on site 34: on writing

ON SITE r e v i e w

architecture urbanism design infrastructure culture construction

number 34 fall 2015

onwriting writing on writing

ON ARCHITECTURE

34

ng CAN/USA $14 sell until May 2016

Mark Dorrian, Adrian Hawker.

Metis: Urban Cartographies.

London: Black Dog Publishing, 2002 ISBN-10: 1901033538 ISBN-13: 9781901033533 Mark Dorrian. Writing on the Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation. London: I.B.Tauris, 2015 ISBN: 978 1 7845 3038 9

Robin Wilson. Image,Text, Architecture Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015 ISBN: 978 1 4724 1443 4

Pedro Gadanho. Filip Dujardin: Fictions Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2014 ISBN-10: 3775738029 ISBN-13: 978-3775738026

LĂŠopold Lambert. Weaponized Architecture. The Impossibility of Innocence. dpr-barcelona, 2012 ISBN: 978-84-615-3702-0

FORENSIS The Architecture of Public Truth Edited by Forensic Architecture Berliln: Sternberg Press, 2014 ISBN-10: 3956790111 ISBN-13: 978-3956790119

Hans Ibelings + Powerhouse Company. Shifts Architecture After the 20th Century. Westmount QC: The Architecture Observer, 2012 ISBN-10: 9081920707 ISBN-13: 978-9081920704 Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project. Rolf Tiedemann, editor Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 2002 ISBN 978 0 6740 0802 1

Gentz, Joachim. Keywords Reoriented. Ella Chmielewska, Hannah Sommerseth, Jack Burton, editors interKULTUR - European-Chinese Intercultural Studies; 4. 2009 ISBN13: 978-3-940344-88-5

Florian Kossak, Doina Petrescu, Tatjana Schneider, Renata Tyszczuk, Stephen Walker, editors Agency: Working With Uncertain Architectures Routledge, 2009 ISBN-10: 0415566029 ISBN-13: 978-0415566025

ON SITE r e v i e w belatedly, Fall 2015

34: on writi n g It is appropriate that this ultimate issue of On Site review should be about writing, as this is what architecture journals, magazines and reviews do: they write about architecture and urbanism, and a lot of other things, in words and images. Pictures alone, like a pure instagram site without captions, titles or text, are a new model – the image itself is like a found polaroid; the viewer applies a context, a narrative, a story; it is free and participatory.

The sheer cost of doing a traditional print publication almost demands significant text to justify itself; the web is better, and faster, and cheaper at just putting out images rather than arguments. But argument is what writing is – the need to speak, to oppose, to confer, to confirm, to argue that one exists, that one has ideas, thoughts, hopes, fears.

The writing in this issue is beautiful – so many people thinking intensely about the world and writing about it in delicately chosen terms. Thought; writing; journals: slow media.

He c t or A b a r c a

c o n t en t s

page

c o n t r i bu t or s Danielle Willkens

Open Letters

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Miranda Mote, Chelsea Spencer, Irene Chin, Lara Mehlings

Digital Shalott, on the parallels of building and writing in the Virtual Age

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Linda Just

About Reading

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Troels Steenholdt Heiredal

Postmedium Narrative

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Igsung So

On Writing (about architecture)

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Thomas Nemeskeri

Forensic Criticism of N Ratsby in The Architectural Review

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Jon Astbury

Notes on writing on architecture, Mark Dorrian’s Writing on the Image

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Stephanie White

The Book Will Kill the Edifice

30

Daniel Fairbrother

Studying the architectural journal, Robin Wilson’s Image, Text, Architecture

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Jon Astbury

Heralds of Their Own Gospel

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Hector Abarca

Between Writing and Design

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Thomas-Bernard Kenniff

A Hunt for Optimism in the Middle or thereabouts

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Ted Landrum

Columns

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Graham Hooper

Writing On Architecture, Times Square: signs and icons

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Rick Lane

Reading Architecture 1

51

Stephanie White

Reading Architecture 2

52

Hector Abarca

who we are

54

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Epistolary Architecture, the trans-Atlantic design network 1789-1837

e pistolary architecture the transatlantic design network, 1768-1838 by danielle s willkens

Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of windy day never to return-more. Every thing presses on— — from Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy , 3rd ed., 9 vols. (London: Printed for J. Dodsley, 1760-1767), 2:VIII.

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Although these borrowed lines may read as the preface to a romantic saga, this article does not tell the story of a love triangle or an affair. Rather, this is the story of a series of architectural relationships: two architects, from opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and their respective meetings with a young, charismatic artist that sparked forty-year friendships and how this triumvirate formed the core of a generative and active network of peers who spent decades sharing letters, drawings, and design ideas across borders and continents. The architects were Thomas Jefferson and Sir John Soane; their shared aesthete was Maria Hadfield Cosway. Much has been written about the probability of a romantic relationship between Jefferson and Cosway and the obsession over their imagined affair is understandable given the famously passionate nature of their early letters. Nevertheless, this story does not focus on their possible affair but rather their shared ardour for aesthetics and architecture.

The lines above from Tristram Shandy are particularly relevant to a discussion of Jefferson and Soane in relation to their first meetings with Cosway: both meetings were brief but for decades the friends would relive their travels together through the pages of letters that travelled across countries and continents. Both Jefferson and Soane were reading Tristram Shandy around the time they first met Cosway. It is curious to imagine that Jefferson and Soane, both of whom generally favoured works of non-fiction, poured over Sterne’s brilliant line diagrams that illustrate the meandering paths of Tristram’s narrative like a section through a wild and imaginative landscape. As the reader progresses through the course of Tristam’s ‘autobiography’, the digressions within his narrative, represented as sinuous curves or abrupt peaks and valleys in the literal plot line, are the most pivotal elements his journey. Much like Tristram, the meetings of Jefferson and Soane with Cosway could be dismissed as insignificant detours along their professional paths; however, these supposed diversions were significant experiences for the architects that, like their correspondence with Cosway, stayed with Jefferson and Soane for the rest of their lives.

D a ni e l l e W i l l k e ns

From top down, timelines of the lives of Jefferson, Soane and Cosway in the style of Sterne’s plot line diagrams in Tristam Shandy , drawn by author. The upstrokes represent times of professional success, the flourishes represent significant meetings or events, and downstrokes represent the death of a significant loved one.

I n t r o du cti o n

During the colonial era and the emergence of the new United States, aspiring North American designers had limited educational and experiential opportunities in comparison to their European counterparts. Typical studies of the early American built environment state that North American occupants could only acquire architectural knowledge by travelling across the ‘Western Ocean’, engaging in the extremely limited field of architectural apprenticeship, and studying architectural pattern books and treatises. These limited, yet commonly held views of American architectural development in the Early Republic fail to acknowledge the presence of a larger and highly influential transatlantic network of relationships that activated the exchange of design ideas and books while shaping careers in the built environment: an architectural Republic of Letters. A study of the Transatlantic Design Network aims to bridge this gap by tracing how the letters, material objects such as drawings, books, artefacts, and personal contacts cultivated a distinct set of shared aesthetic, political and social concerns among an international pool of architects, artists, collectors and educators.

The analysis of this dynamic community proves that architects, artists, and patrons fluidly traversed the Atlantic Ocean through many means: the exchange of letters, drawings and publications, personal travels, and international recruitment for architectural projects. An analysis of the Transatlantic Design Network, a shared and active network of people, sites, texts and objects that transcended nationalistic concerns, offers an alternative approach to late eighteenth and early nineteenth Anglo-American architecture where the ambitions and sensibilities of architectural design in America and Europe were not at odds, where Americans were not naïve hobbyists and nor were Europeans alone in cultivating architectural professionals. Rather, Europe and America were intrinsically linked through the shared interests and travels of interconnected figures such as lawyer-architect-statesman Thomas Jefferson, architect Sir John Soane, artist Maria Cosway, and several others. Scholarship on Jefferson and Soane is plentiful, but these texts study the designers only within nationa contexts and this, consequentially, has imposed a monograph-driven silo effect that fails to identify or properly attribute the existence of a ‘Transatlantic Design Network’

5 Author’s collage of the Transatlantic Design Network, 1768-1838, with letters from Jefferson and Cosway overlaid charts of the Atlantic Ocean, currents, temperatures, and trade routes.

T h e T r a n s a t l antic D e sig n N e twork, 1768-1 838

1 Further exploration of this topic may be found in several sources — Cook, 1996; Hindley, 2013; Shuffelton, Baridon, & Chevignard, 1988

architecture and writing

This brief foray into linguistics provides the background for the importance of analysing how knowledge is acquired and formed through personal connections, often referred to as actor-network theory. Network theory is frequently referenced in contemporary popular culture as ‘six degrees of separation’ and in terms of scholarly analysis, is typically deployed in twentieth-century studies, viz. the work of Latour (2005), Fraser (2007) and Yaneva (2009). Yet, important circles of interpersonal exchange have operated for centuries and personal influences and conversations, not just pattern books and transplanted designers, were responsible for America’s architectural development in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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There is an interesting lexical gap in the English language: unlike Romance languages, it does not make a distinction in the use of the verb ‘to know’ between the knowledge of a fact and knowledge of a person. The Italian verbs sapere and conoscere and the French verbs savoir and connaître linguistically recognise the differences between familiarity with a object or concept and familiarity with a person, thereby revealing a vein of epistemology that recognises the importance of personal interaction in the formation and dissemination of knowledge. Architects like Thomas Jefferson and Sir John Soane learned their discipline from books, on-site investigations, and in the case of Soane, formal academic training and apprenticeship. However, for both men, their understanding of art, architecture, and culture was very much shaped by the interests, observations and talents of their personal acquaintances.

By reading letters, diary entries and account books of Jefferson and Soane, it is possible to trace how conversations in coffeehouses and salons, as well as casual journeys undertaken with friends, influenced their architectural theories and design goals.

D an i e lle W i llke n s

One significant precedent for the dissection of pre-modern international communication as a means of theoretical discourse and exchange is the Republic of Letters. This was a period of communication and intellectual dissemination that blossomed during the Renaissance, concurrent with the new affordability and availability of paper in the 1500s.1 Through the transactions of social and institutional networks, as well as interpersonal connections, participants within the Republic of Letters often corresponded with individuals they never met: they operated within an intellectual community of epistles. The culture of the Republic of Letters highlighted the European interchange of information that eventually spread veins of communication to other parts of the world via trade routes and colonisation. Additionally, the Republic of Letters illustrated the Janus-faced nature of Enlightenment. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), John Locke wrote that enlightenment was a product of both the introspective act known as a ‘talk with oneself ’ as well as interpersonal discourse.

T h e u s e o f e pi s t l e s

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Letter writing was a means of gathering one’s thoughts, disseminating those thoughts, and establishing a dialogue that, unlike diary writing, could be directly challenged and influenced by others. Correspondence frequently triangulated conversations since it was desirable to send letters through personal conveyance: by transferring a letter from author to recipient, the person delivering the note was often provided with a letter of introduction and consequentially benefited from access to new organisations, sites and networks. Additionally, epistles from prominent figures were often printed in newspapers and leaflets; letters weren’t necessarily private. For many authors, this was actually advantageous for broadening international discourses. It is important to note that the epistles sampled for this study were not always transmitted transatlantically: sometimes they travelled within the same country, or even the same city, but their authors had knowledge of and experiences with both sides of the ‘Western Ocean’, the Euro-centric term often used to refer to the Atlantic Ocean.

Over 2,000 letters were consulted in the research and this sampling of documentary evidence was initially defined by correspondence between Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway. The sample was then expanded to include correspondence between figures that knew at least two members of the triumvirate or were directly engaged in conversations with Jefferson, Soane or Cosway about the arts, travel and educational practices. Of this larger sampling of letters, a little over 500 were selected as representative conversations within the network in terms of their focus on the means of cultivating architectural taste, the relationship between buildings, people the design process, and the nature and scope of travel needed to broaden one’s visual and experiential catalogue.

These letters were used to study and map trends within the network. They were also beneficial for the identification of eighteen figures from America and Europe, in addition to Jefferson, Soane and Cosway, who helped delineate the nature and composition of the Transatlantic Design Network. These figures were not selected because they were the most prolific correspondents of Jefferson, Soane or Cosway but rather because of the ways they interacted: what they sent to each other, where they travelled, who they provided letters of introduction to, and how their contributions in design, education, curation, or even law may have impacted the forms, collections and architectural thinking at contemporary sites such as Jefferson’s Monticello and Soane’s Museum.

Character is tic o f the netwo rk

The Transatlantic Design Network was composed of several unique, identifying factors: the introduction of newlynationalised ‘American’ individuals and their associated interests, professionally-driven travel, and the extension of communication and exchange beyond initial, transitory meetings and social engagements. As evidenced by the Republic of Letters, several independent European mail systems were established in the sixteenth century and the increased frequency of centralised mail systems in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries bolstered letter writing. These systems, however, could rarely be trusted for either discretion or delivery. As maritime travel improved, more noncommercial ships crossed the Atlantic therefore more letters were exchanged through personal conveyance that, unlike the mail systems, ensured transfer and timely delivery while simultaneously reinforcing professional connections and social circles. Consequently, the architectural Republic of Letters, unlike the preceding Enlightenment-era Republic of Letters, was composed of more diverse European and North American constituents. The members of the network, therefore, became rich resources for obtaining and disseminating information and, therefore, it was important for select visualisations of the Transatlantic Design Network to display where any key figures met, began cycles of exchange, and encountered common associates.

Unlike a conventional timeline, this geographical timeline, tracing date in the ‘x’ or horizontal axis and place in the ‘y’ or vertical axis, allows the activities and travels of the contemporaries to be read in parallel, identifying both shared and divergent paths of travel as well as points of contact. Through the dramatic vertical rises and falls, representing transatlantic and intercontinental travel, this time line clearly shows Jefferson’s transience in comparison to the localised European travels of Cosway and the even more limited travels of Soane.2 Initially, Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway were selected as formative figures for the study of the Transatlantic Design Network because of their triangulated correspondence and due to the way that they were characterised by some of their contemporaries in letters and descriptions. The generalisations often used in discussions between Jefferson, Soane, Cosway and their peers disclose many of the presumptions and societal conditions that existed in the transatlantic world and contextualise the cartoons in newspapers and flyers from 1750s to early 1800s that played to caricatures of the Englishman, the American, and the Female. In the case of the selected triumvirate, the caricatures had some merit.

Jefferson was labeled ‘the noble savage’, a common stereotype for Americans in Europe, initially perpetuated by Franklin as noted by Flavell (2010:189). In truth, Jefferson was raised in the country and was leery of both big cities and big government. As a plantation owner he also embodied the contradictory nature of many of his revolutionary peers who fought for national freedom while profiting as life-long slaveholders. Soane’s professional and social ambitions inspired the critique among certain Royal Academy colleagues that he was a social climber this was perpetuated in the satirical poems of the Observer and the reviews of the Examiner.

2 As evidenced in the images following, the dense, linear information from these graphics is very difficult to display within the constraints of a typical, printed page. Consequently, many of the images featured in this paper have been made available online for closer inspection (http://www.archdsw.com/ transatlantic-design-network-1768-1836.html).

D a ni e l l e W i l l k e ns

3 Due to the density of information, this map can also be found online as an interactive graphic that allows users to filter and more closely example certain places of travel, professional categories, nationalities, and dates (http://www.archdsw.com/transatlantic-design-network-1768-1836.html).

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travels of Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway were typically sponsored, professionally driven expeditions that, although inclusive of leisurely pursuits, were largely shaped by working interests.

As designers, agents, and patrons, they were participants in post-Enlightenment intellectuals circles and highly attuned to aesthetics and new developments in architecture. Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway were also linked to a transatlantic community through their desire to disseminate knowledge and to bring international experience to a larger audience through their localised architectural and educational endeavors: Jefferson’s house-museum of Monticello and his Academical Village of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia; Soane’s Museum and his work as a Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy in London, England; and Cosway’s Collegeio delle Grazie in Lodi, Italy, a multi-lingual school that taught the arts, humanities, and science to adolescent girls. The geographic timeline for eighteen other figures within the network is featured below and shows that Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway were not the only correspondence within the network embarking on professionally driven travel and founding educational institutions. The figures featured in the timeline below were all shared correspondence of at least two of the members of the Jeffersonian-Cosway triumvirate.3

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Soane’s ambitions were confirmed by his deliberate attempts to obscure his humble heritage that even included adding an ‘e’ to the end of his surname, as noted by several previous researchers such as Darley (1999: 16). His plans to transcend his class took him from the country to the city and in his Memoirs on the Professional Life of an Architect Between the Years 1768 and 1835(1835), he wrote that, as if by divine intervention, he was “led by natural inclination to study architecture at age fifteen” (11). Cosway was potentially the most caricatured and, consequentially, dismissed of the three.

She embodied the image of the attractive artist and within the majority of extant scholarship, her romantic role as a muse has consistently overshadowed her numerous artistic commissions and contributions. Yet, she served as a conduit for her closest correspondents by advancing connections between international figures in the arts, helping circulate publications on architecture and landscape, and providing eyes on the artistic scene of Europe.

As an interconnected triumvirate, the projects by and longstanding relationships between Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway demonstrate a particularly distinguished sample of the Transatlantic Design Network. The humble backgrounds of each figure distinctly differentiate their travels and experiences from those of most aristocratic participants in the Grand Tour who travelled at a leisurely pace with substantial funds, spent the majority of time abroad with their own countrymen, and resisted the full exploration of foreign cultures, much like Smelfungus of Laurence Sterne’s satirical account A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, by Mr Yorick (1768). Additionally, the

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Vis u alis atio ns o f the Trans atlantic A t l a n t i c Des ign Netwo r k

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4 An interactive version of this map can, too, be found online (http://www. archdsw.com/transatlantic-design-network-1768-1836.html)

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D an i e lle W i llke n s

The forty-year correspondence of Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway had wider consequences: they facilitated international networks that sidestepped existing aristocratic ones, gave agency to the voices and initiatives of women, and advanced professional and stylistic developments of architecture on both sides of the Atlantic.

Direct examples of the influence of correspondence are the fact that Cosway was responsible for the dissemination of privately published texts by Jefferson and Soane. Although Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) was printed in London, Cosway introduced members of her circle to the text. Similarly, she was responsible for introducing Soane’s Museum to her acquaintances in Italy, noting in a letter to the architect that, “your beautiful book has been admired all over Milan & architects have taken translations of great part of it” (SJSM, III.C.4, no. 36).

