have also inherited some old recordings of poetry readings; that seems to further assert the kinship between pressings and print.

Most of these acquisitions have stories attached, as they often do for collectors, which can cause the stacks, in certain moods and atmospheres, to become not only a metaphorical garden for fresh ideas but a mausoleum for unbridled and unbidden recollection.

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

But relegating print to roles of memento mori is as dangerous as declaring architecture conservation exclusively an act of preserving fixed notions of the past. The privilege of crafting a history, a narrative, comes with the responsibility of recognising that knowledge is dynamic and evolving.

Organisation and sequence can mean the difference between objects preserved in a vacuum, or contribution to an ecosystem conducive to growth and change. I have handled my own library [and career] with that same rationale.

I love Georges Perec for all his irreverent lists and short essays, but especially for his earnest contemplation on the travails of book organisation. Where, he asks, does one begin? Is it best to sort by genre? Alphabetical order? Shape?

Colour? Order of acquisition? Each filtering tells a story, and most designers make an effort to organise their personal space, consciously or in a state of somnambulance, just as one would a landscape or façade. Bibliophile guests may express curiosity about the logic behind poetry next to material catalogs – it makes for even more strange, and sometimes very animated, conversation as most who ask will have an opinion.

But it is a matter one may attend with some deliberation and even ceremony. Because it does, I believe, superimpose an aspect to moving about one’s living spaces that is not so unlike employing the mnemonic device of a memory palace: you see, and absorb, and think about the contexts as you go about your day.

And THAT is what makes an architect’s library so significant, so revealing.

It’s said that every problem is a nail when your only tool is a hammer, and given my predilection for design, it is seldom that I experience anything without attempting to view its underpinnings – like reading an X-Ray, with design as radium. And it’s in the anomalies, whose structures glow in eerie inexplicable configurations, that I most strongly see the sparks for inspiration, which later manifest in one’s work.

Lined up on their shelves, books will yield a reading like cards from a tarot deck, with their contents contaminating one another by proximity, through consonance or contradiction, generating new hybrids, or at least the rich creative soil in which a new idea can bloom. c

Linda M Just

Linda Just is an architect, interdisciplinary collaborator, writer and researcher. Her practice merges technical rigour with a sharp focus on the abstract capacities of design to engage personal perception and narrative. She holds a Master’s in Design Studies from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and an MArch from the University of Illinois-Chicago.

reading U n c le To m’s Ca b i n s h aw n m i c h e l l e s m i t h

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century. Published by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852, it was an anti-slavery novel that helped fuel abolitionist sentiment in the North before the Civil War. Despite its anti-slavery history, the novel is also the source of some of the most trenchant racist stereotypes in US culture.

I began my teaching career as a professor of American literature and American Studies in the mid-1990s before moving to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to focus on visual culture and photography in the mid-2000s. In my previous role, I taught Uncle Tom’s Cabin roughly every year for ten years, re-reading its 629 pages each time.

During a recent sabbatical, I began to sort through my professional things. When I looked at my teaching materials from the past, I was struck by the yellowing paperback novels riddled with post-it notes. After so many years, I encountered the books anew, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin in particular, as artifacts that showed traces of their use and marked a repetitive analogue reading practice.

Seeing the novel in this way enabled me to understand it not simply as a narrative, but also as an object, and I wondered what other things I might make with this material. Taking the book apart, I constructed small paper cabins out of its pages and photographed them, including a few that I set on fire.

Reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an excavation of my own professional reading practice as well as an oblique archaeology of some of the cultural roots of racist discourse in the United States. c

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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

b o o ks p a ges p a p er a rch a eo lo gy v io len ce

S ha w n M i c he l l e S m i t h

Shawn Michelle Smith is professor of visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her most recent book is Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography (2020).

liq u id a rc h it e c t ure

rea d in g w a it in g f o llo w in g t o u ch in g w in d in g ro a d s

pa u l a s z t u r c

If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fatal, inescapable points, then digressions lengthen that line – and if these digressions become so complex, tangled, tortuous, and so rapid as to obscure their own tracks, then perhaps death won’t find us again, perhaps time will lose its way, perhaps we’ll be able to remain concealed in our everchanging hiding places.

Carlo Levi, from his introduction to Italian edition of Tristram Shandy, quoted by Italo Calvino in ‘Quickness’, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, trans. Geoffrey Brock. London: Penguin Classics, 2016. p 57

This offering brings forward two points from my rather meandric readings. Both moments can be characterised by holding onto the gesture of searching (not synonymous with scrolling). Searching embeds me in the curatorial, historical and particular spatial contexts within the collection I am studying.1 The relevance of this endeavour is determined by the dimensions of proximity. Repeating Vilém Flusser – ‘proximity measures my hope, my fear, my plans’.2

Pa ul a Sz t ur c

1 Temporary closures of Scottish public institutions and universities libraries mid-2020 shifted my ways of organising, archiving and accessing sources, resulting in temporary assemblages that became frighteningly permanent each day. In a collaborative doctoral programme that focuses on a collection of Dada and Surrealist publications drawn from the book collections of Roland Penrose and Gabrielle Keiller, and housed at the Scottish

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National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, the institutional and physical distance between the space of the collection and me, gave a sense of urgency and another dimension to my work.

2 Vilém Flusser, ‘The Gesture of Searching’, in Gestures, trans.

Nancy Ann Roth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. p 157

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

no tes o n th e sch olarly sh e lf With academic life moving onto the screen, I am attuned to lost experiences – the sense of immersion, being surrounded by the familiar vastness of paratextual layers, bridging the disciplines, time and space – the library. The loss takes the shape of a scholarly shelf that morphs into a virtual background reminding me of the privilege of accessing knowledge through physical codex rather than fragmented, infinite yet limiting, pdf/scrolls.3 Through the lectures, tutorials and seminars conducted online, connecting our intimate and secluded worlds, I encounter the perfect shelf – a type of space that transfixes with its spatial fluidity, its material and conceptual layers, that draws in a fasted mind.

It is not the organically amassed assemblage of art and architectural books spanning centuries, contained within subtly worn oak joinery, graciously occupying a Georgian interior, nor is it the carefully composed array of books and design objects climbing modernist modular shelving units. No, I find it in a recorded conversation with Zygmunt Bauman, filmed at his home in Leeds a decade ago.4 Here, a stratified design, based on small concrete blocks and simple wood shelves, wraps the walls of a modest interior. It fills the niches, carrying the weight of decades of academic work. This dynamic structure, with blocks distributed evenly as well as being shifted for more support or, in some places, responding to oversized piles of material becomes a frame that adapts to an ever-growing library. Other videos document the accumulation.5

3 Electronic versions of printed works expose the navigational and format challenges of the virtual space that often disregards the paratextual elements understood in Genette’s terms as ‘liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between the book, publisher, and reader’. Johanna Drucker in her essay ‘The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space’ brings to focus the book as a three-dimensional, dynamic and performative structure. See A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. http:// www.digitalhumanities.org/ companionDLS/ 4 Mike Dibb and Charlie Duran, ‘Personally Speaking; Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman - Film 1’ accessed Dec 31, 2021, https://youtube.com/watch?v=19kmqx1-Slw

Glimpses reveal a print of Don Quixote on the wall, returning later in the form of a sculpture on a shelf. There is an abstract painting on top of everything, leaning against the wall, and abundance of paper, notes, printed pages, arranged in piles, folders, books and boxes. In all the videos, the camera is fixed on the scholar holding a lighter or a pipe, gesticulating as he describes the dialectics of modern uncertainty. On the door is a poster from 1996, an invitation to an event with Janina Bauman at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Staszic Palace in Warsaw.

Above it, is another one, simply titled Moods and Shapes. There is also a card with a poem inside fixed to the door at eye level.

At one point the camera looks across a completely filled desk, with a screen, webcam, hard drive and more books – out to the green barrier of the garden. The shelving system, however easy it is to construct, is overgrown by incoming volumes. Books escape the shelves, pile on the floor, taking over, rendering the rest of the space inaccessible. Piled on the shelves the books become structural members in the absence of blocks, disturbing the rhythm of construction. Nothing is fixed, it’s just timber resting on blocks; some shelves are nearing collapse — all from the overwhelming presence of books.

I am one of many that acknowledged the cosmic pull of this interior constellation. This precious and fragile space was artistically colonised by Polish artist, Mirosław Bałka, who in 2013 brought to Bauman his 1:1 photograph of the studio wall of images, curated with surgical precision. The rationale behind this act was revealed in a limited edition publication, Bałka / Bauman – a record of the conversation between the artist and the philosopher of liquid modernity.6

5 Bartek Dziadosz, ‘Excerpts from the interview with Zygmunt Bauman/Cutaways B-roll’, filmed June 1-16, 2010 as part of the documentary, ‘The Trouble with Being Human These Days’ acccessed Dec 31, 2021. https//www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zvfLpptUIh4 6 Zygmunt Bauman and Mirosław Bałka, edited by Katarzyna Bojarska. Bauman / Bałka. Warszawa: Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 2013. The copy I am working with comes from the library of my supervisor, Ella Chmielewska.

n o tes o n rea d in g Tristam Sh an dy

Paula Szturc

I open the 1815 edition of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, just after restrictions are lifted.7 The four volumes of Sterne’s works are stored on the top shelf in the Roland Penrose Library section, within the Gabrielle Keiller Library Room – an architecturally charged gallery and mezzanine space that blurs the boundary between library, study and exhibition space. Here, paratextual density brings together works that span half a millennium, with Tristram Shandy and Henri Matisse’s Jazz occupying the same space. Both Keiller and Penrose collections centre around Dada and Surrealist publications. Penrose’s bequest contains small section of books he chose to keep from the vast manuscript and rare books library of Baron Peckover, his maternal grandfather.

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The enmeshing of institutional and personal geographies results in a unique situation – the recreation of the original proximities of objects within the collections. Sterne’s four volumes with the remnants of marbling on their covers and tiny evidence of gold in the ornamented embossed details on the spine, share the shelf with the copy of first collected edition of Gargantua and Pantagruel printed in 1564 in Lyon, and a 1545 Venetian edition of Orlando Innamorato.

7 After lockdown and the slow opening of public institutions, 18 months later I was allowed to examine The works of Laurence Sterne, in four volumes, containing the life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. a sentimental journey through France and Italy; sermons, - letters, etc with a life of the author, written by himself. / Volume the Second printed in London by A. Strahan in 1815, now part of Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Archive, Roland Penrose Collection, Peckover Library, GMA A35/2/RPL4/062.

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

White ribbon wraps the volume’s crumbling cover. Its strong scent, signals material degradation. Slightly textured soft cream paper with gentle stains provides a strong contrast to crisp, slightly brown ink. ‘Printed by A. Strahan, Printers-Street, London.’ Sterne’s face on the frontispiece is ambiguous, with care and detail directed towards symbolic objects – a hunting bow and a singing bird. The title page is the last conventional paratextual element in its expected position. The novel unravels with divagated impetus, best described by Carlo Levi (quoted by Calvino in Six Memos) as a weapon to save oneself from the death and time. The dedication is found mid-chapter, and a lengthy preface in the third volume.

I am guided on this journey by Richard Macksey’s foreword to Gérard Genette’s Paratexts, titled ‘Pausing on the Threshold’.8

confession of the continuous and conscious manipulation of the plot. The marbled page from Penrose’s copy, as per Sterne’s specifications, features mesmerising, fluctuating, tinted waves registering the wetness of the process.11 There is a crease on top of the verso page, suggesting a rushed application of the marbling cut out. Large pale pink drops swim in rivers of yellow, turquoise, blue and pink. This motley emblem not only disturbs the novel, but marks ‘the outermost limits of the text’.12 So far I have followed the vectorial movements, the plot line schemata, the entanglements, the curvature. The dislocating gesture however – with positioning liminal devices associated with textual boundaries, in-between the leaves, within the signatures – speaks rather of a liquid architecture of the book. c

Macksey’s footnotes on this strategy against the time lead me to Victor Shklovsky and his Formalist analysis of Sterne’s various temporal transpositions characteristic of poetics rather than prose.9 Prolonged dashes and asterisks adorn the pages, exclaiming in dialogues writing themselves into evasive movement. I almost skip the Malevich-esque black page, another experimental paratextual device denoting ‘the innermost and overdetermined limits of the text itself.’ 10 In Sterne’s book I discover a foldout with the Lili Bullero score – the whistling tune of Tristram’s veteran uncle Toby, and diagrams illustrating the story line in Tristram Shandy – a

8 Richard Macksey, ‘Pausing on the Threshold’ the forward to Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretations, by Gérard Genette, trans. Jane Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.Press, 2010. xi – xxiv 9 Viktor Shklovsky, ‘The Novel as Parody: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy’ in Theory of Prose, Viktor Shklovsky, trans. Benjamin Sher. Illinois: Elmwood Park, 1990. 147-170 10 Macksey, ‘Pausing on the threshold’ xi 11 Unmarbled editions reveal a note from the author to incorporate double-sided marble page: ‘☛ The BOOKBINDER is desired to cover both sides of this leaf with the best marbled paper, taking care to keep the folio lines clear and to preserve the proper margins’ The copy from Peckover Library that I am working with, has marbled pages simply glued on, rather than laboriously incorporated into the binding process, as in the first edition.

12 Macksey, ‘Pausing on the Threshold’, xi

Paula Szturc is currently undertaking an Architecture by Design PhD at the University of Edinburgh (ESALA). In her collaborative research project with National Galleries of Scotland, she explores material, spatial and sensorial aspects of artists’ books.

o b sol esce n c e : encyclopaedia

w ea t h erin g u s eles s n es s b o o ks p a p er mu lch

nicole dextras

I am from Alexandria. No, no the ancient port of knowledge in Egypt but a small dull town near the St-Laurence River in Ontario. But nonetheless the namesake of my birthplace has forged strange neural pathways in my imagination to the fabled lost city of books, instilling a penchant for the tactile and ephemeral nature of ink and paper.

