The architect's library: books, shelves, cases, collections, displays, exhibitions and READING.
ON SITE r e v i e w
the architect’s library
40: 2022
WE ME - Barbara Stauffacher Solomon
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon WE ME 114 pages 8.75 x 10.5 inches Digital Press on 80lb cover Wire-o binding 1st edition of 200 2022
Once again allowing her minimal typography to dance across the page, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon seems hellbent on asking important questions with an almost lyric joy. WE ME is an examination of the expression of self: How we create our individuality and how we manufacture others, through useful self-deceptions and mass(media)delusions. Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (b.1929 in San Francisco) has worked as an artist, designer, and landscape architect across eight decades. Perhaps best known for her invention of Supergraphics, she has also shown her work widely and is represented in the permanent collections of MoMA, LACMA, The Walker Art Center, and many more.
$50.00 USD
https://www.colpapress.com
Jose Gamez
David Walters
Betsy West
the bookshelf as surrogate self greg snyder
on pages 56-9, with the rest of the shelves on the inside back cover
Linda Samuels
Michael Swisher
Lee Gray
once made books stephanie white
small books print field notes hand work things said
Small books about small things: Texas octagonal dance halls, Barcelona’s breakwater fishing platforms, water towers, parks at dusk, highway signs, recipe books, an artist I was taken with who made cardboard casts of everyday things – saws, dictionaries, frying pans. Field notes: short typed explanations, 2 1/4” black and white photos taken with a Rolleicord, all run off on a photocopier, folded and sewn into signatures which were glued to the letterpress cover, pressed and then trimmed on a guillotine. Sections of the coloured proof sheets one used to get when slides were developed were put on the front.
This was before computers lived on every desk. This was when I read that Virginia and Leonard Woolf started Hogarth Press with a hand press that sat on their dining room table. I got an ISBN number and a post office book rate number and mailed them out as mail art, something like three- dimensional postcards. Their footprints have been all over On Site review since 2001.
c
S White
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
ON SITE r e v i e w 40: the architect’s library winter 2022
contents
Stephanie White Barbara Staffaucher Solomon Linda M Just
2 4 8
once made books ME/WE palm readings or, a brief examination of the personal bibliography
On Site review is published by Field Notes Press, which promotes field work in matters architectural, cultural and spatial.
F I E L D
Shawn Michelle Smith Paula Szturc Nicole Dextras Barbara Cuerden Tiago Torres-Campos Thomas Kohlwein SMSteele Rafael Gomez-Moriana Stephanie White Evelyn Osvath Ivan Hernandez-Quintela Robert G Hill Myron Nebozuk
12 14 18 20 22 26 28 30 32 36 40 45 50
reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin liquid architecture obsolescence: encyclopaedia
a monument to the end of bookishness spiral constellations: on books, shelves and libraries a bookish walk around town settled, unsettled, settling stacking crates reading peripheries the architect’s logbook bookshelves, reading and places to read an architecture of books in the company of books you are never alone love affairs: four architects and their books for the love of books the bookshelf as surrogate self
N O T E S
For any and all inquiries, please use the contact form at https://onsitereview.ca/contact-us Canada Post agreement 40042630 ISSN 1481-8280 copyright: On Site review. All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise stored in a retrieval system without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of Copyright Law Chapter C-30, RSC1988. these are listed in the website menu in three groupings: issues 5-16, 17-34 and 35-39. editor: Stephanie White design: Black Dog Running printer: Emerson Clarke Printing, Calgary subscriptions: libraries: EBSCO On-Site review #3371594 at https:// ebsco.com individual: https:// onsitereview.ca/subscribe back issues: https://onsitereview.ca
Dennis Rovere
52
Karen Joan Watson Greg Snyder
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This issue of On Site review was put together in Nanaimo on unceded Coast Salish territory, specifically the traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw Peoples, and in Calgary under Treaty 7 comprised of the Kainai, Siksika, Piikani, Tsuut’ina and Stoney Nakoda First Nations, the descendents of whom continue to live on this land.
The contributors come from diverse and various places: Canada, the United States and Mexico; Scotland, Austria, Spain and Germany. On Site review is honoured to have the contributions in this issue.
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
layout proofs for WE/ ME , a book that questions modernism, screen culture and the role Me has in We. There are 56 pages of searing, searching drawings of words, letters and graphic disturbance.
On page 22 she asks: From De-construction
to Re-construction is Modernism an
overly indulgent over- improvement con job? And answers it on page 23: Maybe. But this is what I still do!
