Species of nooks and other niches by Rosie Milne

SPECIES OF

nooks and s

iche

er n

oth undergraduate dissertation

“…in the world of the imagination, it becomes normal for an elephant, which is an enormous animal, to come out of a snail shell.” —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of 127.

Space,

foreword four-words four walks

“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop”i – and then return to the beginning.

Species of nooks and other niches is a series of textual nooks and niches that explore, simultaneously, the architecture of nooks and nooks in architecture. Guidance is given for four different ways for reading the text. The latter three ways can be considered as distinct but supplementary paths through the dissertation. All four are designed to open, explicate, plicate, enrich and illuminate in their own particular ways: 1 - CONTINUOUS It is recommended that a more conventional mode of reading is undertaken first: from left to right, top to bottom, continuously from start to finish. And then, following this initial grasping of the text, the reader is invited to return to these four words and re-walk the dissertation via a different route. Instructions: to take this walk, simply read the main body of text as you would any text; left to right, top to bottom, start to finish.

Begin at the beginning, and go on until you are stopped. Continue until you are stopped again. Go on in this way ’till you come to the end: then stop.

2 - INTERRUPTED Upon the first reading, the reader will notice there are continued attempts at interruption erupting from the margins. According to Walter Benjamin, “interruption is one the fundamental devices of all structuring”ii - and given that this dissertation takes on the form of a structure (with attic, cellar and ground floor), it must be interrupted. Interruptions are also fundamental to epic theatre, with the same being true of epic poetry. Thus, given that the nook is of epic nature (as becomes clear), the textual interruptions are furthermore both appropriate and necessary. These interruptions act as marginalia to the text, illuminating the content and forming visual-textual links within each page in the same way that a medieval manuscript does — performing both a condensing of meanings within the text whilst also adding small absurdities, side notes and important thoughts which do not fit within the main flow of the text. Instructions: take the same route as the continuous walk, but allow yourself to be interrupted by the creatures occupying the margins.

3 - vertical Sergei Eisenstein wished for a ‘spherical book’ - one which would allow the reader to take in the entirety of the text simultaneously, in a glance. The closest thing I have been able to achieve is to facilitate ‘upward glances,’ creating vertical simultaneity by having visual objects appear in more than one place in the text at once, allowing them to become ‘wrinkles in time’ and space — links between different parts of the text. Here a digital reading is invaluable, enabling a series of hyper-nooks and hyper-niches to pepper the margins and form cross-textual, extra-paginal links — for while the intra-paginal interruptions noted previously allude to verticality, they cannot go beyond the borders of the page. However, by collecting and inhabiting these hyper-niches and hyper-nooks throughout the whole text, the reader may enter into the wider matrix of thought within which the dissertation was constructed. On this walk, there are two activities which may be undertaken: collecting and inhabiting: Begin with a shell and end with a shell

Collecting [shells, hyper-niches] Here to click is to collect, as the reader is invited to collect shells on a shoreline walk back and forth along the margins of the textual Islands/nooks of thought. This method deals with the characteristic simultaneity of shells/niches as things which facilitate both immersion and emersion: “the part that is outside contradicts the part that is inside.”iii Clicking on the outside of the shell will take the reader to the page on which the inside of the shell may be found, and vice versa. These shells connect ideas across the text which are naturally linked but could not be placed alongside each other for reasons of continuity and readability. Chiefly these shells or hyper-niches connect ideas surrounding the ‘niche-noun’ word house (see contents map), as this section of writing was by necessity truncated and therefore required illumination by extra-textual means. With the shells appearing throughout the dissertation, this section is thus allowed to spill into the rest of the text, becoming the thing of many parts that it wanted to be. Instructions: take this walk by clicking on the shells as they appear in the text; the outside of the shell will move you forward, the inside of the same shell will take you back to the place you first saw the shell in

the text – or you may move to another shell as it appears. Begin with the ending.

}

included for demonstrative purposes only

Inhabiting [architectures, hyper-nooks] The end of this paper — however many means are taken to get there — philosophical, literary, phenomenological, poetic etc. — is architectural. In this route, then, begin with Architecture. This way of moving through the text is to inhabit a series of architectural nooks which form part of the cast of marginalia and conjectural supplements peppering the margins of the text. Like the collected method, the inhabited method allows one to jump through the text in a non-linear way. However, rather than collecting and moving between a series of philosophical and conceptual niches, here the reader is allowed to see how the various architectural specimens of nooks are very often multiple species at once; like marginalia may be at once mollusc, monster and man, these architectural nooks may be at once temporal, spatial, aural and visual, appearing across the text under different names and guises; personae with different masks. Instructions: click (your heels) on the marked images of architectural nooks and niches. They are marked with braced brackets (in a similar fashion to simultaneous equations in mathematics) by which the reader may peruse a little bank of ‘see also’s, clicking through to the other places in the text where the nook appears.

Begin at the beginning and take a short cut to a long way around.

4 - COMPRESSED While the previous modes of walking present us with quite long, but relatively fast-paced walks through the text, this method provides a short, yet leisurely walk; a short walk to the long way around if you like. The text includes three poems, one in each section: the first at the start of the section on nooks, the second found at the end of the section on nakes, and the third found in the midst of the section on different kinds of measure. It is possible, therefore, to skip the entire text but for the poems, which are written to compress and condense some of the essence of what occurs in each section, and together form a narrative by which it is possible to understand the text. Like verticality, compression is a vital component of the nook, and it therefore seemed appropriate to include poems in the thick of the text — which by their nature are both vertical and compressed.

Instructions: Follow in the footsteps of the flâneuses — flâneur poets in skirts and corsets; they form hyperlinks by which to navigate the route _______ Small note: One will notice that the second section, in its essence as naked, and being a ground floor and thus necessarily horizontal, can only be moved through via the first method - continuously. In case of tragedy, however, one shell has been included for good measure, so that the reader may return to a nook if they so wish. Please also note: for the digital reading, it is recommended to view the document as single pages only, rather than as double page spreads, allowing each page to act as its own nook or nake as appropriate. _______ And now, forwards! — R.M., 9th July 2018

_______ i Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (New York: D. Apple ton and Co., 1866), 182. ii

Walter Benjamin, “What is Epic Theatre?” 147-154 in Illuminations (New York: Schoken Books, 2007), 151.

iii Gaston Bachelard, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Penguin, 2014), 128.

universe NOUN [from Latin uni-, ‘one’ and versus, ‘a turn of the plough; a line of writing’] all existing matter and space considered as a whole; the cosmos.

UNIVERSE UNI - VERSE ONE - VERSE ONE - LINE ONE - WORD ONE - WORD HOUSE ONE - HOUSE

“Words—I often imagine this—are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common-sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in “foreign commerce,” on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves—this is a poet’s life.” —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of 166.

Space,

[point of departure]

nakes 2 | GROUND FLOOR In which seas of transparency are navigated and word houses are forgotten, neglected, and/or demolished. The poet on board commits suicide.

3 | CELLAR

different kinds of measure

In which shells and other items are reposited; the skiff is shipwrecked on one final Island of thought and the sailors with their captain return home.

NOOK | NOUN | a certain measure of land

1 | ATTIC

nooks INDEX OF specimens

niche | verb | to nest [a speculative nook of script number 1] nook | noun | a corner of the world

[house as nook]

[point of departure]

niche verb

to nest

speculative nook of script no. 1 THE POET: [reciting to herself as she writes in the happy solitude of her attic] To build a nest is no small feat. As a bird flies away Flies home, flies away, Flies homerically, flies — collecting and returning — gathering each tree to settle in one:

away,

It is an Epic feat, to nest, “to install oneself ” to become oneself. Reflexive and reflective, The Robin must collect the entire forest To make one little, lovely nook of a nest. And so with I — I must collect the entire world in order to inhabit it.

[Exeunt.]

nook NOUN

a corner of the world

cosmos

1. NOUN

[a] the universe as a well-ordered whole [b] an ordered and harmonious system of ideas 2. NOUN [from Greek] order, harmony

The house is a nook. The etymology of the noun ‘nook’ reveals that the word was used to denote “one of the ‘corners’ of the Earth”1 (ca. 1400) - a definition which is particularly intriguing, given that in his The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard describes the house as being simultaneously a cosmos and a “corner of the world.”2 In this dialectic between the ‘intimate’ house and the ‘immense’ Universe, Bachelard reveals a poetic, Oneiric House, one which “shelters daydreaming”3 by embodying two essential qualities of poetry: concentration and verticality.4 In compressing an entire cosmos into a corner, the house acts as a “concentrated being.”5 For Bachelard, the house is not only a Universe, but the human being’s “first Universe.”6 Our first house, if it is a good home, is the first place we encounter the order of the cosmos through family life. It is also the first place we encounter ideas, politics, the first place we will encounter conflict, the first place we will encounter love, the first place we dreamed in and the first place we can remember. Hence Bachelard’s image of the house as a nest — the bird must collect the immensity of the forest in order to construct an intimate nest.7 Thus the Oneiric House concentrates the world, just as a poem compresses ideas, emotions, truths, stories - into a few short lines. The Oneiric House is also vertical. Poetry has verticality due to simultaneities and juxtapositions, which, according to Bachelard, replace the horizontality of succession; succession “contracts into ambivalence.”8 This is what makes Baudelaire’s “smiling regret” — or any poet’s Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, “Nook,” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 203. 2 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Penguin, 2014), 26. 3 ibid., 28. 4 ibid., 38-47. 50-58. 5 ibid., 28. 6 ibid., 26. 7 ibid., 111-124. 8 Gaston Bachelard, “Poetic Instant and Metaphysical Instant,” in The Intuition of the Instant, trans. Eileen Rizo-Patron (Northwestern University Press, 2013), 59. 1

INTIMACY - IMMENSITY INSIDE - OUTSIDE HIDDEN - MANIFEST MINIATURE - MASSIVE CORNER - COSMOS HOUSE - UNIVERSE index of dialectics used in Poetics of Space

John Soane’s house at 13 Lincoln Inn Fields, London, Cellar Plan

{

see also: [small boxes] [ground floor] [attic]

cellar

[from Latin cell: a small space for a hermit] 1. noun

[a] a store-room, a repositry [b] something deep, dark, hidden

synonymn

repositry

feeling of bittersweetness — possible.9 The many dialectics of the Oneiric House demonstrate this simultaneity, but it is the “the polarity of attic and cellar”10 which give spatiality to simultaneity. The cellar, an obscure, dark space, behaves as a refuge for memory — the foundations and history of the house. The attic, with its rational construction and airiness, behaves as a room for becoming, a space for intellectual ideas and daydreams: “the dreamer constructs and reconstructs the upper stories and the attic until they are well constructed.”11 Like a snail emerging from its shell, the house simultaneously extends down into the realm of memory and up into the region of becoming: “the part that comes out contradicts the part that remains inside.”12 This spatial simultaneity is possible through the imagination, which infiltrates both memory and becoming, acting as a spiral ‘staircase’ connecting the two. When combined with the everyday “common sense”13 of the ground floor, this forms a Vertical House with a tripartite structure.14 In being both concentrated and vertical the house thereby becomes poetry. Indeed, for Heidegger, the terms ‘poetry’ and ‘house’ are reversible: “poetic creation, which lets us dwell, is a kind of building.”15 Poems, by their mimetic function, are dwelling places for images. And not only images, but active images: as Aristotle says, poetry imitates “men in action.”16 These poetic images are inherently unfinished; as yet becoming. As such, the poetic house becomes a ‘shelter for the imaginer’ because it is a dwelling place for the active, unfinished image that is the becoming human being. Here it is intriguing that Plato, for all his quarrels with the poets, would present us with khōra as a “receptacle”17 for images. Khōra is the “third kind,”18 the space between being and becoming, that “provides a home”19 for active, ibid., 61. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 38. 11 ibid., 39. 12 ibid., 127-128. 13 ibid., 166. 14 ibid., 38-46. 15 Martin Heidegger, “…poetically man dwells…” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 215. 16 S.H. Butcher, trans. The Poetics of Aristotle (New York: Macmillan Company, 1902), 11. 17 Plato, Timaeus, trans. Archer Hind (London: Macmillan and Co.: 1888), 171. 18 ibid. 19 Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, vol. III, trans. Peter Jowett (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011 — original version Oxford University Press, 1892), 481. 9

French:

le cave

A “marginal grotesque,” The Luttrell Psalter, ca. 1325-40, from the British Library, http://www.bl.uk/ manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_42130_ fs001ar

{

Appartement de M. Charles de Beistegui, Paris Photo : Lucien Hervé © FLC/ADAGP source: http://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr/

[inglenook]

becoming imagines. Khōra is a poetic dwelling; an unfinished space for the unfinished in the same way as the nook-house. Thus, although it causes countless arguments among scholars, it is actually fitting that Plato left his concept of khōra underdeveloped, unfinished and vague — “beholding as in a dream”20 — rather like our nooks.

“

Every form of body has depth: and depth must be bounded by plane surfaces. Now every rectilinear plane is composed of triangles.

— Plato, The Timmaeus.

