34writing

The architect's library: books, shelves, cases, collections, displays, exhibitions and READING.

ON SITE r e v i e w

architecture urbanism design infrastructure culture construction

number 34 fall 2015

o nwwo nr irtwi itnirngi tgi n g

ON ARCHITECTURE

ng CAN/USA $14 sell until May 2016

Mark Dorrian, Adrian Hawker. Metis: Urban Cartographies . London: Black Dog Publishing, 2002 ISBN-10: 1901033538 ISBN-13: 9781901033533

Mark Dorrian. Writing on the Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation. London: I.B.Tauris, 2015 ISBN: 978 1 7845 3038 9

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

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

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

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

Hans Ibelings + Powerhouse Company. Shifts - Architecture After the 20th Century. Westmount QC: The Architecture Observer, 2012 ISBN-10: 9081920707 ISBN-13: 978-9081920704

Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project . Rolf Tiedemann, editor Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 2002 ISBN 978 0 6740 0802 1

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

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

ON SITE r e v i e w

belatedly, Fall 2015

It is appropriate that this ultimate issue of On Site review should be about writing, as this is what architecture journals, magazines and reviews do: they write about architecture and urbanism, and a lot of other things, in words and images. Pictures alone, like a pure instagram site without captions, titles or text, are a new model – the image itself is like a found polaroid; the viewer applies a context, a narrative, a story; it is free and participatory. The sheer cost of doing a traditional print publication almost demands significant text to justify itself; the web is better, and faster, and cheaper at just putting out images rather than arguments. But argument is what writing is – the need to speak, to oppose, to confer, to confirm, to argue that one exists, that one has ideas, thoughts, hopes, fears. The writing in this issue is beautiful – so many people thinking intensely about the world and writing about it in delicately chosen terms. Thought; writing; journals: slow media. 34: on writing

Hector Abarca

contents

contributors page

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

Danielle Willkens

Open Letters

Miranda Mote, Chelsea Spencer, Irene Chin, Lara Mehlings

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

Linda Just

About Reading

Troels Steenholdt Heiredal

Postmedium Narrative

Igsung So

On Writing (about architecture)

Thomas Nemeskeri

Forensic Criticism of N Ratsby in The Architectural Review

Jon Astbury

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

Stephanie White

The Book Will Kill the Edifice

Daniel Fairbrother

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

Jon Astbury

Heralds of Their Own Gospel

Hector Abarca

Between Writing and Design

Thomas-Bernard Kenniff

A Hunt for Optimism in the Middle or thereabouts

Ted Landrum

Columns

Graham Hooper

Writing On Architecture, Times Square: signs and icons

Rick Lane

Reading Architecture 1

Stephanie White

Reading Architecture 2

Hector Abarca

who we are

epistolary architecture the transatlantic design network, 1768-1838

by danielle s willkens

Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of windy day never to return-- more. Every thing presses on—

— from Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy , 3rd ed., 9 vols. (London: Printed for J. Dodsley, 1760-1767), 2:VIII.

Although these borrowed lines may read as the preface to a romantic saga, this article does not tell the story of a love triangle or an affair. Rather, this is the story of a series of architectural relationships: two architects, from opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and their respective meetings with a young, charismatic artist that sparked forty-year friendships and how this triumvirate formed the core of a generative and active network of peers who spent decades sharing letters, drawings, and design ideas across borders and continents. The architects were Thomas Jefferson and Sir John Soane; their shared aesthete was Maria Hadfield Cosway. Much has been written about the probability of a romantic relationship between Jefferson and Cosway and the obsession over their imagined affair is understandable given the famously passionate nature of their early letters. Nevertheless, this story does not focus on their possible affair but rather their shared ardour for aesthetics and architecture. The lines above from Tristram Shandy are particularly relevant to a discussion of Jefferson and Soane in relation to their first meetings with Cosway: both meetings were brief but for decades the friends would relive their travels together through the pages of letters that travelled across countries and continents. Both Jefferson and Soane were reading Tristram Shandy around the time they first met Cosway. It is curious to imagine that Jefferson and Soane, both of whom generally favoured works of non-fiction, poured over Sterne’s brilliant line diagrams that illustrate the meandering paths of Tristram’s narrative like a section through a wild and imaginative landscape. As the reader progresses through the course of Tristam’s ‘autobiography’, the digressions within his narrative, represented as sinuous curves or abrupt peaks and valleys in the literal plot line, are the most pivotal elements his journey. Much like Tristram, the meetings of Jefferson and Soane with Cosway could be dismissed as insignificant detours along their professional paths; however, these supposed diversions were significant experiences for the architects that, like their correspondence with Cosway, stayed with Jefferson and Soane for the rest of their lives.