As an artist I have created words in ice that melt and of grass that grows. I am fascinated by the morphing of language. Maybe it is because this town of my childhood lives on the border of Ontario and Quebec where the central thoroughfare is called Main street at one end and rue Principale at the other. To my juvenile ears both languages danced endlessly between division and alliance, while the transmutation of words themselves were an incessant sharpener of wit.

Obsolescence is a series based on lost material technologies such as the typewriter, the darkroom enlarger and the encyclopædia, whose relevance has vanished in my lifetime.

Installed outdoors, I documented their transformation over the course of four seasons.

A full set of hard cover encyclopædias was once a proud affirmation of middle-class aspirations towards progress but now they are displayed as relics of a bygone age in upscale vintage stores. Today these photos of books portray the A to Z of knowledge as their appeal and importance diminishes through the ravages of time. Their pages turn as the leaves fall and the snow blankets. Their mutation is recorded as they are pierced with blooms, then frozen in ice, their pages glued together with mould, with words isolated and blurred, full of nostalgia and loss but also with an ever-hopeful eye for detail and life. c

© n i co le de xtras

Nicole Dextras graduated from Emily Carr College of Art in the interdisciplinary department in 1986. Her art practice is rooted in the environmental art movement with transformative installations and film that mark the nature of time. She has exhibited in Canada, the USA and Asia.

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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

© ni c ol e d e x t r a s

monu me n t t o t h e e n d o f bookishn e ss

in d ex es lib ra ries ma t eria l cu lt u re keyw o rd s eco -a r t

barbara cuerden

Does the scanning activity of online reading reach only surface depths?

Skipping on and offscreen, scanning sideways, sliding down under or even deeply, the hyper of hypertext transfer protocols and https take you outside yourself to external realms, under glass, away from where you are then back again. Command click, or double click, are there enough live link dimensions to re-construct a monument (built from books)?

Grounded in a back story of material culture, and having abandoned thumbing through books with nolonger handwritten marginalia, cracking the spines or dog-earing pages earmarked where eyes have scored a treasure, the escape from materiality lingers as physical loss. Eyes sliding over a screen is an act of differently slippery sensations.

The sense of loss of three-dimensional physical reality led artist Karina Kraenzle and I to construct Monument to the End of Bookishness, built out of discarded books. In the countryside outside of Perth, Ontario and created from a thousand books, our mute Tower of Babel was gathered, struggled with, collected, amassed, transported and installed by us, in a pine forest at the Fieldwork eco-art site. This was our ultimate book return, back to the (tree) gods that made them. · As a professional indexer for scientific research as well as being an artist, it’s my daily occupation to work with books, texts, records and digital files on and off the screen. The On Site review issue 40 call for proposals called me to reflect on “…books… bought, inherited, given away, stolen, returned, used to level table legs, prop open doors…” and, as immediately came to mind, books as building materials.

An index re-builds the content of the book it serves through networks of

words. Eyes scan a paper index much like a screen. Useability and browseability pertain to its structure. The spaces contained in an index act as neural synapses. We jump from one thing to another, re-constructing meaning through an alphabetised wordlist. As an artist and indexer, I’ve noticed that a great index is like a work of art; it’s a code for something culturally deeper, unfolding a lineage of related works and words.

From the indexer point of view, the backbone of an index reveals itself as you build from the content, which I feel is akin to the limitations of artists’ materials. Maybe three-quarters through the book matter, crossreferences and page locators, a pattern emerges whereon you can hang most of the terms. It literally starts to make sense, sometimes in ways the author did not foresee. Something new emerges when you get down to the DNA, or you read in-between the lines.

Through a pared-down index that includes links to external other sites, I invite you, the reader, to re-construct the book monument (referred to on the website as Still Voices). You can slip your eyes over this spinal column of index entries, using hyperlinks as page locators, and in the meantime ask: can our internally created spaces be threedimensional as well? c

K ari n a K rae n z le

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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

INDEX (note: links take the place of page locators) A academic research art, installation artists Barbara Cuerden Karina Kraenzle B blog, see https://stillvoices.weebly.com/blog/ the-site books library number of (1,000) bookstores browse C Catalogue Cindex, indexing software. See https://www. indexres.com/cindex creaturality Cuerden, Barbara (artist) See https:// creaturality.wordpress.com/2013-2/ curation, see https://stillvoices.weebly.com/blog/ category/eco-art D donations E eco-art, see also Fieldwork eco-pedagogy, see also Jardine encyclopedias environmental art F fiction Fieldwork, see https://www.facebook.com/ fieldworkproject/ See also https://stillvoices.weebly.com/blog/ category/fieldwork Frameworks (Ottawa International Writer’s Festival) See https://stillvoices.weebly.com/blog/ frameworks-writers-festival-event

installation, see https://stillvoices.weebly.com/ blog/archives/04-2014 intertextuality, see https://stillvoices.weebly. com/blog/fieldwork-project-2014-poetry-readinglive-books J Jardin de Métis, see https://www.ledevoir.com/ opinion/idees/295779/controverse-sur-l-usage-delivres-aux-jardins-de-metis-le-cycle-de-vie-du-livre Jardine, David (2000) ‘Unable to Return to the Gods that Made Them’. See https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/ edit/10.4324/9780203826133-44/unable-returngods-made-david-jardine K Kraenzle, Karina (artist). See https://www. karinakraenzle.com/ L libraries M material culture monuments O Osler, Susie (artist). See Fieldwork P paper Perth, Ontario pine forest R reading S Still Voices, see website https://stillvoices. weebly.com/blog/category/site-work T texts W words, on the land. See https://stillvoices. weebly.com/blog/fieldwork-words-on-the-land Writer’s Festival, see https://stillvoices.weebly. com/blog/frameworks-writers-festival-event

K a r i na K r a e nz l e

G givens, the H hardcovers hyperlinks I Illich, Ivan (1996) In the Vineyard of the Text See also https://thefrailestthing.com/2010/12/28/ in-the-vineyard-of-the-text/ indexer, see https://www.index-s.com/ influencers, see: Illich, Ivan; Jardine, David

Karina Kraenzle is a photo-based artist living and working in Ottawa. Using original and found photography, and occasionally other ephemeral materials, she creates series as well as site-specific installations.

Barbara Cuerden is an artist and a professional indexer. She lives in Ottawa and works for the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) digital library.

K a r i na K r a e nz l e

sp ir al co n st e llat io n s o n b o o k s, sh e l ve s an d lib rarie s

b o o ks n o t eb o o ks f a milies t ra v el h o me

tiago torres-campos

If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library. In fact, sometimes I think I have never strayed outside that library.1 —Jorge Luis Borges

In my parent’s study room there is a small wooden spiralshaped bookshelf, an unusual shape that holds fourteen unusual notebooks. My father designed and constructed shelf and books as a collection in which all the artefacts are read in relation to one another: a book constellation organised inside a spiralled wooden architecture, inside a personal library, inside my family home.

The notebooks are filled with drawings, paintings, collages, short essays and more diffuse streams of consciousness.

My father travelled extensively, mostly alone and especially the latitudes between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn,

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his comfort zone. Each notebook began with a journey and ended when he was back in his study. Explorations with composition, materiality, colour, ethnography and cosmogony. Memories from the Amazon forest, the African jungle, and the Indian coast. Herbariums, diagrams, and abstractions. Sedimentations of mental digestions of physical journeys. Alluviations of his never-fully crystallised thoughts that were always the report of his body and mind adapting 1 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘An Autobiographical Essay,’ in The Aleph and Other Stories: 1933–1969, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, translator and editor. London: Jonathan Cape, 1968. p 209

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

Ti ag o To rre s - Campo s

to new environments, the heat and the monsoon, the sweat, the thirst and the fatigue. Vibrant cross-examinations of previous expeditions that were always already entangled in the beginning of the next one.

One of my parents’ motivations for moving into a larger house, besides a growing family, was the study room.

Connected to the main living room through a sliding door, the space is independent enough to organise and secure the books, catalogues, albums and magazines that fill the recessed floor-to-ceiling shelves on all walls except the fireplace. We call it the library, and that small stuffed space was the entry point to a much richer, weirder and cosmopolitan world than my sheltered youth in a Catholic school could anticipate. It is also where I became conscious that books contain organised thoughts and images, that they too are assembled in wider collections with other books, and

that those constellations are highly influenced by the physical space that organises them. Like all libraries, ours too has a system, albeit unconventional: novels can be paired with art catalogues if, for example, they refer to a same period, or to a same author, or to a same line of study that my father happened to be exploring at the time. Sometimes, small art pieces or memorabilia stand side by side with relevant publications — a long photograph in sepia taken by my greatgrandfather during a military campaign in Africa alongside a series of books inherited from his collection. An old book hand-written by an Amazon tribal chief, alongside a pair of drawings of macaws from the same region. Unlike most libraries, however, books do not always occupy the same place on the bookcases. The whole system has always been in constant flux, not from just my father but from all of us.

Whenever I needed a book for a school project, it was moved into a lower shelf, so I could access it in my own terms.

Eventually, the book collection outgrew the study room and spilled into other rooms and bookcases around the house.

Publications related to indigenous art were moved into my sister’s bedroom after she got married. Children's books and encyclopaedias, comic books, photo albums, cookbooks, and musical scores filled a more recent bookcase in a smaller adjacent room. My brothers and sisters and I all took some books with us when we moved out, yet my father always kept a mental register of the whereabouts of them all. It was not unusual for him to ask for a book that a relative had borrowed and kept for years. Like all good custodians, he had several mnemonic devices to keep track of the flux.

My father was an architect but he seldom read books specifically about architecture. It was something to do more with knowledge expansion and less with disciplinary specialisation, or so he explained. That made the spiralled assemblage all the more curious to me. The fourteen notebooks were not specifically about architecture, yet they were the labour my father went through to construct his architecture. They were architecturally constructed: Beech samples with specific veins were used to increase the spiralling effect; most book spines were hand-stitched and covers bound with textiles from the visited geographies; and papers were carefully chosen to withstand the architectural operations of book construction. Each spread is a standalone curatorial act to distil an impression or a thought, but the transition from one phototext to the next offers a rhythmic vibrance that is hard to dismiss. My father thought “the space of the book as being equivalent to a building.”2 For scholar André Tavares, ‘both in buildings and in books architectauthors organise sequences and logical paths that generate meaning for those who use them, such that both formats offer similar strategies that can simulate similar physical experiences – from page to page, as from room to room.’3 The architect as a book constructor foregrounds architecture as an important character in the whole process, something that tangles with all the minutiae of conceiving, designing, producing and editing a book.4 Perhaps that was the reason

why the fourteen notebooks were deliberately separated from the all the other books in the study and kept in the spiral. One of the books begins with a visual and written explanation of how to keep the rest of them organised in the correct order. Transitioning from one book to the next is a way of experiencing the spiral. Shelving is as important as reading, the assemblage as important as any of the parts.

Every summer vacation my father brought with us a heavy suitcase containing a temporary book collection that on the first day he neatly organised, by theme, on top of a dusty table: light summer reading and novels, memoires and art books.5 As the summer went on, the books kept changing places.

The whole operation resembled, once again, a spiralled constellation in which publications changed piles and alternated positions between the edges or the centre of the table. More rarely, books could leave the table and then come back, in a sort of gravitational push and pull. But no books were ever left behind. Some of the fourteen notebooks were temporarily a part of the summer table to form constellations with other books, before returning to the spiral and sinking in with the rest.

In his office studio my father kept hundreds of other notebooks. Most architects usually settle on a type of sketchbook that suits their ways of thinking and drawing. His were A4 spiral grid notebooks with a strong blue cover and filled with sketches, plans, sections, elevations, calculations, lists and minutes of meetings. The gridded paper was mostly a comfort metric and rarely respected. The spiral binding allowed the initial sketches to be photocopied or scanned without damaging their integrity. The notebooks were always the point of departure to any of the firm’s projects and they sedimented the evolution of an architectural approach to the world over almost four decades of practice. They are books of architecture perhaps in the way Bernard Tschumi defined them: “books that do not focus on buildings or cities per se, but rather on the search for ideas that contextualise them … aimed at exploring the limits of architectural knowledge ….” . 6 4 Tavares draws from El Lissitzky’s self-titled konstruktor knigi to define architect-authors as book constructors. El Lissitzky first used the title in 1923 to sign Vladimir Mayakovsky’s book Dlia golosa.

5 Itinerant summer libraries are commonplace in my family. My grandfather had a similar suitcase, and so had his brother, who later in life could afford to buy a second smaller apartment next door just for his books on the history of Spain during the Franco period after the weight on his first house began threatening the physical integrity on one side of the building.

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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

Yet, my father was always reluctant to use any of the fourteen notebooks in the spiral to discuss architecture, preferring instead to describe them as a library inside his library, something that could at any minute be packed inside a bag to become itinerant, a temporary organisation that truly served nomadic purposes. The spiral was deliberately constructed as a piece that oscillates between a way of making architecture and a way of making art. Its books are perhaps the clearest link between my father’s profession and his personal interests. Looking back, I believe they showcase the beginnings of what would later become some of his most interesting projects, or at least the ones where the struggle to push his practice to new territory became more visible. It is where he first upgraded an indigenous form of thatched-roof with local reed that had long disappeared from a southern coastal region in Portugal because it was associated with poor livelihoods and unnecessary maintenance; where he first experimented with bold colour schemes adapted from Mozambique and Cabo Verde, textiles as identity branding of social housing complexes mostly for African immigrant communities around Lisbon; and in general where he more actively merged the legacy of Portuguese modernism in his architecture with a strong site-specific materiality.