To better understand the operations and potential architectural and epistemological implications of the Transatlantic Design Network, several diagrammatic investigations were constructed.

For example, the network map below illustrates the connections between approximately 200 figures. Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway served as the generative nodes for this map and they are linked to other members of the network through various strands of association: immediate correspondence, genealogy and marriage, mentorship, patronage, and communal membership in other formal networks such as the London-based Royal Society, Royal Society of the Arts, and Royal Academy and the United Statesbased American Philosophical Society, Academy of Fine Arts, and Columbian Institute. Here, it is important to note that these organisations represent a very selective sampling: Pevsner identified more than 100 artistic academics in Europe during the late 1790s (1973: 141-143). The organisations used for the Transatlantic Design Network study and subsequent visualisations were selected as six organisations, three from England and three from the United States, that were most active in reference to design-related publications or exhibitions and these organisations also had the largest concentrations of practicing designers. The latter distinction of ‘practicing’ verses ‘professional’ architect or artist was used to cast a wider net since the nascent United States lacked both the educational infrastructure and established systems of apprenticeship to support formal architectural training and the promise of steady commissions to support the pursuits of the arts as a full time profession. Painter John Trumbull, now noted for the creation of an extensive graphic record of America’s founding fathers and key moments in the nation’s developing history, noted in his Autobiography that he was reluctant to return from Europe to America in the 1780s because he feared there would be little work: “You see, sir, that my future movement depend entirely upon my reception in America, and as that shall be cordial or cold, I am to decide whether to abandon my country or my profession”.

(1841:160) As evidenced by the map, active members of the network were also connected to selected writers and architects who, although departed, were influential in the discourses on design within the network. The diagram is divided horizontally by travel: North Americans on the far left and Europeans on the far right.

The placement of individual figures within the longitude of the diagram was dependent on the individual’s travel within their respective nation and continent as well as any travels across the Atlantic Ocean. Expatriates are identified in the centre of the map.4

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It is important to briefly note a facet of the origins of this visualisation project: initially, the study of Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway was initiated to better understand transatlantic design operations around the turn of the nineteenth century and, by extension, to try and understand how Jefferson’s Monticello and Soane’s Museum could share so many parallels in their fabrication, form, and collections despite the fact that the two architects never met. A diagrammatic ‘map’ featuring the connections between Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway was initially constructed on large sheets of tracing paper, quickly taped together, with markers as a way to keep complex and ever growing shared network of this triumvirate. Used as a notational tool, it became clear that this network map had significant value beyond its initial process-driven construction: it was a previously unexplored visualisation of the social, geographical, and professional connections between some of the most notable figures of the Atlantic world in the late 1700s and early 1800s. As the study of the network continues to evolve and find its way into a digitised form, it is expected that a larger database will be developed for other researchers to add members and activities to the network, thereby crowdsourcing content to build a more robust picture of the network, its participants, and its impacts. f

Refer ences Cook, E. H. Epistolary bodies: gender and genre in the eighteenth-century republic of letters. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996 Darley, G. ‘The Grand Tour’. In M. A. Stevens & R. Margaret (Eds.), John Soane, architect: master of space and light (pp. 96-113). London: Royal Academy of Arts distributed by Yale University Press, 1999 Flavell, J. When London was capital of America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010 Fraser, M. Architecture and the special relationship: the American influence on post-war British architecture. London: Routledge, 2007 Graves, A. The Royal Academy of Arts: a complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904, etc. London: George Bell & Sons, 1905 Hindley, M. ‘Mapping the Republic of Letters’. Humanities, 34(6), online edition from the National Endowment for the Humanities, 2013

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Jefferson, T. Notes on the State of Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia, 1955 Latour, B. Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 Locke, J. The Works of John Locke. (9th ed.). London, 1794 Pevsner, N. Academies of art past and present. New York, NY: De Capo Press, 1973 Private Correspondence. Archives of Sir John Soane’s Museum. Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.

Shuffelton, I., Baridon, M., & Chevignard, B. Travelling in the republic of letters.

Publications Universite de Bourgogne, 1988. 66, 1-16.

Sterne, L. A sentimental journey through France and Italy, by Mr Yorick (3rd ed.).

London: T. Becket and P.A. de Hondt, 1768

Upton, D. Architecture in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 Winterer, C. ‘Where is America in the Republic of Letters’. Modern Intellectual History, 9(3), 2012. 597-623.

Yaneva, A. The making of a building: a pragmatist approach to architecture. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009

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Trumbull, J. Autobiography, reminiscences and letters of John Trumbull, from 1756 to 1841. New York, NY: Wiley and Putnam, 1841

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D an i e lle W i llke n s

Soane, J. Memoirs on the Professional Life of an Architect Between the Years 1768 and 1835. London: James Moyes Castle Street Leicster Square, Privately Printed, Not Published, 1835

open letters by irene chin lara mehling miranda mote chelsea spencer

In 2013 students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design started Open Letters, a print experiment that tests the epistolary form as a device for generating conversations about architecture and design.

Each bi-weekly issue of the publication, now in its third year and edited by current students, presents one letter addressed to a particular party and written for public dissemination. The following is an exchange between four of the original editors in which they reflect on the project, writing and correspondence.

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September 8, 2015 Dear Chelsea, Between you in New York, Lara in Zurich, Miranda in Philadelphia, and myself in Montreal there are a couple continents, several time zones, many miles, and even more kilometres. (I need to adjust to thinking in metric.)

There is this physical distance now, but what feels farthest is your old kitchen in Cambridge, where two years ago we first met to discuss your idea of a publication to feature writing about architecture and design in the form of letters. It seemed like an obvious idea at the time, but one that was risky, too.

I trained through years of reviews and pin-ups in architecture school, but putting myself out there through writing was terrifying on a completely different level. There is no obfuscating with text like you can with a rendering, little room for interpretation with your choice in words as you might find in a drawing.

And unlike the objective proximity of one’s position in a journalistic piece or the critical distance one can take in a scholarly essay, in signing a letter you consequently expose yourself. 1 You embody your writing – hopefully, with earnestness. (My favourite valediction so far has been Bryan’s – ‘In upbeat sincerity’.) Although I did break that rule about signatures just once2, it was this vulnerability that we kept poking at with each issue, trying to tease out emotions and opinions, be it humour or anger, romanticism or criticism.

I’ve always wanted to ask you about your training, in dance – what your experience on stage was like communicating with audiences. It was my sense that this shaped the presence you command on paper. If I could ever learn to be comfortable with my limbs in public, I bet I would in turn become a more confident writer also.

Now the four of us might write to keep in touch, but I would venture that Open Letters was about making a deliberate effort to be in touch with ourselves, each other, and the environments around us. Maybe some designers are accustomed to constructing and shaping in world-axis mode, from a virtual distance. But the medium of the letter allowed us to deliberate topics from the value of theory to issues of divestment.3 It gave us an opportunity to be sentimental and also to be held accountable for our politics. Our feather-thin publication became a sizeable platform for all kinds of personalities and perspectives.

You wrote in issue 00 that you were worried about this project turning out “to be a waste of paper”.4 I hope with each 30-pound box of newsprint that we continue to order we are helping to fill in some space between.

Yours, Irene

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September 16, 2015

L ara Mehl ing

1 ‘Ingrid Bengtson and Sarah Bolivar respond to Anonymous’, Open Letters, issue 20, December 12, 2014 2 ‘Anonymous writes to GSD’, Open Letters, issue 19, November 21, 2014 3 ‘GSD Students write to Niall Kirkwood’, Open Letters, issue 13, April 18, 2014 4 ‘Chelsea Spencer writes to Mack Scogin’, Open Letters, issue 00, October 3, 2013

Dear Irene, It was with great excitement that I received your message last week. I’m thrilled to be in touch with you, Lara, and Miranda, all the more so because we’ve flung ourselves so far. I’ve been thinking about how I’d reply for these past eight days, but of course not actually putting fingers to keys. I always do this with writing, and I can’t say whether it’s productive or a procrastinator’s avoidance fetish: I fantasise about how I’ll phrase certain things – usually a few words, not whole sentences. The problem is that I so rarely get down to the sentence-writing part before I’ve forgotten those little particles of language fused only in my imagination. I believe that people write at different scales. My own problem these days is that I write at a scale slightly smaller than the clause (i.e., ‘the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition’). But I most admire writing that advances at the scale of the sentence.5 I think it is between sentences – the vaulting from one declaration, or question, to the next – that an author’s thinking is revealed.

I don’t know that I’ve ever been asked about writing and dance. The two

worlds tend to remain separate, neither curious about the other. I think there are a couple of ways you could look at it. One is that dancing and writing draw on two radically different, perhaps even opposing, intelligences. The great dance critic Edwin Denby wrote a piece in 1944 called ‘A Note on Dance Intelligence’, which he begins like this: “Expression in dancing is what really interests everybody, and everybody recognises it as a sign of intelligence in the dancer. But dancing is physical motion, it doesn’t involve words at all. And so it is an error to suppose that dance intelligence is the same as other sorts of intelligence which involve, on the contrary, words only and no physical movement whatever.” Mind you, this is around the time of Martha Graham’s height, when the most modern of dance was something of an exorcism. Lots of dancers count the music and organise their movement recall that way.6 I can’t do it, because even that degree of articulation – just to say the numbers one through eight – interferes with the articulation that (I hope) is functioning at another register and that, for me, has always been fundamentally aphasic.

The other way I look at the relationship between dancing and writing is this: Both are performances. In both you get to decide to be whoever you wish. Of course as a dancer, you’ve usually got choreographers telling you what they want to see. I think that makes it easier – this wedge of external directions separating action from identity. The more ridiculous, the more you must commit to that ridiculousness with total seriousness. Physical limitations impose themselves too: there is no pretending to turn out five perfect pirouettes; there is only doing it (although rarely in my case). But even the most exquisite technicians can lack what dancers and choreographers call ‘commitment’ – the elimination of doubt and hesitation, the ability to collapse the line of thinking and doing onto a point of reflex. The necessary immediacy of dancing – the indispensability of repeatedly rehearsing a piece from top to bottom with your own irreplaceable body until you are prepared to carry out and commit to the performance of every gesture – grants certain gratifications and possibilities. For in the end, the work of dance can only ready you to take your place on stage and begin the piece from the top – at which point you’re only as good as your skill and fortitude, and the audience’s collective patience, on that particular evening.

Writing can be more forgiving, and also more damning. Writers need not muster the energy, renew their commitment to every word, every punctuation mark, again and again, for an essay to subsist. You can scrap together facets of your writerly self over the course of writing it, paving over your graceless, fitful efforts until you’re satisfied (or until a deadline puts you out of your agonizing). The work of writing leaves a durable (though not necessarily stable) proxy on the page – a score, if you will. The rest is up to readers.

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With love and admiration, Chelsea

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architecture and writing

5 ‘Edward Eigen responds to John Davis’, Open Letters, issue 12, April 11, 2013 6 ‘Mack Scogin responds to Chelsea Spencer’, Open Letters, issue 02, November 01, 2013

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September 22, 2015 Dear Lara, I noticed the Harvard Art Museum is hosting a symposium this week.

Anni Albers’s 1926 ‘Wall Hanging’ is front and centre (you know, the one we lingered over with magnifying glasses last spring) – finally, some redemption for our beloved Anni.7 I wonder if the museum will tweet about her weaving? “#BR48.132. German silk 3-ply weave textile, complex layering, made by beautiful memling #AnniAlbers in 1926 #itsabouttime.” Could a tweet absolve art history and the Bauhaus from about seventy years of footnoting the women of that studio and their progeny? In June, I walked through the museum one last time and noticed next to Albers’s ‘Wall Hanging’ a curious textual drawing: a typed pattern of ‘X’s and ‘O’s on printed newsprint.

It was a weaving pattern composed by Ruth Asawa when she was a student at Black Mountain College in Anni Albers’s weaving studio. It was framed as if it was a drawing, but it was really a complex coded set of instructions for a loom, which described the relative position of thread in three dimensions across its warp and weft. I suppose, because it was coded with ‘X’ and ‘O’s, mathematicians or software engineers would like to see it as a curious set of syntactical relationships. Well, in this regard, Anni was a ‘coder’, a junky of pattern and nearly imperceptible, luxurious detail that can only be felt when the fabric is wrapped around our sad, cold, ailing shoulders. She also wrote, well.

German was her language, thread was her vocabulary, the loom was her syntax.

Irene, in her concise genius, declared that “there is no obfuscating with text”. I write because, in my achey social anxiety, I want to connect with my own and other’s intellect as much as I want to connect and interpret my own imagination. Anni wrote about art and design while in Germany, in the thick of anti-Semitic rhetoric (a world saturated with malevolent tweets and judgments). She also wrote about the collective weaving genius of the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus administration’s hypocrisy subjugated women to weaving but consequently consolidated a team of genius that would code the magic of textiles for modern design. “Art – a Constant. Times of rapid change produce a wish for stability, for permanence and finality, as quiet times ask for adventure and change. Wishes derive from imaginative vision. And it is this visionary reality we need, to complement our experience of the immediate reality.”8 I suggest that there is little room for hypocrisy in a signed letter. The obligation of writing as a physical, printed, signed act keeps our public selves sincere and disciplined. So yes, I write slowly and with ink. Because I love you, Anni, and everything she valued.

Sincerely yours, Miranda

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L ara Mehl ing

7 ‘Anni Albers writes to Ise Gropius’, Open Letters, issue 21, January 30, 2015 8 Albers, Anni. ‘Art – A Constant’ Brenda Danilowittz, editor. Anni Albers Selected Writings on Design. Weselyan University Press, Hanover, NH, 2000. p 10

September 28, 2015 Dear Miranda, Facebook has just informed me that today is #nationalpunctuationday. I got sucked into taking the Which punctuation mark are you? quiz: Results cast me as a full stop/period, ‘.’ – calm, helpful, and distasteful of drama. More interestingly, the quiz describes the punctuation mark itself as non-dramatic, calm and helpful. Personally, I am partial to the semicolon. This discovery reminded me of Chelsea’s comment on writers progressing their ideas at different scales. If Chelsea longs to scale up from semi-clauses to sentences, I am stuck at the scale of punctuation. Punctuation marks are defined as singular characters, which separate sentences and their elements to clarify meaning. But I would argue, they do more; they connect sentences, stitch the elements together. My eyes catch tiny things; I was the one who found the dropped earring back, the invisible pin, the single, minuscule flower in a world of brown, grey and green. Here, my windows stand wide open so gusts of fresh air will force me to look out while I copyedit. Occasionally, I must extend my depth of vision, give my eyes a rest – but they won’t ignore a misplaced comma. Is an obsession with text at this scale connected to the luxurious detail of a textile?

I share your fascination with pattern because I think in terms of digits, units, spaces set into an expansive field. My initial idea for the Open Letters covers was to mine the writing for details, which I could weave into an encrypted graphic that would act as an abstracted background.9 Even as the wallpaper patterns faded, I stuck with details: like a Dawn Redwood’s needles.10 Until now, I had never thought to consider why I took on the role of design editor. It appears rather obvious: I gravitate toward looser structures and, rather than write to provoke thought, I write to organise it. It’s a bit

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9 ‘Kiel Moe writes to Open Systems’, Open Letters, issue 15, September 26, 2014 10 ‘Cali Pfaff writes to Dawn Redwood’, Open Letters, issue 05, December 06, 2013

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Let the ruckus begin – Lara

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odd to declare, but I find pleasure in layout, the more physical or spatial composition of thought. With a given document size, a margin, I can draft an idea the way I draft a plan for a landscape architectural design; by treating the paper space as model space. And just as hard and soft materials come together on the ground, text is, for me, only half the equation. It is in the play between image and text that I find meaning. Designing the cover graphics for Open Letters gave me this freedom: to treat text as both a formal organisation of thought and an aesthetic composition. Text, more than writing, obsesses me, because it isolates the compositional element, brings it down to the tiniest terms.

In Zurich, there is no avoiding even the smallest elements of graphic design. The big, bold, sans-serif type developed in 1957 by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann catches my eye at every corner. Of course, in Switzerland, its birthplace and namesake (the Swiss name for the country is Helvetia, or Confœderatio Helvetica), it is no surprise. Thanks to Chelsea’s good taste, we stuck with Benton Sans Condensed and Baskerville for a classic yet contemporary look.

In addition to clean, readable typeface, the Swiss Style established uniformity through a mathematical grid. A standard procedure today, but in the 1920s the use of the grid – in the pursuit of minimalism, functionalism and simplicity – revolutionised graphic design in accordance with modernist ideals. I am not a graphic designer but I, too, recognise the grid as the most legible means for structuring information. Using this method, the structure precedes the content. Text is applied to a grid, snuggled into the predetermined order. Like Asawa’s textural drawing, which you saw hanging at the Fogg, communication relies on a composition of units – in our case, a system or grid of letters. The International Style cast designers not as artists but as conduits for disseminating information. The semicolon in me wants to say we are, in our different ways, both. The grid is my playing field; it has order, but it is infinite. (We set the frame.) And the reason, I think, for our affinity with Albers’s textiles is our approach to composition. We are writing with warp and weft: First we hold the ‘composition stick’ in our hands and put the lead type into order, and then we set the type into the press bed along with wooden ‘furniture’ (placeholders). Whether by hand, with a typewriter, or on a keyboard, I approach writing like I print text on an analog letterpress: The bed is the field. I am tempted to think that it has something to do with being a landscape architect, rather than an architect. Looser structures allow for visible threads and multiple meanings. Letters are our scale. They are the unit we prefer – because each letter can stand alone and yet it is enriched by a response. And a response could expand the grid in any direction.

I am the full stop, but we know this conversation has no end. A bit homesick for American culture and lit., I am reminded of Emerson’s ‘Circles’ essay: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” Don’t we write/solicit/edit/publish letters in order to grow, to redefine ourselves in terms of each other, in even greater contexts? Ultimately, I think our project embraced the openness of a letter, of inquiring without any guarantee for an answer, because we have learned to accept “do[ing] something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle”. The textual fabric has no boundaries of its own – we set and reset the frame. A collaborative editorial team is in constant exchange, sending verbal missives at full tilt. With that, nothing, not even me, is a full stop.