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon
Chris Gunder
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon
the books of Barbara Stauffacher Solomon stephanie white
me to Linda M Just : You mention Barbara Stauffacher Solomon. She sent a picture of the books in her studio – tottering stacks on her desk, a wall of books crammed on shelves. A stack of paper for making the pages of her books, a jar of Elmer’s rubber cement. She sent the proofs of her latest book: fierce and angry, bursting off the pages. Linda Just to me : Starstrike happens less often to me these days, but I have to admit a little audible gasp at your story, especially with the prominent bottle of Elmer’s rubber cement. Fierce is such an excellent descriptor – the glue in her layouts always reads like the aftermath of battle, and begs the question whether to read the paper cuts as wounds to nurse, or bandages to heal.
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, WE/ME . San Francisco: Colpa Press, 2022.
One of the first topics that often drifts to the head of a conversation in a room full of architects (after introductions, construction details, nascent plans for one’s next design pilgrimage, or, possibly, dinner options) is books: what you are reading or have formatively read. Eventually, someone will cite, whether in earnest or irony, a conceptual powder keg of a piece. And like magic, measured conversation shifts to passionate, and even rowdy debate, which may call to mind the Jean Savarin epithet about revealing who you are by divulging what you eat. Following the variation on that theme, I’d thus argue that an architect can be understood in part by their bibliographic tastes – but take it a step further, to a skeptic’s extreme: to really know their inner workings, you need to see their library. Not just the cache of references they keep in the public-facing studio, for use or exhibition, but the ones they live with privately. Because while those, too, are books that contain practical information, they invoke architecture in the same sense that armour prompts an analogy to fortresses. They’re closer to the skin, and to the heart. Perhaps these provocations are built upon the premise that, at the broader psychological level, there is a measure of human connotation and comfort that comes from the book as an object. Thus, superficially, they serve as key but token props in every photograph of a well-appointed, realistically staged interior; without them, a room [for Western colonial iconography] can become a peculiar harbour of sadness, absence, scarcity, or even danger no matter how lavish it may be in other terms – culturally signalling a kind of social uncanny valley. There have been entire businesses established solely around the provision of faux libraries for interior designers – books sold by colour, size, shape, and weight – simply to reinforce the spatial and social meanings their presence offers. But architects have an arguably perennial relationship with printed matter – both in the sense that there is a recognisably established history of so-called paper architecture, and that the relationship has phases of growth and dormancy that follow the phases of design like the cycles of a garden. Most simply put: architects communicate ‘on paper’ what is ultimately translated into physical space through construction. The development of each designer’s vocabulary palm readings or, a brief examination of the personal bibliography linda m just
books ordering collections
preoccupations contamination
for that process will be ongoing, but it is ultimately the outcome of a lengthy personal journey. Print thus becomes a benchmark and shorthand for an architect’s influences and conceits; the recitation of a personal reading list [or, just as tellingly – a ban list] outlines the perimeters of one’s creative universe, with this canonical text at the heart of the solar system, and that bit of Apocrypha exerting the gravitational pull of an outlier planet. At the functional level, there is an echo in a book’s structure and logic that resembles the syntax designers typically pursue in their work. Books are modular, even fractal… like bricks coursed in a wall, which is in turn assembled of smaller parts – their chapters formed of image spreads or paragraphs; of sequences and sentences; of dots, words, glyphs, and gaps… a hypertextual screening of the Eames’ Powers of Ten , a walk through the labyrinths of a Borges novel.
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
the hand and eye. Whether deliberately or subliminally, our shelves take on the character of great internal facades; our somewhat careless piles by nightstands and on studio tables become urban master plans to navigate like parodies of pop- culture leviathans when we make our way to bed or work. In this dormant condition of an archive, on shelves and stacks, arranged in piles, walls, or enfilades, they still communicate – conveying ideas [and humanness, vis a vis intellectual curiosity and manual craft] in space. The proximal relationships between spines produce conceptual rebuses, constellations of interests, curiosities and ethics. In this way, rooms with books are perpetually refreshing, since each volume usually carries both the story between its covers and, more intangibly, of its time or purpose of acquisition… the presence of dust or signs of ultraviolet exposure sometimes further marking temporal history or the enduring power of influence. All of these manifested qualities, independently and certainly when assembled in concert, are so arresting, it begs the question of how architects would not be drawn to books, as media… as design objects in their own right? We will move our favourite specimens – amassed, culled, and curated – across continents, in checked luggage on planes, in cartons packed in moving vans. What we choose to keep surely bears some higher meaning and value… · I say all this at least in part from a place of self-indulgent introspection: for I recognise the habit in myself. While I am a staunch advocate of public libraries [I’m certain I have to be – both my parents worked in libraries at one time, and I spent most of my childhood in them], I’ve gradually accumulated a loosely curated and generously loaned collection of print artefacts over the last two decades, at first, and primarily, of things you couldn’t find in your average community institution. It has grown slowly, like an amateur gardener’s indulgent unruly hothouse, and I have moved it halfway across the country three times – its storage cartons usually exceeding the volume of my other, comparatively stoic, inventory of domestic belongings. On the one occasion I had to store my things during an extended period of transience, it was my books that I missed most, like an extension of self and the way I had always imagined a phantom limb must feel. It was only with their eventual retrieval that home felt like Home, even though I’d settled into a flat months earlier.