”

nook

1. NOUN [a] a small triangular field

ibid., 558

“now it seems, by constraint of our discourse, we must try to express and make manifest a form obscure and dim.”

obscure

[from Latin obscūrus: dark, dim, hidden from light]

1. ADJECTIVE [a] dark, dim [b] concealed from sight by darkness 2. ADJECTIVE [a] unknowable

—Plato, Timaeus, trans. Archer Hind (London: Macmillan and Co.: 1888), 172.

nook verb

to hide in a corner; to conceal

A “marginal grotesque,” The Luttrell Psalter, ca. 1325-40, from the British Library, http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/ Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_42130_ fs001ar

Every nook is a house. Every nook, every corner — be that of a building, a room, an open casket. Bachelard understood this: “we open [the casket] and discover that it is a dwelling-place, that a house is hidden in it.”21 The terms house and nook now appear reversible, such that every nook participates in khōra, becoming a receptacle for images. In the house itself, these images are living, becoming humans — but nooks may also be inhabited by images we have lived (memories), or images we wished to live (daydreams), such that every species of nook is in some sense a room for becoming. For Derrida, khōra is so obscure, it is impossible to name — hence ‘khōra’ and not ‘the khōra.’22 Khōra is “hardly matter,”23 in-between the sensible and the intelligible.24 Khōra is thus as Bachelard’s corner, necessarily obscure: “half-box, part walls part door.”25 Part obstacle, part opening. Part visible, part invisible. And, like khōra, corners are deeply associated with nooks. We have already seen that the nook-noun denotes a ‘corner’ of the Earth, but the association is deepened by excavating the etymological cellar of the nook-verb, meaning “to hide in a corner,” “to conceal.”26 The nook actively conceals the active images inhabiting it, hiding them in corners, enclosing secrets. The nook is a nooking, and in these half-boxes and open caskets we find hiding houses. The house hides itself inside itself, in little houses that are corners of its own interior cosmos. Hence every nook is a house because every nook is as Bachelard’s Oneiric House — a corner of a world. As such, these nooks-within-nooks take on both verticality and concenBachelard, The Poetics of Space, 107. Derrida, “Khora” in On The Name, (California: Stanford University Press, 1995), 96. — on this front, we have followed Derrida’s suit. 23 Plato, Timaeus, trans. Archer Hind (London: Macmillan and Co.: 1888), 185. — The Jowett version of the text translates the phrase as “hardly real.” 24 Derrida, “Khora,” 89. 25 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 156. 26 Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, “Nook,” 204. 21 22

a small anthology of small boxes

{

see also: [cellar] [ground floor] [attic]

“Square Cellaret” Catalogue Item 68, Helen Dorey’s “Catalogue of the Furntiure in Sir John Soane’s Museum,” Furniture History Vol. 44, 63.

“nests of drawers” Catalogue items 71, 72, 240, Helen Dorey, “A Catalogue of the Furniture in Sir John Soane’s Museum,” Furniture History Vol.

see also: [attic] [cellar] [small boxes]

}

John Soane’s house at 13 Lincoln Inn Fields, London, Ground Floor Plan.

tration.We see this occur in the Le Corbusier’s Maison Petite (Corseux, 1923), the house for his mother (and her dog, Nora) - for while Le Corbusier is famous for constructing houses as ‘machines for living,’ he also had a knack for nooking. The reversibility of house and nook is particularly markèd in the corner of the spare bedroom. Here the chest (or nest) of drawers occupying the corner takes on the character of the cellar as a repository of items; one we envision becoming an irrational mess of obscurities over time. But this cellaret is also a sollar. By placing the desk and chair on top of the chest, occupation requires ascent. The cellar-corner becomes a dwelling for the purpose of reading, writing and thinking the ‘well constructed,’ illuminated thoughts only possible in an attic. Still yet, this corner is also ground floor due to the horizontal gaze afforded by the window, a gaze only accessible by ascending into the corner-house and sitting at the desk. In this oneiric corner-house, this ultra-nook, this house within a house, the human being can occupy all three stories simultaneously. Here verticality itself is concentrated. Indeed, it is corners that facilitate concentration. The creation of any corner involves folding, and folding always induces thickness. Architecturally folding walls to create corners induces spatial thickness or opacity, the same way repeatedly folding translucent paper makes it opaque. The more folds, the thicker the space. This thickness provides the intensity needed to ‘compress a cosmos.’ John Soane’s House (London, 1890-1823) is one such cornered cosmos, rife with spatial nooks. In this conglomeration of buildings, which was triply house, architectural studio and working museum, Soane continually intensified the space, curating the cosmos inside caskets and corners to concentrate both images that had been lived (historical artefacts), and images that he hoped someone would one day live in — architectural imaginings, drawings and models. Like a bird constructing a nest, Soane collects in order to inhabit. And yet, with intensity comes obscurity; from the irregular plan, to the corner cabinet grotesques, the house is wholly obscure. This nooking nook may altogether compress the past and the future — but we could never know it all. After all, these nooks are “evident witnesses of the need for secrecy.”27 They must remain as Bachelard’s Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 102.

{

see also: [stair niche]

Ontological ruptures?

A “marginal grotesque,” The Luttrell Psalter, ca. 1325-40, from the British Library, http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.

Plan as Shell? Peter Zumthor, Plan of the Bruder Klaus Field Chapel

A crannied cranny Bruder Klaud Field Chapel, © Samuel Ludwig www.samuelt-

Yet, the chapel also participates in the everyday world’s noise, in horizontal succession. Made using local materials and by local people, its stacked nature echoes the hay-stacks in the surrounding ‘nooks of land,’ participating in the language of its own ‘universe.’ Moreover, the horizontally stratified concrete was set in 24 pours — as many as the hours in a day.64 The building is thus within-time, and for all its verticality, it still maintains its ground floor. As such, attic, cellar and ground floor ‘do not exist in any substantive sense,’ just as past, present and future cannot be segregated. Instead, the cranny-chapel folds time into a temporal corner, a temporal nook. To say nook really is to immediately say cranny.

The cranny is a haystack. Bruder Klaus Field Chapel © Atelier Peter Zumthor and Partner

The cranny is in the world Bruder Klaus Field Chapel © Samuel Ludwig and Thomas Meyer

Pallister, Sacred Space: Contemporary Religious Architecture, 129. 64

“[…]only the dreamer who curls up in contemplation of loops understands these simple joys of delineated repose.”

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of 165.

Space,

This “marginal grotesque” is an iterative loop.

niche NOUN

a seashell

columbaria of livia Nordisk familjebok (1911), vol.14, p.614.

nooks are niched Mausoleums in the Vatican Necropolis with temporal classification of buildings. Pietro Zander; Fabbrica di San Pietro (Hrsg.): The Necropolis under St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.2010,

remember recollect re-collect collect inhabit

The simultaneity of attic and cellar implies a loop between temporality and historicity — between memory and becoming, such that they facilitate each other: an iterative loop. To inhabit this loop, we must inhabit the niche. In the general lexicon of classical architecture, ‘niche’ refers to a semidomed recess, generally topped with a carved shell.65 These were used in several ways throughout classical Graeco-Roman architecture. One use was to shelter rhetoricians who were reciting speeches to outdoor audiences. Another use was to shelter urns contain the ashes of the dead, as in the Columbaria of Livia or the subterranean Necropolises of Rome.66 Still another use was to house statues of significant humans (dead or alive). In every case, the niche commemorates, providing a stage for the images of memory. Therefore, inside every niche we find a memory theatre. The Memory Theatre is a notion from the Renaissance, the foundations of which can be traced back to the Greek Poet Simonides (ca. 500BC). After a catastrophe which left his audience dead and unidentifiable, Simonedes was able to recollect who had been present based on where they had been sitting — realising that associating loci with imagines acted as an aid to memory.67 This mneumotechnic device was taken up by Rhetoric students as a means for recall during their speeches, and was developed through numerous treatises on ‘the art of the memory’ (ars memoriae). According to one treatise, the Ad Herrenium (ca. 80BC), students were to mentally construct elaborate series of loci in which to place imagines of the things they wished to remember.68 To be memorable, these loci had to be “easily grasped Fawzi el Fakharani, “Semi-dome decoration in Graeco-Roman Egypt,” American Journal of Archaeology Vol. 69, No. 1 (Jan. 1965), 58. 66 Glenys Davies, “Columbaria,” in Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed., Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology (Routledge, 1995), 315. 67 Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1992), 17-18 68 ibid., 20-23. 65

a nested creature and a shelled creature occupy the same margin A “marginal grotesque,” The Luttrell Psalter, ca. 1325-40, from the British Library, http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.

A “marginal grotesque,” The Luttrell Psalter, ca. 1325-40, from the British Library, http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.

sub-species of niche Fawzi el Fakharan, “SemiDome Decoration in Graeco-Roman Egypt” American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Jan., 1965)

simonides of ceos source: https://blog. artofmemory.com/arrivalon-the-island-of-kea-ceos-2689.html

ekpbrasis greek Rhetoric practice; “a narrative rendering proceeds in a “relaxed” manner from top to bottom in a downward left to right spiral” See Kirkbride, “The Renaissance Studioli of Frederico de Montefeltro,” 37.

“in its interior is found a whole world” Francis Ponge, “The Oyster,” Things, 39.

urbino studiolo & gubbio studiol0 The Renaissance Studioli of Frederico da Montefeltro and the Architecture of Memory (Montréal: McGill University, January 2002), 2-46.

by the memory, such as a house, an inter-columnary space, a corner, an arch”69 — to truncate: a spatial nook. Here discontinuity and irregularity facilitate memory. Strikingly, not only the loci had to be irregular, but also the imagines. The Ad Herrenium tells us that to remember things successfully, these imagines must become imagines agentes which are three things: vivid, human, and active.70 These grotesque images both humanise and dramatise the art of memory, something that would be echoed as the art manifested as the physical ‘Memory Theatres’ of, for instance Giulio Delminio Camillo (ca. 1480–1544) during the Renaissance.71 Bachelard too alludes to the drama of memory: “In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant rôles.”72 These characters, these imagines agentes, were, in effect, poetic images, for, as Aristotle notes: poetry imitates “men in action.”73 Becoming facilitates memory. This notion of an elaborate matrix of discontinuities as a facilitator of memory is also echoed by Bachelard: “if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated.”74 We can therefore read Bachelard’s Oneiric House as a memory theatre, and the whole of The Poetics of Space as modern treatise on the ‘art of memory.’ More so because these mental memory theatres were not simply means of recall, but were seen as essential for cultivating personal character; memory facilities becoming. Renaissance studioli demonstrate this reversibility. Small nookish rooms in large Italian palaces, they effectively made manifest the invisible memory architectures of the ancients.75 They were used as “inventive agencies for knowing,”76 housing large collections of objects and images that acted as kind of inventory from which to invent new thoughts. As Kearney notes in relation to the simultaneity of the instant: “the word “invention” here takes on all the rich double sense Yates, The Art of Memory, 22. ibid., 18-31. 71 See Yates, “Renaissance Memory: The Memory Theatre of Guillio Camillio,” in ibid., 135-162. 72 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 30. 73 Bucher, trans. The Poetics of Aristotle, 11. 74 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 30. 75 Robert Kirkbride, The Renaissance Studioli of Frederico da Montefeltro and the Architecture of Memory (Montréal: McGill University, January 2002), 2-46. 76 ibid., 2

memory theatre of Guilio Camillo source: http://www.peter-matussek.de/Pub/V_45_ Demos/Medien/camillo-kircher_440.jpg

invent verb [unknown origin] [1] To come upon, find; to find out, discover.

