Thomas-Bernard Kenniff
Reading […] is entering someone else’s head. 7
Let me close with an example from the winter of 2014 that can serve as a postscript. It takes place in an exhibition space packed with the result (and bodies) of term-long processes. For her final review, a student has intricately woven poetry, drawings and models with the structure of the building we are in. One guest critic asks another to read aloud the fine print (a lengthy soliloquy on cycles) wrapped around the polished concrete column. In the moments that follow, the spoken words and the reader’s struggle to follow the cyclical text echoes the frenzied but well-articulated lines of the student’s drawings: a polyphony of lines crisscrossing existing conditions, trapping in its web a heterogeneous assemblage of disparate things and people. A wonderful dialogue of genres is taking place – a performance piece fraught with lines of flight: re-spoken words, questioning architectural drawings and momentarily dislocated subjects. The interdisciplinary practice between creative writing and design has the potential to be an altering space: both uncomfortable and fulfilling because of what we might lose and what we might find.
Design is like writing: a dialogic process that follows lines of flight, feeds back onto itself and deterritorialises its subject. This is where the potential of combining writing with design rests: to momentarily destabilise both object and subject and allow them to become other. Practiced together, design and writing reconcile opposites, play with ambivalences, and make room for subjects to develop. Thinking more specifically about pedagogy, the mode-switch between design and writing allows for both the core elements of a work to appear in contingent fashion (Benjamin’s ‘realm of reconciliation’) as well as give design students the possibility to explore their authorship in relation to the work and to others. It introduces exotopy explicitly. Over the past two years I have been experimenting with creative writing in design studios as a way of introducing uncertainty in what is usually a desired-outcome process. The exercises are not meant to reflect directly on the design project, but generate a non- representational space from the collision between bits of writing (structure, characters, words, tone, flow) and bits of drawing. The non-representational aspect is crucial, since it disconnects the potential of reified signifiers or a simple transposition between narrative and promenade architecturale . Spatial and architectonic qualities emerge elsewhere, where intentions cross, add and subtract. The project space between design and writing is Benjamin’s realm of reconciliation – perhaps conciliation is more accurate – with the goal being that we can make sense of a project only in experiencing the uncertain area between all its genres. And all its subjects.
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References 1 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. London: Cape, 1970, p75 2 Ibid. p82 3 William Whyte, ‘How Do Buildings Mean? Some Issues of Interpretation in the History of Architecture’, History and Theory 45, no. 2 (2006): 153–77 4 Fiona English, Student Writing and Genre: Reconfiguring Academic Knowledge London: Continuum, 2011 5 Jane Rendell, ‘Design from fiction : introduction’, in Once Upon a Place: Architecture and Fiction , ed. Pedro Gadanho and Susana Oliveira. Lisbon: Caleidoscópio, 2013, p293 6 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogue s. Paris: Flammarion, 1977, p54 7 Gijs Wallis de Vries, ‘Metamorphosis: On the Role of Fiction in Architectural Education’, in Once Upon a Place: Architecture and Fiction , ed. Pedro Gadanho and Susana Oliveira. Lisbon: Caleidoscópio, 2013, p302 8 Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtine le principe dialogique . Paris: Seuil, 1981
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