Danielle Willkens

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

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

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

Danielle Willkens

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

The Transatlantic Design Network, 1768-1838 There is an interesting lexical gap in the English language: unlike Romance languages, it does not make a distinction in the use of the verb ‘to know’ between the knowledge of a fact and knowledge of a person. The Italian verbs sapere and conoscere and the French verbs savoir and connaître linguistically recognise the differences between familiarity with a object or concept and familiarity with a person, thereby revealing a vein of epistemology that recognises the importance of personal interaction in the formation and dissemination of knowledge. Architects like Thomas Jefferson and Sir John Soane learned their discipline from books, on-site investigations, and in the case of Soane, formal academic training and apprenticeship. However, for both men, their understanding of art, architecture, and culture was very much shaped by the interests, observations and talents of their personal acquaintances. By reading letters, diary entries and account books of Jefferson and Soane, it is possible to trace how conversations in coffeehouses and salons, as well as casual journeys undertaken with friends, influenced their architectural theories and design goals.

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

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

Characteristic of the network The Transatlantic Design Network was composed of several unique, identifying factors: the introduction of newly- nationalised ‘American’ individuals and their associated interests, professionally-driven travel, and the extension of communication and exchange beyond initial, transitory meetings and social engagements. As evidenced by the Republic of Letters, several independent European mail systems were established in the sixteenth century and the increased frequency of centralised mail systems in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries bolstered letter writing. These systems, however, could rarely be trusted for either discretion or delivery. As maritime travel improved, more noncommercial ships crossed the Atlantic therefore more letters were exchanged through personal conveyance that, unlike the mail systems, ensured transfer and timely delivery while simultaneously reinforcing professional connections and social circles. Consequently, the architectural Republic of Letters, unlike the preceding Enlightenment-era Republic of Letters, was composed of more diverse European and North American constituents. The members of the network, therefore, became rich resources for obtaining and disseminating information and, therefore, it was important for select visualisations of the Transatlantic Design Network to display where any key figures met, began cycles of exchange, and encountered common associates. Unlike a conventional timeline, this geographical timeline, tracing date in the ‘x’ or horizontal axis and place in the ‘y’ or vertical axis, allows the activities and travels of the contemporaries to be read in parallel, identifying both shared and divergent paths of travel as well as points of contact. Through the dramatic vertical rises and falls, representing transatlantic and intercontinental travel, this time line clearly shows Jefferson’s transience in comparison to the localised European travels of Cosway and the even more limited travels of Soane. 2 Initially, Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway were selected as formative figures for the study of the Transatlantic Design Network because of their triangulated correspondence and due to the way that they were characterised by some of their contemporaries in letters and descriptions. The generalisations often used in discussions between Jefferson, Soane, Cosway and their peers disclose many of the presumptions and societal conditions that existed in the transatlantic world and contextualise the cartoons in newspapers and flyers from 1750s to early 1800s that played to caricatures of the Englishman, the American, and the Female. In the case of the selected triumvirate, the caricatures had some merit. Jefferson was labeled ‘the noble savage’, a common stereotype for Americans in Europe, initially perpetuated by Franklin as noted by Flavell (2010:189). In truth, Jefferson was raised in the country and was leery of both big cities and big government. As a plantation owner he also embodied the contradictory nature of many of his revolutionary peers who fought for national freedom while profiting as life-long slaveholders. Soane’s professional and social ambitions inspired the critique among certain Royal Academy colleagues that he was a social climber this was perpetuated in the satirical poems of the Observer and the reviews of the Examiner. 2 As evidenced in the images following, the dense, linear information from these graphics is very difficult to display within the constraints of a typical, printed page. Consequently, many of the images featured in this paper have been made available online for closer inspection (http://www.archdsw.com/ transatlantic-design-network-1768-1836.html).