69 70

[2] To compose as a work of imagination or literary art

of its etymological origins as both creation and discovery (invenio-invenire).”77 The cellar as a repository invades the attic as a room for becoming. Critchley recalls a similar notion in his memoir entitled Memory Theatre. Upon discovering this inventive facet of memory hiding in a series of boxes (cellarets?) that have been deposited in his office, he cites Mark E. Smith: “memory needs to be imagination. Transfiguration.”78 Here the repetitive facet of the fold of historicity goes beyond recitation79 — and towards iteration. Memory facilitates becoming. The notion of the ‘grotesque image’ that dwells in memory theatres and studioli reveals another species of nook which is inherently related to the spatial nooks that are loci. This peculiar specimen is the visual nook. Imagines agentes are nooked images, as irregular and ‘cornered’ as the loci they inhabit. Just as spatial nooks create spatial thickness, and temporal nooks create temporal thickness, the visual nook creates visual thickness — intensity. We see this in illuminated medieval manuscripts such as the Luttrell Psalter (Lincolnshire, ca. 1340). The “marginal grotesques”80 which inhabit the manuscript appear totally obscured from the text — but actually intensify the meaning of the text into the very folds of their obscurities. The text dwells in the images, while the images dwell in the margins. Rather than literally reciting the words of the text, as Sandler notes, these grotesques take an action from the text and intensify it81 — reflecting the way psalms rhymed meaning, with each rhyme often intensifying the verb. As with Critchley, for Sandler “poetic parallelism does not mean repetition of ideas.”82 Repetition is not recitation alone, but rather repetition acts in iteration; it evolves. Indeed, these becoming-images present us with truncated evolutions, folding a series of creatures into a single, concentrated image. Bachelard noted similar truncated evolutions in French manuscripts, writing: “to achieve Kearney, “Bachelard and the Epiphanic Instant,” 41. 78 Mark E. Smith, cited by Simon Critchley, Memory Theatre (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2014), 66. 79 Critchley, Memory Theatre, 66-67. 80 See descriptions in the index of The Luttrell Psalter: Two Plates in Colour and Eighty-Three in Monochrome from the additional manuscript, 42130 in the British Museum, (London: British Museum, 1932), 32. 81 Lucy Freeman Sandler, “The Images of Words in English Gothic Psalters,” Studies in the Illustration of the Psalter, 72. 82 C. L. Seow, “An Exquisitely Poetic Introduction to the Psalter,” JBL 132:2 (2013), 284. 77

index of strangely inhabited shells “marginal grotesques,” The Luttrell Psalter, ca. 1325-40, from the British Library, http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_42130_ fs001ar

The snail-birds are my personal favourites, evoking both the nest and the shell; both the concentrating and vertical aspects of the nook; concentrating like a nest and vertical in the temporal simultaneity evoked by the shell.

grotesqueness, it suffices to abridge an evolution.”83 From mollusc to monster to man, these images are little Oneiric Houses - vertical in their simultaneity and concentrated in their obscurity. The illuminated manuscript thus becomes a memory theatre, the margins acting as loci (spatial nooks) a stage on which the grotesque imagines agentes (visual nooks) can re-member the meaning of the text. The grotesques enable “active participation”84 in the text, such as to enable a transfiguration of the reader through the daily, repetitive readings of the psalms. Memory facilitates becoming. In the Gothic Cathedrals, we find these these illuminated psalters in stone, and indeed both Yates and Critchley present the cathedrals as unofficial memory theatres preceding the official Memory Theatres of the Renaissance. Like the Renaissance studioli and the mental memory theatres of the ancients, cathedrals like Lincoln Cathedral imitate classical notions, but in an “un-classical spirit,”85 tending towards irregularity, asymmetry and nookishness. The Cathedral’s innumerable nooks act as the margins of a manuscript, the loci housing the strange imagines agentes of the grotesque gargoyles and imps, together designed to compress salvation history and encourage active participation in the liturgy. Here cellar and sollar are simultaneous: to remember is to be transfigured; to form an inventory is to invent; to reposit is to become; to be towards beginnings is to be towards endings. To depart we must also return: memory facilitates becoming. Therefore, the visual nook is not simply a poetic image, but an epic image. Here we return to inhabit the etymology of niche in nigier to see its reflexive nature come into play. Reflexive verbs always refer back to themselves; they always return home. The memorial facet of the niche implies that we must be always returning if we are to be always becoming. Ricoeur notes this narrative return-to-oneself as becoming-self: “the temporal return of Odysseus to himself is supported by the geographical return to Odysseus’ birth-place.”86 Odysseus must “grasp” the world and become himself by a process of epic flight Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 128. Sandler, “The Images of Words in English Gothic Psalters,” 72-75. 85 Yates, The Art of Memory, 32. 86 Ricoeur, “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative,” 31. 83 84

nigier REFLEXIVE VERB french - “to install oneself ”

the home is ‘epic’ home - epic home-eric homeric homer

}

also here.

Le Corbusier, like Soane, collects to inhabit , pictured here as a bespectacled bird surrounded by books and nooks in his appartment on Rue Jacob, Paris. Photographed by Brassai, late 1920s. Source: Le Corbusier le Grand (New York: Phaidon Press, 2008), 200.

and return, the same way that the bird must collect the entire forest in order to inhabit it. For while we may depart, we do not really leave the house behind; we are as Bachelardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mollusc emerging from the shell: simultaneously inside its house and outside of it. We are as visual nooks, imagines agentes, â&#x20AC;&#x153;marginal grotesques,â&#x20AC;? those becoming images emerging from shells, engaged in the discontinuous, intense, mutative process of transfiguration through a series of, if you like, ontological ruptures. To inhabit a niche is to be a nook on the move.

recess

NOUN

an interlude; an interruption

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With this ‘epic nook’ in mind, we can here say that we have just navigated several nooks — several islands of thought, as on an Odyssean journey. On each island we have discovered and battled with different species of nooks:

nook NOUN

a triangular plot of land

e th

em en

k oo ln ia at sp

nook

the

dio

oral

visu

al n

ook

X HERE BE GROTESQUE SNAIL MONSTERS

the

emp

the t

— all of which are interrelated specimens in a kind of ecology of nooks. For each specimen, at some point or another on this ecology walk, indicates another, the same way that a heron acts as an ‘environmental indicator’ for the invisible presence of fish in a watercourse. They hide inside each other — like Odysseus himself, these nooks are naturally deceptive: hidden in the spatial nooks of Soane’s house, a temporal nook evolves as it becomes apparent that the house compresses both past and future; in Le Corbusier’s corners, we find little Oneiric Houses, little spatial and temporal nooks; in the temporal nook or cranny that is Zumthor’s Field Chapel, we find an auditory nook; in the mental nook of the niche that is the memory theatre, we find an entire ecology of spatial nooks, temporal nooks and visual nooks concealed; the nook

BEWARE THE WHIRLPOOL

ECOLOGY AS SHELL Laurence Halprin, “Sea Ranch Ecoscore,” The Lawrence Halprin Collection, The Architectural Archives University of pensyvania 1969.

actively hides, and it actively hides itself, folding its different facets in on itself. It is necessarily thick, a thing of many parts, like an epic journey | full of caesura | splits in meaning | pauses in the narrative | our narrative on the nook has been ruptured. But, as we saw in the niche, however many ways it diverges itself, the nook will always be a reflexive nook - it will always homerically refer back to itself. The nook will always return home. Thus, we have reached a point of divergence: we can either remain within these â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;islands of thoughtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and return home to dwell in the thick of the nook, or we can depart forever and stay aboard our skiff, navigating the seas of transparency, stripping the nook away until it is all but forgotten. The former option constitutes an epic, the latter a tragedy; the one a finding of oneself, the other a losing of oneself. Yet, sometimes one has to * * onself in order to find onself again. So we shall begin there.

*lose*

2 | ground floor

naking

roof

If the verb to nook is ‘to con-

level ceal,’ we find an antonym in

RECEPTION

the verb to nake as meaning ‘to reveal.’ For although we now use the word ‘naked’ as an adjective, it originates from a verb: “the naked man was the man who had undergone a process of naking, that is, of stripping or peeling.”90 This naking is analogous to the demolition of our ‘word houses’ — the dismantling of the attic, the obliteration of the cellar. We shall henceforth be confining ourselves to the ground floor - or at least, we shall be confining ourselves to a stratified stacking of these ground floors. In short, we shall be occupying a Glass House. || In March 1926, Russian Film Director Sergei Eisenstein visited Fritz Lang on the set of Metropolis - a science fiction of deception, illusion and delusion, set in a dystopian high-rise city in the year 2026. Key characters include Freder, son of a wealthy industrialist; Maria, a worker whom Freder falls in love with and a kind of prophet in the plot; and her robot double. Inspired by the high-rise concept and perhaps by the themes of deception and mechanical illusions, Eisenstein was inspired to construct his own cinematic Glass House.91 || Eisenstein’s concept for his film The Glass House presents us with a nook-less architecture: a highrise where not only the outer skin is made of glass, but in which the entirety of the building is transparent - floors and walls alike: || “The idea was this, as Sergei Mikhailovich explained it. People live, work and have their being in a glass house. In this great building it is possible to see all around you: above, below, sideways, slanting, in any direction, unless, of course, a carpet, a desk, a picture or something like that should interrupt your line of sight.”92 || Ironically, in this transparent house, the inhabitants become blind to each other, “people do not see, because it never occurs to them to look.”93 As the plot thickens (or un-thickens), three characters emerge: the Architect, the Poet and the Robot. The Architect designs the house, the Poet has the forgotten gift of sight and acts as a prophet in the plot, and the Robot is the perfect inhabitant of this new architecture. The dysfunctional relations between these characters and between the other inhabitants serve to unfold the three-fold nature of the Vertical House, ultimately ending in a dual tragedy - the death of the poet and the disfiguration of the architect. Only the Robot survives as it is revealed that the Architect is the Robot in disguise.94 || This tragedy serves to demolish the spatial nook, but it also eradicates the temporal and mental crannies, desecrates the visual niche, and collapses the upward dimension of the auditory

Clive Staples Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcort Brace, 1960), 146-147. 90

Zoe Beloff, “Glass House,” A World Redrawn video, 21:01 (2015), accessed December 17th 2017, http://aworldredrawn. com/glass.html. 91

Ivor Montague, With Eisenstein in Hollywood, (Seven Seas Books: Berlin, 1968), 102. 92

ibid.

For an explanation of the development of the script, see Oksana Bulgakowa, “Eisenstein , the Glass House and the Spherical Book: from the Comedy of the Eye to the Drama of Enlightenment,” Rouge 7 (2005), accessed December 17th 2017, http:// www.rouge.com.au/7/eisenstein.html. 94

level

spatial nake

recess. In its transparency, the nake that is The Glass House is essentially the environmental degradation of our entire ecology of nooks — leaving only a bleak, bare and barren landscape, an ecology of nakes in which “all are stripped bare.”95|| This Glass House is a word in the surrealist dialogue of the time, one which focused on themes of transparency as a means for “profane illumination”96 as Walter Benjamin calls it — a ‘revolutionary’ reaction against the obscurities of sacred illumination.97 Referring to an experience in a hotel in which all the doors were purposefully left open, Benjamin declares: “to live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence.”98 Combined with the industrial developments in steel and glass, these surrealist notions led to the emergence of a series of glass architectures. We find one such proposal in Eisenstein’s diary — a clipping from the June 1930 issue of New York York Magazine, showing a proposal by Frank Lloyd Wright for an all-glass tower.99 Alongside it Eisenstein writes: “This is a glass sky scraper that I invented in Berlin.”100 As the plot within his own Glass House unfolds, we see that his response to these surrealist interlocutors is that to dwell in the ‘profane illumination’ of transparency is to lead a self-destructive life of obscurity. || Eisenstein’s vision was a house in which it was “possible to see all around.”101 Ironically, the result is blindness and moral opacity: the husband is blind to his wife’s lover; the rich are blind to the hungry.102 In Bellof ’s short film Glass House (2014), an audio-visual walk through Eisenstein’s notes for the never-made-film, she demonstrates this opacity by projecting moving images onto the glass.103 The occupants become trapped within a cave of cinematic shadows and deceptions, divorced from the reality of the people surrounding them: “all live as though there are real walls.”104 As such, though the Glass House may be transparent, the relationships within it are not. This is emphasised by the only opaque part of the construction being the doors105 — the point of interface between the rooms. Unlike Benjamin’s ‘glass house,’ in Eisenstein’s construction all the doors are closed and opaque — there is no ‘virtue’ in this Glass House. || In its transparency, Eisenstein’s Glass House dissolves the spatial thickness of the nook, unfolding the concentrating corner. Here the Glass House inverts the half box which facilitates intimacy through concealment, instead creating opacity and obscurity through transparency. Rather than the known invisibilities that faciliate memory in Lampedusa’s cornered palace, The Glass House is an assem-

Jay Leyda and Zina Voynow, Eisenstein at Work (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 36. 95

Benjamin, “Surrealism: the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentisa,” trans. Edmond Jephcott, New Left Review 108 (1978): 49. 97 ibid., 49-50. 96

ibid., 49.

Bulgakowa, “Eisenstein , the Glass House and the Spherical Book: from the Comedy of the Eye to the Drama of Enlightenment.” 100 ibid. 99

Ivor Montagu, With Eisenstein in Hollywood, 102. 101

102

Zoe Beloff, “Glass House.”

103

ibid.

104

Leyda and Voynow, Eisenstein at Work, 36.

105

Leyda and Voynow, Eisenstein at Work, 36.

level

mental nake

blage of unknown visibilities; all the rooms are visible, but people do not really know each other: they see but “do not see.”106 They forget how to see. || This dialectic of revealing and concealing develops further. In earlier versions of the script, only the camera can see what happens in every room.107 As the script mutates with the emergence of the three characters, Eisenstein endows the Poet with the “gift of sight.”108 She109 uses her combined gifts of sight and prophetic speech to open the eyes of the inhabitants. They begin to ‘see’ each other — however the result is that silent moral deception turns to discordant moral cacophony as people realise the lies they have been living with: “a series of crimes take place.”110 Within this cacophony of atrocities is the formation of the nudiste associatione, which Eisenstein juxtaposes with the tailor faction. These seamstresses rise up against the nudistes, causing raucous discord, leading to the house’s ultimate destruction by the Robot.111 The uncovering of nakedness and transparency is here placed in a destructive dialectic with the covering that is clothing and concealing — a battle of nooked versus naked. || This spatial nakedness of the Glass House demolishes the nooked Oneiric House, dissolving both concentration and verticality. Seeing as it is corners that facilitate concentration, it follows that a house with no corners cannot be compressive. The genius of a thick house such as Soane’s is that it purports to compress all of history into its corners, but not to tell it. The Glass House on the other hand compresses nothing and reduces everything: “all are stripped bare.”112 Verticality is similarly stripped away. Although the Glass House is a high-rise, it is not height which facilitates verticality, but, as we have seen, the spatial simultaneity of attic and cellar. Hence, with no attic and no cellar — not even the figurative ones we encounter in Le Corbusier’s houses — we cannot have verticality. The most that is achieved is that the occupants find themselves on a ground floor 30 storeys up; a stacking of horizontalities creating an illusion of verticality. || Just as a spatial nook will necessarily be precluded by a mental nook in the design process, as in Le Corbusier’s nookish designs, so a spatial nake is always the result of unfolded thought. When the obstacles and corners of the mental nook that give a thought process depth and intensity are contracted, thick thoughts give way to pure succession and mathematic calculation, and representation loses its mimetic, poetic capacity to “construe a symbolic order”113 beyond the order of efficiency. We see this in The Glass House as it is revealed that the Robot

106

ibid.