Digital Shalot t on the parallels of building and writing in the Virtual Age by linda just

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16 In his 1982 text The Architecture of the City, Aldo Rossi described built forms as ‘urban artefacts’ to present the dual nature of architecture. Namely, that it is both the built world as a whole, as well as its constituent parts – which are, in turn, not only physical entities, but also the history and culture laid upon them. This duality – the notion of the abstract and concrete – is innate to the architectural discipline, reflected in the fact that even the word building describes both the act and the product. Consider then the medium through which Rossi chose to convey the idea: text.

In many ways writing bears marked similarities to building; they are both the aforementioned act and product. Both are developed by the assembly of smaller elements that each carry their own significance, in addition to the larger [sometimes different] connotation of the combined whole.

Writing is used to capture the ephemeral – ideas, events, emotions – and present it in a comprehensible fashion to other individuals, achieved through structured phrases and vocabulary. Buildings conceptually echo this process with their concrete delineations of intangible space. Occupants experience defined spaces through their constituent material and geometry – everything from vaulted ceilings to windows to stair treads. These elements, interpreted through their relationship to the human body via haptic, aural or visual perception, are the architectural vocabulary by which

one reads and understands architecture; they can define the successful use and navigation of spaces. Buildings that do not account for this phenomenon, or aggressively deny architecture’s relationship to the body in scale and proportion, will almost always sit negatively in public perception. For this reason, much of the architectural design process still happens through physical analogues. Concepts may be expressed through graphic means but model-making is still a regular tool. Physical samples must still be reviewed before final approval is given, are are almost always examined in daylight and at full scale. This assures the connection between ideas and reality is strong and present.

That importance of material is no less present in print; how and what one reads is constantly influenced by colour, texture and form. MacLuhan’s observations of the relationship between medium and message are demonstrated in every well-published monograph as much as it is in a newsprint flyer. Paper stock, typeface, layouts speak to and of the hands that made them, and the eyes that will ultimately interpret their content. At the very best, readers are drawn to touch and inspect and revisit on multiple occasions. This is perhaps the increasingly overlooked potential of writing, though it is also the reason typewriters still carry a mystique and software developers stubbornly employ skeuomorphic interfaces and pseudo-script fonts for notepad

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applications. These tools and representations are appealing in their familiarity, but there is an odd and unsettling disconnect in scrolling through a seemingly endless tableau of text, or rendering errors non-existent with the press of a key. Print is finite, permanent and knowable; as frustrating and constraining as that may be at times, it is also reliable and comforting.

architecture and writing

For this reason, editing and curation play a major role in this aspect of text and architecture. Economics, culture and politics – all can impact whether a project is ultimately realised. Seen positively, those factors can be constructive filters for quality and stimulants for creative thinking. They can also be quite detrimental; they just

As a necessarily physical response to the basic need of shelter, architecture cannot be fully realised in an intangible format as can text, but it is susceptible to many of the same conflicts writing has met with its conversion to digital media. Information models, animations and renderings are highly sophisticated tools that allow more detailed and varied experimentation. Alluring in their malleability and in the degrees of perfection and complexity they can achieve, with them designers can now frame and present their envisioned worlds with cinematographic precision, and prospective users can get a sense their spaces before ground is even broken.

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Reliability lends itself well to preservation. Writing and architecture both establish a corporeal form for the intangible – space within buildings, ideas within text; the physical objects can long outlive their makers. The ephemeral nature and fluidity of digital media contradicts the permanence of the fabrication process – of literally setting in stone. The final product – the unapologetic deliverable – requires considerable energy and resources, since the implications of permanence demand care. Both buildings and manuscripts are thus refined through draft forms, to reduce the risk of having an error writ large and forever present for public scrutiny.

as easily stifle ideas in the names of profit, censorship, propaganda or elitism. The accessibility and unilateral nature of digital media has the compelling ability to forego the negative limitations, and so the internet has become a global market place for the previously unknown and unrealised. However, the converse is that some content eschews the benefits of editing – the sheer volume of material can make the task of finding truly exceptional [and perhaps most troubling, factual] work increasingly challenging.

This, if nothing else, is a major argument against those who would fully reject print as moribund and its content as irrelevant. The digital realm has yet to establish the filters and standards that physical publication had imposed upon it by the constraints of its evolution and development.

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This building I have passed countless times sits crouched at a minor intersection of my neighbourhood. It asked for no deep study of its harshly weathered, nearly ugly features, and so I gave it little note beyond the fact that it [like so many others in this storied, evolving city] was probably a handsome, albeit modest, creature in its early days. And that, with its good proportions and sturdy bones, it had the inevitable destiny to wear many faces and serve many roles. The most recent skin was probably from the 60’s – enamelled metal panel applied only to the first floor and faded to an urban grey, accented by a portal coated in umpteen layers of cheap milky whitewash and a flaking red door. Once a doctor’s office, now seemingly vacant. Beyond that, I forgot it, or allowed it to fade into the stage dressing of my daily habits.

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And so, one day, while in the midst of ritual errands, I was much surprised to discover a change – some furtive night artist had papered the building with an image of itself – the small, black and white, overexposed elevation made a striking composition in the midst of its context. I paused to look and look again at the scene, and marvel at a strange change in perception. I snapped a photo, musing at the metaquality of the experience, and carried on my way.

Some weeks later, back from travel, I found the building stripped and sandblasted, wearing a new face.

It had become another candidate for the aggressive redevelopment that had claimed many of the more attractive brick walk-ups in an area which had, for some time, carried its pleasant grittiness with pride.

Though the building still stood, and was indeed nicely brick clad in its renewed, naked form, I felt a pang of regret, for having not given it more credit, for the fact that it would exist only in photographs, or a photograph of a photograph.

Nostalgia will kick in and render it more softly in the filmstrip cinema of my memories, a forgotten ghost rendered sublime in a piece of ephemera. But I know it is the hard-edged reality that I will miss.

Complete reliance on such techniques has its risks. No rendering can approximate the impact of sound, temperature or continued variation in light on the personal experience of space.

Hyperrealism makes it easy to forget these factors, and can be so convincing that it asks very little imagination on the part of the viewer. Trust and expectation management are then critical, should the end result not faithfully match the projected image. There also comes another Icarian risk with such an advanced degree of virtual representation: too close an attempt at reality can cause the Uncanny Valley phenomenon to kick in, and then surrealism and perfection garner the completely opposite reaction of incredulity and suspicion. Additionally, forms that can be created easily in a virtual world at times do not translate so well into the tangible one.

Here curation becomes important; one must weigh the measures of novelty and experimentation against those of quality and relevance.

The last few decades of design and construction have witnessed many failed attempts to reconcile the disconnects between conceptual aesthetics and practical means of execution.

would be like denying the emotional and psychological impacts of architecture on its occupants. It may not always be necessary to manifest all qualities simultaneously, but they should at least be acknowledged and reflected upon.

The argument in this broader comparison between text and architecture is not intended to denounce the potential of the digital, or to demand a return to traditions of ink and mortar. But rather this: in processes such as writing or building – where there exists this duality of form and execution – a balanced approach plays a critical role in their value and successful realisation. To ignore the appeal and significance of writing’s physicality to the reader

The unmistakable reality is, however, that we are both abstract minds and physical bodies -- products of our histories and environments – and this fact registers in our every action. It is why we build, and why we write: to express, and to remind. And there is some pleasure and wisdom to be gained in recognising ourselves in those actions and objects, whether we are reading prose or cityscapes. f

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Rossi wrote his pieces to expose a layer of complexity in architecture that may not easily be seen, but that can certainly be felt. The spaces he described likewise cannot fully be understood without occupying them. The great capacity of the virtual and digital is that it expands the boundaries of creativity exponentially – limited in some ways only by the very devices through which they produce and present: screens. Screens are still an intermediate filter of information before it is ever registered by the nervous system that will finally interpret it. To exclusively and impassively consume information through such a lens limits the multifaceted and dimensional perception of reality. It almost denies the existence of the relationship between the physical and the abstract.

about reading

by troels steenholdt heiredal

the pressure of all of the books in the world, there will always be a great book you haven’t read, a book you ought to know to read how to select what to read where to start, to begin, what not to read I have never read Jane Jacobs I have read Charles Olson Equal, that is to the real itself at least five times; I’m trying to listen to what he is trying to tell me I have read small parts, not nearly enough, of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari A 1000 Plateaus I have read bits and pieces in Das Passage Werk actually it’s in The Arcade Project, my german is not that good.

I have never really read Deleuze only an approximation of Deleuze in English and in Danish I really ought to have read Jane Jacobs I have acquired Frank Wilson The Hand Kafka’s Diaries Dostoevsky’s Idiot I haven’t read them – yet [I hope] they are staked in my storage unit in Copenhagen I have read Roland Barthes because Christine Rose recommend me to do so.

I have read tons/ a lot of emails not always because I want to I think it is evident that I have read and enjoyed George Perec.

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I have read on my computer on my iphone on pieces of paper in books signs subtitles translations tried minds, gave up, on labels album covers walls roads shirts I can’t read notes [music] a lot of people/ some people can’t read mine often that’s by design I write so only I can read it sometimes, not using all of the charterers words becoming lines, to keep it an ‘open’ secret text messages instructions facebook updates hopefully all you have written me between the lines while eating drinking almost asleep on busses trains planes ferries boats in cars lecture halls beds living rooms my room classrooms garden benches town squares beaches aloud in silence in groups alone maps drawings plans sections elevations isometrics for my entertainment for school for you for me danish english french dutch german norwegian swedish spanish mexican spanish colombian spanish dominican spanish puerto rican spanish italian polish newspapers magazines pamphlets booklets reports inscriptions bedtime stories fairy-tales thick books thin books large books small books and books in-between of sorrow and pleasure of kings and queens peasants and aliens space travel and time travel and travels to other countries of good guys and bad guys and some you couldn’t determine what was about cowboys and indians eskimos and the people of the stone age the bronze age the dark middle ages munches and beggars summer winter spring fall in the morning afternoon and evening I have read runes I have learned a few Japanese and Chinese characters but forgotten all again about the sun while in the rain and the other way around and sometimes about the sun while it being in my eyes making it hard to read sometimes the rain fall on the pages making it equal hard to read words cast in concrete in brass in bronze words removed from stone gravestones plaques diplomas applications recommendations letters shopping lists charts directions to a place/ on behaviour gestures body language faces photos figures fortunes spells speeches words that left me speechless less is more hard-core words I still think about in paint ink pencil slow and fast the time about time just in time all day and just for a few minutes on balconies in chairs on stools while standing laying waiting walking running driving the path of a balls movement the room the mood in good mood in bad mood good texts bad texts texts that didn’t leave an impression tonight yesterday and the day before that texts that made my happy sad cry angry smile laugh blink believe slow down run out the door out of words stop f

Postmedium narrative by igsung so

We write to make ourselves see what we have got in the inescapable present... to give another interpretation of the same ruins...to show a glimpse of another aesthetic.

­— ­Alison and Peter Smithson. Without Rhetoric – An Architectural Aesthetic 1955-1962. London: Latimer New Dimensions, 1973

Why bother writing about architecture when you could render it?

Why would you verbally explain a work of architecture when you could make a video of it? Better yet: bake out a real-time virtual environment using ready-made video game engines for you to walk around in it. The digital age allows you to construct your own understanding of the space. You create your own narrative.

It’s certainly more democratic this way. Writings are dumb. Don’t take offence: it’s true! Words are slow, unresponsive, and often misunderstood. They have become a medium that architects resort to when drawings and diagrams have failed to explicate the full breadth of their design.

So why lament its transformation? Is there much use in reviewing the heydays of architectural writing? Why not instead attempt to uncover its post-medium specific condition in its unheroic, unexciting state? Simply accept the ruins of writing in its changing reality and present it so.

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In the mid-1960s and 1970s, in the midst what was then called the electric information age, collaborative efforts of Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel and Marshall McLuhan output a series of print matter marketed towards the mass public. Their principal aim was to be inexpensive and intellectually accessible. Most notable of these, as we all know, is The Medium is the Massage, a typo-pictorial translation of McLuhan’s esoteric writing geared towards a nonspecialist audience. Rooted in the techniques of cinematography, the reading experience was delivered as a casual synthesis of both visual and verbal matter, proposing a non-linear narrative to supplant traditional written communication; writing as a formal medium was dissolved; linearity of prose had collapsed. It heralded the end of nature as we knew it and inched us closer in accepting a postmedium condition of the arts, media and architecture: what we now commonly, and endearingly, refer to as interdisciplinary.

If images and movies are celebrated for their clarity, then writing can be championed for its ambiguities and misunderstandings.

By extension, writing could be the last remaining medium that engenders multiple narratives and interpretations: critical subsistence in maintaining our collective imagination.

The following is a series of orthographic and perspective drawings presented in pairs. In parallel, an undecorated prose accompanies the paired drawings. As such, the visual and verbal artefacts are presented simultaneously as a means to communicate specific qualities of a fictional building in Voss, Norway. The writing focuses on a fictional character, Malin. Via her brief encounters with the building throughout her life, the architecture is disclosed in fragments. In doing so, the architecture is not explained under architectural terms per se. The readers’ understanding of the building will draw from her personal memories evoking highly specific qualities of particular spaces within the building, all the while remaining ignorant of the rest of the building. After all, this is how we often experience a building only as it relates to us personally. The ambition of the writing is not to overwhelm the understanding of the project with a singular, machismo narrative, a PR tactic often deployed today to reduce architecture to bite-sized marketing packages. Similar to a cinematic soundtrack, the words construct a backdrop for the unfolding of the project’s architectural sequencing, events and materiality. Along with the visual artefacts, the words reveal spatial depth and evoke tactile memories. The content and delivery of the narrative are as plain as the visuals. Life in plain sight. Exceedingly conventional, exceptionally (sur)real. It is literally a story about architecture, vaguely familiar. Music...cue. n

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the road we are on, Voss, Norway.

Malin remembers visiting her mother’s house in Voss as a child.

Every other summer, she took the trip from Amherst, Nova Scotia to Voss, Norway; from nowhere to nowhere, she always thought.

Each time she sees the strange double house down the hill when she gets out of her mother’s car.

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the main floor and the porch

the lower floor and the pool

She keeps asking her brother to visit the house house with two roofs with her. To Malin’s disappointment, each time he chooses to watch TV instead. She steps out of her house in search of some company. The girls next door are skipping along the road. She approaches with a smile and a hello. They don’t speak much English but they make efforts to communicate with her. She likes that. She has been lonely. To her slight surprise, it appears that the girls have the same strange house in mind as well. They invite Malin to a party hosted at the double house coming Saturday. What is more, there is a large pool. Malin has never swum in a pool before, only the salty ocean off the rocky shores of Amherst. That Saturday, Malin walks down the street in her bathing suit, eager for a swim. At the foot of the property is a field of flagstones. Hopping along the stones she goes, winding her way towards the house with the double roof.

She arrives at the exact centre of the house. Two choices. On the right, a door. On the left, a covered walkway. She hears a general murmuring at its end. She takes the walkway to a large square porch covered by a laminated beam roof. The crisp edges of its floating beams frame the view of the mountains beyond and a fresh breeze blows through. Along the edge of the porch is a queue of girls from the village, all clothed in traditional Norwegian Bunad. It’s Norway Day, May 17. She sees her two neighbours and shyly approaches. She is the only one wearing a bathing suit. “O we are going to swim right now.” She is relieved.

Following her friends’ lead, Malin walks back out to the front and the flagstone path. It leads her down the hill, along the southwest wall of the house. She runs her fingers along the smooth warm concrete wall. The sun is perfect today. As she turns the corner, she can already hear the splashes of the pool. The two girls run into the building to change out of their Bunad. Malin stands still. She doesn’t know what to do. She inches towards the pool and stands along the edge with two other girls. They raise their head to acknowledge her approach then continue to gaze at the pool. A gentle breeze.

Shimmering surface of the water. Not much talk. Malin stands with them in silence, watching the pool. A lady with a white bathing cap.

She notices the familiar warmth of the concrete wall on her back.

A warm silence.

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the roof and the big beam

the studio and the stair down

At eighteen, Malin stops visiting Voss as she leaves for university.

She is studying art history. Postmodernists like David Hockney had always interested her. Wait, Alex Colville too? She can’t be too sure.

It is their expression of the mundane that draws her in. So flat, so good. Every summer she works as a clerk at a small gallery in town in lieu of Voss. Paintings of water, boats and lighthouses – too many lighthouses. She doesn’t care for them. It is almost too real. Her third summer at the gallery, she receives a call from her brother.

Malin’s mother has died. The funeral is next week in Voss.

The next morning, Malin is awake by six. Jet lag. The family is meeting at the house at ten. She walks back to reception for a towel. Empty again. The silence is overwhelming. A curved concrete staircase leads down to the basement. Through the window on her right, she watches the ground rise above her as she descends. Down. At the foot of the steps, she looks back up at the beamed ceiling. Pretty freaking tall. Straight ahead is the pool lit by the morning sun. There are no orthogonal corners in the basement.

All filleted. Light bends around its corners, showing her where to go.

Left is a corridor. Shimmering, wavering sunlight reflects off the pool onto its smooth tiled walls. Refractions, she thinks. She continues her way along; at the end she hears voices. To the voices she goes and finds a bright large room with six dancers, focussed and beautiful. She watches them in silence from the corner of the room, and waits for ten o’clock. Lisa Ullmann teaching Meg Tudor Williams, Lorn Primrose, Mary Elding, Valerie Preston and Warren Lamb.

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When she arrives at her mother’s house all the family is there to greet her. Malin’s grandparents, her brother, two aunts, four uncles, six cousins she has never met. Hellooo. Even her father is there.

All of them talk. About this and that, about things. She is exhausted from the flight and politely asks where her room is. There are no more free rooms. Not great, she thinks. There is a small hostel down the road. It has two roofs; you can’t miss it, they say. She recalls the house immediately. The pool, she thinks. Down the street she goes, then, stepping through the familiar flagstones, she arrives at the covered opening once again. This time, she enters the building through the doors on her right. She remembers these beams over the porch. And the large laminated beam that bisects the room in perfect symmetry. Malin looks around the lspace.

Mostly empty. A few chairs around the fireplace, that’s about it. Was there a party?