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

The use of epistles Letter writing was a means of gathering one’s thoughts,

disseminating those thoughts, and establishing a dialogue that, unlike diary writing, could be directly challenged and influenced by others. Correspondence frequently triangulated conversations since it was desirable to send letters through personal conveyance: by transferring a letter from author to recipient, the person delivering the note was often provided with a letter of introduction and consequentially benefited from access to new organisations, sites and networks. Additionally, epistles from prominent figures were often printed in newspapers and leaflets; letters weren’t necessarily private. For many authors, this was actually advantageous for broadening international discourses. It is important to note that the epistles sampled for this study were not always transmitted transatlantically: sometimes they travelled within the same country, or even the same city, but their authors had knowledge of and experiences with both sides of the ‘Western Ocean’, the Euro-centric term often used to refer to the Atlantic Ocean. Over 2,000 letters were consulted in the research and this sampling of documentary evidence was initially defined by correspondence between Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway. The sample was then expanded to include correspondence between figures that knew at least two members of the triumvirate or were directly engaged in conversations with Jefferson, Soane or Cosway about the arts, travel and educational practices. Of this larger sampling of letters, a little over 500 were selected as representative conversations within the network in terms of their focus on the means of cultivating architectural taste, the relationship between buildings, people the design process, and the nature and scope of travel needed to broaden one’s visual and experiential catalogue. These letters were used to study and map trends within the network. They were also beneficial for the identification of eighteen figures from America and Europe, in addition to Jefferson, Soane and Cosway, who helped delineate the nature and composition of the Transatlantic Design Network. These figures were not selected because they were the most prolific correspondents of Jefferson, Soane or Cosway but rather because of the ways they interacted: what they sent to each other, where they travelled, who they provided letters of introduction to, and how their contributions in design, education, curation, or even law may have impacted the forms, collections and architectural thinking at contemporary sites such as Jefferson’s Monticello and Soane’s Museum.

Danielle Willkens

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

Soane’s ambitions were confirmed by his deliberate attempts to obscure his humble heritage that even included adding an ‘e’ to the end of his surname, as noted by several previous researchers such as Darley (1999: 16). His plans to transcend his class took him from the country to the city and in his Memoirs on the Professional Life of an Architect Between the Years 1768 and 1835 (1835), he wrote that, as if by divine intervention, he was “led by natural inclination to study architecture at age fifteen” (11). Cosway was potentially the most caricatured and, consequentially, dismissed of the three. She embodied the image of the attractive artist and within the majority of extant scholarship, her romantic role as a muse has consistently overshadowed her numerous artistic commissions and contributions. Yet, she served as a conduit for her closest correspondents by advancing connections between international figures in the arts, helping circulate publications on architecture and landscape, and providing eyes on the artistic scene of Europe. As an interconnected triumvirate, the projects by and longstanding relationships between Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway demonstrate a particularly distinguished sample of the Transatlantic Design Network. The humble backgrounds of each figure distinctly differentiate their travels and experiences from those of most aristocratic participants in the Grand Tour who travelled at a leisurely pace with substantial funds, spent the majority of time abroad with their own countrymen, and resisted the full exploration of foreign cultures, much like Smelfungus of Laurence Sterne’s satirical account A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, by Mr Yorick (1768). Additionally, the

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

Visualisations of the Transatlantic Atlantic Design Network The forty-year correspondence of Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway had wider consequences: they facilitated international networks that sidestepped existing aristocratic ones, gave agency to the voices and initiatives of women, and advanced professional and stylistic developments of architecture on both sides of the Atlantic. Direct examples of the influence of correspondence are the fact that Cosway was responsible for the dissemination of privately published texts by Jefferson and Soane. Although Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) was printed in London, Cosway introduced members of her circle to the text. Similarly, she was responsible for introducing Soane’s Museum to her acquaintances in Italy, noting in a letter to the architect that, “your beautiful book has been admired all over Milan & architects have taken translations of great part of it” (SJSM, III.C.4, no. 36). To better understand the operations and potential architectural and epistemological implications of the Transatlantic Design Network, several diagrammatic investigations were constructed. For example, the network map below illustrates the connections between approximately 200 figures. Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway served as the generative nodes for this map and they are linked to other members of the network through various strands of association: immediate correspondence, genealogy and marriage, mentorship, patronage, and communal membership in other formal networks such as the London-based Royal Society, Royal Society of the Arts, and Royal Academy and the United States- based American Philosophical Society, Academy of Fine Arts, and Columbian Institute. Here, it is important to note that these organisations represent a very selective sampling: Pevsner identified more than 100 artistic academics in Europe during the late 1790s (1973: 141-143). The organisations used for the Transatlantic Design Network study and subsequent visualisations were selected as six organisations, three from England and three from the United States, that were most active in reference to design-related publications or exhibitions and these organisations also had the largest concentrations of practicing designers. The latter distinction of ‘practicing’ verses ‘professional’ architect or artist was used to cast a wider net since the nascent United States lacked both the educational infrastructure and established systems of apprenticeship to support formal architectural training and the promise of steady commissions to support the pursuits of the arts as a full time profession. Painter John Trumbull, now noted for the creation of an extensive graphic record of America’s founding fathers and key moments in the nation’s developing history, noted in his Autobiography that he was reluctant to return from Europe to America in the 1780s because he feared there would be little work: “You see, sir, that my future movement depend entirely upon my reception in America, and as that shall be cordial or cold, I am to decide whether to abandon my country or my profession”. (1841:160) As evidenced by the map, active members of the network were also connected to selected writers and architects who, although departed, were influential in the discourses on design within the network. The diagram is divided horizontally by travel: North Americans on the far left and Europeans on the far right. The placement of individual figures within the longitude of the diagram was dependent on the individual’s travel within their respective nation and continent as well as any travels across the Atlantic Ocean. Expatriates are identified in the centre of the map. 4