Linda M Just
Books thus physically manifest the qualities praised in architectural design -- they are tactile, and their sensory engagement prompts a visceral response, perhaps an unnameable feeling of attraction or repulsion. Consider public responses to Brutalist buildings: whether the source of the feeling is readily evident or not – whether the feeling justifies the criticism when the building functions well – and the parallel drawn here becomes more obvious. The tooth of the card stock covers, endpapers, and signatures; the soft relief of typeset on the page; the smell of the ink; the contrast of colour composition in layouts; the diegetic structure of its contents; even the typographic choices, blank space, and margining; all these seemingly small decisions can impact user/reader perception of a story through balance and form, albeit subliminally. Even at the macro-scale, as an object with agency and exerting Thing Power, books have an appealing tectonic parity: they lend themselves to rational assembly, scaled to
This isn’t particularly unusual – personal collections often wander more generously outside the confines of design proper or even the medium of books – they may contain fiction or prose, broadsheets or zines, photographic prints or slides. But I suppose at that stage in a field I had embarked upon with coltish naïvety and subsequently approached with the grave resolution of a novitiate, I needed that invitation to embrace a measure of deviance. To the aforementioned collection, I added photo essays and acoustics primers, a book of Eastern European Secession artwork from the 1960s which my father had rescued from the trash of a library making shelf space. There are graphic design imprints by Beatriz Colomina and Barbara Stauffacher Solomon [on designing graphic design for imprints and architecture] and pieces collected more for the physicality and structure of the book than the subject [I write that with all apologies to The Wooden Crate ]. There are a few beloved childhood picture books and science fiction novels from my mother, which are illustrated by Diane and Leo Dillon and whose surreal watercolours are simultaneously so abstract and intricately detailed that the captivated viewer is informed by a single vignette, even as it leaves just as much to the imagination. Essays on the diegetics and montage in the films of Lynch and Tarkovsky are slipped amongst the novels of Calvino, Rushdie, LeGuin and Pamuk. Vinyl has crept into the shelves, partly because I work to music and sound has been an enduring preoccupation in my design motifs, but also because I find the serial format of sleeves and the graphic/ tactile presence that laces together several sensory stimuli conceptually interesting. I have also inherited some old recordings of poetry readings; that seems to further assert the kinship between pressings and print. Most of these acquisitions have stories attached, as they often do for collectors, which can cause the stacks, in certain moods and atmospheres, to become not only a metaphorical garden for fresh ideas but a mausoleum for unbridled and unbidden recollection.
Though seeds of the collection appeared well before, its proper groundwork was prompted by a theory paper on unbuilt projects, which I was assigned as an undergraduate architecture student in 2001. I drew what my peers thought then was the short and very obscure straw for a topic: John Hejduk’s Berlin Masque . It was a fateful choice, since I could not know how that project would haunt my academic career, and notably shape my disciplinary interests and understanding. It was the waking, recurrent dream set in an unknown place where one does not speak the language but strives to learn at each visit. With less than three weeks to research and write it, and deep dives of the internet yielding no particularly helpful returns, I found my only primary source in the university library stacks. I checked out Mask of Medusa , Rizzoli’s famous first imprint of Hejduk’s architectural oeuvre, and puzzled over the cryptic imaginary landscapes it contained, which were presented in an aleatoric format, full of poetry, interviews, scattered metaphors, ghostly drawings and spidery captions. I revisited the book again and again over the next six years of study – the obscure references, the emotional design intention, the permutations of media used to communicate, and the means of documenting it all had perhaps eclipsed the projects themselves – until one day it could no longer be checked out: it had been placed in Special Collections, with limited access for students and no access granted to even newly-minted alumnae. Public libraries did not have it, and I quickly realised that sourcing a personal copy of an out-of- print, oversized monograph was unimaginable on an intern’s salary. While I did eventually acquire a second-hand copy, bought with, of all things, frequent flyer miles gifted by a globe- trotting employer one Christmas during the last economic crash, I had by then also collected other volumes that struck the same jarring chords as Hejduk’s work. And not just design monographs and technical manuals – but a heavy dose of literature by authors who deftly framed their settings with the rigour of an architect, creating vehicles, plot instruments and stages upon which their dramas unfolded. For some reason, the Mask had affirmed that it was all right to mix genres and contaminate the purity of one’s academic readings.