Knowledge acquired inside libraries is not only derived from book contents; it also follows the ways in which that knowledge is linked to other books, other shelves, and other libraries. It is also not always deliberate. These constellations determine and are determined by book architectures that physically and mentally both precipitate and unsettle knowledge. They guide us along lines of flight leading us somewhere, but they also constantly pull us away from anything that is solid, fixed, prescribed, fully known. They allow for a type of journey that other repositories, including the online ones, can’t. In the words of Borges, ‘a book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.’7 A spiral is not just a whimsical shape for a bookshelf, it is a way of structuring a book collection architecturally. c

Growing up among so many books I always took access to libraries for granted, and specifically my parents’ library, my first ever repository of knowledge, my point of departure to the world and my physical and mental point of return to home. There was something about assuming the knowledge is there — potent, stored and protected inside the room, that always gave me confidence. It is perhaps a fictitious idea that constellations can ever be kept stable inside their own architecture, but the Covid pandemic interrupted my regular visits home and, unsurprisingly, this period coincided with my renewed focus on writing about home. For a while, I could only access the library books through the eyes and mind of my mother. Several times we had to devise a way to get them to me, usually torn apart in scans or bad cell phone photographs.

The system worked to the extent that I could access the content of a specific book, but it failed tremendously in that it broke the serendipitous spiralling of following a constellation inside the room.

6 Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts (1981) London: Academy Editions, 1994. p 6 7 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘A note on (toward) Bernard Shaw,’ in Labyrinths (1962) New York: New Directions Books, 2007. pp 213–215

Tiago Torres-Campos is a Portuguese landscape architect and associate professor at Rhode Island School of Design, as well as the MLA program director. He co-edited Postcards from the Anthropocene: Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation, 2022 and is doing a PhD through which he explores architecture and landscape as conditions of the geologic. www.cntxtstudio.com

a bookish walk aro un d t o w n

t ra ces in d u s t r y b o o kf a irs lib ra ries cit ies

t h o m a s k o h lw e i n

First thing in the morning I go to the newsagent to pick up the local daily papers. As I walk down the street I pass a bookstore with a tiny box of cheap paperbacks outside and browse through the novels. A tree grows in Brooklyn with a stamp from a public library. Down in the subway station I lean against the cast-iron column and begin browsing: I don’t start reading on page 1, I just start anywhere and see where it takes me.

As I read about a yard with an iron gate I begin thinking about iron in construction, my glimpse falls to the roof and its iron beams as the train approaches. Inside I take my paper and look for the book reviews. A new collection of short stories portraying my neighbourhood. Listen to those rails a-thrumming, all aboard springs to mind, I jump out and change to the express train. Different rhythm, again time for the novel. I look at the stamp closely, I heard about the library branch, it closed a few years ago . A nice historic building, what happened to it?

In the train quite a few readers, I recognise the books by their covers. Years of experience at the bargain boxes taught me that. Typical cover designs, typographic styles certain publishers prefer, different editions of the same book. Some of them new titles I just read the reviews about.

Back in the daylight I find myself in part of downtown I haven’t been for years. It’s all finance and coffee shops, but there is a rich building heritage to discover. The street names are poetic, you can imagine the markets, the traders, the horses and wagons as you walk through the narrow lanes. In a place called book lane I wonder how all the bookstores and printers could operate in these small spaces. Here you can see a beautiful iron building, a plaque on it states it was built for a book publisher. From the author’s manuscript to the bound book every step happened in there. Decades ago everything moved to the suburbs, only a very small bookstore specialising on local history remains. There is a sign outside: Closed today, I’m at the fair.

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K aM pE r E & L e - t t i c i a on fl i c k r. c om

Feria del Libro de Madrid in Parque de El Retiro, 2013

We meet at the park where the long mall is crowded with readers between the little stands along the sidewalk.

Hundreds of publishers, book stores, agencies have set up their temporary homes, sometimes writers sit outside, read from their work and sign their books. We get a map and look for the people we know, it’s a city in itself with stand numbers, road names and squares with stages for readings and discussions. We hear the noise of all the conversations, books already published and books in the making.

We visit our publisher’s tiny booth and find her surrounded by so many readers and agents it feels like a marketplace. We look for the more quiet parts of this book town and stumble into a party of Irish publishers celebrating rights deals. But every glimpse we take we see books, they are all around us.

We chat how books build places and places build books.

Back after a short walk our publisher would like us to meet a librarian collecting literature in translation. Mentioning our idea we’re all inspired and agree to meet again soon.

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

It’s only a short ride to the library and as I step out of the station I pass the newsagents already selling the Sunday paper. Entering the grand building I always get excited about the treasures hidden below the surface. Millions of books are stored here and all of them tell their stories. I want to know more about the historic publisher’s building. In the catalogue room I stumble upon the old card catalogues. I browse through all the keywords leading me to titles and their call numbers. I navigate through old street directories to find businesses located on Book Lane. These names I look up again and find more entries. Soon I have a pile of call slips I carry to the reading room.

After I give them my slips the machinery starts. Below me is a huge iron grid of stacks with dozens of levels, and the books are stored there by their call number. In this maze the pages know their way around to find the books I’m looking for.

My books are ready and I start browsing through them I learn about the building being the first fire-proof in the city and the role iron played in its design. In one small octavo I find memories of book lane in the 1920s, another box is full of maps of the area. All the print shops are marked in it, also places like type foundries, book binders and paper suppliers.

In a collection of letters between an author and a publisher I recognise the places they met and I decide to go there soon, walking along the routes of book production. On the shelf is a folio about the city’s libraries with a portrait of the branch I have the novel from. Back in the days the librarian was part of a circle of writers and artists making their neighbourhood famous, while the library doesn’t exist anymore its books are still circulating in the city.

As the library closes for tonight I step outside and pass the lions on my way to the station. I’m excited to go on a journey and my train leaves in 30 minutes. In the station store I see the new book on my neighbourhood and take it with me and I think about how I always carry books around town as they are like conversations with a friends. In the train I doze and dream about all the cities I walked, the buildings I visited and how all places tell the stories of the people who built them and the people I met told me their stories and the cities write their books and the books build their cities and how I long to see the city again. c

B i bli o th è qu e n ati o n ale de F ran ce , dé par te me nt E s t a m p e s e t p hot ogr a p hi e , B OI T E F OL - H D - 1176 ( 1)

Louis-Émile Durandelle: Library stacks of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1888

J aco b A bbo tt: T h e H arpe r e s tabli s h me n t; o r, H ow t he s t or y b ook s are made . N e w Yo rk: H arpe r & B ro th e rs , 185 5

E. Doppler: Franklin Square Front, 1855

Thomas Kohlwein is a writer and editor exploring the relationship between architecture and literature. Researching publishing and library history from an urban perspective, his latest publications include literary anthologies about North America and Hong Kong.

set t l e d, un se t t le d, se t t li n g

mo v in g f in d in g ga t h erin g t ra n s f errin g s h if t in g

smsteele

My past dozen years may be summarised as: settled, unsettled, settling. From 2008-22, I crossed the Atlantic 36 times, travelled tens of thousands of km overland, was on an airplane every 6-12 weeks for work and pleasure, wrote an oratorio, an opera, a PhD, survived a major pandemic, and, most recently a year-long, life-threatening illness (not C-19). During this time, I navigated from settled mother/ CEO wife to unsettled war artist (Afghanistan war artist 2008-12) to scholar (PhD, Exeter, UK) to exhibiting video installation artist, editor, commissioned artist (my new Riel opera premiers in 2022), writer, and Indigenous-languageresearch project manager. This little oak Arts and Crafts, or Mission-style bookshelf (dimensions: 28”w x 11.5”d x 33.5”h), one of my greatest treasures, contributes greatly to my sense of settling in these unsettled times. It travels with me as I continue to create a body of work.

I bought this lovely object in a northern Vancouver Island town three years ago for thirty bucks from my favourite antique shop, a real dog’s breakfast of fine china cups, musty furniture, and odd objects. I found the bookshelf at the back of the shop buried in dust and ephemera, took one look at it and knew it was the answer to a profound dis-ease I was experiencing as a library-less writer. At the time of the purchase, I’d rented out my home on southern Vancouver Island and was oscillating between a funky 300 sq. ft. apartment in the west end of Vancouver and a log house on a small northern Gulf Island. When in residence at the log house, I use my 13’, 1974 Boler, Sweet Pea, as an office.

However, the pile of books on Sweet Pea’s bunk beds looked profoundly uncomfortable on her plush 70s orange and brown polyester upholstery, and I could never put my hand on a specific book when I wanted it.

smsteele

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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

Until I bought the bookcase I’d packed and unpacked, sold, given away, purchased, received, and misplaced hundreds of books (where is my Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy???). I’d dragged basic texts in a suitcase across the Atlantic several times and used digital copies whenever I could. But as a visual writer and artist, for me books are aesthetic things that ‘home’ me, as well as intellectual or inspirational objects.

And when I look at the spines of beautiful books I focus more easily on the task at hand. I like the feel of a book in hand, and I love how they look on this little bookcase that folds ups so nicely when needed.

In the photograph below (from 2019), you can see what I was researching/working on at the time: The Métis and the Medicine Line, a Riel bio, some French grammars for the opera (written in five languages); Edna O’Brien for stylistic prose purposes; Diego Rivera’s murals in Detroit for visual and intellectual companionship; The Chicago Manual of Style which is all business and weird pleasure (I was editing a project for MIT);

a few Golden-Age detective collections to lure me into the fantasy that I might have leisure time; a biography of Marie Colvin, the war correspondent I was to meet in 2012 had she not been murdered by the Assad regime; drafts of the opera; some poetry, and my taxes. If I took a photo of the bookshelf today, you’d see some new books; the little bookshelf, so aesthetically pleasing and filled with ghosts of books past, continues to give visual insight into what’s in my brain these days. Besides the core texts I mentioned, I currently have the following in the bookcase: Indigenous People in the Canadian Military; The Tivium (a primer on logic and argument); Maria Campbell’s Half breed (new edition); a graphic novel bio of Josephine Baker; collections of essays; Ford Madox Ford’s collected letters; The Collected Writings of Louis Riel (to crossreference as Riel aficionados are particularly careful about details and I need to be armed and ready); Lincoln’s bio; Alice Oswald’s Memorial, and much more. Gone, however, are early draft manuscripts of the opera. However, sadly, tax receipts and their paperwork remain. c

Dr. Suzanne M Steele is an author, an editor (with a specialty in Indigenous style), a scholar and a visual artist. Currently she is engaged in a major Indigenous language project and advises on protocol. She is a frequent speaker on the subject of art, language and reconciliation. s ms te e le

s t acking c rat e s

w o o d w o rk ef f icien cy p a ckin g mo v in g b u ild in g

r a fa e l g ó m e z - m o r i a n a

A library is wonderful to own, except when moving house.

Who hasn’t tired of packing books into cardboard boxes and disassembling Billy bookcases only to have to reassemble and reload them again at destination? What if the very same containers could be used to both store as well as relocate a collection of books?

This question arose some years ago in the middle of relocating from one Winnipeg apartment to another. If only I had a bookcase that disassembled into smaller carrying crates during a move; crates which could then be reassembled into a bookcase again at destination, their content remaining unperturbed throughout.

The idea stuck in my head long after my move. No such system seemed to be commercially available at the time and the only thing that came remotely close was the milk crate, many of which I already used for storing 12” LPs. But they were unstable when turned sideways and stacked into a shelving system open at the front. Besides, milk crates remind me too much of being a teenage stoner in the 1970s. Wooden wine crates? Too small and flimsy. There was no choice but to design and fabricate my own system. · The design idea was for a bookcase made of stacked crates turned sideways but that doesn’t look like it’s made of crates.

It would help if the crates were elongated as opposed to squarish, were made of a strong material and that they fit together without gaps.

If the crates are too large, they become too heavy to carry; if too small, then book size is too limited. Should they be different sizes? Unlike LPs or CDs, there is no standard book size, but there’s a certain beauty in standardisation and modularity: I’m the type who likes early Lego which came in only a handful of sizes and colours, not the current Lego, which is little different from putting together a model airplane kit. In any case, to avoid making an arbitrary decision regarding a standard crate size, I let the standard dimensions of the material I would use determine the outcome.

What material to use? I chose high-quality birch plywood 1/2” (12 mm) thick, for reasons both structural and aesthetic.

Birch is a hardwood so it’s strong and plywood made with it has thin plies and no knots, so edges are elegant and surfaces uniform. Two brands of birch plywood were available: 4’ x 8’ sheets of Apple Ply and 5’ x 5’ Baltic Birch. Since either product is pricey, it would only be used where edges became visible – the four sides of a crate in moving mode. The bottom (i.e. the back when flipped and stacked into a bookcase) could be ordinary plywood as it would hardly be seen.

rafael g o me z - mo ri an a

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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

To use 100% of standard panel without wastage was what, in the end, determined the crate sizes. A 5’ x 5’ panel produces five crates measuring 30 x 61 x 25 cm deep. A 4’ x 8’ panel delivers six crates 30 x 61 x 27 cm deep. I opted for the 5 x 5’ Baltic Birch plywood, preferring less depth, and ordered three panels for making 15 modules, as well as a sheet of ordinary 1/4” (6mm) plywood for the bottoms, or backs. · Working in the woodshop of the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Architecture, I cut the three 5 x 5’ panels into six equal strips on a table saw (4 x 8’ panels can be cut into nine equal strips perpendicular to the long edge), then cut each strip into the differently-sized sides of the crates. From the sheet of ordinary plywood, I cut 15 crate bottoms.

I used Rabbet joints throughout, though Box joints can also be used. The longer side pieces are trimmed on their short edges to be Rabbet-joined to the short edges of the shorter sides, after which all bottom edges are trimmed so that the crate back is inset and unseen.

Before assembling the modules, four circular recesses are routed on the outside of each long side. Pieces of hardwood dowel are inset on one of the sides to form Lego-type connectors for stacking. Oval recesses are routed on the small side pieces to act as carrying-grips.

Assembly involves wood glue and quick clamping of the birch side pieces before inserting and gluing the bottom, pneumatically gunning a few finishing nails into each joint before the glue set. The Lego connectors are inserted and after a light sanding, each crate gets two coats of matte varnish.