Danielle Willkens

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

It is important to briefly note a facet of the origins of this visualisation project: initially, the study of Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway was initiated to better understand transatlantic design operations around the turn of the nineteenth century and, by extension, to try and understand how Jefferson’s Monticello and Soane’s Museum could share so many parallels in their fabrication, form, and collections despite the fact that the two architects never met. A diagrammatic ‘map’ featuring the connections between Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway was initially constructed on large sheets of tracing paper, quickly taped together, with markers as a way to keep complex and ever growing shared network of this triumvirate. Used as a notational tool, it became clear that this network map had significant value beyond its initial process-driven construction: it was a previously unexplored visualisation of the social, geographical, and professional connections between some of the most notable figures of the Atlantic world in the late 1700s and early 1800s. As the study of the network continues to evolve and find its way into a digitised form, it is expected that a larger database will be developed for other researchers to add members and activities to the network, thereby crowdsourcing content to build a more robust picture of the network, its participants, and its impacts. f References Cook, E. H. Epistolary bodies: gender and genre in the eighteenth-century republic of letters. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996 Darley, G. ‘The Grand Tour’. In M. A. Stevens & R. Margaret (Eds.), John Soane, architect: master of space and light (pp. 96-113). London: Royal Academy of Arts distributed by Yale University Press, 1999 Flavell, J. When London was capital of America . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010 Fraser, M. Architecture and the special relationship: the American influence on post-war British architecture . London: Routledge, 2007 Graves, A. The Royal Academy of Arts: a complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904, etc . London: George Bell & Sons, 1905 Hindley, M. ‘Mapping the Republic of Letters’. Humanities , 34(6), online edition from the National Endowment for the Humanities, 2013 Jefferson, T. Notes on the State of Virginia . Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia, 1955 Latour, B. Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 Locke, J. The Works of John Locke . (9th ed.). London, 1794 Pevsner, N. Academies of art past and present. New York, NY: De Capo Press, 1973 Private Correspondence. Archives of Sir John Soane’s Museum. Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. Shuffelton, I., Baridon, M., & Chevignard, B. Travelling in the republic of letters . Publications Universite de Bourgogne, 1988. 66, 1-16. Soane, J. Memoirs on the Professional Life of an Architect Between the Years 1768 and 1835 . London: James Moyes Castle Street Leicster Square, Privately Printed, Not Published, 1835 Sterne, L. A sentimental journey through France and Italy, by Mr Yorick (3rd ed.). London: T. Becket and P.A. de Hondt, 1768 Trumbull, J. Autobiography, reminiscences and letters of John Trumbull, from 1756 to 1841. New York, NY: Wiley and Putnam, 1841 Upton, D. Architecture in the United States . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 Winterer, C. ‘Where is America in the Republic of Letters’. Modern Intellectual History , 9(3), 2012. 597-623. Yaneva, A. The making of a building: a pragmatist approach to architecture. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009