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
But relegating print to roles of memento mori is as dangerous as declaring architecture conservation exclusively an act of preserving fixed notions of the past. The privilege of crafting a history, a narrative, comes with the responsibility of recognising that knowledge is dynamic and evolving. Organisation and sequence can mean the difference between objects preserved in a vacuum, or contribution to an ecosystem conducive to growth and change. I have handled my own library [and career] with that same rationale. I love Georges Perec for all his irreverent lists and short essays, but especially for his earnest contemplation on the travails of book organisation. Where, he asks, does one begin? Is it best to sort by genre? Alphabetical order? Shape? Colour? Order of acquisition? Each filtering tells a story, and most designers make an effort to organise their personal space, consciously or in a state of somnambulance, just as one would a landscape or façade. Bibliophile guests may express curiosity about the logic behind poetry next to material catalogs – it makes for even more strange, and sometimes very animated, conversation as most who ask will have an opinion.
But it is a matter one may attend with some deliberation and even ceremony. Because it does, I believe, superimpose an aspect to moving about one’s living spaces that is not so unlike employing the mnemonic device of a memory palace: you see, and absorb, and think about the contexts as you go about your day. And THAT is what makes an architect’s library so significant, so revealing. It’s said that every problem is a nail when your only tool is a hammer, and given my predilection for design, it is seldom that I experience anything without attempting to view its underpinnings – like reading an X-Ray, with design as radium. And it’s in the anomalies, whose structures glow in eerie inexplicable configurations, that I most strongly see the sparks for inspiration, which later manifest in one’s work. Lined up on their shelves, books will yield a reading like cards from a tarot deck, with their contents contaminating one another by proximity, through consonance or contradiction, generating new hybrids, or at least the rich creative soil in which a new idea can bloom. c
Linda M Just
Linda Just is an architect, interdisciplinary collaborator, writer and researcher. Her practice merges technical rigour with a sharp focus on the abstract capacities of design to engage personal perception and narrative. She holds a Master’s in Design Studies from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and an MArch from the University of Illinois-Chicago.
reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin shawn michelle smith
books pages paper archaeology violence
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century. Published by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852, it was an anti-slavery novel that helped fuel abolitionist sentiment in the North before the Civil War. Despite its anti-slavery history, the novel is also the source of some of the most trenchant racist stereotypes in US culture. I began my teaching career as a professor of American literature and American Studies in the mid-1990s before moving to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to focus on visual culture and photography in the mid-2000s. In my previous role, I taught Uncle Tom’s Cabin roughly every year for ten years, re-reading its 629 pages each time. During a recent sabbatical, I began to sort through my professional things. When I looked at my teaching materials from the past, I was struck by the yellowing paperback novels riddled with post-it notes. After so many years, I encountered the books anew, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin in particular, as artifacts that showed traces of their use and marked a repetitive analogue reading practice. Seeing the novel in this way enabled me to understand it not simply as a narrative, but also as an object, and I wondered what other things I might make with this material. Taking the book apart, I constructed small paper cabins out of its pages and photographed them, including a few that I set on fire. Reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an excavation of my own professional reading practice as well as an oblique archaeology of some of the cultural roots of racist discourse in the United States. c
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
Shawn Michelle Smith
Shawn Michelle Smith is professor of visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her most recent book is Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography (2020).