107

Beloff, “Glass House.”

ibid. Interpretations of the Poet’s gender vary; Beloff’s interpretation in her short filmThe Glass House presents the Poet as a ‘she’ — she may be combining the character of the Poet (or psychopath, as the character is also referred to in Eisenstein’s notes) with the character of the ‘respectable lady’ that emerges and unveils the deception of a cheating wife (See Leyda and Voynow, Eisenstein at Work, 27). Other translation of Eisenstein’s notes cite the Poet/Psychopath as a ‘him.’ Still, Beloff’s use of Poet as ‘she’ seems fitting given that the metaphorical divorce of poet and architect that emerges along with their respective death and disfiguration — leaving only the neutralised, un-gendered Robot. 110 Leyda and Voynow, Eisenstein at Work, 37. 108 109

111

112

Beloff, “Glass House.”

Leyda and Voynow, Eisenstein at Work, 36.

Perez-Gomez, “Questions of Representation: the Poetic Origin of Architecture,” 219.6. 113

is really the Architect in disguise, and furthermore with the death of the poet. This double tragedy murders the mental nook, killing the imagination to leave only the mental nake of pure calculation. Eisenstein echoes this in his notes for the Script, calling the Glass House “the reproduction not of image but of process.”114 This notion is synonymous with Deleuze’s “societies of control.” Writing in 1992, Deleuze observed that society was moving from a “analogical mode” towards a “numerical mode” of operation. The analogical mode is that of Foucault’s disciplinary society, in which individuals move within a mass from one institution to the other, each realm an analogical image imitating a larger societal model115 — the reproduction of image. In the numerical mode however, there are no individuals and no mass — there is only “continuous deformation,” nodes of data within a constantly fluctuating process116 — Eisenstein’s reproduction of process. Here the nooks between different institutions of “analogical societies” are stripped away to (de-)form society as a continuously deforming horizontal strata. The cranny collapses; the Robot reigns. || We see this collapsed cranny of societies of control in contemporary architectural representation, eliciting the emergence of the mental nake. Pérez-Gómez notes that the obsession with efficiency has the danger of reducing representation to “a systematic representation that leaves little place for the invisible to emerge in the process of translation:”117 representation becomes naked of nooks, as our known invisibilities dissolve into unknown invisibilities. This is especially apparent with the introduction of Building Information Modelling (BIM) systems, which contract the mental nooks created by navigating between different modes and mediums of representation (sketching, drawing, detailing, modelling, conversing). Instead: a single platform of data and virtual models, where multiple users can contribute within a ‘collaborative’ process; a transparent system of constant deformation which echoes the Glass House as a ‘society of control.’ || These Glass Houses subvert the nature of subjects and objects. Eisenstein intended to explore this subversion by exploiting the transparency of glass and using the cinematic technique of stereoscopy to place actions and the reactions of people in the same image.118 We see this dissolution of subject and object in transparent societies of control. Firstly, the loss of the individual means that subject is deformed to superject.119 These superjects are not nooks on the move — the vivid, active, becoming imagines in the loci of memory theatres. Rather they are dislocat-

114

Beloff, “Glass House.”

Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October Vol. 59 (Winter, 1992), 3-7. 115

116

ibid.

Perez-Gomez, “Questions of Representation: the Poetic Origin of Architecture,” 223. 117

Leyda and Voynow “Introduction,” in Eisenstein at Work, xii. 118

David Savat, “Deleuze’s Objectile: From Discipline to Modulation” from David Suvat and Mark Poster, Deleuze and New Technology, (Edinburgh Scholarship Online: March 2012), accessed December 16th 2017, DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748633364.001.0001, 9-12. 119

ed “dividuals,” nodes of control within a never ending, continuous process.120 Such is the fate of a user in a BIM system — the individual is destroyed in the name of ‘collaboration.’ Yet, as in The Glass House, rejecting the mimetic power of poetry causes a reduction of the mathematical order that was originally sought. In BIM, real collaboration is destroyed, reduced to ‘model share’ e-mail requests over real conversations. The programme user becomes as an inhabitant in The Glass House, trapped in a cave of screened projections: “all live as though there are real walls.”121 || Objects undergo a similar deformation, becoming objectiles.122 These are not the crafted caskets or “beautiful objects”123 of Bachelard’s Oneiric House or Soane’s Museum that would be imaginatively ‘carried on’ with the introduction of a Poet on the scene. Rather, they are as Aristotelean “generic objects”124 engaged in the constant deformation solicited by the horizontality of pure process — a term which, intriguingly, BIM programmes such as Revit have adopted for their built in design components. These objects give the virtual model the appearance of completeness; rather than the lines of a crafted drawing which have the capacity to become something else, these objects are already walls, already windows, already doors. They do not want to become something else, making these objects decidedly opaque. Eisenstein invokes these objectiles by trapping opaque objects in the “weightlessness”125 of glass, noting to himself: “do not forget the compositional power of carpets thrown on the glass floor!”126 This not-becoming soon becomes un-becoming. A systematic process involving multiple ‘users’ with no nooks between representational media means that the virtual model is continuously being edited —a constant cause of frustration in practice. This echoes the constant deformation of Deleuzian objectiles, and is the categoric reversal of poetic transformation. || Just as the measure-driven approach of Renaissance architects sought to atone for the geographical-mental nooking of the architect from the site, BIM attempts to reconcile the architect with the site by using the efficiency of data driven, mathematic process to construct a virtual site; such that the computer houses all the information you might need about the location of a project. Site is reduced to screen. On the other hand you have architects like Le Corbusier. Rather than attempting to be reconciled with the site via reductive measures, he revelled in this abstraction; he dwelled in the mental nook. Colomina notes for instance that his Maison Petite was not even conceived with a

Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 5. 120

121

Leyda and Voynow, Eisenstein at Work, 36.

Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 19. 123 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 107. 122

Mario Carpo, “The Craftsman and the Curator”, Perspecta Vol. 44 (2011), 90. 124

125

Leyda and Voynow, Eisenstein at Work, 37.

126

Ibid.

level

temporal nake

specific site in mind, but rather a specific sight127 — and actually two sights: the view of the lakes and the mountains his mother would see from the horizontal window, and the view of the street from the nooklet in the corner of the garden - there so the dog could bark at the postman as he approached the house.128 He used the obstacle of the mental nook as a means for creativity, utilising the mathesis of industrial and efficient process to create liveable ‘machines for living’, whilst also using the mimesis facilitated by mental nooks to create houses “worth living in.” || Le Corbusier’s drawings are generative drawings, rooms for becoming which house ideas. The sections cut directly from a virtual BIM model are deformative drawings, a result of a naking of the nook by way of mathematic reduction, rather than intensifying it by mimetic compression. As we have previously said, it is corners that facilitate concentration, hence by deleting the corner from the design process, representation loses its capacity for thickness - its capacity to compress a cosmos of ordered simultaneities. As such, slicing sections through virtual models is deemed sufficient for its efficiency. We are subsequently confined to the ground floor of representation, as the nooked mutations of our ‘marginal grotesques’ are erased in the name of profit margins - profane illumination at its finest. || The illusion of verticality solicited by the spatial nake also applies to temporality, such that the collapse of the cranny occurring in mental naking also nakes the temporal nook. The poetic instant is incarcerated, leading to a jarring insanity and ultimately to suicide. Temporality is thereby unfolded, un-thickened, stripped naked. This unfolding occurs within the narrative of the three characters. Each character effectively enacts one of the folds of Heidegger’s threefold present. The Poet enacts historicity, the cellar of memory; she uses the repository of language to invent unfinished images; caskets which might be ‘carried on’ by someone else. She has the “gift of sight,”129 as well as the gift of spoken word, making her not only poet but prophet — recalling Eisenstein’s influence from Metropolis, given than Lang’s character of Maria also acts as a kind of prophet. The Architect, creator of the Glass House, is the attic of temporality - the realm of becoming. This recalls the way architects represent what has not yet been built, constructing the future into ‘well constructed thoughts.’ The Robot, “perfect citizen of the new civilisation,”130 personifies Heidegger’s within-timeness — the everyday successive time that passes through the ground floor of Bachelard’s Oneiric House. The

Beatriz Colominia, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992) 114119. 127

The former sight is noted by Colomina in “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,” — see ibid. The latter sight was uncovered to me by my tutor Dr. Dorian Wiszniewski pointed out this nooklet in one of our illuminating/obscure conversations, October 26, 2017. 128

129

Beloff, “Glass House.”

130

Beloff, “Glass House.”

discordant relationships between these three characters unfolds the three-fold present, obliterating the cosmic order of the instant to leave a temporal nake which echoes with the sound of its own cacophony. || Following its destruction of the house, the Robot reveals itself as the Architect in disguise.131 Here the fold of temporality is flattened as the imagination of the attic is subjected to the pure calculation of the ground floor. The ‘staircase’ of imagination is replaced with the elevator of efficiency; the iterative loop between temporality and historicity is broken. Here the architect undergoes a disfiguration wholly antithetical to the transfiguration solicited by the ancient memory theatres. There are no rooms for becoming in a Glass House — only for becoming less. So divorced from the Architect, the Poet cannot function, becoming more and more insecure: “the more securely [memories] are fixed in space, the sounder they are”132 — for here there are no nooks, no loci, in which our Poet or her imagines agentes can be fixed. She is dislocated and therefore cannot be ‘sound.’ She goes insane. This Poet knew the truth of the Don Fabrizio’s statement: “a house of which one knows all the rooms is not worth living in.”133 The only one besides the camera who could see, and therefore know, all the rooms — the only logical conclusion for our Poet is death: she commits suicide.134 || The Glass House attempts to replace the immensity of the vertical instant with the massiveness solicited by horizontal, transparent process. Rather than Bachelard’s” “miniature is one of the refuges of greatness,”135 we have ‘massive as the refuge of process.’ We see this murder of the miniature enacted in the glass houses of Norman Foster for example. Being fascinated by the inner workings of machinery and by infrastructure, Foster’s architecture is founded on the same themes of transparency and process we see in The Glass House. His buildings tend towards the massive: “obviously, it’s human nature. We’re all interested in the tallest, the longest, the biggest.”136 We see this collapse of the intimate cranny in Foster’s Maack Schreiter House (Lüdenscheid, Germany, 1994). Although noticeably gargantuan in plan (dis-figure 1, refer to section 3) the street elevation (dis-fig. 2) is more deceptive, appearing to modestly rise but one storey. The section (dis-fig. 3) reveals this glass house to have multiple storeys — yet for all the stairs, we never really leave the ground floor. This is the same stacking of horizontalities we find in Eisenstein’s Glass House. Its excavation of the the hill implies a cellar — yet here the slope of the hill means that emerging from this ‘cel-

131

ibid.

132

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 31.

133

Lampedusa, The Leopard, 126.

134 Another effect of this ‘breaking of the loop’ we see in the divorce of Architect from Poet is a gendered neutralisation, something that Bellof may be alluding to by making the Poet a woman and the Architect a man. Bachelard purports that “the mystery of poetry is androgynous” - this poetic androgyneity dwells between the dialectic of feminine and masculine — and therefore in the simultaneity of attic and cellar. The neutralisation we see in the Glass House however is wholly different to poetic ‘androgyneity.’ Instead of dwelling in their polarity, attic and cellar are flattened. This is even more intriguing given that Bachelard, being French, is operating within linguistic schemata which, unlike English, incorporate masculinity and femininity into words themselves. In light of this, it is unsurprising that ‘the attic’ (Architect) is a masculine noun, le grenier, while ‘the cellar’ (Poet) is feminine: la cave. The implications of this observation are out of the scope of this paper, however, given the prophetic nature of the rest of the film in relation to current culture, it is possible to speculate the extent to which this has occurred in modern 135 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 174.