Danielle Willkens

September 8, 2015

open letters

Dear Chelsea, Between you in New York, Lara in Zurich, Miranda in Philadelphia, and myself in Montreal there are a couple continents, several time zones, many miles, and even more kilometres. (I need to adjust to thinking in metric.) There is this physical distance now, but what feels farthest is your old kitchen in Cambridge, where two years ago we first met to discuss your idea of a publication to feature writing about architecture and design in the form of letters. It seemed like an obvious idea at the time, but one that was risky, too. I trained through years of reviews and pin-ups in architecture school, but putting myself out there through writing was terrifying on a completely different level. There is no obfuscating with text like you can with a rendering, little room for interpretation with your choice in words as you might find in a drawing. And unlike the objective proximity of one’s position in a journalistic piece or the critical distance one can take in a scholarly essay, in signing a letter you consequently expose yourself. 1 You embody your writing – hopefully, with earnestness. (My favourite valediction so far has been Bryan’s – ‘In upbeat sincerity’.) Although I did break that rule about signatures just once 2 , it was this vulnerability that we kept poking at with each issue, trying to tease out emotions and opinions, be it humour or anger, romanticism or criticism. I’ve always wanted to ask you about your training, in dance – what your experience on stage was like communicating with audiences. It was my sense that this shaped the presence you command on paper. If I could ever learn to be comfortable with my limbs in public, I bet I would in turn become a more confident writer also. Now the four of us might write to keep in touch, but I would venture that Open Letters was about making a deliberate effort to be in touch with ourselves, each other, and the environments around us. Maybe some designers are accustomed to constructing and shaping in world-axis mode, from a virtual distance. But the medium of the letter allowed us to deliberate topics from the value of theory to issues of divestment. 3 It gave us an opportunity to be sentimental and also to be held accountable for our politics. Our feather-thin publication became a sizeable platform for all kinds of personalities and perspectives. You wrote in issue 00 that you were worried about this project turning out “to be a waste of paper”. 4 I hope with each 30-pound box of newsprint that we continue to order we are helping to fill in some space between.

by irene chin

lara mehling miranda mote chelsea spencer

In 2013 students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design started Open Letters , a print experiment that tests the epistolary form as a device for generating conversations about architecture and design. Each bi-weekly issue of the publication, now in its third year and edited by current students, presents one letter addressed to a particular party and written for public dissemination.The following is an exchange between four of the original editors in which they reflect on the project, writing and correspondence.

Yours, Irene

September 16, 2015

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

Lara Mehling

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

worlds tend to remain separate, neither curious about the other. I think there are a couple of ways you could look at it. One is that dancing and writing draw on two radically different, perhaps even opposing, intelligences. The great dance critic Edwin Denby wrote a piece in 1944 called ‘A Note on Dance Intelligence’, which he begins like this: “Expression in dancing is what really interests everybody, and everybody recognises it as a sign of intelligence in the dancer. But dancing is physical motion, it doesn’t involve words at all. And so it is an error to suppose that dance intelligence is the same as other sorts of intelligence which involve, on the contrary, words only and no physical movement whatever.” Mind you, this is around the time of Martha Graham’s height, when the most modern of dance was something of an exorcism. Lots of dancers count the music and organise their movement recall that way. 6 I can’t do it, because even that degree of articulation – just to say the numbers one through eight – interferes with the articulation that (I hope) is functioning at another register and that, for me, has always been fundamentally aphasic. The other way I look at the relationship between dancing and writing is this: Both are performances. In both you get to decide to be whoever you wish. Of course as a dancer, you’ve usually got choreographers telling you what they want to see. I think that makes it easier – this wedge of external directions separating action from identity. The more ridiculous, the more you must commit to that ridiculousness with total seriousness. Physical limitations impose themselves too: there is no pretending to turn out five perfect pirouettes; there is only doing it (although rarely in my case). But even the most exquisite technicians can lack what dancers and choreographers call ‘commitment’ – the elimination of doubt and hesitation, the ability to collapse the line of thinking and doing onto a point of reflex. The necessary immediacy of dancing – the indispensability of repeatedly rehearsing a piece from top to bottom with your own irreplaceable body until you are prepared to carry out and commit to the performance of every gesture – grants certain gratifications and possibilities. For in the end, the work of dance can only ready you to take your place on stage and begin the piece from the top – at which point you’re only as good as your skill and fortitude, and the audience’s collective patience, on that particular evening. Writing can be more forgiving, and also more damning. Writers need not muster the energy, renew their commitment to every word, every punctuation mark, again and again, for an essay to subsist. You can scrap together facets of your writerly self over the course of writing it, paving over your graceless, fitful efforts until you’re satisfied (or until a deadline puts you out of your agonizing). The work of writing leaves a durable (though not necessarily stable) proxy on the page – a score, if you will. The rest is up to readers.