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On Writing (about Architecture) by thomas nemeskeri

I found something interesting when I recently installed Instagram on my phone. Though I was looking forward to sharing my photographs (which, though not all instant captures, captured remarkable instances about the built environment), I knew that many people now use the app, and that like many forms of social media, its popularity has allowed it to create trends, which seems to have led to the ubiquity of so many aspirational selfies and food shots. Rifling through this seemingly endless stream, I saw how flat architectural photography had become. With the proliferation of aspirational and lifestyle snap photography, the photogenic qualities of built space have been pushed to the fore, while the myriad ways in which architecture shapes our lives have been pushed to the periphery. Ironically, despite this proliferation of imagery, architecture is at risk of being marginalised.

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Contemporary architectural photography tends to focus on the quality of lifestyle that is associated with a given design; idealised lifestyles associated with the promises of modernity, like so much self-referential, glamorous isolation. Architectural photography has a proclivity toward iconicity by virtue of its subject matter – the built world stands as an exhibitive judgement of our relationship to the world, and is so used to represent desired ends. Architectural discourse, which includes photography, fufills this purpose, but it is at best a limited understanding of architecture, and one that can be challenged. Indeed all architectural discourse that (like photography) is primarily visual tends to share this proclivity to contextualise built form as the space of human consumption. The challenge of these forms of discourse is to project the quotidian aspects of the architecture that speak of a broader relationship to our world. Within the medium of photography itself, for example, moments of resistance may be found that suggest more complex sets of relationships and a broader context than the designers’ initial intentions (as the photographs accompanying this text attempt to do).

This seductive aspect of architectural photography, reinforced by the increasing realism of rendered scenes that typically precede built space, can dominate the discussion, analysis and public perception of significant architectural projects, to the point that other design considerations, such as responses to particular social or physical contexts, are inadequately addressed or just ignored.

At its most cynical, this focus on retinal delight is capable of reducing architectural experience to a series of one-liners; a series of unrelated moments comprising a building. Short of employing collage to point out the fallacies created by some architectural photography, it is arguably writing, in combination with photography, which offers the greatest opportunity for ongoing reassessment of a number of preconceptions about our relationship to the built environment, which may ultimately translate into an appreciation for the capacity of architecture to reveal and challenge such preconceptions.

T h o mas N e me s ke r i : : ne m e s k e r i . c a

this page, from the top: Villa Savoye, Poissy, 2014 Castelvecchio, Verona, 2013 facing page: Condominium construction site, 2004

T h o mas N e me s ke ri :: n e me s ke ri .ca

This is not to suggest that architectural photography by itself does architecture a disservice. It plays a crucial role in advocating the value of design, presenting architecture in its myriad social, political, economic and cultural contexts. Its ability to make explicit comparisons and contrasting associations can make architecture more accessible to a wider audience. However, there is a kind of exactitude that can only be gleaned from the capacity of language inscription. This capacity is eminently useful to architecture, as it can evoke lived experience in a way that much architectural photography does not.

1 This reality is evocatively described by Heidegger, who in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ writes “It is language that tells us about the nature of a thing, provided that we respect language’s own nature.” This nature comes about through the everyday practices that imbue our lives with meaning. He gives a detailed account of the roots of the word building; how its etymology speaks of the Old Saxon word wuon and the Gothic wunian, like bauen (building), mean to remain in place.

Wunian means to be at peace; to be at peace means to be free – friede – to be safeguarded. “To free really means to spare. Real sparing is something positive that takes place when we leave something beforehand in its own nature, when we return it specifically to its being…”

(Martin Heidegger. Poetry, Language, Thought. NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2013. p 149) This simple account points to how ‘building’ is sustaining, and thus offers powerful insights into architecture’s role in mediating the natural world –how and why it ought to be safeguarded.

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The roots of words contain a residuum of wisdom about lived experience, which is informed by our development of relationships to the things around us. The ways in which words come about tell a story about how we have lived, live now and might live in the future, and how we have come to understand the world around us. As we explore the roots of words, we come to know how architecture plays a fundamental role in the formation of lived experiences, and how it exists as an exhibitive judgment of lived experience in general.

What then, of language inscribed, when so much of culture focuses on self-actualisation, on the amassing of experiences and practices when they are doled out as commodities? Where is the virtue of architecture when it is served up in glossy shots of its modernist promise? The current proliferation of architectural photography has not only flattened architectural experience to two dimensions, it has encouraged the perception and pursuit of architecture primarily as a form of retinal delight. By drawing upon that which differentiates written discourses from photographic ones, this reduction can be challenged, and in disrupting the flattening effects of idealised imagery we may both recover and uncover greater understandings of the ‘value’ of architecture. f

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Writing about architecture tends to be either academic or journalistic. Academic writing is often at risk of alienating the reader through esoteric references, but uses a vocabulary and language that points to the values behind design approaches, offering insights into the relationship between architecture and the circumstances that inform its design; the capacity for language to express the ambiguities and contradictions of living in the built environment is made evident when understood in context of the practices and relationships that are at the roots of words. Though it is not commonplace for this analytical approach to appear in journalistic reviews of buildings, their level of analysis reminds us of the greater virtues that architecture must serve, and must ultimately translate to an approachable argument about the value of the built environment. Written language is eminently capable of underscoring these larger relationships that architecture plays a part of, and this capacity is even more crucial when observed through an etymological lens.

This understanding is well described by the eighteenth century philosopher Giambattista Vico, in his account of the importance of etymological analysis in understanding the human condition.

In his book The New Science, Vico draws insights from the origins of ancient words to speak to the evolution of cognition, including the development that takes place in early childhood in creating a ‘situatedness’ of understanding.1

by j o n a s t b u ry

forensic criticism of N Ratsby in the Architectural Review

In 2006 The Architectural Review published ‘Blackbird Pie’, a feature in the Evidence series examining Niall McLaughlin’s then still in-progress project for a private residence at 49 Duncan Terrace, Islington. Work on Duncan Terrace began in 2001, and involved stripping back a Georgian end-of-terrace property, restoring its original interior layout, adding a modern extension to the back of the site, connected to the terrace at the front by a glass corridor.

Situated in a conservation area, the modern extension was not permitted to announce itself to the street, and as a result the only reference to its existence is a window in the exterior wall facing the street and perhaps a glimpse of the corridor’s glazed roof.

However, as Ratsby states, ‘McLaughlin is not the first visitor here: the exterior walls show the location of a previous window - bricked up with fresh masonry and strikingly obvious alongside the sootmarked bricks of the original house.’1 49 Duncan Terrace is home to a couple, although nowhere in the feature are they mentioned and nor do they appear in any of the photographs. One unpublished photo includes a hand [figure 9, p29], but this would seem to be the only example. It is unclear whether their omission is simply an indication of a lack of interest in the use of people as subjects, or a result of a focus on the material traces of lives. Although Ratsby makes no direct reference in the article, notes on his original photographs2 suggest that he had a great interest in Freud’s work on the uncanny, in particular the dual meaning of heimlich as both ‘that which is familiar and

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p r epared f o r AR by N R at sby. Drawing s cour t esy of Nial l Mcl augh li n A rch i te cts

congenial’ yet also ’that which is concealed and kept out of sight’.3 This is particularly applicable to Duncan Terrace as an act of restoration, when quite unfamiliar modern additions pierce the familiar fabric of the original house.

Ratsby’s ‘Blackbird Pie’ runs over six pages: 15 often indistinct images, two plans and a section, a thousand words. Ratsby’s methods are effective when applied to projects dealing with existing conditions, and the quality of traces at Duncan Terrace is rich both in terms of materiality, the owners’ belongings and their extensive collection of artworks. Among Ratsby’s few studies this one is perhaps the most intriguing in terms of its narrative depiction of space, one guided by a reference to a short story quoted by an artwork in the residence: ‘In the dining room of 49 Duncan Terrace hangs an artwork reciting a passage: ‘the radio played softly in the other room. It was a little suite I’d h—’ (the passage is cut off mid sentence).’

This passage is taken from Blackbird Pie, a short story by Raymond Carver where a wife leaves her husband. It begins with a letter slipped beneath the husband’s door, which, despite containing knowledge he feels could only be known by his wife, is not characteristic of her sentiments, nor written in her hand. The man promptly misplaces this letter, but due to his uncanny ability to retain facts, he remembers its contents and is later able to recall them with great accuracy.

Carver’s story frames several themes that help better understand both Ratsby’s study of 49 Duncan Terrace and a wider debate on criticism. First is the husband’s uncanny ability to retain and recite historical fact in the absence of any material evidence. Second is his apparent ability to deduce the author of the letter through traces in the text – ‘Take this word talked for instance. That simply isn’t the way she’d write talked!’4. Third is the act of losing the letter. Last is the latent violence implied in Blackbird Pie, which a policeman refers to as a domestic dispute.

Sur f ac e / De p t h

Key to this study is the relationship between surface and depth.

Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, in their 2009 work Surface Reading, explore a renewed interest in ‘modes of reading that attend to the surfaces of texts rather than plumb their depths’.5 They believe that analysis dependent on the concealed has neglected the surface. Vital to this is the role and function of the critic: ‘if criticism is not excavating hidden truths’ they ask, what exactly does it add to our experience of an architectural present?

Telling us of his ability to memorise facts in Blackbird Pie and how he is able to ‘recall every word of what I read’,6 the husband proceeds to recite pages worth of dates, battles and wars. This presentation of facts with no judgement is perhaps one answer to Marcus and Best’s question — some expect the critic to be able to fastidiously date any piece of architecture as taught through Pevsner’s ‘Treasure Hunt’, acting as a sort of historical taxonomist.

Studies of the surface need not be so prosaic.

Ratsby’s description of the rooms in 49 Duncan Terrace in ‘Blackbird Pie’ mirrors Carver’s character’s deadpan recital of facts, but rather than connect them to or arrange a broader sense of history, they relate only to events in the house itself: ‘I could hold forth with great confidence if called upon to talk about the texture of the floor... each mark of paint and each scratch left by a chair leg...in the dining room a shutter hangs at an angle where two screws have come loose from the wall...’

This descriptive tone continues throughout Ratsby’s text. Implicit is the idea that the most accurate description of the operations of contemporary architecture is not something that must be extracted by the critic, but something immanent or latent in the architecture itself: ‘depth is continuous with surface’.7 In 49 Duncan Terrace, many of these surfaces, from bubble wrap and packaging to the smooth plastic coverings on clothing, jar with the clean, neat lines of the modern addition.

Marcus and Best look unfavourably on what they term the ‘suspicious detective’ who, in looking past the surface and moving straight to an analysis of details often misses that which lies in plain sight, an unsuccessful method which Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter ‘continues to teach us’. With Dupin, Poe laid the groundwork for the basic conventions of the modern detective story. In the search for the missing letter, the police, anticipating it to be hidden cleverly, search everywhere, in what Jacques Lacan termed an ‘exhaustion of space’.8 The twist, of course, is that the letter is there in plain sight all along, and it is simply a failure to read the surface that means it is not discovered sooner. An excess of suspicion would seem to be the police’s downfall.

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pre pare d f o r A R by N R ats by. D raw i n g s co u r te s y o f N i a l l M c l a u ghl i n A r c hi t e c t s

Dupin’s success in Poe’s novel, as Anthony Vidler has stated, ‘was not a triumph of visual acuity...his feat was the result of intellectual introjection, precisely a feat of not seeing’ (my emphasis).9 The paradox outlined in Marcus and Best’s work is that while reading like a detective may be concerned with uncovering some hidden truth, it will always articulate an inordinate interest in surface matter. It is, after all, on the surface that most clues will be eventually found.

Som e th i n g’s M is s in g

This reveals a fertile dichotomy within Ratsby’s critique: a preoccupation with the detective’s extortion of meaning also values the reading and describing of surface. When architectural criticism attends to the surface it is often accused of superficiality: I would argue that the photograph’s ability to infer a reading both of surface and depth itself acts as a detournément of this accusation.

We spend so long searching for the critique – the future – that we unwittingly pour over the surface – the present – that laterally enters our vision.

Ratsby’s essay presents The Architectural Review’s demarcation of the contemporary as ‘akin to the tape at a crime scene through which only the works chosen by the critic may pass into the canon’. As a space, the crime scene is one that simultaneously possesses a wealth and a dearth of meaning, able to charge or exhaust a space.

The imagery and text in ‘Blackbird Pie’ indicate that there is something to be found; that there is a pattern to be drawn between the images displayed. The text mentions some we can see – ‘the shiny plastic coverings on clothes suggest infrequent usage’ —

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p r epared f o r AR by N R at sby. Drawing s cour t esy of Nial l Mcl augh li n A rch i te cts

but others, such as the shutter ‘hanging loose from the wall’ are not illustrated. Giving no clear point of focus, the images – a bed and a skewed lampshade or the legs of a table – reinforce a sense of unease, encouraged by the text: ‘the duvet bears only light impressions but the lamp, askew, speaks of violence.’

The images are aligned to the grid of the journal’s page. In the difference between human vision and the detective’s fluid visual acuity, the publication grid is a reflection of the more pragmatic spatial grid applied to a modern scene of often criminal evidence.

We are perhaps not only witnessing an act of detection within the home’s spaces, but are ourselves being drawn into an act of detection of the journal page itself.

Marcus and Best allude to this grid. While Jameson would encourage the reader to ‘sketch the ideological rectangles...in order to move toward what lies outside of them’, a reader of the surface would ‘find value in the rectangles themselves’. Here, more important than the meaning of patterns is their identification and delineation. The mention of geometry is pertinent. As Vidler notes in The Exhaustion of Space, in the Basic Course Unit Guide provided for the training of California peace officers, a geometrically controlled search pattern is advocated rather than a ‘point to point’ search that jumps from one object - or perhaps interpretation - to another.

In many of Ratsby’s studies the geometrical rigour of contemporary architecture coupled with the messiness of lived traces articulates this relationship, but in particular ‘Blackbird Pie’, with its views through corridors, open cupboards and bookshelves, is a rigorous attempt to search everywhere. The text moves vertically, floor-by-

floor through the house, while the photographs follow no such order: it becomes almost impossible to jump from one mode of representation to another and still understand where one is. The search culminates in the attic, where Ratsby finds perhaps what was being searched for: the ‘strongest connection to the house’s origins’, unlike the ‘oddly reticent’ spaces below.

This approach remains distinctly two-dimensional – Vidler imagines the interrelation of these fields in three dimensions as something of a Klein bottle, transforming ‘the geometrical space of rational detection into a knot of abyssal proportions’11 – one that consistently returns the searcher to the beginning, just as the detective narrative ends at its omitted beginning. We can attempt to use Ratsby’s photographs to understand the space – or create some impression of the future – but we remain stuck in the uncertainty of their present.

The layouts of The Architectural Review at the time were also what we could consider as highly two-dimensional, frozen and flattened. Yet through their images they introduce a projection into the future that introduces some sense of a critical trajectory, even if it is towards a false future. In Ratsby’s photographs architecture is presented far less as an object and more as a series of ‘scenes’. Crucially, it moves away from the photograph as the fixed dissemination of a completed architectural idea, and transforms it into a temporal site of investigation and a search on the behalf of the reader.

Again, this refers back to Poe’s The Purloined Letter, and the spatial considerations created through ideas of crime and evidence. Most of all it articulates a relationship Ratsby was constantly exploring: that of the reader as detective.

What does this act of searching mean for criticism? In its presentation not as an immutable object but as what Eyal Weizman would call a dynamic ‘field’, ‘Blackbird Pie’ does not simply enter into the forum of the journal but transforms it. The journal’s ability to determine what the future may be is no longer possible and we are instead forced to remain in the present of the search.

Utopia is no longer presented to us but rather, as Elana Gomel states, ‘to gain a utopia, one needs to solve a puzzle’.12 As with all puzzles, we soon become aware of the time spent trying to solve it. f

1 Ratsby, N. ‘Evidence: Blackbird Pie’. The Architectural Review, May 2006. pp 48-53 2 See the attached selection of photographs 3 Freud, S. The Uncanny. London: Penguin, 2003 4 Carver, R. ‘Blackbird Pie’ in Where I’m Calling From: Selected Stories. London: Harvill Press, 1993. p406 5 Marcus, S and Best, M. ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’. Representations. 2009 v.108 n.1 2009. pp. 1-21 6 Ibid.

7 Lacan, J. ‘Seminar on the Purloined Letter’, in Écrits, New York: WW Norton, 2007 8 Vidler, A. ‘The Exhaustion of Space’ in Jacobson, K. (ed.)

Scene of the Crime. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997 9 Marcus, S and Best, M. 10 Vidler, A 11 Ibid.

12 Gomel, E. ‘Mystery, Apocalypse and Utopia: The Case of the Ontological Detective Story’, Science Fiction Studies, v.22 n.3. 1995. pp343-356

af te r wor d

f i gu re 9

how it is impossible to speak of architectural criticism ‘without also speaking of literary technique, rhetoric, and the persona of the critic as author.’2 In creating my own persona I was able to create criticism free from any historical strictures, while simultaneously undergo the creation of a ‘character’ similar to that which the critic will always create. It also allowed this persona itself to be the generator of a narrative, running alongside the theoretical study.

Above all was the desire to create this ‘forensic criticism’ against a richly narrative backdrop, one that would amplify but also call into question its theoretical position as suspicious or paranoid.

This allowed the work itself to become subject to a detective gaze, and the photographs that accompany this essay are a testament to this ongoing investigation – a means of allowing the reader to take part in it themselves.

1 Macarthur, J., Stead, N. ‘The Judge is Not an Operator: Historiography, Criticality and Architectural Criticism’.

OASE n. 69 (2006) pp. 116-139 2 Macarthur, J., Stead, N. ‘The Judge is Not an Operator: Historiography, Criticality and Architectural Criticism’.

OASE n. 69 (2006) pp. 116-139

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N Rat sby

unfinished – both still ‘wait’ for one another to reach a conclusion, feeding off the productive potential I have mentioned to continue generating one another – the conclusion is self-referential of the ability the work itself has attempted to demonstrate.

What such an experiment sought to understand was the interaction between the critical potential immanent in the work of architecture with the external status of the critic or, more broadly, the interaction between the practices of historiographical evidence-making undertaken in the duration of the MA programme and the practice of written criticism undertaken in my work for The Architectural Review. The work was the result of the friction I experienced in moving between these two disciplines every week, as well as a prior interest in the Review’s history of pseudonyms among its authors seemingly as a means of allowing the writer to present opinions or ideas perhaps counter to their own.