Marc-Christoph Wagner, “Norman Foster Interview: Striving for Simplicity,” Louisiana Channel Video (June 1 2015), 40:40, accessed December 17th 2017, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=hJNxgv9Rak0. 136

lar’ is to emerge into the garden; we remain on the ground floor. Likewise, from this lower-ground floor, the upper storey (dis-fig. 4) — a welllit space complete with a glass desk and iconic angle poise lamp — suggests an attic, a place where ideas and imagination flourish; where an architect might construct a model as in Soane’s house. Yet here the Architect is decidedly absent. There are neither secrets nor dreams here. We cannot even imagine these static spaces are occupied, or have ever been occupied, or ever will be occupied. This ‘attic’ too is a ground floor, actually opening out onto the street. This is not the poetic simultaneity of attic, cellar and ground floor that we see in the corners of Le Corbusier’s Maison Petite, but rather a ground floor posing as the attic and cellar that its horizontality dismantled and obliterated, respectively. These pretend-attics and cellar illusions are too immaculately static to take the motion and mess of a becoming human being — to introduce such incompleteness would seem irreverent. Colomina notes that by inhabiting photographs of Corbusier’s houses we become detectives collecting “the traces of his existence,”137 where in Loos’ houses, we are staking out a crime about to happen.138 In Fosters’s houses, however, the very act of inhabiting is a crime. || We noted earlier that the temporal nook acts as an Oneiric House in that it has the capacity to ‘concentrate a cosmos’ through the order of its vertical simultaneities. By unfolding the three-fold, the Glass House rejects this order, resulting in chaos and cacophony. Here the ordered polyphony of simultaneity is distinct from the chaos of cacophony: rather than an ordered scattering of instants, cacophony presents a chaotic shattering of instants; an act of discord which, in destroying vertical time, also disrupts the order of succession: the Robot destroys his own house. The Maack Schreiter House demonstrates this same jarring chaos. Such a statement seems at first confusing when initially observing the photographs — the kitchen and ‘living’ spaces (dis-fig. 5) appear very much in order, chairs perfectly arranged around a inordinately massive designer table. But then our attention is stolen by a child in yellow. This nooklet-on-the-move is a disturbing irregularity in a regulated world, a lost imagine agente from our Memory Theatres, active, human and vivid. Here he is trapped in the Forgetting Cinema of a glass house. The effect of this disturbance is the same dissonance of Eisenstein’s Glass House. The result on the viewer is something uncanny the same madness of the Poet following the cacophony caused when

Colomina, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeirism,” 100. 137

138

ibid.

she opens the eyes of the occupants. Foster purports that “the history of humanity coming out of the cave into a dwelling is a story of technology, of innovation.”139 And yet, to divorce the mathesis of the ground floor from the mimesis of the attic-cellar is to recede back into the cave, as we see in the Glass House - the walls become as screens; as the boy in yellow attempts to move out of the room through one screen, his reflection is caught by another. Each is trapped in a cave of projections, seeing “only the shadows,”140 while introducing a poetic word into such an ecology of glass only discordantly disturbs the house. The subversion of the iterative loop, the unfolding of the three-fold present — the result is insanity.

Marc-Christoph Wagner, “Norman Foster Interview: Striving for Simplicity.” 139

See translation / transcription of Eisenstein’s notes in Leyda and Voynow, “Introduction,” Eisenstein at Work, viii. 140

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hr s h sa r a h 4 h h D L O URACKET D hu RACKET u b bLuO U raucou

sness

b bbhauunb gg eErha aan c rr eTb g an Rg rsh b b n a T b u s A b L h C hg cad s c oepoati r hfeoon a nm h yEoaO n d o e m in g ti R fe mL g o n bang L U D c in eran T m g C LCA NuA pcTorouapd irs tohu r brarn ci en GOU C Li ARNm o ur aa uajrm busbrh a o cAlNsat uGGr bOcraUlh C Ld bD R n c e L OuU O U R t l umLrohtiO uoll tucm a bm a lou nu U olt D o mc t h bang eran a g u b sliphh d e a fca on eco yb u b r n u a o b u dcilsb e n m a g t p u h u b b ur b a nrco e a h rUgsD agLiour h h u ll a b abclam rAnRACKET nCrO lo oL

auditory nake

w o r i

c Ch LANG u b bO UuaRh ch om p hu o nlt y brasrhcdtsaiu h s t ha rsh L ltm Duullttu r b Ca nLc e mOuU

r a UhD a rja u cr oa uu scno eusssn e s s L Os

n N nU oRACKET o ti raem gR c o m mRACKET parjnd g emrGaO niu braon

tubangtteran uutmgu mg uA N GlO UtR LbOaU D b e l a agu rd i s tnuoriseb aU D r j ur a m o g o n la c nuc emult c l gi n t clam our n h g r C s g r L i ha a rsh An r O h NO RACKET ra L GOU i tin U D r URm naiL r j o RACKET Dult r o c m g u a n m t r o r c L O U D r r e RACKET gs ti o n b j c naiu RACKET a a b pa jnd a em a on b j o e h m rdaceoasrmfermshnahuh lU D t l ctou u sE in n eRs u s L g m h u O n T o c ti b T o a u A m L h b m C b hu cbouu br a hu h L Ar LCa O UshD N n c a c oupp chcaoarcnco oyopphhoornnyry i L O

rb bobw s

bRACKET cbburaba gR u b nU e rGaO h n gs RACKET h e r ad u c oaufe TER s nne in s s g CC L A T haurbtsbuh huLuAlNtbGbOu UR r s h m h u b R arsh bU D L OmcUamcD EO h T T A L C n L o ti o ophonyL ha co Otu tm t h u bCbLuA T T E Rtum U lm lth u D l u u t u s r a h b lstp h hb ctau caoacnL hualtrtush phhooU che nrc ogb nnyyD tum la um ia mult lcoyopO

tumc rRra s h ulthlntugrbcs tutm a ch om pb hu b oe a nlt yl a m i b h u t u c a c o pu r b h o n d y r i s t RACKET ule s s ntguscrorbda n c e pa jnd nayauem m c oon u siun m cacocphtoru r i di a c o p hroRACKET na y r h s g a L D h RACKET e ll s sa b a lo o c r i nrja u c oguOshnuU AT T r iu m RACKET C LCAL aduEem N G pa jnd ec oaon aR OrU ufe s nne in ssg tu

eg nign RACKET a brrarh s sh hgar ha jjR hlin u a fe aadAerC n l aTba KE n g rsh l

w LrhO ULD o c r s r a h L O U Da s hO U D ran

pa nd em on b aiunmg eoroa

d e a fe n n in g c o m m o tido ea th

tragedy

level The forgetting theatre of the Glass

House, neutralises the memory theatre in every niche. In both places, we see the “superiority of sight.”141 The memory theatre relies on sight visual in its use of grotesque imagines to nake remember words. This is the gaze that simultaneously looks back and looks forward; at once recessing and emerging. The forgetting cinema of Eisenstein’s Glass House however, having rejected both historicity and temporality, leaves the visual nooks that are the inhabitants totally dislocated. The inhabitants become as ecologically barren visual nakes, operating under the non-gaze solicited by Deleuze’s society of control as a destruction of the individual. || Eisenstein initially intended the film to be a “comedy of and for the eye,”142 with the camera having the capacity to see into every room, every other inhabitant being blind to their own moral opacities as well as the numerous atrocities surrounding them. He intended it be farcical, “a look at America through walls,”143 selecting immoralities from those most common in American hollywood society and exaggerating them: “American seen through Hollywood clichés.”144 Here we can recall Aristotle: “Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.” Hence, with the introduction of the Poet the one with the “gift of sight,”146 the plot evolves into “nightmarish, grotesque tragedy.”147 From the camera to the human, in changing the protagonist to the Poet, Eisenstein humanises the plot in a similar fashion to the unknown author of the Ad Herrenium humanising the art of memory by purporting the use of imagines agentes over simple imagines. Yet these images are not the becoming nooks on the move that we see in the imagines agentes of the memory theatres. In this forgetting cinema, there is not transfiguration - only Deleuzian deformation. As our boy in his lurid yellow football shirt appears as lost in the bleak, sterile greyness of the Maack Schreiter house, the imagine agente suffers an uncanny dislocation from which there can be no return — a definitive departure: suicide. || This tragic grotesqueness of the visual nake is wholly different from the epic grotesqueness of the visual nook that we see in illuminated manuscripts and memory theatres. Rather than facilitating a becoming of oneself, a transfigurative finding of oneself through the iterative facet of recall and return, this tragic grotesque is as a loss of oneself. This definitive departure is the alternative ending to Homer’s Odysseus: || “Ulysses is for me the prototype of man, not only modern man, but the man of the future as well, because he represents the type of the “trapped” voyager. His voyage was a voyage

141

Yates, The Art of Memory, 42-43.

142

Beloff, “Glass House.”

143

Beloff, “Glass House.”

144

ibid.

S.H. Bucher, trans. The Poetics of Aristotle, 13. 145

146 147

Bellof, “Glass House.” Leyda and Voynow, Eisenstein at Work, 36.

toward the center, towards Ithica, which is to say, towards himself. […] I think that the myth of Ulysses is very important for us. We will all be a little like Ulysses, for in searching, in hoping to arrive, and finally, without a doubt, in finding once again the homeland, the hearth, we re-discover ourselves. But, as in the Labyrinth, in every questionable turn, one risks ‘losing oneself.’”148|| The Glass House will never be an epic, oneiric ‘house for the dreamer,’ a nook for the one who left and returned. At most it is a nake for the “trapped voyager” who lost themselves on their journey, the one who did not, “without a doubt” return: the one who forgot. A tragic house of nightmares.

Mircea Eliade, The Trial of the Labyrinth, cited by Paul Ricoeur in “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative.” 31. 148

the roof a speculative nook of script number 2 [the Poet emerges from the stairwell to the roof (the only stairwell in the building; elevators.) Utter despair. Stage make-up smeared down face — argument with the Architect between acts during the cabaret. She wears a tutu. From two floors below: sounds of discordant music. Violins, synthesisers, pianos.] THE POET: [eyes down, observing the cabaret through the glass roof] The tailor’s lover lives a lie, That nudiste chief whose naked guise Turned half-box to unfolded rhyme — For this house never is at home. Never do they see each other roam Across the bleakish window panes. Only ever to cause pain Only ever to deceive, or blame, Would they look the other in the eye. Woe to me who opened their eyes! Who showed their naking for disguise. Such chaos should be no surprise. — For nobody can build a nest Out of glass, out of un-thickness. [turning] As such, I go out in loneliness. Would but they still their fingers on those pianos, I say. “The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite, That ever I was born to set it right!” So, alone, to die I go. For the surest way this shackled time to rupture is to hope That in my grave these fickle sounds with silence should elope. [She jumps.] [Cut to shot from above, lingering; audience to see only her shoes. “She sees no-one but all eyes are on her.” Audience of the cabaret / the rest of the cast in the tragedy through the glass roof; they have been watching the whole episode, the final act in the cacophonous cabaret. The music from has now halted.“Final view of the gloomy heartlessness of the building. A nightmare of smooth glass.” Finally — the silence the Poet had been searching for.] [CUT.]

Small note: All images throughout this ‘Ground Floor’, except those of The Maack Schreiter House, cited separately, are from Zoe Bellof ’s short film “Glass House;” Beloff uses vertical aspect ratio of 9:16 — the same as this paper.

3 | cellar

different kinds of measure

The forthcoming section is an incomplete repositry; an inventory of items for future inventions, including: [one further nook of thought] [placid nooklets of thought] [fostered dis-figures] [index of some of the words used in this dissertation] [montage of possible cinematic nooks] [a comparison of sketches and stills] [an apology] [index of the books inhabited in the course of this work] [index of shell specimens / hyper-niches] [index of architectural nooks appearing in this text] [medical diagnosis of the dissertation] [a proposal] [speculative nook of script number 3] [appended literature review]

nook NOUN

a certain measure of land149

How can the nook be a measure? It is so tempting to think the nook immeasurable - it is so obscure, neither real or unreal - how could it possibly be measured? But only those who have confined themselves to a single kind of measure could say such a thing. Every nook is an Oneric House, and every Oneiric House is poetry. And poetry, according to Heidegger, is a measure: “An upward-looking measure-taking of the dimension, in which the sky belongs just as much as the earth.”150 In the nook, we measure upwards. We measure against something other than ourselves or the people around us. This vertical measure “gauges the between, which brings the two, heaven and earth, to one another. This measure-taking has its own metron, and thus its own metric.”151 A different kind of measure. Yet neither measure is an inherent evil - neither the matheis of the Robot nor the mimesis of the Poet. But architecture suffers when it chooses one over the other. Buildings which chose only mimesis have no ‘ground floor’ - they cannot be in the world, and so they collapse - these are the numerous leaky concepts that litter our landscapes. But buildings that choose only mathesis have neither attic nor cellar. They have no nooks, no silent spaces - for nooks resist rationalisation. Silence cannot be economised, and yet, to reject silence entirely is to cause cacophony, and ultimately insanity. The former spaces are not liveable, and these latter spaces are not ‘worth living in.’ There is a knack to achieving both things. So yes, the nook is a certain measure of land - a very ‘certain’ one for being so particular.

Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, “Nook,” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 203. 150 Heidegger, “Poetically Man Dwells” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 221. 151 ibid. 149

One could say, a measure taking in which the shoreline walker glances up from the dirty, sandy, earthy snail to the delicate, airy, sky-fairing bird constructing their nest. In this glance, which is the closest thing to instanteneity produced by a human, the nest and shell become nearly simultaneous - satisfying given their etymological crossover in the french reflexive verb nigier: ‘to install oncself.’

“some animals are more equal than others”

— George Orwell, Animal Farm.

placid nooklet of thought number 1. It follows that: some species of nook are more equal than others not all species of nake are equally evil this is an unfinished thought

placid nooklet of thought number 2.