With love and admiration, Chelsea

September 22, 2015

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

Lara Mehling

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

It was a weaving pattern composed by Ruth Asawa when she was a student at Black Mountain College in Anni Albers’s weaving studio. It was framed as if it was a drawing, but it was really a complex coded set of instructions for a loom, which described the relative position of thread in three dimensions across its warp and weft. I suppose, because it was coded with ‘X’ and ‘O’s, mathematicians or software engineers would like to see it as a curious set of syntactical relationships. Well, in this regard, Anni was a ‘coder’, a junky of pattern and nearly imperceptible, luxurious detail that can only be felt when the fabric is wrapped around our sad, cold, ailing shoulders. She also wrote, well. German was her language, thread was her vocabulary, the loom was her syntax. Irene, in her concise genius, declared that “there is no obfuscating with text”. I write because, in my achey social anxiety, I want to connect with my own and other’s intellect as much as I want to connect and interpret my own imagination. Anni wrote about art and design while in Germany, in the thick of anti-Semitic rhetoric (a world saturated with malevolent tweets and judgments). She also wrote about the collective weaving genius of the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus administration’s hypocrisy subjugated women to weaving but consequently consolidated a team of genius that would code the magic of textiles for modern design. “Art – a Constant. Times of rapid change produce a wish for stability, for permanence and finality, as quiet times ask for adventure and change. Wishes derive from imaginative vision. And it is this visionary reality we need, to complement our experience of the immediate reality.” 8 I suggest that there is little room for hypocrisy in a signed letter. The obligation of writing as a physical, printed, signed act keeps our public selves sincere and disciplined. So yes, I write slowly and with ink. Because I love you, Anni, and everything she valued.

Sincerely yours, Miranda

September 28, 2015

Dear Miranda, Facebook has just informed me that today is #nationalpunctuationday. I got sucked into taking the Which punctuation mark are you? quiz: Results cast me as a full stop/period, ‘.’ – calm, helpful, and distasteful of drama. More interestingly, the quiz describes the punctuation mark itself as non-dramatic, calm and helpful. Personally, I am partial to the semicolon. This discovery reminded me of Chelsea’s comment on writers progressing their ideas at different scales. If Chelsea longs to scale up from semi-clauses to sentences, I am stuck at the scale of punctuation. Punctuation marks are defined as singular characters, which separate sentences and their elements to clarify meaning. But I would argue, they do more; they connect sentences, stitch the elements together. My eyes catch tiny things; I was the one who found the dropped earring back, the invisible pin, the single, minuscule flower in a world of brown, grey and green. Here, my windows stand wide open so gusts of fresh air will force me to look out while I copyedit. Occasionally, I must extend my depth of vision, give my eyes a rest – but they won’t ignore a misplaced comma. Is an obsession with text at this scale connected to the luxurious detail of a textile? I share your fascination with pattern because I think in terms of digits, units, spaces set into an expansive field. My initial idea for the Open Letters covers was to mine the writing for details, which I could weave into an encrypted graphic that would act as an abstracted background. 9 Even as the wallpaper patterns faded, I stuck with details: like a Dawn Redwood’s needles. 10 Until now, I had never thought to consider why I took on the role of design editor. It appears rather obvious: I gravitate toward looser structures and, rather than write to provoke thought, I write to organise it. It’s a bit