Under the guise of Contributing Editor, I was able to visit both Duncan Terrace and Haslemere Road with free reign to photograph and explore. These photographs then became the accompaniments to works I produced under the anagrammatic pseudonym of N. Ratsby, my detached critic alter ego. There were several reasons for this fabrication. Naomi Stead writes

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[It is impossible to speak of architectural criticism without] ‘also speaking of literary technique, rhetoric, and the persona of the critic as author.’1 The works of N. Ratsby presented and studied here are fabricated studies produced by the author. The history into which they have been inserted is factual. I will here reveal and explain this purely for the benefit of additional readers who were not party to this work’s creative processes.

This essay has been an almost autobiographical experiment in the simultaneous production of a piece of criticism and a critique of that work. As such, the fabricated work was aware of what the criticism of it would say, while the criticism itself generated new ideas as the fabricated work was produced. As such, both, similar to the theories they study, remain

on writing on architecture by stephanie white

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Mark Dorrian, in Writing on the Image, Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation, investigates how we see certain phenomena through constructed temporal and political lenses. How we understand objects, architecture, landscape, cities, power and culture is generally similar; his case studies, which traverse a couple of centuries and much of the world, are each unique with particular complexities.

The first essay, ‘The King in the City: the iconology of George IV in Edinburgh, 1822’ has all the lineaments of Dorrian’s project: the entry of George IV (German interloper, King of Scotland by some ghastly slippage of lineage) was staged for the city to see the King, and the King to see the city. It was like the management of one of today’s political campaigns: photo-ops, significant backgrounds, resonant sites. There were subsequent images – etchings, drawings and paintings of this event, its aspect and prospect where an object (a Hanoverian King) is dropped into a view (the city of James I).

The politicised landscape, celebratory, heroic, kilted, was artfully crafted. It could have been done by Lynton Crosby.

This is the basic premise of all the subsequent essays – what we see is a function of where we are allowed to stand. From the London Eye and surveillance society, to Dubailand as the airconditioned inheritor of More’s Utopia, to living in the shadow of any tall building, especially Stalin’s Ministry of Culture, the view down, the aerial view, whether by balloon, airplane, satellite or drone, abstracts civilisation to pattern where details are lost. It is at this omniscient scale decisions are made, at the detail scale is where we live our daily lives. Our very being becomes abstract to ourselves, scenography, quaint, at best of little import. Such views, chosen and crafted often by architecture itself, put us into a place not entirely of our own choosing or understanding.

The essays themselves are beautifully written, each a rich education: after a wide-ranging discussion of the way that air, its purity or not, its capacity to hold water or not, its temperature, its ubiquity, has been the site of centuries of utopia-based procedures to manage population, weather and military advantage, the essay ‘Utopia on Ice: the sunny mountain ski-dome as an allegory of the future’ suddenly sharpens on the artificial ski hills of Dubai.

For Dorrian, Dubailand is not a ridiculous experiment enabled by petrodollars and irresponsibility to climate change, but rather simply another example of how we feel we can inhabit this world armed with technology and the right to rebuild nature to suit our increasingly worried desires. Dubailand presents us with the image of how it can be done.

These are all long essays, a form given at conferences and symposia and generally inaccessible to the wider community outside academia unless collected in a book, such as this one.

Each essay stands alone, each addresses the significance of the position from which we view architecture and the city through the image, and how the image places us. The politics of representation reinforces the impossibility of the innocent image, and by extension, the innocence of architecture. And not necessarily partisan politics, but rather the cultural politics of class, power, technology and partisan ambition. The long-form essay gives space to discuss such narratives, for they are not simple, or easily parsed.

Short essays such as those found in this journal (this very short and thus inadequate to the task essay, for example), are 1500-word

abstracts to a discussion perhaps not yet written, perhaps fullyformed; they merely signal a wider, more complex discourse. Mark Dorrian’s Writing on the Image is that discourse. It is also an example of the habit of thinking, the habit of thinking through writing, and the habit of writing itself. There is a venue: continual conferences and symposia throughout the world, there is the need to publish, and importantly, there is a length – these are the structures that facilitate thought. Without the venue and the need, would anyone write at all? Of course they would, we all have a great need to speak. How articulate or fluent we are however, is dependent on the armature within which we produce thought. f

In On Site review 31: mapping | photography, Robin Wilson wrote about the kinds of images used conventionally to represent architecture in the architectural press and the dismay and disarray that happens when images of architecture that come from a different photographic sensibility are used. Wilson’s essays have been collected in Image, Text, Architecture, reviewed in this issue on p37. Wilson’s work and that of the reviewer, Jon Astbury, are an extended critique of hoary, vital British architectural journals such as The Architect’s Journal and The Architectural Review. Using the armature of the page size, the layout grid, the fonts, the proportion of image to text, they both have subversively undermined the assumption that the traditional armature of the architecture journal is a neutral venue for the presentation of architecture. Astbury’s project in this issue on p26, ‘Forensic criticism of N Ratsby in The Architectural Review’, presents a kind of writing about architecture for the establishment press that one can only dream of. Within the conventions of publishing for a professional readership – plans, sections, site, clean description, and cleanly descriptive photographs – he proposes an incomplete and subjective description of what, in this case, is a rather beautiful modernist extension to a Georgian terrace house, an architectural interloper, with the magazine critic as interloper to architecture as a site of human occupation. Forensic criticism: the critic as detective. f

Daniel Fairbrother writes, also in this issue (p32), about two books: White City, Black City by Sharon Rotbard and Hollow Land by Eyal Weizman. After writing Hollow Land, Weizman developed a forensic strategy whereby architecture and planning, and how they are enacted and written, can be subject to an evaluation that lays bare political and metaphorical frameworks that compromise any idea that architecture is some sort of neutral being. This reinforces Mark Dorrian’s thesis of political representation, particularly through the image, often in this globalised media landscape the only way architecture is received.

While I was reading Dorrian, I was also reading Ali Smith’s Artful, four essays given as lectures for the Weidenfeld Visiting Professorship in European Comparative Literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford in 2012. One essay, ‘On Edge’ asks, ’Do words on the page hold us on a surface, above depths and shallows like a layer of ice?’ at which I immediately think of Dorrian’s feet in figure 6.2 in ‘The Aerial Image: Vertigo, Transparency and Miniaturisation’, a satellite image of London that is the surface of the lowest level of City Hall. One can view it from above, one can stand on it. Ultimately one is looking at, or standing on, an epilimnion which itself carries an image positioned thousands of feet below the putative eye, the camera lens. Where is the surface of this image: the pigment on the floor? the ground upon which London sits? And where, in this vertiginous in-between, are we?

Ali Smith quotes Virginia Woolf on the cinematic image and how ‘the exchange between eye and brain when watching the cinema forms a separating surface between us and participation.’ What we see has become ‘real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life. We see life as it is when we have no part in it.’ f

f

It is a fool’s errand to define what architectural criticism is today.

It is clearly more than description although it is not at all clear who is equipped to judge the success or failure of a building or a landscape, or whether exhibit A is better or worse than exhibit B. The last fifty years have invalidated such judgements as the unhelpful creation of hierarchies of value and reward systems.4 However, we are entering a new global era of hardened battle lines, social inequity and extreme ideologies that do judge right and wrong, good and bad – why would the discussion of architecture be exempt? Against this prospective rigidity, I find Mark Dorrian’s discussions of a wide range of often unpalatable architectural and urban installations so rewarding. Each case study is embedded in a description of a world exposed to enormous historical and ethical and political forces. His subjects, from Diller & Scofidio’s Blur to the images of ‘weapons of mass-destruction’ sites that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, are canaries reacting to the air in the mineshaft. f

Even books of collected essays are not discrete objects any more; Writing on the Image contains an afterword, ‘Postscript as Pretext’

by Ella Chmielewska on Dorrian’s work with Metis and a previous book, Urban Cartographies. A serious apologia, it gives context to Dorrian’s essays by showing them to be a continuation of his work where images and text interconnect and interact to establish an ambiguous liminal space: the kind of spaces examined in his essays. She invites the texts ‘to demonstrate, to make a place for writing: writing as a form of inquiry, the mode of writing with images that informs the thinking of architecture’ [her italics]. It is a given in Dorrian’s work that the terrain is unstable, shifting, netted with opposing forces, and in this place that never reveals itself clearly, is where the conditions for writing lie. f

architecture and writing

1 Mark Dorrian. Writing on the Image. Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation. London, New York: I B Tauris, 2015 2 Ali Smith. Artful. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. p121 and p129 3 In 1941 John Crowe Ransom proposed a scientific approach to criticism based on empirical evidence found within the text. New Criticism’s emphasis on close reading held sway from the 1940s to the 1970s when it was assailed by the emergence of feminism, post-structuralism, New History, and in architecture, post-modernism. More or less.

4 Nonetheless prizes, magazine covers and hero-formation persist, occupying a parallel universe to the discussion of architecture as a social and cultural act.

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This detachment has become so naturalised that we can’t even see it, which certainly impairs our critical faculties. Earlier, last fall, I re-read the 1969 Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird, a project that grew out of their respective dissertations at the Bartlett in the mid-1960s. It consists of 15 essays, from Reyner Banham’s ‘A Home is not a House’ to Kenneth Frampton’s ‘Labour, Work & Architecture’, to Martin Pawley’s ‘The Time House, or argument for an existential dwelling –1. design for human ambiguity’. All the essays are annotated with marginalia: questions and comments by the other contributors.

This was the particular and popular book that translated Joseph Rykwert’s critical studies on semiology to a whole generation of young architects looking to escape the rigours of modernity. As criticism, it was an escape from New Criticism, whereby the object, whether it be a poem or a building, is a discrete, self-referential entity, answerable only to itself. Modern architecture sought coherence within itself, rather than with the world; purity of form was self-defining, one of the conditions of modernity. Ambiguity, double readings, metaphor, subjectivity and intentionality had little place in serious critique until, converging with Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture of 1961, Meaning in Architecture thrashed its way through a number of architectural scholars, historians and thinkers, arguing point by point that there was a wider, more holistic, more layered way to discuss architecture in the world, rather than in itself. 3 The contributors to this particular book, plus their schools, their students, their critical essays in the journals, undercut any codifiable critical position for the making of architecture. When, in 1961, Robert Rauschenberg declared in a telegram ‘This is a portrait of Iris Clert, if I say so’ he obviated the position of the critic who, as an observer, felt able to pronounce on a piece of art. It was at this point that artist became critic; that architects and their projects became critics and critiques. Ron Herron’s 1964 Walking City was an architectural proposal, a technological forecast and a critique of the authority of CIAM and its meta-theoretical urban solutions. Archigram effectively said ‘This is architecture, if I say

so.’ The object was utterly destabilised, becoming instead the subject of a wider discourse.

Hans Ibelings feels that the 1980s constitutes a ‘golden age’ of architectural criticism. This happens to be when the ‘68 generation flooded the universities, assuming positions of authority, from tenure professorships to Bernard Tschumi becoming the dean of the architecture school at Columbia in 1988. Every dog has its day, and while the 1990s were accompanied by a sinking dread as in project review after review students were asked ‘Yes, but what does it mean?’, by the 2000s architecture fell into a re-discovery of structure and building systems – the David Leatherbarrow world of material architectural culture.

the book will kill the edifice by d a n i e l fa i r b r o t h e r

‘The book will kill the edifice.’

‘This will kill that.’

Thus Dom Claude Frollo – Victor Hugo’s Archdeacon of Notre Dame – feared for his church. His fear, examined at length by Hugo in a digressionary chapter of which David Foster Wallace would have been proud, is said to have two meanings. First, on the surface, it is ‘the terror of the ecclesiastic before a new force – printing.’ Here it is not so much the church itself which is doomed but the sort of speech it houses; the monopoly of the pulpit, and the library of rare manuscripts feeding it, is to be undercut.

Second, though, there is a threat to architecture itself; Hugo thinks that somehow books can compete with buildings directly. If this sounds paradoxical, it is because we normally think of books

as offering something intangible – quite unlike buildings, if not entirely fictional. For Hugo, though, this doesn’t hold: buildings were first silent bearers of memory, mere markers for the tribe, and then carriers of fragmentary inscription.1 ‘Last of all’, he says, ‘they had written these marvellous books which are equally marvellous edifices: the Pagoda of Eklinga, the Pyramids of Egypt, and the Temple of Solomon.’ But now, with cheaper editions in paper – not stone – it is impossible to return to an age when ‘you would have thought that the world had cast off its old raiment and clad itself anew in a white raiment of churches.’

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Modernist white raiment

co u r te s y o f E y al We i z m a n a nd Ve r s o

By using ‘the book will kill the edifice’ as an epigraph for his White City, Black City, what Sharon Rotbard really means is: this book will kill the edifice.2 The edifice, in this case, is the modernist white raiment which Rotbard says has been used to smother the inconveniences of Israel’s history; in particular, it is white Tel Aviv imposed on black Jaffa. The self-conscious whiteness of Tel Aviv is taken to begin with its founding myth of a perfect democratic initiation on what Rotbard calls a ‘virginal dune’ near Jaffa. Here, sixty-six families are said to have divided up the land by a ‘seashell lottery’ in 1909, the first local materials to be used in the making of this national home. This is not quite ex nihilo, as Rotbard proposes, because it is the story told by European Jews claiming a return to long-neglected rights. Seer of modern Israel before it existed, Theodor Herzl called for an ‘old-new land’ – Altneuland (1902) – fixing its right as timeless but detaching any specific obligations.

So ‘first a book, then a city’, as Rotbard puts it, Tel Aviv came to think of itself as a Bauhaus piece, reflecting the white sands in a way Hugo could not have foreseen. Others see it as a different sort of brutalism.

The edifice tried to kill the book. Nevertheless, the actual result was a multiplication of books and words and exhibitions – a second tower of Babel, as Hugo puts it. Rotbard’s book, and later Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land, were nothing if not provoked.

There is a sense, though, in which the ‘not architecture’ claim was correct, but it missed the point that it is essential to architecture to be open to the non-architectural – open to people, and therefore open to history.3 Buildings that are designed to be dead already, or for the quality of their anticipated death – as in Albert Speer’s theory of ‘ruin value’, which Rotbard says is the key to the Etzel Museum commemorating Israeli paramilitaries – are therefore in a deeper sense ‘not architecture’.

architecture and writing

1 Victor Hugo, Notre Dame of Paris. Charles William Eliot (trans.): Harvard Classics. 1917 2 Sharon Rotbard, White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. Babel Press, 2005 (Hebrew): Orit Gat (trans.): Pluto Press, 2015 (English) 3 For the difficult connection between Zionist architecture and Nazism see Black City, White City, p.43. Compare Raymond Geuss, ‘Politics and Architecture’ in A World Without Why. Princeton University Press, 2014

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The book raised an edifice. That grey concrete didn’t seem so white to later visitors like Jean Nouvel (‘do you see white? I don’t see any white’) didn’t seem to matter. The whiteness could be written in. Tel Aviv was commemorated in catalogues such as Michael Levin’s White City and films like Boas Berr’s Air, Light & Utopia, and finally consecrated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, specifically as a white city, in 2003. All this seems to miss what was written out. Rotbard wants to reinstall the black city in memory: the disfavoured neighbourhoods missed off maps; the failing orchards bought from Arabs by early Jewish settlers (as they failed they showed whiter in the monochrome photography of the time); and the hundred-thousand Arabs who seemingly melted into the beaches during the 1948 war. The white city was only possible with the clearance of its footings. Here the book and the edifice have become entwined, and Rotbard thinks only correcting its history will force an acknowledgement of architecture’s silent speech – the better to argue with it.

So in White City, Black City architecture is dragged into history and conversation, maybe malgré lui. It is foremost a story where buildings have only walk-on parts. With more than a nod to Franz Fanon, the meaning of the colours comes from people, the buildings reflected (on) in their light. The importance of writing about architecture is something Israelis like Rotbard have been fighting for – in words – since the schism of architects over the censoring of A Civilian Occupation in 2002. Prepared by Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, with Rotbard as one of the contributors, the catalogue was set to accompany an exhibition making conspicuous the role of architecture in Israel’s project of domination; the lauding of Tel Aviv’s ‘International’ Style and the concrete enclosure of the Palestinians were almost simultaneous. Despite its initial support, the Israel Association of United Architects claimed that the catalogue’s ‘ideas’ were ‘not architecture’ and destroyed five-thousand copies. But enough people disagreed for it to be published by other means.

co u r te s y o f E y al We i z m a n a nd Ve r s o

The whole within which the stories move

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Rotbard’s historical technique in White City, Black City is thus to put the content back into the drained white form; yet Weizman’s, in Hollow Land, is to convey the very emptiness of the form. He aims much less to tell a story than to give you a way of seeing the whole within which all the stories move. The book itself is assembled as what Weizman calls an ‘archival probe’, multiple essays and aspects held together by the title’s load-bearing metaphor. Its

coherence surpasses that of similar but more album-like efforts such as Léopold Lambert’s Weaponized Architecture.4 Cities become containers for the barest of lives, domestic buildings exploded to let the soldiers flow as freely as the sewage; Palestinians fear ghosts in abandoned Israeli homes; and where previously ‘Jerusalem Stone’ was assigned in planning law to enshrine Israel’s national substance, it is allowed to thin to a facade. As a writer, Weizman has found a way to organize these disparate materials into a single ‘imaginary object’.5 The book has become a kind of edifice. Its clarity lies in its openness to the bodily senses. Stills of Palestinians crushed into checkpoints, queuing eyes, settlers scoring the desert, and the sweeping arms of military commanders and civic planners are all given their movement in the larger whole of the written text.

It is an impossible survey, compressing so much that is disparate across such a torn quarter of the Middle East.6 left: Queuing eyes

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below: Crushed into checkpoints

all i mag e s co u r te s y o f E y al We i z m a n a nd Ve r s o

top: Sweeping arms of both the military and the planners left: Settlers score the desert right and below: Soldiers move as freely as sewage

There is, of course, a long tradition of reading meaning into these sands. Part of the devilry of mapping a peace here is in the layering of the two sides’ sacred sites.7 For interloping Christians, whose combats are now mostly elsewhere, the place of Jesus’ death has been tangled in memory with the significance of their written bible.8 Mediaeval crusaders were keen to triangulate chapter and verse. No less – well – imaginative was imperial Briton Gordon Pasha’s claim in 1884 that the architecture and topography of Jerusalem revealed a (cartoonishly) literal symbol of the body of Christ.9 This avowal of coherence is equally a feature of the German tradition of history-writing which says that the historian’s writerly task is to tell the story of the identity of a nation by representing its ‘historical idea’ or ‘seed’ – to bring its essential aspects together under a single concept or metaphor.10

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4 Léopold Lambert, Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence. dpr-barcelona, 2012 5 RG Collingwood, The Principles of Art. Oxford University Press, 1938: 139-144 6 The blending of bodily detail into the abstracted totality of Weizman’s Israel comes close to one ideal of literary realism.

