Dupin’s success in Poe’s novel, as Anthony Vidler has stated, ‘was not a triumph of visual acuity...his feat was the result of intellectual introjection, precisely a feat of not seeing’ (my emphasis). 9 The paradox outlined in Marcus and Best’s work is that while reading like a detective may be concerned with uncovering some hidden truth, it will always articulate an inordinate interest in surface matter. It is, after all, on the surface that most clues will be eventually found. Something’s Missing This reveals a fertile dichotomy within Ratsby’s critique: a preoccupation with the detective’s extortion of meaning also values the reading and describing of surface. When architectural criticism attends to the surface it is often accused of superficiality: I would argue that the photograph’s ability to infer a reading both of surface and depth itself acts as a detournément of this accusation. We spend so long searching for the critique – the future – that we unwittingly pour over the surface – the present – that laterally enters our vision. Ratsby’s essay presents The Architectural Review ’s demarcation of the contemporary as ‘akin to the tape at a crime scene through which only the works chosen by the critic may pass into the canon’. As a space, the crime scene is one that simultaneously possesses a wealth and a dearth of meaning, able to charge or exhaust a space. The imagery and text in ‘Blackbird Pie’ indicate that there is something to be found; that there is a pattern to be drawn between the images displayed. The text mentions some we can see – ‘the shiny plastic coverings on clothes suggest infrequent usage’ —
but others, such as the shutter ‘hanging loose from the wall’ are not illustrated. Giving no clear point of focus, the images – a bed and a skewed lampshade or the legs of a table – reinforce a sense of unease, encouraged by the text: ‘the duvet bears only light impressions but the lamp, askew, speaks of violence.’ The images are aligned to the grid of the journal’s page. In the difference between human vision and the detective’s fluid visual acuity, the publication grid is a reflection of the more pragmatic spatial grid applied to a modern scene of often criminal evidence. We are perhaps not only witnessing an act of detection within the home’s spaces, but are ourselves being drawn into an act of detection of the journal page itself. Marcus and Best allude to this grid. While Jameson would encourage the reader to ‘sketch the ideological rectangles...in order to move toward what lies outside of them’, a reader of the surface would ‘find value in the rectangles themselves’. Here, more important than the meaning of patterns is their identification and delineation. The mention of geometry is pertinent. As Vidler notes in The Exhaustion of Space , in the Basic Course Unit Guide provided for the training of California peace officers, a geometrically controlled search pattern is advocated rather than a ‘point to point’ search that jumps from one object - or perhaps interpretation - to another. In many of Ratsby’s studies the geometrical rigour of contemporary architecture coupled with the messiness of lived traces articulates this relationship, but in particular ‘Blackbird Pie’, with its views through corridors, open cupboards and bookshelves, is a rigorous attempt to search everywhere. The text moves vertically, floor-by-
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prepared for AR by N Ratsby. Drawings courtesy of Niall Mclaughlin Architects
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