The first section focuses largely on theatrical nooks, with the Glass House, as a cinematic nook, presenting an antithesis to the theatrical nook. However, given the early use of the word nook as “fournooked” meaning “four cornered,”1 it is possible to see not only folding, but also framing and cutting as a kind of nooking. Such notions are inherent to film composition, especially in regards to Eisenstein’s technique of montage where we see the same simultaneities, poetic juxtaposition and polyphonic constrction that occurs within a nooking matrix.2 Colomina notes that Le Corbusier composes architecture as though it were a film, using the technique of framing to create the house as a camera.3 It thus becomes unsurprising that Eisenstein and Le Corbusier shared an affinity, with Corbusier declaring “I am thinking the way Eisenstein is thinking when he creates movies.”4

montage of possible cinematic nooks: 1 - Villa Roche, Le Corbusier, Paris, France,1925.

source: https://www.archdaily.com/151365/ ad-classics-villa-roche-le-corbusier accessed 8th December 2017

2 - Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier, Poissy, France, 1928.

Photo: Paul kozlowski, (C) Foundation Le Corbusier Source: http://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr/corbuweb/morpheus.aspx?sysName=redirect64&sysLanguage=en-en&IrisObjectId=7380&sysParentId=64

Thus, we have to begin to consider a cinematic nook. 3 - Farnsworth House, Mies Van Der Rohe, Illinois, USA, 1953.

Soure: https://architoss.wordpress.com/ miscellaneous/essays/a-study-of-mies-van-derrohes-farnsworth-house/. Accessed

4 - Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier, Poissy, France, 1928.

Photo: Paul kozlowski, (C) Foundation Le Corbusier Source: http://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr/corbuweb/morpheus.aspx?sysName=redirect64&sysLanguage=en-en&IrisObjectId=7380&sysParentId=64

5 - Barcelona Pavillion, Mies Van Der Rohe, Barcelona, Spain,1929.

Photo: (C) Gili Merin source: https://www.archdaily.com/109135/ ad-classics-barcelona-pavilion-mies-van-der-rohe

6 - Petite maison au bord du lac Léman, Le Corbusier, Corseux, Switzerland,1923. Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, “Nook,” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 203. 2 For the polyphony and simultaneity of Montage, see “Introduction” in Leyda and Voynow, Eisenstein at Work, xi. 3 Colomina, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,” 98-120. 4 V. S. [Sergei Eisenstein], “Novaia klientura gospodina Korb’zu’e’,” Sovjetskii ekran, No 46 (1928), 5. 1

Photo: Olivier Martin-Gambier, (C) Foundation Le Corbusier http://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr/corbuweb/ morpheus.aspx?sysId=13&IrisObjectId=4445&sysLanguage=en-en&itemPos=72&itemCount=78&sysParentId=64&sysParentName=

placid nooklet of thought number 3. My favourite part of Aristotle’s Poetics is the translator’s list of abbreviations, an index of symbols used to account for various gaps in the translated text. Here is a similar index I invented; different kinds of measures of textual silence; different ways of “inciting blanks” throughout this work: .

Periodic rupture

Periodic pause; half-rupture

Hyphen / khora

—

Em dash / Triple hypen (I like this one)

Epic rupture

[ ]

Confinement; tragedy

( )

A step aside

* *

Lacuna; an unfilled gap in the text; cavity

127

An upward glance, a footnote below; an attic and a cellar Marginalia; conjectural supplement to the text; living appendix

Empty shell; temporal loop; wrinkle in textual-time; hyper-niche space

index of some of the words used in this dissertation

american 44 bark 40 barren 36, 34, 71 bittersweetness 12 bleakish 46 blindness 36

lover 36, 46 lurid 46 margins 3, 4, 5, 28, 29, 40 mathesis 19, 40, 43, 50 mess 16, 42 [and every page on nooks]

cacophony 37, 41, 42, 43, 50 cellaret 16, 28 columbaria 26 comedy 44 concentrating 28, 36 conglomeration 16 cornered 16, 18, 21, 28, 36, 60 crannied 22, 23 crannies 18, 35, 53 cranny 8, 9, 18, 21, 23, 24, 32, 38, 40. 41, 73, 75 cranny-chapel 24 delusion 35 dreamers 7, 22 dysfunctional 35 elope 46 epic 3, 10, 29, 32, 33, 44, 45, 52 eradicates 35 excavating 15 fickle 46 fiction 35 gargantuan 41 gargoyles 29, 69 garret 7, 16, 27 greyness 44 grotesque 12, 15, 16, 18, 21, 23, 26, 27, 28, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 44 half-box 15, 17, 46 herself 10 homerically 10, 33 house [un-listable] illumination 4, 36, 40, illusion 35, 37, 40 incarcerated 40 innumerable 29 interlocutors 36

mimesis 19, 43, 50 miniature 11, 41 mneumotechnic 26 mollusc 5, 29, 30 monster 5, 29, 32 murder 38, 41, 57 nake [text is rife, un-listable] naked 6, 35, 37, 38, 40, 46, 73, 75 nakedness 37, 75 nakes 5, 8, 36, 40, 44 naking 35, 40, 46, 74 necropolises 26 neutralises 44 niche [text is rife; un-listable] nightmare 45, 46 nook [text is rife; un-listable] nook-house 13, 17 nook-less 35 nook-noun 15 nook-verb 15 nooked 18, 28, 37, 40, 60, 69 nooking [the text a nooking] nookish 27, 29, 37 nookishness 29 nooklet 40, 42, 49, 51, 52, 59, 60, 62 nooklet-on-the-move 42, 53 nooks [text is rife; un-listable] nooks-within-nooks 15 notch 18, 23 obliterating 41 obsession 19, 38 oneiric 11, 12, 15, 22, 27, 29, 32, 37, 39, 40, 42, 45, 50 pepper 5, 20 phoenix 23 pianos 46 placid 49, 51, 52, 60, 62 quarrels 12

khora 12, 13, 15, 20, 52 knack 16, 50

receptacle 12, 15 reflexive 10, 29, 33, 50 reversibility 16, 27 rife 16, 53, 71, 75

labyrinth 19, 45 lexicon 26 loneliness 46 love 11, 35 lovely 10

secrets 15, 17, 23, 42 shell [text is rife; un-listable] simultaneities 21, 22, 42, 53 snail-bird 28

species [text is rife, un-listable] specific 40, 71 specimen 28, 32, 68 specimens 5, 9, 18, 49, 66, stratified 24, 35 subject 38, 41 subterranean 26 suicide 8, 40, 41, 44 superject 38 tragedy 6, 33, 35, 38, 42, 44, 46, 52 transfiguration 29, 30 transformation 39 translucent 16 transparent 35, 36, 38, 41 transverse 8, 9, 18 traversed 8 truncated 4, 23, 28 truth 11, 41 un-thickness 46 uncanny 42, 44 unknowable 14 upward 4, 22, 35, 50, 52 voyage 44, 45 watercourse 32 yellow 42, 44 zumthor 23, 24, 32, 54

index of nook assemblages in plan

[Le Corbusier, Maison Petite, 1923.]

[Peter Zumthor, Vals de Therme, Switzerland, 1996.]

[Studiolo of Frederico di Montefeltro, Italy, 14741483.]

[Le Corbusier, Sainte Marie de La Tourette, Ă&#x2030;veux, France, 1956.]

[Memory Theatre of Guillio Camilo, ca. 1500.]

[John Soaneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s House at Lincoln Inn Fields, London, 1794 - 1824.]

[Mausoleums at the Vatican Necropolis, ca. 138-161.]

[Lincoln Cathedral ca. 11851311.]

disfigure 1 | gargantuuan The Maack Schreiter House, Plan. 1994 - LĂźdenscheid, Germany (C) Foster and Partners, www.fosterandpartners.com/projects/maackschreiter-house/

disfigure 2 | a single story illusion The Maack Schreiter House, Elevation 1994 - LĂźdenscheid, Germany (C) Foster and Partners, www.fosterandpartners.com/projects/maackschreiter-house/

disfigure 3 | the murder of the basement The Maack Schreiter House, Section. 1994 - LĂźdenscheid, Germany (C) Foster and Partners, www.fosterandpartners.com/projects/maackschreiter-house/

disfigure 4 | a pretend-attic The Maack Schreiter House, Interior. 1994 - LĂźdenscheid, Germany (C) Foster and Partners, www.fosterandpartners.com/projects/maackschreiter-house/

disfigure 5 | a nooklet on the move. The Maack Schreiter House, Interior. 1994 - LĂźdenscheid, Germany (C) Foster and Partners, www.fosterandpartners.com/projects/maackschreiter-house/

the weightlessness of objects S.M. Eisenstein, sketch for the Glass House

source: notes from lecture on Glass House given by Zoe Bellof, lecture at The Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, January 2015. http://lffexperimenta2015.tumblr.com/ post/131686727008/notes-on-glass-house-by-zoe-beloff-excerpt-from-a

the poet at the glass house cabaret S.M. Eisenstein, sketch for the Glass House

the death of the psychopath / poet S.M. Eisenstein, sketch for the Glass House source: Leyda and Voynow, Eisenstein at Work, 42.

the blindness of the occupants S.M. Eisenstein, sketch for the Glass House source: Leyda and Voynow, Eisenstein at Work, 45.

catalogue of some of the furniture in Le Corbusierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s House for his Mother and her dog Nora. It is corners that facilitate concentration.

Petite maison au bord du lac LĂŠman, Le Corbusier, Corseux, Switzerland,1923.

Photos: Olivier Martin-Gambier, (C) Foundation Le Corbusier http://www.fondationlecorbusier. fr/corbuweb/morpheus.aspx?sysId=13&IrisObjectId=4445&sysLanguage=en-en&itemPos=72&itemCount=78&sysParentId=64&sysParentName=

Eisenstein reading a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses Gagri, 1928 - exploring the dangers of losing oneself. Source: Leyda and Voynow, Eisenstein at Work , 37.

“But we still have books, and they give our day-dreams countless dwelling-places. Is there one among us who has not spent romantic moments in the tower of a book he has read?”

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

placid nooklet of thought number 4. How irritating it is then, that the pages of a book must be read from top to bottom! How much more appropriate would it be if lines of text were read bottom to top — then we would really be able to inhabit books as though they were towers.

AN APOLOGY In light of this and given the construction of this dissertation, an apolgy here ensues. I apologise on behalf of the misguided ruptures in literary thinking that gave rise to the top to bottom book. For who ever entered a house from the attic? This work would make much more sense could it be read from bottom to top, inhabited like the house that it is. Yet, although this would be more-sensical, it would also have the effect of making it unreadable; we are forced to abide by the law of legibility on this one.

index of books/other nooks inhabited during the course of this work Bachelard, Gaston.The Formation of the Scientific Mind. Manchester: Clinamen, 2002. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. New York: Penguin, 2014. Bachelard, Gaston. “Poetic Instant and Metaphysical Instant.” In The Intuition of the Instant. Translated by Eileen RizoButcher, S.H. Translator, The Poetic of Aristotle. New York: Macmillan Company, 1902. Beloff, Zoe. “Glass House.” A World Redrawn video, 21:01. 2015. http://aworldredrawn.com/glass.html. Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentisa.” Translated Edmond Jephcott, 47-56. New Left Review 108 (1978). Bulgakowa, Oksana. “Eisenstein , the Glass House and the Spherical Book: from the Comedy of the Eye to the Drama of Enlightenment.” Rouge 7, 2005. Dorey, Helen. “Catalogue of the Furniture in Sir John Soane’s Museum.” Furniture History Vol. 44 (2008), 21-203, 205-248. Patron, 58-63. Northwestern University Press, 2013. Carpo, Mario. “The Craftsman and the Curator.” Perspecta Vol. 44, 2011. 86-91, 199-200. Colomina, Beatriz. “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism.” In Sexuality and Space. Edited by Beatrix Colominia, 63-130. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992. Critchley, Simon. Memory Theatre. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2014. Davies, Glenys.“Columbaria.” in Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Edited by Nancy Thomson de Grummond. Routledge, 1995. 314-15. Derrida, Jacques. “Khora” in On The Name. Edited by Ernber Hamacher and David E. Wellbury, 89-130. California: Stanford University Press, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October Vol. 59. (Winter, 1992), 3-7. Deleuze, Gilles The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. el Fakharani, Fawzi. “Semi-dome decoration in Graeco-Roman Egypt,” American Journal of Archaeology Vol. 69, No. 1 (Jan. 1965), 57-62. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. trans. John Macquerrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1962. 49-62. Heidegger, Martin, “…poetically man dwells…” in Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter, 213-229. New York: Harper and Row. 1971. Kearney, Richard. “Bachelard and the Epiphanic Instant.” in Philosophy Today SPEP Supplement, 2008. 38-45. Kirkbride, Robert. The Renaissance Studioli of Frederico da Montefeltro and the Architecture of Memory. PhD diss., McGill University, January 2002. Lampedusa, Guiseppe Tomasi di. The Leopard. London: Vintage, 2005. Lewis, Clive Staples. The Four Loves. New York: Harcort Brace, 1960. Leyda, Jay, and Voynow, Zina. Eisenstein at Work. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982. Montague, Ivor. With Eisenstein in Hollywood. Berlin: Seven Seas Books: 1968.