7 See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Willard R Trask trans. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1953 8 See Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948. University of California Press, 2000. See Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory. Lewis A Coser trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 9 Daniel Bertrand Monk, An Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestine Conflict. Raleigh: Duke, 2002. pp.20-21 10 Historismus; see Frank Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012. ch 1. All roads lead through Hegel here.

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Meaningful inscriptions

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Weizman’s book answers to these traditions, but inverts them both. A hollow object sits where an affirmative idea might have been expected. It is this hollowness which drives the Arab-Israeli conflict on and on. What is hollow, finally, is the soullessness and ‘insecurity’ of all enemy-defined nationalisms.

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Much inspired by Weizman, Penelope Curtis curated an exhibition about the Arab-Israeli conflict called the object quality of the problem.11 The metaphor ‘object’ seems half-right to describe the overall unity of Hollow Land, but what sort of object is it? Curtis thought of sculptures, but artist Adania Shibli disagreed because ‘we are in the sculpture’. This sounds less sculptural than architectural.

Weizman’s object is made of writing, exploding many buildings

and compacting them together in a mostly verbal picture of human conflict. The explosions, though, are notional. The writer, and the architect and planner, as organisers of others’ material, in their dependence on others and each other, share a common ground.

For our time, with so few meaningful inscriptions and so many modernist white walls, the edifice needs the book: ‘Undoubtedly this, too, is a structure, growing and piling itself up in endless spiral lines; here, too, there is confusion of tongues, incessant activity, indefatigable labour, a furious contest between the whole of mankind, an ark of refuge for the intelligence against another deluge, against another influx of barbarism.’12 f

11 Penelope Curtis, The object quality of the problem. Henry Moore Institute, 2008.

12 Victor Hugo, Notre Dame of Paris: book 5, chapter 2. One thinks, of course, of Tatlin’s tower: see Svetlana Boym, The Architecture of the Off-Modern.

Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. The original interpreter of the writing on the wall was – Daniel (5:17).

studying the architectural journal by j o n a s t b u ry

View the digital edition of November’s China edition of The Architectural Review and you will be met with a disclaimer: ‘This is to make clear that all contributors, including photographers and writers and the institutions they represent in a personal capacity, had no prior knowledge of, and are not responsible for, the editorial presentation of their work.’

We often overlook the complex gulf that can exist between the representation of an architectural work and its editorial presentation: a relationship that, in the case of China, can be an extremely dangerous one to negotiate. In The Architectural Review’s China Issue, the representation of architecture was one that, on the whole, sported a conventional genre of flattering photography, and yet its editorial frame took a far less flattering stance on the Chinese state, a stance that was then treated as an independent entity.

Naomi Stead has remarked that such self-censorship is what defines criticism, which can only progress by becoming more aware of its agendas and allegiances. The movement of a photograph or piece of text from its owner’s possession into the pages of a journal is a highly transformative one: there is, arguably, no going back. The journal draws upon many sources in its presentations of architecture, but rather than flatten them all together in a neat institutional package, they each retain their complex ideologies and jostle against one another within the journal’s editorial frame.

It is such concerns that preoccupy the emerging field of architectural journal studies: one that works with the journal as more than a historical record but as the key to revealing the mechanisms of editorial projects and their wider impacts, from Townscape or Manplan in the The Architectural Review to the postwar avant-garde in Architectural Design. It is a particularly pertinent time in the history of the UK’s architectural press to undertake such studies. Amidst the longstanding and growing fear that the old greats - among them The Architects’ Journal and The Architectural Review - will be forced towards digital-only by their owners, we are faced with the prospect of this editorial frame being reduced to a simple online template.

In light of this, writing a review of Robin Wilson’s book Image, Text, Architecture is something of a bizarre exercise, in that having read it I am now equal parts curious and suspicious of the processes my writing will be subject to once it is submitted.† Of course there may be spelling or factual mistakes, or issues of clarity, but most notably of all it will enter into On Site review’s editorial strictures, be they in print or online, and will never be quite the same. To quote Wilson’s opening gambit, ‘the authored text…no matter how respectfully handled…has entered into profoundly different circumstances of legibility and meaning.’ † for the suspicious reader and writer, not a thing has been changed here, for better or worse, other than the impositions of font and column width and the addition of images. The text is the same as the original file. But form is all; two columns reads with different expectations than one typewritten page, so in this sense, yes, it will never be quite the same. —ed.

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Robin Wilson. Image,Text, Architecture Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015 252 pages ISBN: 978-1-4724-1443-4 www.ashgate.com

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R ob i n W i l s on

R o bi n W i ls on

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This is the key concern of Wilson’s text: the way in which the contributed content of a journal meets with and is shaped by the ideological determinations of its editors, such as those made blatant by The Architectural Review’s disclaimer. Wilson’s gaze, however, is far closer than other studies of the journal: it moves beyond a particular editor or issue to an investigation the individual pages of the journals themselves - their construction and physical layout as much as their content. The result is an evolution of more traditional journal studies, aligned with art practice’s recent preoccupation with the ‘pagework’, treating the page as a space of performance, meaning and tension. Through such a methodology we are led from the surface of the page into its depths, emerging equipped to reassess the surface as a whole. As such Wilson’s work sits in something of a field of its own making.

Crucial to the study are theories of the utopian from French theorist Louis Marin and Frederic Jameson, suggesting both the role of the journal as site of projection, but also one in which repressed utopian tendencies are seen to re-emerge, often against the editorial frame in which the work of architecture appears. Via Marin and Jameson, Wilson presents the journal page as a dynamic space that articulates both a repression of the utopian and its latent second-coming, disrupting the supposedly stable projection of architecture that the journal offers us.

With each chapter structured around a specific case study, we move from Paul Nash in The Architectural Review to the photography of Sophie Warren and Jonathan Mosley in The Architects’ Journal, Lacaton & Vassal in Spanish journal 2G, Andrew Mead in The Architects’ Journal and finally the work of Hisao Suzuki, photographer for El Croquis. Each study demonstrates an instance in

which the traditional notions of the journal are challenged, be it by the primal scene of Nash’s Monster Field or the potential of Mead’s editorship to challenge representational norms.

The case studies themselves move from relishing detective-like details - the broken bark of a fallen tree or the threads on a sleeve to considering entire editorial and photographic practices as sites of utopian emergence. In this sense they not only demonstrate an unveiling of these specific sites, but construct a way of reading the journal page that, albeit with mixed success, could be subsequently applied to any other page.

What unites each study is their sense of indeterminacy or even error, in which revelations of the utopic hinge on states of ‘doing nothing’ or indeed doing the wrong thing as with Lacaton & Vassal’s project in 2G, or absences in Mead’s texts in The Architects’ Journal. It is perhaps coincidental that these, as the ‘fault lines’ of architectural journal articles, are in themselves faults. Closure or reification is denied both in the sense of the depiction of an architectural ‘ideal’ and in the sense of a complete textual or photographic work. Yet for all these mistakes we also encounter measured digressions from institutional norms: the utopian impulse manifests itself both in ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms.

Particularly memorable are the photographs of Suzuki, in which the editors of El Croquis, Fernando Márquez Cecilia and Richard Levene, repeatedly appear standing in the photographs of the buildings featured in the journal. For Wilson, this repeated deployment of the same figures is not only a divergence from photographic norms, but a reflection on the image’s mechanisms of production, containing the image of an architectural ‘idea’ that the journal propagates.

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R o bi n W i ls o n

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f

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Just like these recurring figures, once read the spectre of Image, Text, Architecture hangs in the periphery when viewing any journal page. At a time when many are anxious of the journal’s future, Wilson’s book comes as a pertinent reminder that it still has much to give us, often in strange, unexpected ways. These engaging and enlightening snapshots from a handful of architectural journals demonstrate above all the complexity of the architectural journal – a ubiquitous means of dissemination but one we rarely grasp in its entirety. It is time we took these archives from their shelves and revisited them not as historical artefacts, but as the sites of discourse on the architectural media that are still very much alive.

heralds of their own gospel by hector abarca

1 In 1946, Ernesto Nathan Rogers, wrote in the editorial of Domus magazine, ‘the problem is one of forging a taste, a technique, a morality, a different manifestation of the same problem: the problem of building a society’.

This editorial was part of one of the first issues published after the end of World War II, and Rogers, like all the other professionals that had lived through the horrors of war, was immersed in the project of reconstruction, of the city and of the man.

Metron was another important Italian magazine that under the editorship of Bruno Zevi led the reconstruction debate by focussing on planning and building issues that corrected the ideological mistakes made by the first Italian modernists (the rationalist movement) which fell under the spell of Benito Mussolini and the spectacle of crisp volumetric compositions of fascism.1 The new Italian postwar architecture, aesthetically built upon Zevi’s writings, found in architectural space an answer that unleashed the independence of architecture from materiality, understood as an evolution of the European functionalism.

Like Rogers and Zevi, architects emerged as public figures embracing their technocratic role

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Q: Just out of interest, were these figures well known when they were laying down their manifestos in words? Were they read because they had already built significant and recognised projects, or was the writing part of their own personal avant-garde? The question for me is whether the absence of the avant-garde journal is because of the absence of an avant-garde, or because it is an archaic publishing model.

‘Architects, more often than artists are heralds of their own gospel,’ said Henry-Russell Hitchcock, ‘and faith and works are not always of the same value or consistency.’ first as authors. Le Corbusier compiled the lectures he held in Argentina in his 1930 ‘Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City Planning’, which later led to the engagement to lead the design workshop that created the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro of 1936, the first truly modem high-rise ever built. Josep Lluis Sert, years before being appointed the dean of Harvard GSD, was an illegal alien who had abruptly left Spain to escape Francoist persecution and had toured America with the mock-up of Can Our Cities Survive?

An ABC of urban problems their analysis, their solutions, the visionary 1942 book that changed America’s understanding of urban design.

In Europe, Sert had been the editor of AC, Actividad Contemporánea, a leading avant-garde architectural magazine published in Barcelona. Like Le Corbusier with L’Esprit Nouveau, Lina Bo Bardi also started her career as an architectural journalist in Milan before moving to Brazil, where she helped define the Paulista School and their scrupulous view of architecture and public space that unfolded in the ingenious structural work of Paulo Mendes da Rocha, 2006 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate.

1 Zevi, B. Verso una Architettura Organica. Turín: Einaud, 1945 2 Zevi, B. Sapere Vedere l’Architettura. Turín: Einaudi, 1948

developers and publishers, to embrace reconstruction: they understood that among the atrocities of war there was an opportunity for a new fresh beginning. And for this they depended on radio and print media.

L’Esprit Nouveau (April 1921).

Celebrated journal founded

by Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant. Their essays were later compiled and rearranged to become Vers une Architecture (1923).

HA: Rogers and Zevi were starting their careers. Rogers’ time as editor of Domus was short-lived, and even if he was a key figure when the CIAM meetings were re-established, in 1949 he had to take a teaching job in Argentina to make ends meet. Highlights were the Velasca Tower in Milan and the 1953-65 editorship of Casabella that included famous editorial fights with The Architectural Review and Reyner Banham, and with Peter Smithson within CIAM; both called him and his students (Aldo Rossi and Gae Aulenti) ‘neo-liberty’. Rogers answered labelling them ‘defenders of refrigerators’. Rogers is not much known in North America even if his role was fundamental in the 1951 CIAM and its book, The Heart of the City, and he lectured at Harvard. He designed the tipi-like Canadian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale and was a juror, with Saarinen and Pratt, for Toronto City Hall. Nathan Phillip Square is his input.

Zevi was a Harvard graduate – this helped to break a cultural barrier; even if his books initially were meant for the Italian scene, they gave him a prominent position in Europe and Argentina. And when Saper vedere l’architettura (1948) was translated to English in 1957, he hit stardom.2 It had been translated earlier, in 1951, to Spanish, however nothing compares to the American academic system.

In both cases they united, with all the Italian architects,

Collection of the Getty Research Institute.

H e cto r A barca

2 We know about the financial hardships that Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Louis H Sullivan, Paolo Soleri, Adolf Loos and Arthur Erickson experienced at countless points of their careers, as they travelled to promote their ideas and writings with the international community. For them it was both a need to shape their ideas about the complexities of the environment and the forces that encompass design, and to gain acceptance in scholarly circles.

With their passing, the days of the visionary architectural office also ended for the precise reason that this model is considered economically unviable, discouraged and ignored by professional associations of architects that by mandate focus only on architectural practice and its business. In 2012 the Internship In Architecture Program published by the Canadian Architectural Licensing Authorities deleted requirements for discretionary experience in ‘Related Disciplines and Post Graduate Study/Teaching/ Research’ – 1880 hours of ancillary activities including visits to exhibitions, writing or attending lectures.

Frank Lloyd Wright wrote ‘Architecture as a profession is all wrong’, ‘The commercially degenerated architect’ (both published in 1930) and ‘Away with the realtor’ of 1958. In each he claimed that there was an intellectual crisis in the standard business model that requires a ‘safe-man’ and disregards ‘how much of an architect this fellow is if he can make a popular picture of his building’.

Wright was saying to his compromised colleagues that for them ideas are anathema that clogs their machinery.

Wright reminded us that often customers are to blame for their lack of architectural culture when buying property, but he also extends this to the realtor and his financier who are accountable for having packaged up a faulty product that limits the freedom of man. In an arrangement that actually involves more actors, from the architect’s staff to the City’s building officials, we all contribute to perpetrate an architectural sin. Today it is impossible to act as conscientious objector and expect to stay on the office payroll, or to stick to our beliefs (acting like Howard Roark or Louis H. Sullivan) risking destitution over compromise.

3 Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Le Corbusier. An exhibition arranged by the Department of Architecture of the MoMA. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1935

Metron 2 (September 1945).

Started publishing in Rome a couple of months after the end of the Second World War in Europe. Over the time Bruno Zevi was involved at an early start and took control on 1948 until its closure in 1954.

Collection of the Getty Research institute

Collection of the Getty Research Institute

Collection of the Getty Research Institute

H e cto r A barca

architecture and writing

Planificar para Sobrevivir.

Mexican edition of Survival through Design, collection of essays by prolific writer and designer Richard Neutra.

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La Arquitectura de Hoy (April 1947) presented the Master Plan for Buenos Aires prepared by Le Corbusier, despise not being commissioned, with the help of Jose Ferrari Hardoy and Juan Kurchan (of the Butterfly chair fame). The Spanish edition of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui was briefly published in Buenos Aires.

Today the magazine is under the ownership of Jean Nouvel.

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3 In 1926 Adolf Loos arrived in Paris already a famous architect – not because of his built work, that still remained humble, but for his writings. Beatriz Colomina reminds us that for Loos, only when it has been de-intellectualised can the printed word give back the language to culture. Bruno Zevi shared the same awareness declining to ‘subject buildings to rigorous ideological scrutiny’.

Robert Campbell, architect and architectural critic of The Boston Globe, collects ‘gems of pretentious illiteracy’, or overly-elaborated intellectual architectural rants; ArchiSpeak, he calls them.4 Should we pay attention to Campbell’s wordsmithing mastery? Carter Wiseman, author and professor of architectural writing and criticism at Yale, echoes Campbell when he notes that with the advancement of technology and the increasing complexity of actual projects, clear written communication has declined, even among the best-educated professionals.5 At first he thought it might be that current times have left little time for reading and writing, but then Campbell hazards that ‘architects, especially academics, may feel they’re so smart they don’t need to master the technology of writing’.

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4 Since the 1980s we have gradually elevated architecture to the level of art it was in Baroque times. It is debatable how it started – was it with Mitterrand’s grand travaux, or the Barcelona 1992 Summer Olympic games? Was it with the British high-tech architecture of the Second Machine Age, as Martin Pawley, long-time columnist of The Architect’s Journal, called it, paraphrasing Rayner Banham’s 1960 Theory and Design in the First Machine Age? The Guggenheim in Bilbao was the work that changed public understanding of architecture.

Perhaps not since the times of Fillippo Brunelleschi, has any other building received such copious media attention and, like the Florence Duomo, it dominates Bilbao’s skyline: architecture as an unmistakable phenomenon. From connoisseurs to day-trippers, from academic papers to tourist guides, everyone is writing about the handful of architects behind every other city’s reprise attempt of the Bilbao effect that would bring crowds to a city core, downloading the smartphone application to find the right spot to take the best selfie with a curvaceous landmark, and then writing about it, in a blog, social media or a journal.

Alexandra Lange, design critic, author and Loeb Fellow, rejects the idea that architectural criticism is constrained to talk about specific new buildings that actually only have impact on a handful of people.6 In ‘Writing about Architecture’ she points out that there is enough talk about architecture, but often it is focussed on real estate, investments and commodities – design is merely an accessory element of the equation. What we actually need are more critics – citizen critics – equipped with the desire and vocabulary to remake the city. Lange’s call is for public service, the critic as a mediator between the city and the individual, to break the mould of the traditional newspaper critic.

4 Campbell, R. ‘Having trouble understanding what the architectural cognoscenti are saying? You’re not alone’.

Architectural Record 189 (10), October 2001, p 79 5 Wiseman C. Writing Architecture, a practical guide to clear communication about the built environment. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2014 p2 6 Lange, A. Writing About Architecture: mastering the language of buildings and cities. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012

El Arquitecto Peruano journal, (October 1937). Directed by the influential Latin American architect Fernando Belaunde between 1937 and 1963.

Collection of the Charles E. Young Research Library – UCLA.

architecture and writing

Architectural Design (April 1970) covering the PREVI Experimental Housing International competition. In the 1960’s AD counted with the collaboration of Theo Crosby, Kenneth Frampton and particularly John F C Turner, who shifted focus to the global south, raising issues of informal settlements and the urban poor.