When the crates were stacked two crates wide by seven high, the maximum height that my ceiling permitted (the 15th crate became a nightstand), and after filling them with books, the two columns of crates deviated slightly from one another, so shims were inserted. It also became apparent that a toe space was necessary, so in subsequent assemblies the bookcases were stacked on strips of lumber, which also ensures better alignment between stacks on uneven floors.

Although then I had no plans to move, I was accumulating so many books that I had another 15 crates made by Winnipeg cabinetmaker Garry Dehls. · Five relocations, including a trans-Atlantic move, and 23 years later, the nomadic bookcase system is still in use. It makes moving books easier, but one thing hasn’t changed: I still dread moving.

raf ae l gom e z - m or i a na

Rafael Gómez-Moriana is an architectural designer, writer and educator who, after criss-crossing Canada several times and living out of a suitcase in Amsterdam for two years, finally ended up settling in Barcelona, where he directs the Barcelona Program of the University of Calgary’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. https://rafagomo.com @rafagomo

reading pe riph e ri e s

b o o ks b o o kca s es geo gra p h y ero t ica ch ild h o o d

stephanie white

Writing about my books and what they mean to me would be like talking about your children: vital to you, but less so to people who don’t know you, aren’t particularly interested in them, but are interested in children to a point, and books, to a point. Somehow writing about books has to fit into a less personal context, although the personal is key, but rather more important is what books mean in the arc of a life.

An arc of a life, what is it? This is the author’s subject, the critic’s preoccupation, the artist’s focus: everything folds into it – learning, love, identity, place, daily life and life-long hopes and fears. I am an architect by training, in a kind of unrequited love for the subject. As it doesn’t give much back in terms of professional accord, it is, rather, the paper on which I place other non-building things.

In 1989, in Barcelona, I spent a lot of time at Herder’s bookstore where I found Barbara Harlow’s Resistance Literature, a book that was the key to understanding my apparent marginal position in the world and why I taught architecture the way I did, why I drew the way I drew; it taught me how to recognise the periphery where I lived and worked, and the core where everything supposedly happened. I discovered world theory, which came from the Latin American periphery and which explained so much, so much about everything I had ever experienced. Including the practice of architecture, the education of the architect, being one of the 5% of women in the field (at the time). I didn’t learn resistance from the book, I learned to recognise it in myself, in others, and that turned my thinking. It explained what I was in Barcelona to do, which was to find out why there was the early-1980s explosion of magical new modernist architecture, specifically in Barcelona, after the death of Franco and the transition to a socialist government after forty years of isolationist repression.

Little was known about Spain during the Franco years; it had two borders, the stony Pyrenees between it and France, and the deceptively glittery Costa del Sol, inaccessible to Spaniards, not unlike the tourist edges of Cuba — a border of apartheid between decadent foreigners and a righteous, impoverished hinterland. Francoista architecture was heroic, heavy, monumental; modernity was seen as an internationalist force to be resisted by the nationalist and isolationist Franco regime. When he died, a repressed international socialism, stewing since the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, burst forth. Barcelona, the heart of the

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Republican side of the Civil War, had remained peripheral to Madrid, turning instead to its historic relationship wtih northern Italy. Carlo Scarpa, who died just four years after Franco, had been a surreptitious beacon to Catalan architects, drawing them particularly to the romantic modernity of 1960s Italy. The explosion of sculptural, acrobatic, purely beautiful architecture under the directorship of Oriol Bohigas between 1980 and the 1992 Olympics was radical, exhilarating and completely inspired. Moneo, Miralles, Calatrava— their early work unfolded buildings to the urban realm, the street, the plaças, the parks — they were magical. This was why I went to Barcelona near the end of the 1980s, I had just wanted to see it all, to live there, to understand how such freedom leaps out of a recently rigid culture and society. Such innovation does not emerge from an allegedly free society, or from free speech, or from libertinism; it seems to develop in the dark corners of oppression, things denied, or politically denigrated, youth denied and denigrated, where internationalism is a threat, not an opportunity. For me, the 1992 Olympics and Spain’s entry into the EU — its entry into the core, was the end of this remarkable flourish.

After the epiphany that was Resistance Literature, I spent the 1990s reading 1960s dependence theory and 1970s world systems theory: Walter Rodney, Emmanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank et al. Core and periphery, it all made sense to me, the layers of core I belonged to, but peripheral in them: the structures were the same as any decolonising country. Whence comes this peripherality in the midst of plenty? Black Lives Matter is a first world protest precisely because many people living in the first world are considered irrelevant to core values and ambitions. Decolonising the mind is a structural proposition that starts with recognising core-periphery relationships.

It’s a construct; maybe accurate, maybe not. But the books, the books, they bred in the night, filling shelf after shelf, springing off into side shoots, film theory, novels, art history, colonial theory, war studies — the world was explained to me in a way that I’d never encountered. I needed it. Architecture was still the domain of great white men; I was no longer interested in how it was written about, practiced, critiqued, taught or mythologised.

It started with a book, this re-slanting of the world in which I lived.

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

My father was a librarian who picked up unusual books – early travellers’ tales in western Canada, explorers in Africa – many found in junk shops on Vancouver Island. Although peripheral to Canada, Vancouver Island had been promoted specifically by General Sir Ian Hamilton in The Times (London, 1935) to scores of retired British and Indian Army officers who came with all their Imperial accoutrements. My Sheraton highboy, in rough shape let it be said, was found storing paint cans on one of the outer islands; my father generously offered to cart it away in the library van.

When he was a very young man he catalogued a private collection of eighteenth and nineteenth century erotica being donated to the medical library at the University of Washington. He was given, as part payment, books the university did not want, including Nuits de Paris, Travels in Manchuria and such things as birthing practices in Borneo which seems neither travel nor erotic. All these books were very interesting for someone little — my favourite had lots of small black and white photographs of hunters in jungles of leathery leaves larger than the people. All thse books, sent over the years to the rare book trade, exist now only in my 8-year old’s memory. However, the habit of looking into books was set. If they are readers, kids are indiscriminate; they read everything. In grade 7 I found in the library branch a deeply fascinating book on Japanese torture methods and probably read a Georgette Heyer next. At one time I quite liked Rumer Godden; she wrote passionate novels about 1930s Kashmir, where she lived a jodhpurs and silk shirt sort of life. One of the librarians reported to my father that Rumer Godden was unsuitable for someone my age. He quite rightly found this hilarious. The report, not Godden, but maybe both.

For an elderly bibliophile in 1950’s Tacoma with his lifetime collection of erotica – clearly a story there, one I’m not up to excavating – the recording of tattoos and scarring, medicinal practices, spiritual healing and just unimaginable ways of living were experiences that shocked the mind and tested the body. In his 1978 book Orientalism, Edward Said proposed that the European sensibility found Asia erotically sensual, steamy and cruel. The fear of the unusual must lie very close to both eroticism and violence, whether in foreign territories or, more nearby, foreign parts of one’s own body. Books, painting, appropriative music – all the arts as we still define them – are instrumental in the othering process; they fix, with often inadequate interpretation, the startling. If Travels in Manchuria is read over and over, Manchuria becomes deceptively familiar, denatured, safe, a bound book on a library shelf. To state the very obvious, books contribute to the interpretation of culture as a curiosity, peripheral, an entertainment.

Core culture does not find itself curious, oddity lies in the shadows of its periphery, perceived as unstable, lawless, uncivilised. The projection of everything feared by the core onto the periphery is enacted every day at this moment of writing in early September 2020, where en masse walking black and brown people, young white people, students, mothers, healthcare workers and grandmothers, are called thugs, anarchists and rioters. This is the worst a group that considers itself at the very centre of society can project: this is what it fears. Peaceful marches, just as in the 1960s Civil Rights marches, are not made up of people who consider themselves at the centre of wealth, power and influence. But marchers know they are the medium that supports this small, vitriolic, fearful core group, and therein lies their particular power. And that is what is so interesting about peripheries and semi-peripheries. They have an immanant power, they know more about the core than the core knows about the edge. Timothy Mo’s early novels are very much about this: servants are invisible, but they see everything.

The country that never was. Do I live in this world? Seems not.

Theory, religion, philosophy – all constructs, ordering systems to make sense of a life and lives. Some are more useful at some times than others, all are true, all are narratives, all are valuable. At one time, in my teens, I thought the imagist poets described a world worth being in.

They occupy a section in my bookshelves. At another, much later time, having discovered Henry Glassie, I dropped like a stone into material culture studies: the world was full of things that had deep cultural histories but remained largely silent about them, mostly because they hadn’t been asked.

This interrogation of a material world that we take for granted was revelatory — there is no quick take on anything. At the same time, James Clifford’s new ethnography presented the world as deeply interconnected: thick description, that delightful term, plus Braudel, plus all the books spawned in their wakes, they swept through the universities, for me when I was at the University of Texas at Austin teaching design studios and drawing. Anthropology symposia, MLA meetings, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival conference, post-colonial film programmes — I could hardly sleep it was all so exciting. The shelves of these books are the material flotsam that wave left behind. I read them all, as if I had been dying in the desert and was offered a shower.

Such waves of enthusiasms fill my bookcases. Collectively these books represent one of the unmoveable objects in my life, the other two being an 1895 cast iron platen press I bought 30 years ago and a 1957 Austin A50 in the garage which hasn’t run since 1985 after driving it to Kansas. I built twelve floor to ceiling glass fronted bookcases in the early 1990s in an effort to control the chaos of all those sizes, colours, widths, subjects — all that paper and board, all that intellectual history, all that dust. Once behind glass, it all settled down: sequestration belies the instability of the book as a trusted certainty. Materially sturdy yes, what’s inside, less so.

S W hi t e

It is perhaps a heresy to instrumentalise books, but sometimes they do move one on. I read Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet every year through my twenties; they were different books every time and seemed to offer ways of being unencountered in my own life — there was a loucheness that was Egypt, expatriate, corrupt, all passion and pain: only now do I see this as orientalism in action. Egypt was both central and peripheral – Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea, such beautiful names, were about a place, and a time, and

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The glass-fronted bookcases, made 1992-3. Twelve bays. Very inexpensive: 2 x 2s, a ton of 1”steel corner braces, 1 x 10 and 1 x 12 boards, piano hinges, picture glass and cove moulding from the off cuts bin at Revelstoke contractors division. 18” wide door frames out of 1x3s amd 1x4s run up by a fellow at the end of the street in the old Hudson’s Bay warehouse. Everything screws together, everything is demountable in case I ever have to move it all.

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

a tragic web of people in the wrong place at an impossible time. It seemed both relevant and distant. I still have the Faber editions in case they become relevant again. As might Marxism. And Gramsci, and von Clausewitz and Diderot’s Encyclopédie. All these books, most of them rarely mentioned now, hundreds of them, are my literary autobiography. They are what I have read. And this doesn’t count all the books from all the libraries, public and university, nor all the photocopied chapters from them, filed impenetrably in a single-drawer filing cabinet almost impossible to move. Paper weighs a lot. But that is material.

And where are the architecture books? They occupy their own case, mixed with lots of other things – an ambiguous zone where architecture acknowledges its crossover with landscape, the vernacular, indigenous building traditions, and conceptual art – some of the first Pamphlet Architectures given to me by their authors — it was Steve Holl who wrote about Glassie in his first pamphlet about music; the first Zone, memorable for a long piece on the destruction of Beirut, Colin Rowe’s Collage City, Nathan Silver’s Adhocism, Coop Himmelb(l) au which gave me an inkling that in extreme almost out of control drawing one can find the direction and the space of the architecture one is looking for. These books slide away from the definitive, the canon, the monograph, the object, and instead raise issues of breakage, improvisation, hybridity, ambiguity, the fragmentary, the ruined.

I feel at home here. c S W hi t e

As anyone who knows me knows I do not spend money on anything, believing that one can make lovely things with ordinary lumber, hardware store hardware and Armstrong methods: it just takes a bit of time. Virtue born of necessity.

These bookcases are so solid I never have to think about them toppling or overloading, and at the same time are magically ethereal, the glass shimmers; they seem deceptively fragile.

Behind the glass is a complex and wealthy world, visual, conceptual, historic and material.

Bosher, J F. Imperial Vancouver Island. Woodstock, Oxfordshire: WritersWorld, 2012 Clifford, James and George Marcus, editors. Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. University of California Press, 1986 Harlow, Barbara. Resistance Literature. New York and London: Routledge, 1987 Glassie, Henry. Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971 Holl, Steven. Pamphlet Architecture 9: Rural and Urban House Types, 1982 Mo, Timothy. An Insular Possession. London: Chatto & Windus, 1986 Said, Edward. Orientalism. NY: Pantheon Books, 1978 Wallerstein, Immanuel with Etienne Balibar. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso. 1991

Stephanie White is the editor of On Site review.

the a rchit e c t ’s lo gbo o k e v e ly n o s vat h

wri ti ng seei ng col l ecti n g sel f-di sco v er y archi tect u ra l d es ign t o o ls

Architecture is the only art form that affords us the opportunity of being voyeurs who watch the outside from the outside, the outside from the inside, and the inside from the inside. It is all made up from a series of outside fragments and inside fragments.

— John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 1985

Evelyn Osvath

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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

Five years ago I began working with a logbook to collect my ideas around architecture. It immediately felt like a natural act of materialising my thoughts, as a way of digesting impulses that affect me. The logbook is a tool that can be used to make sense of things that are not yet comprehensible; a medium to perceive the world. Over the years, as I filled many logbooks, I created a condensed archive of my views and positions that I can re-integrate in my profession.

Having access to this personal collection gives me enormous power. As an architect, I am challenged in my everyday work with building tasks that require conceptualisation and presentation of good and valuable solutions. My logbooks, that I would also define as ‘work journals’, are the sources that help me to be more efficient in coming to diverse conclusions and varieties of options of solving a design task. Looking up entries that fit into the immediate topic, or even random entries always start a path of contextual reflection that supports and enriches insight. Since I use this tool, I think differently and more intensively both about architecture’s physical presence and its intangibility. My logbook is both a space for inner dialogue and a catalyst for creativity. It serves as a link between basic ideas and architecture, and is, to me, crucial in the creative process as a designer or architect.