Pallister, James. Sacred Space: Contemporary Religious Architecture. London: Phaeton Press, 2015. Pérez-Gómez, Alberto. “Questions of Representation: the Poetic Origin of Architecture.” Architectural Research Quarterly., 9:3-4 (2005). 217-225. Plato. Timaeus. Translated by Archer Hind. London: Macmillan and Co.: 1888. Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, vol. III, trans. Peter Jowett (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011 — original version Oxford University Press, 1892), 481. Poster, Mark and Suvat, David. Deleuze and New Technology. Edinburgh Scholarship Online: March 2012. DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748633364.001.0001, 9-12. Seow, C. L. “An Exquisitely Poetic Introduction to the Psalter.” JBL 132:2. 2013. Sandler, Lucy Freeman. “The Images of Words in English Gothic Psalters.” In Studies in the Illustration of the Psalter. Edited by Brendan Cassidy and Rosemary Muir Wright. 2000. Ricoeur, Paul. “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative,” Research in Phenomenology,.Vol. 9, 1979. 169-190. Wagner, Marc-Christoph. “Norman Foster Interview: Striving for Simplicity.” Louisiana Channel Video, 40:40. June 1 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJNxgv9Rak0. Yates, Frances.The Art of Memory, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1992).

Index of architectural nooks appearing in this text Asplund, Gunnar. Own Home Casa Stênnas, 1937. [fireplace / inglenook] Camilo, Guillio. Memory Theatre, ca. 1500. [numerous loci and loculi] Le Corbusier. Apartment Beistegui, Paris, 1929-31 [staircase / steigernook] [exterior fireplace / inglenook] Le Corbusier. La Petite Maison au bord du Lac Léman (House for his mother and her dog, Nora), 1923. [dog-nook] [corner of his mother’s room] [exterior window nook] Le Corbusier. Sainte Marie de La Tourette, Éveux, France, 1956. [unlabelled room] [unlabelled room no. 1] [unlabelled room no. 2] Le Corbusier. La Villa Roche, Paris, France,1925. [cinematic nooks, window-frames] Le Corbusier. Villa Savoye, Poissy, France, 1928. [cinematic nooks, window-frames] [pilotis] [exterior window-nook] di Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi. Don Fabrizio’s Donnafugata Palace, fictitious 19th Century Italy. [unknown rooms] [unlabelled rooms] Lewis, Clive Staples. Digory’s House, fictitious 20th Century London [attic] [wood between worlds] di Montefeltro, Frederico. Studioli, Italy, 1474-1483. [Urbino Studiolo] [Gubbio Studiolo] Rohe, Mies van der. Farnsworth House, Illinois, USA, 1953. [cinematic nooks, window-frames] [pilotis] Rohe, Mies van der. Barcelona Pavillion, [cinematic nooks, window-frames] [exterior corner inhabited by imagine agente] Soane, John. House at Lincoln Inn Fields, London, 1794 - 1824. [attic / model room] [cellar] Unknown Architect, Columbarium of Livia Augusta’s Liberti, Roma, Via Appia, Early Imperial Roman. [numerous loculi / niches] Unknown Architect(s), Mausoleums in the Vatican Necropolis, ca. 138-161. [numerous nooked niches] Various Architects, Lincoln Cathedral ca. 1185-1311. [imps] [gargoyles] [numerous nooks] Zumthor, Peter. Vals de Therme, Switzerland, 1996. [aqua-nooks]

INDEX OF SHELL SPECIMENS / hyper-niches

Author’s (unfinished and incomplete) collection, accumulated on various walks up and down the shore-lines of our little Island. Here they become little ‘wrinkles in time,’ and a means of navigating the shore-lines of the various Islands of Thought investigated throughout this dissertation.

— specimen 1—

— specimen 2 —

— specimen 3 —

— specimen 4—

— specimen 5 —

— specimen 6 —

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INDEX OF MARGINALIA

PART 1: shelled and winged creatures

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INDEX OF MARGINALIA

PART 2: becoming humans

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MEDICAL DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISSERTATION

cosmosis noun

The dissertation suffers from a serious case of cosmosis. Also has suffered from appendicitis. Appendices have been removed from the body of the text but remained tethered as marginalia (with the exception of the literature review).

Invented (in both senses of the word) from ‘cosmos’ and ‘osmosis’ such that cosmosis is a disease by which ideas are gradually assimilated and concetrated into an ordered sustem of thought (a cosmos)

Dental health far from satisfactory. First section had a number of serious lacunas in the text. These cavities have been filled however care should be taken that these acetate fillings are not removed for the structural integrity of the text.

[1] movement of molecules within a solvent through a semipermeable membrance from a less-concentrated solution toa more concentrated one

Text has also suffered several ruptures (breakages, fractures). To prevent amputation (truncation, maiming) of various body parts of the text, these ruptures are held together with a woven matrix of bandages. Text remains a thing of many parts.

[2] gradual assimilation of ideas, knowledge

rupture verb

truncate verb To shorten. From Latin past participle truncare “to maim, mutilate”

To break. Originally medical useage. From Latin ruptura “the breaking (of arm or leg), fracture.

PROGNOSIS: full recovery not likely.

Unless ... poets become architects in the cities or those whom we now call architects can be truly and adequately poetic and there is a conjunction of poetry and architecture … there can be no cessation of the evil of reduction … for cities nor, I think, for the human race. — Proposal for Architect-Poets adapted from Plato’s The Republic.

speculative nook of script number 3. [The realistion of the poet. An alternative ending. Roof after argument with the Architect. Cacaphonic cabaret downstairs.] THE POET [murmuring at first as she looks out over the barren skyline] To repeat is not to recite. To repeat is not to recite. — to retrieve is to incite A Becoming. To return is to become! To recess is to emerge — To be a snail, to be a bird To be a house, to be a word. To repeat is not to recite. To inhabit a niche is to ignite My burnt out, but-forgetten past And fly away from this horizon. And yet, no wings. No means to flee these cacophonic lies. Only two feet, a muddied pair of Nikes, And a silent cloak of solitude that fits their naking not. So, there are two ways to be gone: A long walk to a very little loft Or a short jump through the very long way down. To repeat is not to recite To depart is only strife. To delete my life is surely rife With further atonalities. As such, [she turns] I choose the former The very former The form foregone The Beginning, For to build my own Beyond. This nook is on the move And she's moving out. Down this echo-grey elevator, Down, down, down I rupture these layered up lies One by one with my silent eyes. — Until I reach the one that made me less than the one I wanted to become. “Ground floor.” Says the monotone voice. "Nevermore." Replies this Poe, as she [exeunt]s from this un-seen. Not a feather left behind to trace. This Poet is gone, gone, gone from this nake Forevermore. [Cut to a lake, non-specific, where the Poet is seen dwelling in the happy solitude a corner not unlike that of my friend Le Corbusier’s Maison Petite. (He will like that.) Finally, the silent depth the Poet was seeking.]

(one further)

appendix

noun that part of the body which makes the indigestible digestible

LITERATURE REVIEW

completed Autumn 2017

literature review INTRODUCTION 0.1 Abstract Because the nook is a niche in thought, finding literature has proved an interesting task; the nook has been written around, written over, written into, and indeed many species of nooks have been wonderfully identified, invented, and occupied by philosophers, critics, poets and fictional writers alike. However little effort has been made to synthesise a definition of the nook and the related species of spaces (the cranny, the niche, the recess). The obscurity of the topic has necessitated a research corpus which is not confined only to architectural sources. As such, the search for literature has divulged into fields of poetics, phenomenology, philosophy, etymology, and studies of memory and imagination, and has also permeated other creative mediums such as poetry, fiction, theatre and cinema. 0.1 STRANDS Broadly speaking, the literature reviewed falls under two categories: nooking and naking, where ‘nooking’ literature is that which facilitates, incorporates or embodies the nook in any way, and where ‘naking’ literature is that which demonstrates, discusses or brings forth a stripping away (a making naked) of the nook. These two separate ‘plots’ of texts are connected by transverse strands of thought which are used to thematically examine the literature: spatiality of the nook/nake (obscure versus transparent, irregular versus regular) temporality of the nook/nake (duration versus instant, continuous versus discontinuous, unfolded versus folded) poetics of the nook/nake (epic versus tragic, compressive versus reductive) memory of the nook/nake (to remember versus to forget, theatre versus cinema, transfiguration versus transmutation)

— texts on nooking —

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REVIEW OF THE LITERATRE 1.1 Spatiality of the nook/nake The nook’s spatiality is its most obvious characteristic. Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space immerses us in spatial nooks, from attics to cellars, cupboards, drawers, wardrobes, nests and shells - as such Bachelard gives us a kind of pre-treatise on the nook, illustrating a number of nooks as irregular, solitary, in-between spaces. The work is a departure from his more positivist studies in The Formation of the Scientific Mind for instance, into of the spatial refuges of imagination and memory, or, a formation of the poetic mind. For Bachelard, the house is simultaneously a ‘corner of the world’ and a Universe - it is both ‘intimate’ and ‘immense’, because it contains what are effectively nooks. In addition to this poetic concentration, Bachelard gives the house verticality through the attic and cellar. Citing fictional examples from Bosco and Rilke for instance, Bachelard presents the cellar and attic as refuges for memory and imagination1. When combined with the ground floor, this gives the Vertical House a tripartite structure. As well as these human refuges, he also analyses architectures of nature - nests and shells. Whereas attics and cupboards are inherently human images, nests and shells act as ‘primal images,’ as such having the capacity to reveal the essential character of refuge, and indeed of the nook itself as a refuge for memory and imagination2. The importance of Bachelard’s work in relation to my own research into the nook is manifold. Firstly, by analysing the species of nook he outlines this provides a basis for uncovering more essential qualities of the nook. Secondly his notion that “words are little houses” which have a cellar of etymology, a ground floor of everyday use and an attic of possible uses prompts a linguistic approach to the nook. Heidegger notes in his essay “…poetically man dwells…” that man behaves as if he is “the master of language, whereas in fact language remains the master of man3.” This therefore allows language to shape the investigation. Given this, immersion in the etymology of the nook, niche, cranny and recess is a crucial strand of research, and as such The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary has become an important room in the cellar of the research into the nook that goes beyond the mere trivia of etymological obscurities. In line with this linguistic approach, Bachelard’s “word houses” also prompt a poetic approach to the nook. In the same essay, Heidegger ascertains that poetry, “which lets us dwell, is a kind of building4” - giving us full permission to place more poetic, literary nooks alongside more concrete examples. We find the nook, for instance, in Francis Ponge’s Notes Towards a Shell, a prose-poem which embodies Bachelard’s notion of shells as “transpositions of the function of inhabiting5.” Poetry can act as a nooked dwelling not only in its content but also in its form - as far back as the Greek poet Sappho, poetry reveals its nooked nature through its use of metre and absences - in-between spaces. For Heidegger this ‘meter’ is a “different kind of measure6” to empirical measure; rather than a horizontal gaze, it is as an “upward glance7.” This recalls Bachelard’s notion of verticality in the house and provides a basis for further investigation into the verticality of the nook. The importance of the poetic intensity or spatial thickness of the nook becomes acute in its absence, or in other words, by demolishing the Vertical House. Such is the case in Eisenstein’s never-made film The Glass House (1926-1930). Intrigued by Surrealist notions of transparency, Eisenstein constructs a high-rise in which all the walls and floors are totally transparent, meaning that it is possible to see into all the rooms. Rather than spatial thickness, we have spatial transparency, something which is emphasised in the plot through the formation of a nudiste association, associating nakedness with transparency as was characteristic of the surrealist movement8. Eisenstein’s critique was that in such a house, all would be ironically blind to each other; they “do not see9.” Initially only the camera sees - but as the script develops10, the character of the Poet also has the “gift of sight11”. The plot is rife with moral obscurities and deceptions which result from the transparency of

1 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Penguin, 2014), 26-93. 2 Ibid., “Nests,” 111-124, and “Shells,” 125-154. 3 Martin Heidegger, “...poetically man dwells...” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 215. 4 ibid. 5 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 156. 6 Heidegger, “...poetically man dwells...” 221. 7 Heidegger, “...poetically man dwells...” 220-221. 8 Owaka Bulgakowa, “Eisenstein, The Glass House and the Spherical Book,” Rouge 7 (2005), www.rouge.com.au/7/eisenstein.html. 9 Eisenstein, from his notes on The Glass House, cited in Jay Leyda and Zina Voynow, Eisenstein at Work (New York: Random House, 1982), 36. 10 Bulgakowa, “Eisenstein, The Glass House and the Spherical Book” 11 Zoe Bellof, “Glass House” A World Redrawn video, 21:01, 2015, http://aworldredrawn.com/glass.html.