Lara Mehling

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

odd to declare, but I find pleasure in layout, the more physical or spatial composition of thought. With a given document size, a margin, I can draft an idea the way I draft a plan for a landscape architectural design; by treating the paper space as model space. And just as hard and soft materials come together on the ground, text is, for me, only half the equation. It is in the play between image and text that I find meaning. Designing the cover graphics for Open Letters gave me this freedom: to treat text as both a formal organisation of thought and an aesthetic composition. Text, more than writing, obsesses me, because it isolates the compositional element, brings it down to the tiniest terms. In Zurich, there is no avoiding even the smallest elements of graphic design. The big, bold, sans-serif type developed in 1957 by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann catches my eye at every corner. Of course, in Switzerland, its birthplace and namesake (the Swiss name for the country is Helvetia, or Confœderatio Helvetica), it is no surprise. Thanks to Chelsea’s good taste, we stuck with Benton Sans Condensed and Baskerville for a classic yet contemporary look. In addition to clean, readable typeface, the Swiss Style established uniformity through a mathematical grid. A standard procedure today, but in the 1920s the use of the grid – in the pursuit of minimalism, functionalism and simplicity – revolutionised graphic design in accordance with modernist ideals. I am not a graphic designer but I, too, recognise the grid as the most legible means for structuring information. Using this method, the structure precedes the content. Text is applied to a grid, snuggled into the predetermined order. Like Asawa’s textural drawing, which you saw hanging at the Fogg, communication relies on a composition of units – in our case, a system or grid of letters. The International Style cast designers not as artists but as conduits for disseminating information. The semicolon in me wants to say we are, in our different ways, both. The grid is my playing field; it has order, but it is infinite. (We set the frame.) And the reason, I think, for our affinity with Albers’s textiles is our approach to composition. We are writing with warp and weft: First we hold the ‘composition stick’ in our hands and put the lead type into order, and then we set the type into the press bed along with wooden ‘furniture’ (placeholders). Whether by hand, with a typewriter, or on a keyboard, I approach writing like I print text on an analog letterpress: The bed is the field. I am tempted to think that it has something to do with being a landscape architect, rather than an architect. Looser structures allow for visible threads and multiple meanings. Letters are our scale. They are the unit we prefer – because each letter can stand alone and yet it is enriched by a response. And a response could expand the grid in any direction. I am the full stop, but we know this conversation has no end. A bit homesick for American culture and lit., I am reminded of Emerson’s ‘Circles’ essay: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” Don’t we write/solicit/edit/publish letters in order to grow, to redefine ourselves in terms of each other, in even greater contexts? Ultimately, I think our project embraced the openness of a letter, of inquiring without any guarantee for an answer, because we have learned to accept “do[ing] something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle”. The textual fabric has no boundaries of its own – we set and reset the frame. A collaborative editorial team is in constant exchange, sending verbal missives at full tilt. With that, nothing, not even me, is a full stop.

Lara Mehling

Let the ruckus begin – Lara

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

Digita l Sha lott

on the parallels of building and writing in the Virtual Age

by linda just

Linda Just

In his 1982 text The Architecture of the City , Aldo Rossi described built forms as ‘urban artefacts’ to present the dual nature of architecture. Namely, that it is both the built world as a whole, as well as its constituent parts – which are, in turn, not only physical entities, but also the history and culture laid upon them. This duality – the notion of the abstract and concrete – is innate to the architectural discipline, reflected in the fact that even the word building describes both the act and the product. Consider then the medium through which Rossi chose to convey the idea: text. In many ways writing bears marked similarities to building; they are both the aforementioned act and product. Both are developed by the assembly of smaller elements that each carry their own significance, in addition to the larger [sometimes different] connotation of the combined whole. Writing is used to capture the ephemeral – ideas, events, emotions – and present it in a comprehensible fashion to other individuals, achieved through structured phrases and vocabulary. Buildings conceptually echo this process with their concrete delineations of intangible space. Occupants experience defined spaces through their constituent material and geometry – everything from vaulted ceilings to windows to stair treads. These elements, interpreted through their relationship to the human body via haptic, aural or visual perception, are the architectural vocabulary by which

one reads and understands architecture; they can define the successful use and navigation of spaces. Buildings that do not account for this phenomenon, or aggressively deny architecture’s relationship to the body in scale and proportion, will almost always sit negatively in public perception. For this reason, much of the architectural design process still happens through physical analogues. Concepts may be expressed through graphic means but model-making is still a regular tool. Physical samples must still be reviewed before final approval is given, are are almost always examined in daylight and at full scale. This assures the connection between ideas and reality is strong and present. That importance of material is no less present in print; how and what one reads is constantly influenced by colour, texture and form. MacLuhan’s observations of the relationship between medium and message are demonstrated in every well-published monograph as much as it is in a newsprint flyer. Paper stock, typeface, layouts speak to and of the hands that made them, and the eyes that will ultimately interpret their content. At the very best, readers are drawn to touch and inspect and revisit on multiple occasions. This is perhaps the increasingly overlooked potential of writing, though it is also the reason typewriters still carry a mystique and software developers stubbornly employ skeuomorphic interfaces and pseudo-script fonts for notepad

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