• Adorno wrote about the archive of one’s own. This phrase immediately struck me as describing a project I had started a couple of years earlier as the way to go to the foundations of architecture. Its core is to find out more about my positions, beliefs and attitudes around architecture. Or to quote John Hejduk in Architectures in Love: Sketchbook Notes, ‘I want to know what the soul of architecture might be’.

A logbook is a medium well-suited to imagine the world and record all the ideas and considerations in it. Now my logbooks form my own archive, a collection that preserves my thoughts and experiences of the built realm, with access whenever I need it. Adorno pointed out that subjective and private moments belong to no other than the subject themselves. Adorno’s 1931 dissertation, Construction of the Aesthetic is an analysis and critique of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. The critique pointed towards Kierkegaard’s introvert definition of ‘reality’, in his view experienced in a pure inwardness without reference to the outer world.

Following Adorno’s arguments, including the outer world gives us necessary reactions: as architects we work at the intersection of nature, landscape, the built world and people – there is meaning in everything. Anything can make an impression and has reason to be acknowledged. Outer impulses and subsequent reflection, as seeing and perceiving, are the sources and process that ultimately nurture my logbook.

Perception of my world is tightly connected with the way I move in it. I am Benjamin’s flâneur who walks without intention through dense cities. I am the wanderer who walks restlessly through a landscape as a romantic experience of nature. I am the pilgrim in motion for deeper spiritual reasons, observing my inner world, walking as meditation or to overcome pain or powerlessness. Just small pieces of the world can be experienced and understood. A logbook helps me compose my thoughts and emotions to find order for my ideas. Most things that I note refer to architecture or are observations about the world seen through an architecturallytrained eye. In daily work as an architect or in travel to different places with unknown structures, vigilant watching and walking constructs a new awareness of the world.

My logbook makes me reflect, sort ideas and trains my sensibilities. The overall output of the whole logbook project is an intensification of the creative mind: I break down impressions and experiences to something I can use.

•

A transcription and translation of a logbook page– a wall in Italy, a forest in Germany: date, place, subject, graphic

Evelyn Osvath

Graphic and visual tools belong to the ‘official’ language of the architect. But it is not the only legitimate form of expression – there are things better expressed in words.

Writing captures information at different layers: the way I write, what I write, the mood I write in, the language I use.

Applied to the whole concept of working with a logbook, graphics and writing are my instruments.

The actual logbooks are tiny and portable. There are times I write everyday. Sometimes the work is less intensive and I don’t make entries for a while, thus presenting fragmentary pieces of my architectural journey. Each entry starts with a spatial and temporal marker and an architectural archetype descriptor.

Historically, logs were used in ship navigation to record daily events, weather conditions, and to leave a trail. A logbook describes an itinerary, an ongoing story through time and space, as we can see with the logbooks of Odysseus and his adventurous ten year journey home, or James Cook as he mapped his travels through the Pacific Ocean. It has neither an end nor a predefined aim: it embraces the process, the motion, the intermediate, the inside, the outside, the visible, the invisible.

Blaise Pascal, mathematician and philosopher, wrote notes on theology and philosophy, published in1670 as Pensées.

His notes were all on loose paper, un-ordered, describing an open and fragmented collection of ideas that I have applied to my logs. Chronology supports archiving, but there are other principles that go beyond simple tracking.

E ve ly n Os vath

A transcription and translation of a logbook page, a mountain and a line: date, place, subject, graphic

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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

The logbook catches a stream of experiences grasped in an isolated and individual way in a world that is experienced collectively. By materialising thoughts, a starting point and direction are laid out, giving orientation. The interdependence of the lived, the told and the written supports memory. The value of the archive is in how it affects continuously the past, the present and the future. It is more than a travelogue collecting objective matter-of fact notions, but such unreflective descriptions are the first step.

As the flow of creative thoughts and observations accrues, an entry rarely stands for just itself but rather evolves, ready to be compared and to develop further. This is the strength of a collection of ideas, an open field of conceptualisation as a process without ending. There is no pressure to provide concrete answers or products. Ideas and lessons compiled in the logbook subconsciously find their way into materiality as catalysts in the daily design process.

Carrying a notebook that wants to be filled with content takes up a lot of energy. There are many times that I do not make any entries for weeks or even months. Many things get lost that way, but a notebook leaves intentional room for error.

I want to open perspectives and discussions about the tools that we as architects can make use of, not stressing material outcomes or manifestation of creativity, but path and process itself. With a loss of theoretical background in the profession due to the focus on aesthetic objects, the logbook has become the foundation of my own theoretical ideas. It questions the boundaries of conventional architecture and conventional ways of using books, images and words. The logbook serves only myself, not foreseeing where it will direct me. It is a critical tool reflecting on and finding access to the discipline and principles of architecture, describing my personal journey to the basics of the profession. Even though it was never my plan, my logbook has turned out to be an important companion on my learning path to become an efficient architect: as a compass it navigates times of uncertainty and unclarity. c

Evelyn Osvath

Evelyn Osvath holds an MArch from Bauhaus University and after several years of travelling she currently works as an architect in Leipzig, Germany. Her work is driven by a deeper understanding of the intersection of architecture, politics and philosophy.

bookshel v e s, re adi n g a n d pl ace s t o re ad

b u ild in g o rga n is in g rea d in g t h in kin g s it t in g

i va n h e r n a n d e z - q u i n t e l a

bo o ks: a rela tion sh ip th at goes beyond r eadin g t h em I can’t remember how I used to organise my books before I decided to build particular bookshelves to keep them in. I guess they were just everywhere, piled next to my bed, stacked on top of my working table, leaning on top of any window ledge. I first built a bookshelf unit for my literature books, since most of my architecture and art books I could keep at my studio. I wanted a light-looking set of shelves with a Japanese feel to them and where it would be apparent how it was all assembled. As soon as I started putting books on shelves, all the lightness was gone from the carefully designed unit (one important lesson learned which also applies to architecture: most of the details you obsessively over-design will soon move to the background to give way to everyday life itself).

All one could see once all my books were in place was that colourful pattern of different thickness of lines that the sides of books generate. The thing that broke that vertical pattern resulted from a design mistake – I failed to include an end support to each shelf, so books would topple and fall – so I had to put the end books horizontally to act as bookends.

the bottom shelf are all in Spanish, (books on the other two shelves are mostly in English) and I must admit I have less of them so I deduced that the nearness-of-language was reason enough for Spanish and Portuguese literature to jump the ocean and join the other continents.

The fourth shelf is half-filled with Literature from the Orient, mostly from Japan and the rest of the shelf has boxes, sketchbooks and other things that should not be there but I have not found a place for them.

The fifth shelf is for poetry, regardless of where it is from.

Here I have space for more books, which I definitely would like to acquire as I am beginning to be more and more interested in the Japanese restrictive poetry of Haiku. On the rest of the shelf I have unread books laid horizontally to remind myself to get to them soon. On the ends, one category might spill into another if there is no longer room in its section and the other category does not have enough to fill the entire shelf so there goes any sense of order.

Now to the organisation of the books by shelves.

On the top shelf, I keep my favourite genres: diaries, biographies and correspondences. I keep acquiring these kinds of books so they no longer fit within that shelf. For now, the solution has been to keep stacking them on the horizontal end piles until they are no longer stable. At that point I need to consider whether they deserve a second shelf or if they will just spill into other sections where I still have space to add more books.

On the second shelf I keep American literature. I am not sure if is because I studied in the United States but in terms of geography, it is the biggest section I own.

The third shelf belongs to European literature – mostly British, Irish, French, Italian and Russian literature but one could find a couple of books by Norwegian, Polish, Czech and German authors. As for Spanish and Portuguese literature, I have placed these on the bottom shelf, along with Latin American, Indian and African literature. I know it makes no sense to not place them in the European shelf but books on I van H e r na nd e z Q u i nt e l a

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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

Iv a n He r na nd e z Q u i nt e l a

My second set of bookshelves had the same details as the first one but I increased the distance between shelves for architecture and art books, which, as they tend to have mostly photographs, tend to be much taller than literature books. I failed to correct my mistake and left the ends of the shelves open. One side leans towards the wall so no books fall sideways but on the other side I need to pile books horizontally once again to keep vertical books from falling. I use magazines such as Croquis, Quaderns and GG series to create horizontal piles that generate one visual block, all the same length and same thickness.

On the bottom of the shelf, I keep, purely for nostalgic reasons (since I almost never look at them) the books I bought while studying architecture. The architects which I thought were so cool during my studies have turned out to not be of much interest anymore. Since then, I have opted to buy mostly architecture books from the masters of modern architecture, which occupy the next shelf. Some contemporary architects have made their way into that shelf: Murcutt, Miralles, Studio Mumbai, Rural Studio, Peter Salter (as I consider them already classics in my universe). These I do browse often. On the third shelf, are books on photography, film, fashion and theatre.

Above that, art books, mostly from the sixties and seventies – Body Art, Arte Povera, Conceptual Art, Minimalist Art, Performance Art, Land Art. It is these books I would say have influenced me the most. I like having them at eye level. On the top shelf, I have no idea why I have decided to separate these from the shelf below (other than they could not fit there), are

women artists. This shelf has plenty of space left for dozens more books and I do not have any particular plans to acquire more but one never knows what treasure one might run into during travel or what discovery one might receive from a friend’s recommendation so I do not consider my book collection finished.

The third set of bookshelves came a couple of years later and I did not do the same mistake again. This time the shelves were closed at the ends to keep books from falling. I still did not want this piece of furniture to feel heavy so I left a low space within each box. I figured I could use that in-between space to store my classical music cd collection and some large format sketchbooks I once enjoyed using. Top shelf for architectural theory and urbanism. Next shelf for social studies. Next, philosophy. Bottom shelf for music, film, theatre and dance.

It is at the edges that the organisation gets strange. One cube for children’s books. Another cube for books that for one reason or another I have not read or have not finished reading. Another cube for a magazine collection a friend of mine edits. Another cube has a folding backgammon board, a folding chess board and a box of dominos. The cube next to the couch, within reach, has a tin bucket full of coins that keeps filling, as I get home, sit on the couch and empty my pockets. Next to the tin buckets, the TV and DVD control. On top of the shelf, I keep some amber glass bottles with shapes I like and some optical tools I began to collect such as old binoculars, old polaroid cameras, pocket size slide viewers and strange looking magnifying glasses.

on co m i ng u p w ith an absurd meth od t o t h in k I h av e put t h in gs in o r der I have always been an active reader. I literally leave marks on the books I read. It started subtly. My respect for a book, as a precious object, was enough for me not to want to violate it with a blunt mark. So I use to leave a dot in pencil at the edge of the line or lines I found interesting. Soon, I discovered, when I went back to look for the line I sort of remembered having read and marked, I noticed that it took an enormous effort to find the tiny dots I had made while reading the book. Soon after, I got over my fear of vandalising a book and started underlining the entire phrase or phrases I was interested in. First with pencil but a couple of books after I did it with a thin pen. Now, I still use a thin but in colours.

I have learned that for me it is more important to be able to go over a book and quickly find those interesting ideas I had marked, than is my fear of the book turning ugly with all those black, red and even green lines all over it. I remember, during my years at the school of architecture, finding it completely offensive looking at other students underlining

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with a phosphorescent marker in their books. Now, I find pleasure to browse through my own books and finding entire paragraphs underlined (if only in not as offensive manner as a phosphorescent marker). It is as if the more lines (of notation) fill the space between lines (of text) the more the interesting I find the reading. With books that I have gone back to reread, lines of different colours accumulate to show how my interest in what I find interesting has not only changed but that with each reading I find more and more phrases and ideas interesting in books I already found interesting enough to re-read. With most of the books I decide to re-read, I end up underlining as many new phrases as I had underlined on the first reading. It almost seems as if I am reading and discovering for the first time, and when I re-read a phrase I had previously underlined, I cannot help but linger a bit on it and reflect what kind of state I must have been in, or with what things in mind did I read that particular book when I decided to mark that particular sentence.

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

I v a n He r na nd e z Q u i nt e l a

At some point, I convinced myself that I had enough interesting phrases marked in one, two, three, a dozen, two dozen books to make a book of books, a notation book where I would write all the phrases I had underlined during my readings. It takes about a year of reading to fill one out.

The first page of the notation book I reserve to list the books notated. I use my date stamp to mark when I begin not to read the book, but when I begin to take notes from the particular book. Then I write down the author and then the title. When I begin to write down the underlined parts of a particular book, I find particular patterns about that book I had not realised while just reading it, whether they are short phrases, isolated words, or long and entire paragraphs. While reading the book for the first time, the lines feel isolated, almost an interruption to the flow of reading. But by making note of them, they begin to build a new thread, often finding particular words that repeat from one phrase to another.

When that happens, I underline my own text to make evident that repetition. So words like body, space, drawing, chance, play, territory, field, landscape, tools, machines seem to occur over and over in what I find interesting in my readings. At times, I find that re-writing the phrase I found interesting is not enough to remember it. Sometimes, not nearly enough, I try to draw out the idea within the phrase. Sometimes, I sketch the sculpture, building or frame of the film I could not underline in the book.

In Spanish, to take notes is anotar. I like the verb because it contains notar, which means to notice something or put attention to something. I think, therefore, that in the act of notation there is implicitly an extra effort to pay attention to it – to the act of reading and to the reading itself. (a)notar – to take notes, is to notice or pay attention to the readings themselves. I mark, underline, and notate my books to try to understand them better and through it I feel myself marked by them.