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Collection of the Vancouver Public Library

H e cto r A barca

‘While some buildings might seem to speak for themselves, even the best ones may need some help to be fully appreciated’, begins the conclusion of Wiseman’s Writing Architecture.7 In Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a short pop film aired by the BBC in 1972, Banham explains Los Angeles to us, as “it needs some explaining because it’s normally regarded as an inexplicable sprawling maze.” 8 These architects and critics pulled architectural debate back from academia, giving it instead a popular voice that reverberates in hallways, blogs and short-run magazines. As Colomina reflects, we should start thinking of architecture as media, accepting that is not a matter exclusive to architects, but a high artistic practice that sits in opposition to mass culture.

In current secular times the feeble relationship of practicing architects with architectural theory has been reduced to the design philosophy printed in a corporate brochure and in the project brief submitted to a city’s Design Panel, part of a submission that can be hundreds of sheets long and that still leave us empty. The architecture we produce is not particularly high anymore. After all the architecture we produced in the past, we haven’t done enough to challenge this current practice.

Here is a reflection irrelevant for the developer but appealing to the young professional and urban activists: we need to re-learn how to read a building, an urban plan and a developer’s rendering to see where critique might make a difference to the city, and then communicate this critique to the reader and the writer, the citizen and the critic.

Images can be compelling but critique is best conveyed through the written word to those with fragile visual training. To give an example, let’s travel with the pen of Wright in ‘In the Cause of Architecture’, one of his first collaborations for Architectural Record. He says, ‘As for the future – the work shall grow more truly simple: more expressive with fewer lines, fewer forms; more articulate with less labour, more plastic; more fluent, although more coherent, more organic. (…) but shall further find whatever is lovely or of good repute in method or process, and idealise it with the cleanest, most virile stroke I can imagine.’9

Q: Should perhaps architects just get on with doing architecture, whatever that entails, and let the community (that complex entity that ranges from scholars to occupants, and includes the builders, the media, the maintenance people and people passing on the sidewalk) incorporate the building, or the urban project, or the landscape, into the mental map of their environment? Do they really need to be massaged into ‘right thinking’ by people with a vested interest in promotion, reputation and various axes that need grinding?

Part of the original call for articles for this issue asked ‘at what point in the political process of building the city (largely conducted in wars of words in the media) should architects intervene with a project proposal, not more words’. That is what we do. We design things.

7 Wiseman p207 8 Cooper, J, director. ’Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles’ One pair of Eyes series, BBC, 1972 9 Wright, F L. ‘In the Cause of Architecture.’

[March 1908] in Pfeiffer, B B editor. Frank Lloyd Wright collected writings. Vol 1. (pp. 84-100). New York: Rizzoli, 1992

HA: I think that the less scrutiny that architects have means more chances to propose non-architecture. I was reading Spacing (fall 2013), and an article that praises George Baird legacy is called ‘Teaching architects to see the space around buildings’. Well, in academia he has his space because of Meaning in Architecture, but for those who just want to be practitioners Baird’s writings are of no interest, and reading them does not help at all to go through the internship process. As Wright explained in the thirties, North American architects have decided to step away from the debate and just do business.

In many cases, the usual talk about the fluidity of space and the integration with the public realm will continue to be popular because it cannot be measured (proven), and it sounds very nice, even if the architect cannot design a plaza without calling a landscape architect or urban designer, or pay attention to ‘the space between buildings’. This is the model that has been implemented and won’t change. And unless the public gets informed enough to read these points, it will continue to be more concerned with sustainability and looks. Still, civil society depends on knowledgeable experts (not necessary technocrats), such as the local newspaper architectural critic; we listen to them when they talk about planning and urban issues that are difficult to cover and explain. In architecture should be the same. If the concept that beauty is in the eye of the beholder was true we wouldn’t need curators at the museums, but we have to remember that beauty is not just looks, beauty is the splendour of truth (Plato) .

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Spazio & Società (April 1978), published until 2001 under the directorship of Giarcarlo di Carlo.

Collection of the Architecture and Fine Arts Library – USC.

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The work associated with this statement has lost importance, we don’t really need it to visualise the arresting power of architectural writing when it encompass good architecture. Writing takes over what drawings are not able to fully express, ‘especially when it comes to urbanism’ said Le Corbusier. And let’s not forget that he referred to himself as homme de lettres, his listed profession in his French identity card. At some point in his career he found himself in the position of a narrator over, or supplementary to, his role of an architect. f

architecture and writing

He c t or A b a r c a

between writing and design by thomas-bernard kenniff

Translation points the way to this region: the predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fufillment of languages. The transfer can never be total, but what reaches this region is that element in a translation which goes beyond transmittal of subject matter.1 In The Task of the Translator, Walter Benjamin suggests that the fulfilment of the text is to be found in the space opened up between the original and its translation. Something is always lost in translation, but good translation manages to echo the qualities of the original beyond its written words.

In the reflection that follows I suggest that the non-linear translation between design and writing is bound to a similar condition. Each task, and its object, contains its potential translation ‘between the lines’.2 Design and writing are reconciled in a space that is generated by their shared dialogue.

ll se peut qu’écrire soit dans un rapport essentiel avec les lignes de fuite. Écrire, c’est tracer des lignes de fuite, qui ne sont pas imaginaires, et qu’on est bien forcé de suivre, parce que l’écriture nous y engage.6 If writing, as Gilles Deleuze suggests above, is related to lines of flight (lignes de fuite), then the space of writing is heterogeneous, characterised by increased possibilities, instability, openness and immediacy. Writing deterritorialises. It fissures and ruptures, stretches and reconfigures. It permits, among other things, risk and uncertainty. What does this mean for the writing subject?

Creative writing, particularly in education, is a mode related to the development of the self. Not the discovery of the self, but its becoming through an action that destabilises a given architectonics and reconfigures another. Writing allows you to momentarily stand outside yourself.

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Similarly to Benjamin’s realm of reconciliation, William Whyte argues that the meaning of architecture should be found in the relation between the various (and necessary) transpositions between the different genres that characterise its process: from drawing to model, model to fabrication, detail to construction, construction to occupation, etc.3 This suggests that there is a potentially meaningful dialogical space generated by the act of switching modes or what, in creative writing, Fiona English has called regenring.4 Writing is spatial in a dialogical sense. It brings up relations, movement and translations that link the self to another, an interior to an exterior, a word to language, or a part to a whole (however stable). It is spatial because it situates the author, the action and its result in space and time. Writing, as Jane Rendell succinctly states, takes place. 5 This, however, is not to suggest that stability may be evoked from the reciprocity between text and designed construction – this is not where the potential of translation or transposition rests. The question we should ask instead is: what space are we writing?

T h o mas - B e r n ard K e nni f f

The characteristic of creative activities that allows one to take flight and stand outside oneself is expressed by Tzvetan Todorov, reading from Mikhail Bakhtin, as exotopy.8 The best way to experience the exotopy of writing is to read something you have written a few years back. The author is both you and not you, simultaneously recognisable and unrecognisable. Reading your own writing is also entering someone else’s head.

T h o mas - B e r na r d K e nni f f

Reading […] is entering someone else’s head.

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Design is like writing: a dialogic process that follows lines of flight, feeds back onto itself and deterritorialises its subject. This is where the potential of combining writing with design rests: to momentarily destabilise both object and subject and allow them to become other. Practiced together, design and writing reconcile opposites, play with ambivalences, and make room for subjects to develop.

Thinking more specifically about pedagogy, the mode-switch between design and writing allows for both the core elements of a work to appear in contingent fashion (Benjamin’s ‘realm of reconciliation’) as well as give design students the possibility to explore their authorship in relation to the work and to others. It introduces exotopy explicitly.

Over the past two years I have been experimenting with creative writing in design studios as a way of introducing uncertainty in what is usually a desired-outcome process. The exercises are not meant to reflect directly on the design project, but generate a nonrepresentational space from the collision between bits of writing (structure, characters, words, tone, flow) and bits of drawing. The non-representational aspect is crucial, since it disconnects the potential of reified signifiers or a simple transposition between narrative and promenade architecturale. Spatial and architectonic qualities emerge elsewhere, where intentions cross, add and subtract. The project space between design and writing is Benjamin’s realm of reconciliation – perhaps conciliation is more accurate – with the goal being that we can make sense of a project only in experiencing the uncertain area between all its genres.

And all its subjects.

Let me close with an example from the winter of 2014 that can serve as a postscript. It takes place in an exhibition space packed with the result (and bodies) of term-long processes. For her final review, a student has intricately woven poetry, drawings and models with the structure of the building we are in. One guest critic asks another to read aloud the fine print (a lengthy soliloquy on cycles) wrapped around the polished concrete column. In the moments that follow, the spoken words and the reader’s struggle to follow the cyclical text echoes the frenzied but well-articulated lines of the student’s drawings: a polyphony of lines crisscrossing existing conditions, trapping in its web a heterogeneous assemblage of disparate things and people. A wonderful dialogue of genres is taking place – a performance piece fraught with lines of flight: re-spoken words, questioning architectural drawings and momentarily dislocated subjects.

The interdisciplinary practice between creative writing and design has the potential to be an altering space: both uncomfortable and fulfilling because of what we might lose and what we might find.

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f

Ref eren ces

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1 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn.

London: Cape, 1970, p75 2 Ibid. p82 3 William Whyte, ‘How Do Buildings Mean? Some Issues of Interpretation in the History of Architecture’, History and Theory 45, no. 2 (2006): 153–77 4 Fiona English, Student Writing and Genre: Reconfiguring Academic Knowledge London: Continuum, 2011 5 Jane Rendell, ‘Design from fiction : introduction’, in Once Upon a Place: Architecture and Fiction, ed. Pedro Gadanho and Susana Oliveira. Lisbon: Caleidoscópio, 2013, p293 6 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion, 1977, p54 7 Gijs Wallis de Vries, ‘Metamorphosis: On the Role of Fiction in Architectural Education’, in Once Upon a Place: Architecture and Fiction, ed. Pedro Gadanho and Susana Oliveira. Lisbon: Caleidoscópio, 2013, p302 8 Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtine le principe dialogique.

Paris: Seuil, 1981

A Hunt for Optimism in the middle — or Thereabouts

(for and against Viktor Shklovsky)

by ted landrum

the book is written in different books different parts convince me re-things are poetical in rains the moon O bizarre heart riders of poetry in poetry arch-re-innovators arch-under-merge with reality—the ironic ur notes in the most music mean even room the deathless forebears write anew montaging out the captions as desk as a reflection stand your transit to change or restructure the meantime

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say you stage a play and rip out the stage replaced by loud light beams the city as air pass behind the invisible fit in art re-art

place you have literary origins on a ship asked from memory need them if they lose their guard pinned you move on your ability to know only one i will cross paths in person we will think with yet another friend we made a mistake to err in order to pause the work for another i need to finish discussing (read) where is unity reader in the person looking and building an illusion just a landscape through there is your able

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words ink the resistance the transformation of transformation my friend—i am no less a fact than actual

to find the reader in a foyer we are wearing

note: The source text for this found-erasure poem is the opening part of ‘The Middle of the Book or Thereabouts’ in Viktor Shklovsky’s A Hunt for Optimism [1929-31], translated by Shushan Avagyan. Dalkey Archives, 2012. p71-75.

On Reading — a hunt for optimism

– Marcel Proust, On Reading (1905) “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.”

– Viktor Shklovsky, Art as Technique (1914) “A crooked road, a road in which the foot feels acutely the stones beneath it, a road that turns back on itself—this is the road of art” – Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose (1925) “We don’t know how to build buildings…

Should we build small houses on legs, a separate room, a studio for one person, so that he can be either with everyone else or completely alone? Or should we build huge buildings with elevators and maybe tram cars in the hallways… Our house floats… under the sky. That’s probably called ‘drifting’…

There is a place in the mountains where the rivers join. They have brought with them so many stones that it looks like a construction site for a city with paved streets. …as a painter would teach another painter. He taught him how to break the planes, how to insert a plane into another, he taught him what was then called sdvig [shift, dislocation].

Mayakovsky transferred the culture of painting to poetry…

Mayakovsky was familiar with ‘the revolt of things,’ the knowledge that things would betray us…

I was very young then, a curly-haired boy with a few ideas, …and a temperament that could bend the boards of a podium.

I was a sculptor then and could understand literature because I was coming from the craft of sculpture…

‘In the meantime, the epic was born.’

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…Every writer is asked to repent after several days or several years of appearance.

‘Be like everyone else and we’ll forgive you for writing.’

Shouldn’t we talk here, too, about the fact that the writer isn’t made of bronze? That he is afraid of the reader, believes in him, watches…

We have been bizarre since the creation of the world.

I am holding a small book in my hand. …The dawn is breaking. The dawn is breaking persistently.

The dawn is breaking in all the stories of this book…

We are walking. I think we are in the middle of the street.

It’s wide. The sky is above us.

The Future was an important concept. A longing for another time –a time that is behind the mountains, where one can go.

The ellipsis–an omission–is the principal image. If you fill the space between the thing and what it is being compared to with explanations, the image becomes explicable and useless…

Dear stranger, I’m afraid of you when you read my book in a tram car.”

– Viktor Shklovsky, A Hunt for Optimism (1929-31)

architecture and writing

The writer carries a live bird–his heart–in his hands…

It’s much easier to talk through a hero. This is how it all begins…

Everything in the past matters…

And so your heart is hidden in the chest of another…

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Asked about writing architecture, and the architecture of writing, my first thought was not archi-poetry, but the underlying importance of reading.

For there can be no writing without reading, and no reading without reading situations. Even granting evidence put forth by Stephen Hawking, and friends, that strange kinds of information just might escape a black hole precisely because they have strings attached, no literary cosmos ever scrawled forth of its own accord from a wordless vacuum. Or, as the photographer André Kertész, the critic Roland Barthes and the novelist Marcel Proust each demonstrated in their respective works On Reading, the act of reading ‘takes place’ not solely in individual minds and hearts, but in the shifting midst of complexly imperfect worlds within worlds; i.e. within those human and inhuman situations that – like us – are shaped (however partially and ironically) via social, discursive and symbolic encounters.

‘A Hunt for Optimism in the middle – or thereabouts’ (facing page) is one in a series of experimental poems resulting from transformative re-readings of textual works I’ve selected for their potential to open up questions of architectural poetics. Themselves worthy of multiple readings, these sources become renewable and renewing resources: new beginnings for an ongoing exploration of the poetry of architecture and the architecture of poetry. By selectively re-opening, condensing, transforming and complicating these exemplary sources – through a responsive process midway between reading and writing, finding and making – these poems reinterpret not simply the original words but the worlds those words had begun to originate, expose, explore and reform. And this is done not simply for my own amusement, but with the aim of inciting others to risk their own heuristically interpretive and emancipatory responses, thus perceiving the world anew through the art of reading archi-poetically.

To the extent we succeed (together) in doing this, then the poem on the facing page is a poetic translation, a world-changing shortcut, ripping through the heart of Viktor Shklovsky’s A Hunt for Optimism. Throughout this experimental, meta-literary, multi-genre, hyper-textual mash-up montage of a novel, Shklovsky mingles provocative reflections on literature, poetry, art and architecture, with ironic satires of the related political, historical, and social situations that made him write both with and against them.

Although the book opens and closes with profound musings on the architecture of human reality, I found what I needed in ‘The Middle of The Book or Thereabouts’. As I’ve attempted here on this page, for the sake of doing justice to underlying sources, A Hunt for Optimism presents many pages split into two columns, thereby juxtaposing excerpts from literary contexts and precedents the author’s own writing associatively builds on and reads into.

In his early influential essay ‘Art is Technique’, Shklovsky outlined a strategy of Ostranenie, a device of formal estrangement (defamiliarisation, or ‘strange making’) meant to enkindle and empower more radical perception in readers of life and art. As he later clarified, this ‘formalist’ device was not a rejection of cultural content, meaning, and context, nor of emotive and symbolic imagery, but a necessary strategy of artful resistance: both to oppressive political ideologies (and censorship) and to our human tendency to fail to perceive what is actually happening in the world we live in.

Although Shklovsky recanted and ultimately softened his formalist polemic, in the midst of A Hunt for Optimism he maintains: “We weren’t too wrong.

Only to the extent that one needs to err in order to think”, and to see and to build “new forms of art so they can convey life”. f

“The effort of the writer as of the painter succeeds only in partially raising for us the veil of ugliness and insignificance which leaves us indifferent before the universe.”

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A structural element that transmits Through compression The weight of the structure above To other structural elements below

One or more vertical blocks of content Positioned on a page Separated by gutters (vertical whitespace) or rules (think lines) Used to break up large bodies of text that cannot fit in a single block of text on a page To improve page composition and readability

Columns are written by columnists A recurring piece, a regular feature in a publication Explicitly contains the author’s opinion or point of view

columns

48 by graham hooper

G r a ha m Hoop e r

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G r a ha m Hoop e r

writing on architecture Times Square: signs and icons

by lane rick

Our writing, like our cities, outlives us. The inherent longevity of the written word, like built form, informs our histories and relays information over centuries.

But another, more temporary written language thrives in our cities in the form of advertising and way-finding signage. These written elements appear and vanish with ease, a by-product of the ongoing dialogue between a city and its citizens.

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The very essence of Times Square is defined by its signage, now and in the past. Gaudy billboards crowd the elongated intersection of Broadway and 7th Avenue, replacing architectural facades with glowing words and images, never turned off. Since the bowtie-shaped intersection was renamed Times Square in 1904, its electric signage has defined its urban identity and growth. Unlike buildings, signs are easily replaced with newer, more outstanding ones, cultivating innovation rather than preservation, the temporary over the permanent. At a time when New York is increasingly concerned with preserving its character and urban fabric, what does preservation mean when a space’s historic identity is about the new? The very adaptability of one of New York City’s most iconic public spaces means that efforts to preserve it must wrangle with the unusual process of maintaining its most consistently capricious element: the signage.

By the 1920s, Times Square was a thriving entertainment and cultural district. Its already famous aggregation of neon signs and illuminated billboards, or ‘spectaculars’, had cemented its role as the sign-mecca of the city. In part due to the influence of theatres that profited from both Times Square’s reputation and a heightened street visibility of their marquees, a 1916 zoning ordinance was passed to permit large illuminated signs in the square while restricting them in other neighbourhoods because of concerns over the vulgarity of the lights and their tasteless endorsement of commercialism – nearby Fifth Avenue businesses successfully lobbied the 1922 passage of a law that banned all projecting and illuminating signs along the entire street.