the house, and the story quickly turns from a “comedy of and for the eye12” to a tragedy as the Poet uses her gift of sight and spoken word to open the eyes of the blind inhabitants - the result is further moral cacaphony, resulting in her insanity and ultimately her suicide. The other characters, the Robot, and the Architect, turn out to be one and the same, with only the Robot surviving following its destruction of the house. Bulgakowa’s research, drawing on primary research and compliations of Eisenstein’s notes found in Leyda and Voynow’s work is a good foundation for understanding the premise and the development of the script, especially in relation to the development of the three characters and their relation to Eisenstein’s own system of beliefs and his own life experiences. The significance of the characters in relation to the Glass House as a nook-less architecture remains to be said. Another key source is a short film by contemporary filmmaker Zoe Bellof, outlining the story behind the creation of the script as well as giving us an audiovisual walk through Eisenstein’s notes and sketches on the project. Her reading of the film is purely political, and indeed the film is typically read as a critique by a socialist of American capitalist society13. However as well as this political reading, a more poetic reading may also be be inferred which reads the Glass House as an ‘ecologically barren,’ nook-less architecture. The combination of transparency and the death of the poet are of paramount importance in this reading, as well as the relationships between the three main characters. Other writers provide nooked architectures with which we can cross examine the Glass House, for instance Lampedusa gives us with a house in which many of the rooms remain concealed and unknown - “a cause of great satisfaction to [Don Fabrizio], for he used to say that a house of which one knew every room was not worth living in14.” This notion of the ‘unknown room’ is also revealed in more concrete architectures, such as in Le Corbusier’s La Tourette, adding a material weight to the investigation. All of this provides a basis for a dialectical examination of the spatial nook as that which conceals against a kind of spatial ‘nake’ as that which reveals, raising questions on the necessity and the status of the ‘species’ spatial nooks within the architectural field - are nooks becoming extinct? Or are they merely endangered? These are niches in thought which require inhabiting. 1.2 Temporality of the nook/nake Investigations into verticality reveal not only the spatial nook, but the temporal nook. In his poignant 1939 essay “Poetic Instant and Metaphysical Instant,” Bachelard presents the ‘instant’ as the vertical alternative to the horizontality of Bergsonian duration. The instant appears throughout his works, as examined by Richard Kearney in his article “Bachelard and the Epiphanic instant,” and indeed the concept can be traced back to Bachelard’s more scientific studies, from which his most notable contribution was the idea of the epistemological rupture - the idea that to develop, thought must encounter obstacles - it must be discontinuous15. This idea of a rupture in thought that he describes is akin to the rupture in time that is the instant, a notion which ruptures the horizontality of successive time with its verticality and simultaneity16. This notion of vertical rupture was again echoed in The Poetics of Space through the Vertical House although here it is a spatial rupture. Bachelard’s research thus provides a point of departure from which we see that the nook has a mental, spatial and also a temporal dimension, but the nature of that synthesis remains to be unfolded - or rather, to be folded in a more clearly delineated fashion; other research on temporality give us precisely three ‘folds’ which help explain the nook’s temporality and how it relates to its spatiality. In “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative,” Ricoeur synthesises concepts from Heidegger and Augustine to explain the discontinuous nature of time. He uses Heidegger’s concept of the three-fold present based on historicity (being towards beginnings), within-timeness (everyday time), and temporality (being-towards death) to give time a thickness or ‘opaqueness’ which explains the non-linear, discontinuous nature of time17, a concept which, as we’ve seen, also appears in Bachelard’s work on the instant. Ricoeur purports that time acts as a matrix, a discontinuous series of interweaved connections18 - much like his writing19. This notion of a matrix resonates with Bachelard’s idea of discontinuous time as being “knit20.” According to Ricoeur, we experience time like fictional narratives - narratives operate in successive time, 12 Bellof, “Glass House.” 13 ibid. 14 Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard, (Reading: Random House, 2005), 126. (15 Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind, Manchester: Clinamen, 2002), 24-32. 16 Bachelard, “Poetic Instant and Metaphysical Instant,” in The Intuition of the Instant, trans. Eileen Rizo-Patron (Northwestern UniversityPress: 2013), 58-9. 17 Ricoeur, “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative,” Research in Phenomenology Vol. 9 (1979), 17-20. 18 ibid., 23. 19 Dowling, Ricoeur on Time and Narrative, (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), ix-xii. 20 Kearney, “Bachelard and the Epiphanic Instant,” Philosophy Today SPEP Supplement (2008), 39.

but they are also discontinuous, forming a matrix of interconnected events that go beyond (but not without) simple chronology21. This idea of ‘folded time’ can be likened to the structure of the Vertical House as a tripartite structure, each storey embodying one of the folds in a different way - the cellar enacts historicity, the ground floor within-timeness, and the attic temporality. This enables a synthesis of the nook’s temporality with its spatiality. The plot of Eisenstein’s Glass House unthickens time just as it unthickens space, demolishing the temporal nook just as it does the spatial one. A reading of The Glass House in relation to temporality is lacking among existing criticism, however by drawing on Bachelard, Heidegger and Ricoeur, it is possible to show that the subverted relationships between the three characters (Poet, Architect and Robot) serve to ‘unfold’ the three-fold present and replace it with a more Bergsonian continuous time. 1.3 Memory of the nook / nake Part of Bachelard’s focus in The Poetics of Space is the capacity of spaces like attics, cellars, cupboards and caskets (nooks) to provide ‘refuge’ for our memories. This localisation of memory he calls ‘topoanalylsis22,’ linking it to his studies on Psychoanalysis which penetrate his other works (such as The Psychoanalysis of Fire). The nature of how this occurs is not explained in depth, although other scholars have conducted extensive research into it. Most notably is Yates’ project, The Art of Memory, which traces the concept of ‘memory localisation ’ through history from its inception via the Greek Poet Simonides, who realised he could enable recall by placing images (imagines) on locations (loci). This notion was developed through numerous treatises on memory throughout history, from the Ad Herrenium to Bruno’s idea of the Renaissance Memory Theatre. It becomes apparent that both imagines and loci should be irregular (nooked) in form in order to remember23, bringing forth a striking realisation that not only is space, time and thought nooked, but images may also be nooked by being grotesque. Although there is an architectural undertone to all of this, rarely does the research relate to specific architecture, seeing as most ‘memory theatres’ were mental inscriptions. Critchley begins to elaborate on Yates’ themes in his highly intriguing memoir Memory Theatre, in which he discovers several boxes of an old professor who was clearly obsessed with the concept of Memory Theatres24. His discoveries build on Yates’ foundations, the most striking of which being his presentation of the Gothic Cathedral as Memory Theatre, the concept of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as a philosophical, mental Memory Theatre and his ideas on collective memory25. Others have researched the art of memory with more architectural foundations, such as Robert Kirkbride, whose study on two Renaissance studioli elaborates on the inventive function of memory26, providing a basis from which to relate memory to imagination in a more defined way. My own research draws on other architectural examples, looking at specific Gothic Cathedrals, the Renaissance Cabinets of Curiosity, John Soane’s House in London and Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus Field Chapel. Though all seemingly obscure references when placed alongside one another, they all have one thing in common: the nook as a refuge for memories, and an inventive facet for imagination and becoming. Again, when this refuge is demolished in The Glass House, its nature is further elaborated on. The concept of the nook as a ‘theatre’ for memory begins to be questioned, as the Glass House can be read as a cinema for forgetting. A piece by Colomina proves useful here, as in her work on the “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism” contrasts Loos’ houses as ‘theatre boxes’ against Corbusier’s houses as cinemas, a notion which calls to question the use of the nook in the home and the nature of the gaze it solicits27. A viewing of the Glass House alongside a reading of Deleuze’s “Post-Script Essay on the societies of control” is illuminating here, as it can show that, in being “a reproduction not of image but of process” the Glass House acts as Deleuze’s ‘modulatory society’ - one in which the individual does not exist28, and there are only nodes of process, something which occurs in the glass house as result of its transparency. Here the nook’s role, not only in the home, but in society as a whole is called to question. 1.4 Poetics of the nook / nake The nature of space as ‘poetic’ is often talked about in relation to the nature of poetry in general, although in relation to the different forms of poetry, there are perhaps new connections which can be made using the nook as a vehicle. For instance, 21 Ricoeur, “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative,” 23-30. 22 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 32. 23 Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge, 1966), 28-37. 24 Simon Critchley, Memory Theatre (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2014), 9-17. 25 ibid., 17, 35-37, 67. 26 Robert Kirkbride, The Renaissance Studioli of Frederico da Montefeltro and the Architecture of Memory, (Montreal: McGill University, 2002), 2. 27 Beatriz Colomina, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,” in Sexuality and Space, 28 Deleuze, “Post-Script on the Societies of Control,” 5, 7.

in Yates’ and Critchley’s research into memory theatres, we see the nook take on an Epic form in light of the nature of memory as an inventory from which to invent; the inventive facet of memory relies on recall - the notion that we must homerically return somewhere in order to become something. This is touched on by Ricoeur as he likens the fold of historicity and the realm of memory to the journey of flight and return undertaken by Homer’s The Odyssey; Odysseus returns home only to discover who he was searching for all along - himself29. This facet of Homeric return can be shown to be inherent to the nook as a refuge for memories, hence the nook takes on the form of Epic poetry. Eisenstein’s Glass House, on the other hand, takes on the form of a Comedy-turned-Tragedy; here a nook-less architecture inevitably results in the insanity and ultimately the suicide of the poet. Both forms of poetry involve the grotesque, something which is discussed by Critchley and Yates with regards to memory theatres, and thus with regard to the Epic form of poetry. But the Tragic also takes on the hyperbolic nature of the grotesque, as can be read from Eisenstein’s Glass House, which, as is demonstrated from his notes, he intended to be a farcical and ‘grotesque tragedy30.’ This notion of the grotesque forms a connection with other research into two different forms of illumination: the sacred illumination that we can find in Gothic Cathedrals and medieval manuscripts, and also the ‘profane illumination31’ of surrealism. Both forms, it can be ascertained, contain the grotesque, but in very different ways. One of the most well known manuscripts to English calligraphers, The Luttrell Psalter depicts a number of ‘marginal grotesques’ which condense and intensify meaning from the Psalms in a highly obscure fashion. Sandler conducted research into this area, which is illuminating for the purposes of ascertaining how the grotesque can capture and condense meaning, localising and remembering the text in a similar fashion to memory theatres. This form of the grotesque, as a nooked image, is as Epic poetry - it facilitates recall and becoming. Yates only speculates on the possibility that illuminated manuscripts may act as memory theatres32; the nature of how this could occur and how the nook is involved is a niche. The profane illumination that the Surrealists sought, on the other hand, takes on the more Tragic form of poetry; it is departure alone, rather than departure and return. Walter Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire, The Arcades of Paris and on Surrealism are illuminating here, and the Glass House, as a word in the Surrealist dialogue of the time, serves to demonstrate the effects of this profane illumination via its transparency and its tragedy in the suicide of the Poet. As such, species of nook, as Epic, allow one to become who they are, whereas nook-less architectures, as Tragic, cause one to lose who they are.

29 Ricoeur, “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative,” 31. 30 Leyda and Voynow, 36. 31 Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: the last snapshot of European Intelligentsia,” trans. Edmond Jephcott, New Left Review 108 (1978), 49. 32 Yates, The Art of Memory, 113.

WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bachelard, G. The Intuition of the Instant.

“Poetic Instant and Metaphysical Instant.” 58-63.

Bachelard, G. The Poetics of Space. Bachelard, Gaston, and Mary McAllester Jones. The Formation Of The Scientific Mind. Manchester: Clinamen, 2002. Beloff, Zoe. “Glass House.” A World Redrawn video. 21:01. 2015. http://aworldredrawn.com/glass.html. Beloff, Z. “Notes on Glass House” Benjamin, W. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” Benjamin, W. “Surrealism: the Last Snapshot of European Intelligentsia.” Bulgakowa, O. “Eisenstein, the Glass House and the Spherical Book.” Colomina, B. Editor, Sexuality and Space. “the Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism.” Critchley, S. Memory Theatre. Deleuze, G. “Post-Script Essay on the Societies of Control.” Deleuze, G. Pure Immanence. Dowling, W. Ricour on Time and Narrative Sandler, L. F. “The Images of Words in English Gothic Psalters.” Eisenstein, S. “Montage and Architecture.” Fakharani, _. “Semi-Dome Decoration in Graeco-Roman Egypt.” Garcia, K. “Solitude.” Heidegger, M. Being and Time. Heidegger, M. Poetry, Language, Thought.

“… poetically Man dwells…”

Kearney, R. “Bachelard and the Epiphanic Instance” Kirkbride, R. Architecture and Memory - the Renaissance Studioli of Fredericho da Montefeltro. Lampedusa, G. T. The Leopard. Leyda, J. and Voynow, Z. Eisenstein at Work. Montagu, I. With Eisenstein in Hollywood. Oxford English Dictionary, The Compact Edition. Perec, G. Species of Spaces and other Pieces. Ponge, F. Unfinished Ode to Mud. Ponge, F. Things. Ricoeur, P. “Narrative Time.” Ricoeur, P. “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative.” Seow, C. L. “An Exquisitely Poetic Introduction to the Psalter.” Valery, P. An Anthology. “The Man and the Seashell” Yates, F. The Art of Memory.

ORGANISING TEXTS AND PARATEXTS

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— texts on temporality —

— texts on poetics —

— texts on phenomenology —

— texts on memory —

— texts on illumination —

— texts on nooks —

— texts on niches —

— texts on crannies —

— texts on recesses —

“Mankind’s nest, like his world, is never finished. And imagination helps to continue it.” —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of 124.

Space,

)

[ NOT ]