I van He r na nd e z Q u i nt e l a

on co m i ng up with e x cuse s to create an o t h er r eadin g place w it h in my h o us e Reading is for me a mood activity. I do it for pleasure (even if I am researching a particular project I’m working on or for a specific text I’ve committed myself to write). So depending on my mood, I choose to read on three different spots in my house. The first is on a leather chair I inherited from my father. It is not the most comfortable of chairs but I like its width, which allows me to shift from right to left as I cross my legs during my readings. This chair is in front of my philosophy bookshelf. The ceiling is low, and the chair is angled to the corner so I feel enveloped. I tend to read with low-volume classical music. One of the speakers is right next to the chair so I can clearly hear the music. I have a small piece of tree trunk next to the chair where I place my cup of tea. The chair faces a window framing an acacia tree and an orange tree. Birds are always hanging on their branches.

There is a lamp on top of the bookshelf and its bulb faces the wall so it lights indirectly, not enough for night reading so I mostly read on that chair during the day, not for too long, mostly when I am browsing through already-read books looking for a particular passage or a specific quote.

At night, a couple of hours before going to bed, I might read at my working table. There, I also have another of the leather chairs my father gave me. This one’s seat is a bit torn. A desk lamp allows for good night reading; here I read for longer periods. In this spot I might write and draw as well, so the table gets a bit messy at times. Books often pile on the table for a couple of weeks, three or four at a time. Here I read heavy books on art and architecture, with pictures.

I might switch from one book to another depending on my mood. If my neighbour receives a visit at night, the car, as it parks, blinds me with its headlights as his parking spot faces directly into my window, so I tend to have the curtains closed.

When the curtains are open (only during the day) I can see a robust medlar tree. Here reading feels more serious, more focused.

Before going to sleep, I read, at most, ten pages of a diary or of poetry, in bed, pillows against the headboard and sit

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with legs stretched out. Nothing dense but surely inspiring.

It is my preparation before night meditation. I like the words I have just read to linger. I should be clearing my mind of all thoughts, but a phrase might stick in mind like a kind of mantra before I finally try to focus on my breath. On Wednesdays when the cleaning lady comes, the current book disappears from my bedside table. To her, books belong in the bookshelf. I have spoken to her about it, how I read every night in bed before falling asleep, how I believe in the concept of the pillow book.

I have given up. On Wednesdays, before heading to bed, I rescue the book I’m reading that week. I need it so I can fall asleep.

On weekends, I read on my terrace, on a futon whose base was inspired by Donald Judd’s furniture, with a dozen cushions bought from a local artisan. Here reading is completely relaxed. I alternate between reading and napping, reading and gardening, or simply reading and doing nothing at all. Here, music is not necessary. I can hear all sorts of birds, my dogs chasing a squirrel, even the neighbour’s chickens and pig.

The terrace has two open sides to catch the breeze. If chilly, I wrap myself in a blanket. The couch faces my main garden.

If a plant needs trimming, or an old leaf hangs on, I interrupt my reading without hesitation. I have no goal, no task, no hurry. Here, reading is a slow-living ritual. Sometimes, when the weather is particularly pleasant, I’ll take out a small round table and a plastic chair to have my morning tea on the open terrace and read a bit. c Ivan Hernandez Quintela closed Ludens, his urban practice in Mexico City, four years ago, moving to the woods of Valle de Bravo and starting a new practice, Haiku Architecture. It focuses on small architectural gestures within the landscape. Currently building his own house, he has used this article to rethink book shelves once the house is done (one thing is clear: there will only be one long bookshelf on a long wall) and to make plenty of reading spots inside and out. His father’s chairs will go with him and there will be plenty of benches all around the garden and a tea room surrounded by all types of ferns in which to read in the utmost leisured way).

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

an a rch it e c t ure o f bo o k s r o b e rt g h i l l

cu ra t io n co llect io n co h eren ce co n t a in men t co n cen t ra t io n

D a v i d D u nc a n L i v i ngs t on

In the architectural profession, there is an old adage that one good book is worth two good buildings. This credo serves me well as I patiently build my own architectural library over a period of fifty years. The library collection began in 1970 when I was a student at the School of Architecture at the University of Toronto and living at home in Don Mills with my parents, and then, from 1979 to 1993 in my one bedroom apartment where I finally ran out of space, and commissioned a new custom-made house on a vacant lot to accommodate the library in a purpose-made room specifically tailored to form the nucleus of the residence. I slowly and methodically assembled, book by book, an outstanding working library of distinctive and memorable publications related to architecture in Europe and the Western world. At the outset, it should be emphasized that this was created, not as a collector’s library, but rather as a working library of valuable books and monographs on architects and architecture covering the period of the late nineteenth century up to the present time.

The library was to be the centre of my new residence. I directed Shim/Sutcliffe Architects to locate my library room up on the second floor, with high ceilings, generous natural light and views of the sky, clouds, and the surrounding landscape. The design of the house is a grafting of two Toronto architectural precedents; the lower floor is a nod to the classic Victorian one-storey cottage from Cabbagetown, with low ceilings and clad in horizontal lap siding. Above, and grafted to this, is a high loft space, inspired by Toronto’s industrial lofts built from 1900 to about 1930.

Completed in 1994, it serves as a private sanctuary conducive to careful study, reflection, inspiration, and as a room designed to relieve stress. Lined with books on three sides, this well-groomed library room exudes permanence, and also serves as a den, home office, a study, and a refuge and therapeutic haven of privacy and individuality. The books themselves are a pure reflection of my own personal design intelligence, my wide-ranging interests, and my endless curiosity. Every architectural book I own was acquired because I wanted to read it although, frankly, some remain unread, but are instantly accessible to me for reference, for reading, for fact-checking, and for the study of architectural precedent considered so vital to contemporary practise.

As we continue to be inundated with the onslaught of ephemeral new media such as the dreaded online texts, audio books, E-readers, and Kindle editions, it is essential to underscore how important a real book can be, and how much joy and pride there can be when celebrating the appearance of a new publication on an architectural subject which has never before been published. Nothing matches the look and tactile feel of handling a new book, admiring the organizational structure of the content, the graphic layout and appearance, the heft of a substantial work prepared by authors who may have spent years researching and assembling material from disparate sources.

Despite the erosion of the book trade through the disappearance of bricks and mortar retail bookstores, it is continually surprising how the flow of fine quality architectural books continues unabated, especially from small press European and American publishers, even when faced with a global pandemic plague and supply chain issues, they are still able to produce and market hardcover books and catalogues to satiate the thirst of architects for high quality books on new subjects.

Constructing a personal architectural library is endlessly rewarding, and the thrill of the hunt has been made much easier with powerful online search engines giving access to literally thousands of book dealers and book sellers around the world who market original printed editions of architectural books that have long been out-of-print and unobtainable. For me, an essential task (and a very enjoyable one at that) is to travel to other cities to visit the great architectural bookstores, some of which still exist – Hennessey & Ingalls in Los Angeles, Peter Miller Books in Seattle, William Stout in San Francisco, Chicago’s Prairie Avenue Bookshop. New York City: George Wittenborn, Jaap Rietman, Seymour Hacker Art Books, Rizzoli, Urban Centre Books, Strand Book Store. Toronto’s Karelia Bookstore, run by the architect Janis Kravis, opened on Front Street in 1966; Ballenford Architectural Books in 1979. In Montreal, the CCA Bookstore opened in 1989.

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S t e v e n E v a ns

Equally important were my visits to Europe: London, RIBA, the AA,the bookstores on Tottenham Court Road. And there was the book store owned and operated by Ben Weinreb (19121999), the dean of the architectural book trade in the United Kingdom, whose shop in Great Russell Street in London was architectural heaven. And then there is the continent and excursions to thriving bookshops in Paris, Milan, Berlin, Stockholm and Helsinki.

These visits are absolutely necessary because new architectural books can be found which will never, ever, turn up in Canada. The discovery of unknown books can only occur by actually travelling, taking the time to visit a bookstore and to examine the new titles or, even more important, to see out-of-print or antiquarian architectural titles which a specific dealer may have on hand. The careful process of curating and building an architectural library is pure intellectual pleasure, but it comes with one caveat: a beautiful library room is never done, is never complete, and is continually growing and developing.

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

t h e libr ar y r o o m: The library has over 3,000 titles, including books on architecture; architectural drawing, history and photography; architectural guidebooks, rare twentieth century architectural journals of the modernist era from 1930 to 1960; books on graphic design, poster design, art, landscape, and catalogues from architectural exhibitions and architectural awards programmes.

All the books are arranged by country, not by author or title.

No central computerised index is used – I find all books can be remembered by their title and visual appearance of the graphic design. New books and journals are added on a monthly basis.

David D u n can L i vi n g s to n

Why architectural modernism from 1930 to 1960? I am a dyedin-the-wool modernist, not an antiquarian. The remarkable fact about this style of architecture is that it was an entirely new invention, a clean, stripped down and dramatically handsome presentation of architectural ideas and forms with an elegant simplicity that caught the imagination of architects around the world. Architectural journals from Europe played a key role in disseminating images of this new style, and they capture the immediacy and excitement of this style which first appeared in France, then Germany, and then to Italy and Spain, spreading rapidly across eastern Europe, England, the Americas, thence to the Middle East and parts of Africa.

I have about 700 publications from 18 different countries, including bound and unbound copies. My theory is that these journals were the most important way to spread the modernist style, inspiring hundreds of architects to experiment with these concepts in their own countries.

R ob e r t G Hi l l

R ob e r t G Hi l l

specifications: The library room consists of custom-designed shelving units prefabricated off site and assembled in vertical units each 12’ high, from floor to ceiling. There are 72 compartments, each 28” wide, 13” high, and 14” deep to accommodate oblong folios and oversize books on the subject of architecture. The house framing was specifically designed to take a live load of 50 lbs.per square feet. The weight of the book collection and the shelving is approximately two tons, and is supported by a triple wood beam on the south wall, and by 2x6 vertical wall framing at 12” centres (not 16” centres) all around the perimeter of the house. The floor joists are placed at 12” centres, not the conventional 16”.

Each shelving unit is fabricated from 1/2” thick mdf, edged both vertically and horizontally with solid maple trim which adds rigidity and strength to each supporting shelf. Each shelving unit is backed with sheets of 1/4” masonite for added strength. An integrated system of incandescent uplighting is incorporated into the vertical dividers of each module of shelving.

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On the north side of the library room is a credenza (above and right) – a low open shelving unit 37” high and 16 feet long.

It acts as a barrier and railing beside the open stair, meeting code regulations. This unit holds oversize architectural books and folios, and consists of 16 compartments each 21” long, 14” high, and 12” deep.

The total amount of shelving is 430 linear feet, including shelving on the south and east side of the library, and the credenza.

Craven Road House was designed in 1994 by Shim/Sutcliffe Architects, Toronto. Design, fabricaton and installation of the shelving, by Arthur Billard and Larry Norris of Catfish Design/Build, Toronto, 1994-5. I moved into the house November 1994 but the interior finishing was not completed until mid-1995. Exterior finishing of the house was Spring 1996, when we had a building bee with five people including Howard Sutcliffe and others from KPMB Architects. c

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

o n libr ar ies , a s elect ed r eadin g l i s t : Beaufre, Roland and Dominique Dupuich. Living With Books.

London: Thames & Hudson, 2010.

Bresciani, Elisabetta. MODERN: Architecture Books from the Marzona Collection. Vienna: Schlebrugge Editions, 2003. An illustratetd exhibition catalogue of architectural books from the collection of Egidio Marzona (1944- ), a German-Italian artist, art dealer and collector.

Ellis, Estelle, Caroline Seebohm and Christopher S. Sykes. At Home With Books: How Booklovers Live With And Care for Their Libraries. New York: Carol Southern Books, 1995.

Geddes-Brown, Leslie. Books Do Furnish a Room. London: Merrill, 2009.

Harris, Eileen and Nicholas Savage. Hooked on Books: The Library of Sir John Soane Architect 1753-1837. London: The Sir John Soane Museum, 2004. du Prey, Pierre de la Ruffiniere, editor. Architects, Books & Libraries: A Collection of Essay. Kingston, Ontario: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, 1995.

Purcell, Mark. The Country House Library, New Haven & London: Yale University Press for the National Trust, 2017. An indispensable work for understanding how the landed gentry of England created library rooms on their estates for the use by friends and colleagues. de Smet, Catherine. Le Corbusier: Architect of Books. Zürich: Lars Muller, 2005. An illustrated study of the designs for over 100 architectural books and manifestos produced by Le Corbusier between 1912 and his death in 1965.

Steffans, Jo, editor. Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Interviews with ten prominent American architects, and illustrations of books from their own professional and personal libraries.

R o be r t G H i ll

The Craven Road House and Library, appeared in On Site review: 4, Winter 2000-1, pp 26-29

Robert G. Hill FRAIC is an architect and architectural historian who lives and works in Toronto. He is the author and editor of The Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada 18001950, and is a voracious and incorrigible collector of beautiful architectural books and journals. www.dictionaryofarchitectsincanada.org

in t he co mpan y o f bo o k s you are never alone

c o llect io n s s h elv in g l ega cies e s ca p e o u r o w n h is t o ries

myron nebozuk

Ten years ago, while helping the town of Beaverlodge, Alberta reimagine their library, we estimated the number of books to be 9000. The same estimation method for my family’s books also arrived at 9000.

As my house is a third the size of Beaverlodge Library, book storage, retrieval and presentation is an ongoing challenge.

bo o kshelves: We began with commonly available 6’ tall teak veneer bookshelves. I chose teak because William Burroughs believed that Dutch Schultz, the gangster, had a fetish for teak. As our collection grew, we simply bought more bookshelves. Books here are grouped by category and arranged (more or less) alphabetically. These shelves line one wall in our finished basement, a large and open space interrupted with only two steel columns. Our ability to add to another long line of bookcases came to a sudden halt when the shelving factory was destroyed on December 26, 2004 – the Indian Ocean tsunami.

I K EA to the rescue: We then decided on contrasting bookshelves to complement the teak ones, and ones better suited to freestanding horizontal groupings. These bookshelves were also better for oversized book categories like architecture and cooking.