With similarly tight regulations on spectaculars appearing across much of New York, electric signs, increasingly concentrated in Times Square, were welcomed by the theatres that saw both an opportunity to out-shine neighbouring competition and to cultivate a bustling and thriving tourist attraction; they installed bigger, brighter signs in a vicious cycle of one-upmanship. To this day, constantly evolving technology accelerates the rapid obsolescence of the most interchangeable component of buildings and brands: the signs affixed to the façade.

Times Square’s identity emerged precisely because of the absence of nostalgia among its theatre-managers and business owners. The freewheeling evolution of entertainment and spectacle only encountered preservationist forces after Times Square’s degeneration in the dilapidated context of 1970s New York. As economic decline and rising crime rates led to a widespread debilitation of the city, Times Square adopted a deviant subculture of hustlers and adult entertainments at street level. Above, large signs remained a strong part of its character; plastic backlit panels and movie marquees replaced older signs, new neon signs advertised sex shops and peep shows in fluorescent colours. The intersection was still illuminated into the night, but with female silhouettes and racy titles of porn flicks instead of Coca-Cola bottles and Broadway shows. However, in the 1980s, the New York City Planning Commission worked with public and private interests to rehabilitate the floundering theatre district.

Through eminent domain land seizures in 1982, landmark status designation for 28 of the district’s 44 theatres in 1984, and a comprehensive re-zoning in 1986, Times Square was slated to undergo a total rehabilitation in the form of family-friendly entertainment in Broadway theatres, restaurants, and retail shops along the ground floors, funded by office towers overhead.

above, from top: Robert Frank, New York City, 1953 Dennis Stock, James Dean, 1956 Walker Evans, Neon Signs at Night for Lucky Strike Cigarettes and The Big House, Times Square, 1930 facing page, from top: Robert Frank, Mein Kampf, Times Square, 1961. RISD Museum Vivian Maier, New York (Suspended Man, Times Square Billboard), circa 195155. Stephen Bulger Gallery Alfred Eisenstadt, Times Square 1945 anon, Times Square 1980 Inge Morath/Magnum, A Llama in Times Square, 1957 anon, Times Square 1940 anon, Times Square 1943

To execute this manoeuvring act, the City Planning Commission consulted Robert A M Stern and graphic designer Tibor Kalman, whose ‘42nd Street Now!’ proposal oversaw the continued incorporation of signage in the subsequent development of Times Square. The 1987 Zoning Resolution fostered highvolume commercial and entertainment space in Times Square, and mandated the installation and upkeep of huge signs on the buildings’ facades and roofs. This paradoxical gesture of preservation marks a disparity between Times Square’s architectural legacy and its cultural legacy. Unlike other historically relevant neighbourhoods of New York, the architectural motifs were not deemed the most critical element of the district’s identity. Instead, it was the signs, which cover even those buildings landmarked for preservation. Signage regulations in most districts in New York City set a maximum area, height, or percent coverage for exterior signs, but Times Square follows the reverse condition: each building must exceed a robust minimum area of illuminated sign coverage, essentially ensuring that each building along the ‘bowtie’ has a 75-foot tall base of continuous signage.

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The influx of capital that drives Times Square today has produced accusations of ‘Disneyfication’ of an increasingly corporate urban space. Architects may deride its tasteless corporatisation and New Yorkers might pointedly avoid the tourist-heavy mobs, but the ongoing transformation of Times Square reveals a unique urban typology inextricably tied to the signs that obscure the buildings behind them.

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Many buildings erected after 1987 display unusual efforts to incorporate the signage into the façades, often exceeding the minimum requirement by as much as 50 percent. Bands of LED screens on Gwathmey Siegel’s 1585 Broadway alternate with horizontal windows, providing unobstructed views from inside the building. The drum-shaped corner of Fox & Fowle’s Four Times Square maintains views by wrapping a rounded screen about the facade and punching out the windows, leaving black squares scattered across the moving words on the facade.

The subway stations too are brightly advertised. In lieu of the recognisable green bulbs at the entrance, glittering lights spell out ‘subway’ above glowing medallions that mark the train lines that access the station. Even the pavement has writing on it, bronze plaques that map the theatres of Times Square in an abstracted plan of the district.

Historic buildings were no less extreme. The old New York Times Building at One Times Square can be better placed in history by its signage than its form or façade: one of the earliest illuminated signs in Times Square was its news ticker, the ‘zipper,’ installed in 1928 near the base of its 25-story building, and to announce Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s victory in the 1936 presidential election, a two-story billboard of his face was installed. With sign designer Douglas Leigh’s purchase of the Times building in the 1960s, the façade took on a new prominence, for he mounted over a dozen billboard panels to the exterior, and used them as a testing ground for new signs, including the famed smoking Camel sign and later, the steaming Cup O’ Noodles sign. As the building changed hands over the next half century, billboards were added and replaced, though the zipper remained, a minimal nod to preservation. When Lehman Brothers bought the tower in 1996, they ran a cost analysis and concluded that more money could be made through wrapping the building in billboards than by renovating and leasing the relatively small office space on each floor. The building has been vacant ever since, save the bottom three floors, which currently house a Walgreen’s, as though the drugstore’s presence is an advertisement for the brand’s convenience and ubiquity.

the persistence of commodity over form: Times Square illuminations, 2015

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Times Square has always preferred the ostentatious to the nostalgic. By the 1890s it had already been nicknamed the ‘Great White Way’ due to its early adoption of electric street lighting. When vulgar spectaculars were banned in districts concerned with tasteful streetscapes, Times Square welcomed illuminated signs with fervour. When economic decline pushed old businesses out of the district, theatres survived by showing porn films, replacing old marquees and ads with x-rated movie promotions and dancing silhouettes. With the arrival of the corporate financiers that upended the district in the 1990s, Times Square acquiesced, exchanging its seedy shops and streetscape for Disney musicals and chain restaurants. With each transformation, the bright signs of Times Square continue to attract.

The district’s unifying element through decades of change has been twofold: culturally, it has adapted without losing its iconic peculiarity and distinction from the neighbourhoods that abut it; typologically, Times Square’s identity is not wed to its architecture and history as much as to the bustle of entertainment and the signs that promote it. Times Square’s very existence hinges on its disregard for its past, and its iconic identity thrives because of that, not in spite of it.

Times Square is still changing. In 2009, the fourlane stretch of Broadway that passes through it was converted to a pedestrian plaza; instead of honking taxi cabs, visitors sit in chairs and benches. The signs continue to evolve. John Portman’s 1986 Marriott Marquis Tower recently replaced the former collage of smaller signs on its facade with one massive LED screen, as wide as a football field and six stories high. In both its transformation and its preservation, Times Square has become a paradoxical icon of ephemeral newness. Its adaptability to new technologies and expectations has propelled it to evolve, but also reinforced its role as a shameless and immersive promoter of commercialism, entertainment and advertising. People visit Times Square not for its architectural character, but for the dazzling writing and pictures that hang off the glass and stone façades, re-compose the urban space and relegate buildings to mere scaffolds. Times Square changes, Times Square remains the same. f L a ne R i c k

reading architecture 1

He c t or A b a r c a

by stephanie white

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f

The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles downtown.

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Writing on and about architecture presumes publication, and until very recently that meant magazines, journals and books. And where does one find these? Unsold magazines on the newsstand are sent to the recycling bin after a month, books last on the bookstore shelves a while before being remaindered, however libraries subscribe to journals, they buy books and in theory they maintain their collections forever. Since it started, On Site review has sent two copies of each issue to Canada’s National Library and Archives; all the university libraries that subscribe to On Site review have them in bound volumes, as they do Trace and Canadian Architect; Hector Abarca reports that he found his copy of AD, April 1970 in the Vancouver Public Library in a pile of uncatalogued magazines: gold dust!

Print is indelible, the print object difficult to throw away. Even if a library de-accessions a volume, it enters the world of the secondhand bookseller. I bought George Baird and Charles Jencks’ 1970 Meaning in Architecture (ranked 3,016,782 by Amazon) online.

The bookplate inside is from Brunel University Library and was borrowed seven times between 1974 and 1995. Unread, unloved, but not totally discarded.

reading architecture 2 by hector abarca

‘The universe (which others call the library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.’

So begins the ‘Library of Babel’, the short story by Jorge Luis Borges compiled in Ficciones (1941-2, 1944, 1956). The library is the storehouse of all knowledge, there are no answers hidden in the endless hexagonal reading rooms.

Artists and architects like Erik Desmazières (whose etching illustrates the cover of the 2000 English edition), Cristina Grau, Antonio Toca and Enrique Browne, in distinct places such as Paris, Madrid, Santiago and Mexico City have tried to transfer into drawings its description, finding their delight in slight variations in the text of every different edition of the story, helping to give them a better architectural representation. Toca pointed out that a final slight correction, the addition of just one word, would help him to produce a set of accurate architectural drawings. However, and it seems that Borges, who was aware of Toca’s attempts, purposely didn’t want to give the architect the satisfaction of materialising his infinite dreams, keeping it in the fictional world.

The use of Borges’ metaphor is widespread, from Shirley Neuman, former dean of the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Arts at the opening ceremony of the Koerner Library in 1997, to a better known example in the labyrinth-like library of the Ligurian abbey where Umberto Eco’s Il Nome della rosa takes place, where Jorge of Burgos, the blind librarian is none other than the very same Borges who, ‘like all men of the Library (…) have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues.’

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above: Powell’s Books in Portland.

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left: The Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library.

The revealed catalogue is none other than the 1975 Book of Sand, another short story of Borges that tells the story of a book with infinite pages, the book that Borges finally has hidden in the shelves of the National Library of Buenos Aires in order to escape from the devouring seduction of what its immeasurable pages tell. The Library of Babel has plenty of these books, the modern versions of the Book of Sand, for us located in the periodicals section of the library where one volume represents the entire collection of a magazine such as Architectural Record, which began publishing in 1891, or Architectural Review, begun in 1896. But it especially represents those no longer circulating – Moderne Bauformen (1902-44), Quadrante (1933-36), Nuestra Arquitectura (1929-85), L’Architecture Vivante (1929-33). Accessible in digital format, or at a dusty movable bookshelf in the public library or in a tempered special collection room of a research library, they represent the diary of our century, a history written day-to-day and presented in monthly full colour editions, or twice a year like Jean Badovici’s L’Architecture Vivante, or our own On Site review, presenting critiques, thoughts, exhibitions, ideas, utopian- and built-projects fundamental in their heyday, often still important although newer issues have displaced them from our reach.

Le Corbusier was able to collect his essays from L’Esprit Nouveau in Vers une Architecture, scholars have compiled Frank Lloyd Wright writings, but still if we want to enjoy the romance and fascination that Arthur Erickson had with Japanese culture, imperative and indispensable in understanding his work, we for now have to dig into the issues of Canadian Architect of 1964. f H e cto r A barca

above: Seattle Central Library reading room

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left: Getty Research Institute Library

On Site review 34

architecture and writing

ON SITE r e v i e w

34: on writing Fall 2015

On Site review is published by the Association for non-profit architectural fieldwork [Alberta] which promotes field work in matters architectural, cultural and spatial.

c o n t r i bu t or s t o t h i s i s s u e Hector Abarca is a licenced architect in Canada and Peru currently practicing in Vancouver. Previously he worked and studied in Europe, Latin America and United States. Besides working in new projects, Hector’s interests are historic and modern heritage conservation and the role of architecture as a cultural resource.

Jon Astbury is a writer based in London. He studied architecture at De Montfort University in Leicester, Architectural History at The Bartlett, UCL and is Contributing Editor at The Architectural Review.

Irene Chin was managing editor of Open Letters from 2013 to 2015. She is now a curatorial intern at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

Daniel Fairbrother is a PhD student in Sociology at Warwick University in the UK. Previously, he studied Philosophy at the Universities of York and Cambridge.

His thesis evaluates attempts to use evolutionary theory in historical sociology.

Troels Steenholdt Heiredal engages with the world by writing, drawing, photographing, sculpting/constructing/building exploring his observations; these are presented in an open form as an invitation to discussion: www. troelsheiredal.com

For any and all inquiries, please use the contact form at www.onsitereview.ca/contact-onsite 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.

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back issues: www.onsitereview.ca/subscribe editor: Stephanie White design: Black Dog Running printer: Emerson Clarke Printing, Calgary distribution: Magazines Canada 416 504 0274 Ubiquity Distributors USA 718 875 5491 On Site review is available in a great number of news stands listed at www.onsitereview.ca/wheretofindonsite

On Site review 34

architecture and writing

On Site review gratefully acknowledges the past support of our contributors, our subscribers and the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts through their Publishing Grants to Arts and Literary Magazines.

Graham Hooper , artist, educator and writer, lives and works in the United Kingdom. He runs the Felpham Psychogeographical Association (felpham. ishappynow.com and @FelphamPA), writes for a number of international publications and exhibits widely.

Linda Just is an architectural designer in Chicago. She spent several years working in the field of acoustics, and maintains a stubborn curiosity and keen interest in aesthetics, perception, and their roles in multidisciplinary design. www.distantbellwether.com Thomas-Bernard Kenniff studied architecture at the University of Waterloo and the Bartlett. His research work focuses on public space and the ethics of design processes. He is currently Invited Professor at the UQAM School of Design, Montréal.

Ted Landrum teaches architecture at the University of Manitoba. His archipoetry is published by Routledge, CV2, Lemon Hound, American Society for Aesthetics, Brooklyn Rail, and the Centre for Creative Writing & Oral Culture. www.ubuloca.com Lara Mehling was design editor of Open Letters from 2013 to 2015. She is now a research associate and editor of Pamphlet at the ETH Zurich.

Miranda Mote was content editor of Open Letters from 2013 to 2015. She is now an adjunct professor at Temple University.

Thomas Nemeskeri is an architect, photographer and artist, based in Toronto.

He has lectured in Canada and Europe and co-wrote ‘The Radical Potential of Architecture’ in Agency, Working With Uncertain Architectures. New York: Routledge, 2010 Lane Rick is a designer, illustrator and writer in New York City. In addition to designs and installations in the USA, Canada and China, her work includes drawings of cities and research about chinatowns around the world.

Igsung So is an architect based in New York City. He received his Honours Bachelor of Architectural Studies with Distinction from the University of Waterloo. He is the editor of Mole Issue 1: Cute Little Things. molemagazine.com Chelsea Spencer co-founded Open Letters with Michael Leef and served as editorin-chief for its first year. She is now managing editor of Log.

On Site review also acknowledges the exceptionally understanding support of Calgary Arts Development, City of Calgary. We are proud to have done this whole project in Calgary.

Stephanie White has been the editor of On Site review since its beginning in 1999, its publisher since 2000, and its designer since issue 4. It has been grand.

Danielle S Willkens is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, Auburn University, New York.

The Other Architect exhibition 28 October 2015 to 10 April 2016

The Pidgeon Audio Visual kit “Technology Is the Answer But What Was the Question?” by Cedric Price. 1979. CCA © Pidgeon Digital/World Microfilms Publications An annotated outline of various ways to analyze a street. 18 September 1970. Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies fonds, CCA. Gift of Eisenman Architects © CCA, Montreal

Canadian Centre for Architecture 1920, rue Baile Montréal Québec H3H 2S6 www.cca.qc.ca

For as long as architecture has been reduced to a service to society or an ‘industry’ whose ultimate goal is only to build, there have been others who imagine it instead as a field of intellectual research: energetic, critical, and radical.

But how can we produce or maintain this position?

In the history of architecture, especially since the 1960s, there has been a proliferation of experiments representing the work of architects who ventured to creatively and thoroughly rethink every aspect of the profession. Moved by a desire to contribute more substantially and more actively to the construction of a cultural agenda, they critically analyzed their roles and challenged the precepts and ultimate goals of the discipline.

Together, their experiments point beyond what architecture is toward what architecture could be, or what it already is, if we would recognize it: not just a practice that inevitably brings about the construction of an artifact, but a way of thinking and observing the present and the society in which we operate; of identifying and asking questions while marking a new territory on which to act; of looking for or inventing suitable tools; and, finally, of responding generously and concisely.

–Giovanna Borasi The Other Architect is also a book, edited by Giovanna Borasi with contributions by Florencia Alvarez, Pep Avilés, Greg Barton, Samuel Dodd, Isabelle Doucet, Ole W. Fischer, Anna Foppiano, Kim Förster, Owen Hatherley, Larissa Harris, Alison B. Hirsch, Douglas Moffat, Whitney Moon, Pierluigi Nicolin, Kayoko Ota, Panayiota Pyla, Angela Rui, Deane Simpson, Johanne Sloan, Molly Wright Steenson, Rebecca Taylor, and Mirko Zardini — a co-publication with Spector Books, Leipzig, designed by Jonathan Hares (Lausanne and London).

ANGELA SILVER

ECHOLALIAS February 12, 2016 March 12, 2016

401 Richmond Street West, Suite 104 Toronto ON Canada M5V 3A8 416 504 8238 openstudio.on.ca

I have nothing to say, only to show.

—Walter Benjamin Echolalias evokes a matrix of ideas that Angela Silver has explored over the last fifteen years—artistic expression as both process and trace, performance and inscription, remembering and forgetting, and the permeable thresholds between these realms. Emerging from her ongoing investigation of technologies of communication, here the artist transforms the gallery over time using a hand-held typewriter ball, the slow methodical effort of mark-making recorded directly on walls with each hand strike on carbon paper, creating an evolving alphabetic palimpsest with its simultaneous accretion and erosion of letters in overlapping layers. While ‘echolalia’ itself refers to the repetition of spoken words, the accumulation of simple marks coalesces into an expansive lacework of symbols and signs imbued with a sense of stillness that underscores the poetics, as opposed to pragmatics, of communication.

— Shauna McCabe excerpt, exhibition essay

ON SITE r e v i e w

w w w. o n s i t e r e v i e w. c a

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apropos of nothing other than the title on page 14 on not being able to visit architecture The imperfect render; long streaks of shadow the hand that lays the bricks that cuts the lath that presses the plaster the arm that smooths the wall over and over I never see this now, all cleaned away in photoshop nor the sound of traffic bouncing off sheets of buildings across windy plazas patrolled by security with paramilitary hats and holsters The lady of Shalott, from her tower surveilling, the watcher in the night, she was half sick of shadows.

Surveilled, malls and gaudy dustless under the fluorescent gaze Please, give me a shadow I am half sick of glare I want to see some architecture to feel its contradictions with my hands, its critical flaws, its surfaces, its failures and its beauty

writin writing please, let me go somewhere other than here