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.
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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
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