Given their lower height we used the tops to display particularly unusual or beautiful books. Islands were

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arranged in smaller spatial groupings — the space resembles a contemporary library with comfortable nooks to explore and read. To this mix we added musical instruments, inspired

by Jaron Lanier who has five thousand musical instruments, most of which can be picked up and played immediately.

o ur pr ide o f place dis play : The living room on the main floor has a contemporary reinterpretation of the gravity-defying bookcases designed

by Herman Miller and his modernist contemporaries. An aluminum, glass and rosewood bookcase holds some of my architectural books (history, theory, urban design and architect’s monographs). This array is also a tribute to my parents whose financial discipline enabled me to start and grow an architectural library when I was a student in Ottawa in the mid 1980s. Particularly heartening were Sunday afternoons when my father, who had wanted to be an architect, would choose a monograph or three, settle into a good chair and read until dinner.

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

M yr on N e b oz u k

the L a g er feld bedroom stac ks: Karl Lagerfeld discovered that he could have more books if he stacked them vertically into columns. At the time of his death, his collection numbered 250 000 volumes.

At first glance, this system seems to be wholly unsuited to quick retrieval and perusal. It is not. The casual act of repeatedly glancing at stacks of books registers in one’s memory. If I suddenly need to read something by Jhumpa Lahiri or Stephen Fry, I can find the book in a few moments.

The process of extracting a specific book from a pile also produces moments of surprise as I find overlooked and worthy neighbours.

Books are particularly important to me: my earliest purchases from the Architecture Book Store in Ottawa take me back to the very moment of the purchase. I can recall which school project I was working on and why I thought a particular book would help me in design studio. This reason for acquiring architectural books – to rise above ordinary experiences and places – continues. Diving into a monograph with detailed plans, sections and essays helps me to better understand other architects’ perspectives and processes. For me, books are springboards, inspiring me to push myself far more than an internet search. c

Coming back to my title, books have enabled my family and me to get through recent lockdowns without succumbing to emotional isolation. Quoting Eddie Van Halen, ‘More is always better’, I now see our book collection as a multigenerational project. The love for learning was instilled by my parents and continues — my youngest daughter, who is studying architecture, asked if she could inherit my architecture books.

Myron Nebozuk is an architect with three decades of experience.

He is currently working with a small team to make his province’s healthcare system more responsive and effective.

love a f fa i rs four architects and their b ooks

s h elv es p a s s io n s memo r y f rien d s h ip co llect io n s

dennis rovere

We (the i nd i visible divin ity th at w ork s in us ) h ave d rea m ed th e world. 1 ­— Jorge Luis B o r ges beaut y is mo r e t h an s k in deep: Books and buildings – both are objects we inhabit. I am not alone in this thinking; Neil Gaiman, in reference to genres, wrote that ‘Writers live in houses that other people built’.3 Books and architecture can have gravitas or whimsey; each occupies space, has structure and weight, and their dust jackets, their façades, serve the same purpose: to draw you in.

However, the backs of buildings are often more interesting than the front. Instead of showing what the building wants to be, it shows us what the building actually is. The back cover of a book gives us insight into what the interior, the inhabited space, holds. Borges reminds us that a book ‘is more than a verbal structure or a series of verbal structures; a book is a dialogue with the reader’. Similarly, good architecture is more than simply a structure; like a good novel it creates a dialogue and a connection with the viewer.

co n n ect io n s , r elat io n s h ips , dialo gu e s : We tend to think our relationships, whether in love or business, are unique; we are often surprised to find there is commonality in how relationships begin, flourish, endure, or in some instances end. de n n i s ro ve re

On my desk sits a sturdy gravity bookcase I made in Grade 7 Shop at St. Mary’s Junior High in Calgary over 50 years ago.2 I have kept it more for sentimental reasons than practicality.

It holds a handful of books, not for reference, but because they help inspire, aspire, and encourage me to ask difficult questions – how can I better think, write, and practice architecture?

1 Borges, J. L. Other inquisitions 1937-1952. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984 2 Gravity bookcases: simple yet clever. One end is elevated, here by a piece of dowel under one end of the shelf. Gravity forces the books to lean against a vertical support on the opposite end. Not particularly practical, mine has travelled with me from place to place, reminding me of home.

3 Gaiman, N. Trigger warning. New York: Harper Collins,2015

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I have three close friends with whom I discussed the architect’s library: I grew up in Calgary but architectural work and university had me living in the United States for many years – Cincinnati; Pullman, Washington; Montana; Los Angeles, California; and various parts of Indiana; as well as travelling to China, Italy and other lands. Brett Pawson, a past collaborator, is a 3D architectural animator and researcher in animation and media in Vancouver. Former classmate Tom Schilb has a practice based in Seattle, but has done work all along the West Coast, most recently in northern California. The late Tip Scott, initially a philosopher, was an architect and builder – we worked together for many years in California, Indiana and other places in the States. He had a large library – but preferred magazines such as Domus over books about or by other architects. We all have diverse interests and architectural and design practices, but share a love of books and their connection to the works we produce.

Tip loved Frank Lloyd Wright; I am a huge fan of Carlo Scarpa who was a fan and friend of Wright. There are connections.

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

the o b j ects of our a f fecti o n:

1 D enni s Rove re What are these objects that attract, entice and compel us to gather, collect, and in some instances hoard? I have always loved architecture books – architects, theory, history, drawing, speculative and unbuilt design, contemporary Italian architects, Tadao Ando and Tom Kundig. I buy books (haven’t borrowed a book from a library in over 35 years) and have a rather large collection of several thousand – according to my wife several thousand too many. She tolerates my collection because she knows that though I love my books, I love her more – and my books, I am sure, know this too.

d e nni s r ov e r e

Books are in bookcases in my library and studio in the basement. They are in multiple languages (English, Italian, Chinese); some are loosely organised by theme, for example, writings by Umberto eco, but right below him are Tadao Ando, Italian and contemporary Chinese female architects next to the three-volume set of Magnus Robot Fighter. Over the years, I have remained faithful to most of them, particularly my art, architecture and children’s books – primarily because of the illustrations. Fickleness or various and diverse writing or design projects cause my affection for certain volumes to change. Sure, I still love them all, but competition for my affection is fierce. As a result, I rearrange my shelves two or three times a year as certain texts emerge or fade in relevance.

2

To m S chi lb

Tom, a consummate artist with a strong engineering background, is an architect who tends not to collect books on architecture – rather his books are inspirations from places other than design. He has very few books on architecture, but many Italian cookbooks, books on philosophy, forensic facial reconstruction and paleontology, graphic novels, poetry and field guides. Tom is truly in love, or as he puts it ‘crazy and neurotic about books’ and considers buying them as a form of self-reliance knowing that he’s assembling his own library of

treasures – sometimes twice when he realises that somehow he’s lost a book he once had. To him bookcases are furniture, a major part of almost every room in his house, as are tables stacked with books. Books are everywhere. Although he tries to organise and stow them tidily in bookcases, they mysteriously migrate to appear within arm’s reach, no matter if he is on the couch, sitting in his favourite chair, cooking in the kitchen or lying in bed. Like all good partners, books bring Tom comfort by just knowing they are there.

n o t s o r o man t ic lia s on s The internet displaces the need to maintain a physical library of Sweets Guides, binders from manufacturers and vendors, code books, and so on. It’s difficult to find outdated material online, whereas years ago, keeping up to date with current products and code changes was never ending. We all consider online liaisons more as acquaintances rather than long-term, serious relationships.

Tom sums up our collective feeling that ‘the internet is not the place for inspiration and getting in the right frame of mind to be at your best creatively. This duty still falls to getting lost in a book – shutting off the outside world and taking a journey that resets you with yourself’.

To m Sch i lb

3 B r et t Paw s o n Brett, the architectural animator, has books from eastern metaphysics to more practical subjects – ‘gardening to archery to construction to animation’. Most of his active collection is piled on the floor within 10 feet of his desk, clear except for his laptop, paper and pens. Books on his shelves are stored in a mix of the horizontal and vertical; horizontal piles frequently serve both as bookends for the vertical books and as independent horizontal stacks; what one sacrifices in removability from the pile one gains in easy reading of the spines. He borrows from the library, buys used books and uses Wikipedia and other online resources (books reviews, general articles) as a first resort or to expose related items he may not have initially considered. Although convenient, he usually calls in the text through library services just to check page numbers and accuracy.

B re tt P aw s o n

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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

4 Ti p S co tt We all use words such as pervasive, active, or passive to describe our ongoing relationship with books. Brett’s relationship is both active and passive – he uses his books in his design work and maintains an active research library. He also maintains a passive resource collection in a different city – one that has not been touched in years. Tom’s relationship is pervasive and never as active as he would like. Late in his career, Tip would have used the word indifferent.

His passion for books was initially active in that they provided a deeper understanding for his architectural projects, primarily through his life-long romance with philosophy via DePauw, the Sorbonne and Oxford. The first project we collaborated on was the Tibetan Cultural Centre in Indiana.

By way of design research he gave me a copy of The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, which still holds a prominent place in my library.4 Tip’s studio had few books; those present were stacked, in no specific order, on tables and custom designed and manufactured moveable sets of drawers. Magazines and journals stood on the long work table in his studio. Most of his library was in his house, on bookshelves that spanned the length and height of one wall, over two floors.

Late in Tip’s career rumours began to circulate he was carrying on affairs with books outside his home; casual affairs, to be sure, with audio books from the public library.

He claimed these were not serious encounters but only undertaken for companionship during his solo, late-night studio design sessions. However, I knew his relationships were changing when he packed almost all of his books into boxes. They were labelled and placed in storage, never to be opened again in his lifetime. In his studio, his collection of design magazines were put in cupboards and the only books that remained in the open were those actively needed for construction, pricing or detailing.

During all of this, he did stay faithful to one book – a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, carried with his sketch book and drawing tools in a hand-woven Ecuadorean bag.5 One particular summer day we stopped for coffee on our way to dinner with a client. As we sat and chatted, he began to read from Leaves and at one point began to cry. When I learned that Tip had died suddenly, I found the best hard cover copy of ‘Song of Myself’ – the core poem in Leaves of Grass,5 commemorating Tip’s love of Whitman and our long and close collaboration and friendship. Despite its emotional value, ‘Song’ does not sit on my desk. It lives beside the Great Liberation in the architecture section of my library. No longer a book, but akin to a paper gau, it stands as a reminder for Tip, now gone. c 4 Evans-Wentz, W.Y. The Tibetan book of the great liberation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982 5 Whitman, W., & Crawford, A. Song of myself. Portland & Brooklyn: Tin House Books, 2014

d e nni s r ov e r e

A dri e n n e R o ve re

In his mid-twenties, Dennis Rovere left the fast-paced world of oracle bone translation to pursue architecture. When not designing, or rearranging his library, he practices Taiji and Chinese painting. www.dennisrovere.ca @disegno.dennis

fo r t he l o v e o f bo o k s

t ra v el lib ra ries res ea rch p a s s io n it a ly

k a r e n j o a n wat s o n

K a r e n Wa t s on

I t a li a I lay out favourite titles around me for research, entertainment and enlightenment. Books from my shelves and library loans form a pyramid beside my bed. I may use the library’s three-week deadline to finish the latest art-spy thriller from Daniel Silva. Or I’ll re-read Mary McCarthy’s The Stones of Florence and Venice Observed, my own copy of Jesse McDonald’s Michelango, and a tourism book on Florence from my shelves, while I also read Alexander Lee’s The Ugly Renaissance – framed as a walk by Michelangelo through Florence. Starting from the San Marco area of wealth, beauty and comfort he passes the Palazzo Medici Riccardi by Michelozzo, home of his host and patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici ‘il Magnifico.’ He then crosses the Ponte Vecchio to the Oltrarno’s working class dwellings, churches and people. Lee paints all concerned with an ‘ugly’ palette to create a book of social and art history, fleshed out by in-depth research on the gritty reality of the Renaissance, its businesses, patrons, politics, the Church, its artists. I dive into virtual archives to check references in the text, aware of the parallels to greed in the present day. Like Alice, I fall down the internet rabbit hole, reading Lee’s academic bio and Twitter page, noting that

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his new Venetian Ghetto history will be published, reminding me of the Venetian backstory of Daniel Silva’s Chiara, she of the riotous chestnut curls.

The engaging book by art historian Caroline Murphy, The Murder of a Medici Princess, reveals newly-discovered missives from European ambassadors in the mid-1500s who gossied freely about the state of ducal marriages and their fecundity, relaying descriptions of intellectual and artistic pursuits in the Florentine court of Duke Cosimo I. She interleaves them with notes of court sycophants and scribes, and the personal letters of the extraordinary princess, Isabella de’ Medici, who lived her life in late-Renaissance Tuscany among allies and enemies.

With these books spread out on my bed, I open my laptop to follow Michelangelo’s path through Florence on a historical map, remembering the smells and sounds of rising early in Florence in 1994, leading a group of American theatre students down these same roads to practise T’ai chi in the garden nearby. I can live inside the ancient city walls, in a time-layered world created through books, memories and imagination.

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

libr ar ies In the mid-70s, one of 75 new students at Carleton’s School of Architecture in Ottawa, Professor Glenn Milne asked us to draw a map of the campus. We protested that we didn’t know the campus yet, we were just getting our bearings.

He insisted. My map showed a beeline from the school to the pool and back up to MacOdrum Library. That was it.

Glenn pointed out how we each drew what we knew, what we were drawn to. My conceptual map included the path to the campus library, my happy place.

R o sem o u n t Li brar y, 1918, cour t esy of T he Ot t awa Cit izen, A pri l 24, 2006

I come home in 2019 from a trip to Italy, primed by the Italian art of living, from my relatives’ bubbling welcome in Le Marche in the east, to the angst of the latest Art Biennale in Venezia, to the familiar smells and sounds of Firenze with its heady mix of language, art and architecture in every narrow street, to a visit to a neighbouring prince’s rural villa, to, finally, a perfect wood-fired pizza at the airport before I fly.

