floor through the house, while the photographs follow no such order: it becomes almost impossible to jump from one mode of representation to another and still understand where one is. The search culminates in the attic, where Ratsby finds perhaps what was being searched for: the ‘strongest connection to the house’s origins’, unlike the ‘oddly reticent’ spaces below. This approach remains distinctly two-dimensional – Vidler imagines the interrelation of these fields in three dimensions as something of a Klein bottle, transforming ‘the geometrical space of rational detection into a knot of abyssal proportions’ 11 – one that consistently returns the searcher to the beginning, just as the detective narrative ends at its omitted beginning. We can attempt to use Ratsby’s photographs to understand the space – or create some impression of the future – but we remain stuck in the uncertainty of their present. The layouts of The Architectural Review at the time were also what we could consider as highly two-dimensional, frozen and flattened. Yet through their images they introduce a projection into the future that introduces some sense of a critical trajectory, even if it is towards a false future. In Ratsby’s photographs architecture is presented far less as an object and more as a series of ‘scenes’. Crucially, it moves away from the photograph as the fixed dissemination of a completed architectural idea, and transforms it into a temporal site of investigation and a search on the behalf of the reader.
Again, this refers back to Poe’s The Purloined Letter , and the spatial considerations created through ideas of crime and evidence. Most of all it articulates a relationship Ratsby was constantly exploring: that of the reader as detective. What does this act of searching mean for criticism? In its presentation not as an immutable object but as what Eyal Weizman would call a dynamic ‘field’, ‘Blackbird Pie’ does not simply enter into the forum of the journal but transforms it. The journal’s ability to determine what the future may be is no longer possible and we are instead forced to remain in the present of the search. Utopia is no longer presented to us but rather, as Elana Gomel states, ‘to gain a utopia, one needs to solve a puzzle’. 12 As with all puzzles, we soon become aware of the time spent trying to solve it. f
1 Ratsby, N. ‘Evidence: Blackbird Pie’. The Architectural Review , May 2006. pp 48-53 2 See the attached selection of photographs 3 Freud, S. The Uncanny . London: Penguin, 2003 4 Carver, R. ‘Blackbird Pie’ in Where I’m Calling From: Selected Stories. London: Harvill Press, 1993. p406 5 Marcus, S and Best, M. ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’. Representations. 2009 v.108 n.1 2009. pp. 1-21 6 Ibid. 7 Lacan, J. ‘Seminar on the Purloined Letter’, in Écrits , New York: WW Norton, 2007 8 Vidler, A. ‘The Exhaustion of Space’ in Jacobson, K. (ed.) Scene of the Crime. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997 9 Marcus, S and Best, M. 10 Vidler, A 11 Ibid. 12 Gomel, E. ‘Mystery, Apocalypse and Utopia: The Case of the Ontological Detective Story’, Science Fiction Studies, v.22 n.3. 1995. pp343-356
afterword [It is impossible to speak of architectural criticism without] ‘also speaking of literary technique, rhetoric, and the persona of the critic as author.’ 1 The works of N. Ratsby presented and studied here are fabricated studies produced by the author. The history into which they have been inserted is factual. I will here reveal and explain this purely for the benefit of additional readers who were not party to this work’s creative processes. This essay has been an almost autobiographical experiment in the simultaneous production of a piece of criticism and a critique of that work. As such, the fabricated work was aware of what the criticism of it would say, while the criticism itself generated new ideas as the fabricated work was produced. As such, both, similar to the theories they study, remain
unfinished – both still ‘wait’ for one another to reach a conclusion, feeding off the productive potential I have mentioned to continue generating one another – the conclusion is self-referential of the ability the work itself has attempted to demonstrate. What such an experiment sought to understand was the interaction between the critical potential immanent in the work of architecture with the external status of the critic or, more broadly, the interaction between the practices of historiographical evidence-making undertaken in the duration of the MA programme and the practice of written criticism undertaken in my work for The Architectural Review . The work was the result of the friction I experienced in moving between these two disciplines every week, as well as a prior interest in the Review ’s history of pseudonyms among its authors seemingly as a means of allowing the writer to present opinions or ideas perhaps counter to their own. Under the guise of Contributing Editor, I was able to visit both Duncan Terrace and Haslemere Road with free reign to photograph and explore. These photographs then became the accompaniments to works I produced under the anagrammatic pseudonym of N. Ratsby, my detached critic alter ego. There were several reasons for this fabrication. Naomi Stead writes
how it is impossible to speak of architectural criticism ‘without also speaking of literary technique, rhetoric, and the persona of the critic as author.’ 2 In creating my own persona I was able to create criticism free from any historical strictures, while simultaneously undergo the creation of a ‘character’ similar to that which the critic will always create. It also allowed this persona itself to be the generator of a narrative, running alongside the theoretical study. Above all was the desire to create this ‘forensic criticism’ against a richly narrative backdrop, one that would amplify but also call into question its theoretical position as suspicious or paranoid. This allowed the work itself to become subject to a detective gaze, and the photographs that accompany this essay are a testament to this ongoing investigation – a means of allowing the reader to take part in it themselves.
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1 Macarthur, J., Stead, N. ‘The Judge is Not an Operator: Historiography, Criticality and Architectural Criticism’. OASE n. 69 (2006) pp. 116-139 2 Macarthur, J., Stead, N. ‘The Judge is Not an Operator: Historiography, Criticality and Architectural Criticism’. OASE n. 69 (2006) pp. 116-139
N Ratsby
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