As I open the door to our Ottawa home I am greeted by the heavy red-blossomed hibiscus that shade bright windows in deep window wells. I return travel and language books to the straining shelves beside the desktop computer. In the living room I lay out magazines and books on the coffee table. I return a coveted art book to a shelf in the studio, sliding another out to compare a detail prompted by my visits to Benozzo Gozzoli’s artwork in San Gimignano and in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Firenze. I push aside the suitcase at the end of my bed, and spread out the art book and map, with notes and images of Michelangelo on my tablet, savouring them with memories of light striking the Duomo at different angles. My bed as studio, as stage, as retreat.

I have always lived near a library. I brought home all the books I could carry from the children’s section of our old Benny Library in Montreal’s NDG, a haven for someone my size with my own library card. It had the same magic as Arto Monaco’s Land of Makebelieve in Upper Jay, New York where the castle, train and village houses were built to half-scale just for children.

As a teen living a few blocks from the Carlingwood branch of the Ottawa Public Library, I would lay out texts, notebooks and references along a table as I studied. At St. Joseph’s High School, I volunteered for the library club with the other bookworms – my people. School, like home, was bustling; the library gave me quiet and a place to think. From this place of quiet I was fortified to rejoin the school crowds cheering on our football team.

We returned to Montreal in 1973 and lived a few blocks west of the historic Loyola College, now Concordia University.

Loyola’s modern Vanier Library appeared to be designed around a massive plaster copy of Michelangelo’s David. My friends and I would meet to study at the feet or behind the shoulders or in the favoured spot, beside the penis. David gave us a frisson of sophistication to match our studied indifference to male nudity on a giant scale.

Now, I take out all the books I can carry from the Rosemount branch of the Ottawa Public Library around the corner.

Rosemount is an original Carnegie library – a 103-year-old temple to books and learning. When I enter, I feel the same magic as I did in NDG. The Rosemount embeds Carnegie’s library ethic and aesthetics, his expansive gift to learning and to creating enduring libraries that are public and free.

w h ere b o o ks live The shelf and space beside my bed is a temporary library devoted to my latest obsession or project. Around the house, books cluster thematically. Languages, travel and love are in the bookshelf near the main computer. Psychology, death and dying rest in a bookshelf near my side of the bed. Novels, history, literature, politics and my husband’s aviation books live in our living room. Writing, architecture, Renaissance society and art line my studio shelves. Indigenous customs and reconciliation belong there as well, with environment and science.

On the tall bookshelf of my studio is an heirloom – my maternal grandfather Quain’s well-used, spiral-bound January 1938 issue of The Architectural Forum, designed and written by Frank Lloyd Wright, with pull-out sketches of plans of Taliesin and other designs. As a young man in 1916 during World War I, Redmond T. Quain was bound for war duty overseas when his father suddenly died. His uncle offered to support his mother and four younger sisters while he was sent to law school. Redmond protested, “No, my dream is to study architecture.” His uncle answered, “No time for dreaming my boy, law school is quicker.” Eventually he and my grandmother collaborated with architect Gordon Hughes to design and build their Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired house in the Gatineau Hills of Quebec. An interest in architecture runs through the generations like a thread through the family story.

K a r e n Wa t s on

s t i ll p o i nts Books offer a still point, starting with the quiet I looked forward to when caring for boisterous younger brothers and sisters, who, as night fell, slipped into sleep – a quiet that allowed me to enter another world. For a book lover, approaching and holding a book is to silently hold a world rife with possibility as I surrender the experience to the other senses. I take time to enjoy its weight, the feel of the cover, the design of its artwork with the author’s name big or small, the smell of the old or new, opening the book to any page to get a sense of the author’s voice; I note the font and layout, read the back cover blurb for a hint, and scan the index for clues. Books are truly an overlooked treasure trove of quiet sensation.

r ea d i ng I was three years old; we were living in cold-war Germany with a copy of the seminal German children’s text, Der Struwwepeter, a series of morality tales for children originally written and illustrated in 1845, featuring harsh and terrifying images of naughty children’s fingers cut off and bleeding. Some of the book’s pages were taped shut so I would not scream as our Kinderfrau read them to us. When the little matchgirl Paulina burned into ashes, I identified with her and was deeply sad.

Perhaps searching for an antidote, my parents brought me back a miniature four-volume set of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales from a trip to Denmark. What struck me at the time

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was that my parents gave me my own set of books, books that fit perfectly in my small hands. I willed myself to understand the letters. The illustrations were delicate line drawings that seized my imagination. On the red living room couch, nestled in my mother’s or father’s arms with my two little sisters, I asked for the re-telling of the story of the curious little mermaid who made a choice for love. The Little Mermaid does not hide the pain of adapting to a human state, the agony of ‘walking on knives’ yet I was not afraid as I listened. Her great love was unrequited, she became sea foam, transforming into a spirit of the air. But it was her choice to love. Here I found even harder lessons, though easier to absorb than the horrific morality of Der Struwwelpeter.

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

m ysteri es: a myste r y of th e h ear t My love of mysteries started with The Bobbsey Twins, then Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, later Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie, to Le Carré and Daniel Silva. I think of Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven that I read in the early days of the pandemic. Looking up how to spell her name, I am delighted to find out Emily wrote Last Night in Montreal. I immediately put in a hold request from the library.

Before the internet, as a freelance researcher-writer I haunted the National Library and Archives of Canada for the references and microfiche records of everything written in Canada and beyond. I knew the rules and the system, and I found a treasure. I brought my father in to see his father’s World War I records as a Canadian Seaforth Highlander.

Included in the small box with David M. Watson’s signature were notes by his commanding officer about my gentle grandfather being disciplined for unsanctioned boxing – for money – in a local village overseas.

Why a mystery fascinates is in itself a mystery. For me, research is like being on the trail. I follow clues, jump over red herrings, double back for that dropped hint, and when it’s a good search, I remain engrossed, almost feverish in pursuit of answers. · As I awaited open-heart surgery for a serious birth defect in the years between 2012 and 2017, like Sherlock Holmes, I dove into the complex, mysterious subject of why and how the heart works and what might lie in my future. I brought together a cluster of resources that fit into the bedroom

bookshelf and cascaded out into a pile by my bed where I could drop them as I fell asleep at night. In the pile of heart books, a picture book of the body was the biggest. I loved the photographic realism showing each organ and connective tissue. And the crinkly sound as I pulled each cellophane layer across the other, superimposing different systems against the background of the human body. This picture book was at the bottom of the stack closest to the floor, a pedestal for the others, fending off the Roomba vacuum cleaner on its daily rounds.

Above the anatomy book was Adam Pick’s heartfelt story and resource book – The Patient’s Guide to Open Heart Surgery, which I got my husband to read cover to cover. (He was still surprised at the process, but says he is ready for the next time.)

During those years, I kept Gail Godwin’s hardcover meditation Heart: a personal journey through its myths and meanings in that pile of biology and heart surgery books. From Heart I learned about the musical tempo of the heartbeat. “The Italians have a musical notation not found in any other language: tempo giusto ‘the right tempo.’ It means a steady, normal beat, between 66 and 76 on the metronome. Tempo giusto is the appropriate beat of the human heart.”

After recovering from surgery, I felt one more mystery in life was solved – how to survive. After years of consulting biology textbooks and tomes about dying and dealing with uncertainty, I returned the books to their bookshelves, along with my journals about the experience. Journals belong in my studio bookshelf with sketchbooks, lined up or piled in order from earliest to most recent. The notes inspire me to write my own story as a thank you to the thousands of books in my life.

ep i lo g ue Today, like my heart, my love of books is stronger than ever. I sit cross-legged on my bed, surrounded by books pulled from the bookcase and spilled/piled beside the bed, books that together weave many versions of a story into a whole. While I have returned the heart books to their shelves, I am ready to dive into endless new literary and research journeys.

I let the Heart book fall in my lap, practise breathing and feel my heart beat, at tempo giusto. c

B r a d S ni d e r

‘Sono viva e vegeta!’ Karen Joan Watson is a Canadian writer and visual artist, former Government of Canada manager in Marketing-Communications, a traveller, family genealogist, mother’s caregiver and a defender of all that is lively. https://kjwatson.ca

the b ook sh e lf a s s u r r o g a t e s e l f greg snyder

ex h ib it io n s b io gra p h y ma rkers o f t ime i den t it y ma t eria l h is t o ries

The way I collect books vacillates between casual habit and a ritualised activity as closely linked to a sense of self as anything I can imagine. I realise that my books are a measure and a record of what I have given consideration to, as well as what I aspire to give consideration to. My collection of books is a portrait of how I have come to identify myself, and have worked to form a self.

A book has many frames of reference, from its author’s oeuvre, to its Dewey Decimal Classification, to how a reader projects a unique consciousness to it. For the collector of books, the shelf is the customary host for assembly, display and storage.

Some might see the shelf as utilitarian, a solution for an efficient and compact consolidation of a book collection; others might conceptualise the bookshelf as part storage, part theatre – a spectacle of both an interior landscape and a landscape of the imagination. This sense of possibility (and opportunity) is echoed in Italo Calvino’s essay ‘Whom Do We Write For? or The Hypothetical Bookshelf’: Whom do we write for? Whom do we write a poem for?

For people who have read a number of other novels, a number of other poems. A book is written so that it can be put beside other books and take its place on a hypothetical bookshelf. Once it is there, in some way or other it alters the shelf, expelling certain other volumes from their places or forcing them back into the second row, while demanding that certain others should be brought up to the front.1 all i m a ge s G r e g S ny d e r

This prospect of animate interaction between books on a shelf invites us to consider the shelf as a ground for play, curation, speculation and strategic composition and juxtaposition.

Altering the shelf underscores how physical relationships between books impact meaning and significance within the situation of being on a shelf. Calvino characterises the distillation of relations into concrete form in ‘Ersilia’ from Invisible Cities: In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or grey, or blackand-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled: only the strings and their supports remain.2 Aldo Rossi in A Scientific Autobiography describes the rewards of being attentive to relations: The emergence of relations among things, more than the things themselves, always gives rise to new meanings.3

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Books as a measure of interests, and the collection of books as an instrument in the act of self-definition and re-membering, was the catalyst for an exhibition that I curated entitled Heroes and Reminders: Faculty Bookshelves from the CoA, and installed at the school of architecture where I teach. Leading with the passage from Italo Calvino above, each faculty member was asked to identify the books that had shaped their thinking, interests and even their scholarship. Their collection of books forms a portrait of any given faculty member, and the bookshelves collectively, a portrait of the entire faculty.

The exhibit shared dimensions of the faculty with our students that they might not be aware of, and revealed to them that their teachers have breadths of interests and curiosities that encompass a rich variety of subjects that both include and transcend what is simply thought to be architectural. Initially, the assumption was that the exhibition was for the students, that the students would be the beneficiaries of this peek into the inner workings of the faculty.

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

Greg Snyder’s curated, important, books

Each faculty member identified and composed their books, and then measured them. Individual shelves were fabricated for each collection. There were some remarkable distinctions between the faculty members: one required a shelf 53” wide, one was content with 1 1/2”; a few needed segmented shelves to better differentiate their influences and enthusiasms. Some offered excerpts from both their pre-PhD selves as well as their post-PhD selves … some did not. Some took delight in arranging the books — in all likelihood a composition born of diagrams and iterative analysis; another exploited the play of words and titles to demonstrate their acute wit; many just offered their most sincere account of interest through a curated collection intended to both encourage and provoke.

Apart from the electricity and interactions of the opening, it was through the activity of photographing the bookshelves as a record of the event that catalysed the most meaningful

a l l i m a ge s G r e g S ny d e r

realisations about this exhibition. I was alone in the Gallery with the twenty-five bookshelves. The thought emerged that I was sharing the space with twenty-five surrogate selves, the books and the bookshelves embodying at least one version of a portrait of each of my faculty colleagues. c 1 Calvino, Italo. ‘Whom do we Write For? or The Hypothetical Bookshelf’. The Uses of Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. p81 2 Calvino, Italo. ‘Ersilla’. Invisible Cities. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 19798. p76 3 Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific Autobiography. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981. p19 Greg Snyder is an Associate Professor in the College of Architecture at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His research interests are in issues that arise out of acts of making and construction, and the phenomena and meaning that accrue in and around these acts.

Kelly Carson-Reddig

Pam Unwin

Eric Sauda

Krista Sykes

Susan Rogers

Charles Hight, Dean

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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

John Nelson

David Thaddeus

Mark Morris

a l l i m a ge s G r e g S ny d e r

Scott Cryer

Dale Bentrup

Paul Clark

Linda Samuels

Bob Sandkam

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Peter Wong

Rich Preiss

on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections

a l l i m a ge s G r e g S ny d e r

READ Books

The Paper Hound

A specialty art bookstore at Emily Carr University 520 East 1st Avenue Vancouver BC V5T 0H2 604 630 7411 readbooks@ecuad.ca

We of fer pic k-up an d sh ippin g for pur chases pl ac ed on l in e 344 West Pender St. Vancouver BC V6B 2V6 604 428 1344 https://paperhound.ca new, secondhand and rare, hard-to-find titles

from Pa p e rh o u n d ’s ve ry e n t e rt a in in g tumblr blo g a b o u t b o o k s: 04 M ay 2021

There are many arguments against punitive justice based on rigorous empirical evidence, but permit us to add a single anecdote to the chorus: we have never encountered a copy of the horrifying Struwwelpeter, with its inventory of brats behaving badly and receiving violent and beastly punishments wildly disproportionate to the scale of the offence, that has not been defaced by an underwhelmed child.

Deterrence is a myth! Abolition now!

www.cca.qc.ca

bookstore collections library

Crist ina G uadal upe G al ván

Canadian Centre for Architecture 1920, rue Baile Montréal, QC H3H 2S6