liquid architecture paula szturc
reading waiting
fol lowing touching winding roads
If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fatal, inescapable points, then digressions lengthen that line – and if these digressions become so complex, tangled, tortuous, and so rapid as to obscure their own tracks, then perhaps death won’t find us again, perhaps time will lose its way, perhaps we’ll be able to remain concealed in our ever- changing hiding places. Carlo Levi, from his introduction to Italian edition of Tristram Shandy , quoted by Italo Calvino in ‘Quickness’, Six Memos for the Next Millennium , trans. Geoffrey Brock. London: Penguin Classics, 2016. p 57
This offering brings forward two points from my rather meandric readings. Both moments can be characterised by holding onto the gesture of searching (not synonymous with scrolling). Searching embeds me in the curatorial, historical and particular spatial contexts within the collection I am studying. 1 The relevance of this endeavour is determined by the dimensions of proximity. Repeating Vilém Flusser – ‘proximity measures my hope, my fear, my plans’. 2
Paula Szturc
1 Temporary closures of Scottish public institutions and universities libraries mid-2020 shifted my ways of organising, archiving and accessing sources, resulting in temporary assemblages that became frighteningly permanent each day. In a collaborative doctoral programme that focuses on a collection of Dada and Surrealist publications drawn from the book collections of Roland Penrose and Gabrielle Keiller, and housed at the Scottish
National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, the institutional and physical distance between the space of the collection and me, gave a sense of urgency and another dimension to my work. 2 Vilém Flusser, ‘The Gesture of Searching ’ , in Gestures , trans. Nancy Ann Roth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. p 157
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
notes on the scholarly shelf
With academic life moving onto the screen, I am attuned to lost experiences – the sense of immersion, being surrounded by the familiar vastness of paratextual layers, bridging the disciplines, time and space – the library. The loss takes the shape of a scholarly shelf that morphs into a virtual background reminding me of the privilege of accessing knowledge through physical codex rather than fragmented, infinite yet limiting, pdf/scrolls. 3 Through the lectures, tutorials and seminars conducted online, connecting our intimate and secluded worlds, I encounter the perfect shelf – a type of space that transfixes with its spatial fluidity, its material and conceptual layers, that draws in a fasted mind. It is not the organically amassed assemblage of art and architectural books spanning centuries, contained within subtly worn oak joinery, graciously occupying a Georgian interior, nor is it the carefully composed array of books and design objects climbing modernist modular shelving units. No, I find it in a recorded conversation with Zygmunt Bauman, filmed at his home in Leeds a decade ago. 4 Here, a stratified design, based on small concrete blocks and simple wood shelves, wraps the walls of a modest interior. It fills the niches, carrying the weight of decades of academic work. This dynamic structure, with blocks distributed evenly as well as being shifted for more support or, in some places, responding to oversized piles of material becomes a frame that adapts to an ever-growing library. Other videos document the accumulation. 5
Glimpses reveal a print of Don Quixote on the wall, returning later in the form of a sculpture on a shelf. There is an abstract painting on top of everything, leaning against the wall, and abundance of paper, notes, printed pages, arranged in piles, folders, books and boxes. In all the videos, the camera is fixed on the scholar holding a lighter or a pipe, gesticulating as he describes the dialectics of modern uncertainty. On the door is a poster from 1996, an invitation to an event with Janina Bauman at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Staszic Palace in Warsaw. Above it, is another one, simply titled Moods and Shapes . There is also a card with a poem inside fixed to the door at eye level. At one point the camera looks across a completely filled desk, with a screen, webcam, hard drive and more books – out to the green barrier of the garden. The shelving system, however easy it is to construct, is overgrown by incoming volumes. Books escape the shelves, pile on the floor, taking over, rendering the rest of the space inaccessible. Piled on the shelves the books become structural members in the absence of blocks, disturbing the rhythm of construction. Nothing is fixed, it’s just timber resting on blocks; some shelves are nearing collapse — all from the overwhelming presence of books. I am one of many that acknowledged the cosmic pull of this interior constellation. This precious and fragile space was artistically colonised by Polish artist, Miros ł aw Ba ł ka, who in 2013 brought to Bauman his 1:1 photograph of the studio wall of images, curated with surgical precision. The rationale behind this act was revealed in a limited edition publication, Ba ł ka / Bauman – a record of the conversation between the artist and the philosopher of liquid modernity. 6 5 Bartek Dziadosz, ‘Excerpts from the interview with Zygmunt Bauman/Cutaways B-roll’, filmed June 1-16, 2010 as part of the documentary, ‘The Trouble with Being Human These Days’ acccessed Dec 31, 2021. https//www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zvfLpptUIh4 6 Zygmunt Bauman and Miros ł aw Ba ł ka, edited by Katarzyna Bojarska. Bauman / Ba ł ka. Warszawa: Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 2013. The copy I am working with comes from the library of my supervisor, Ella Chmielewska.
3 Electronic versions of printed works expose the navigational and format challenges of the virtual space that often disregards the paratextual elements understood in Genette’s terms as ‘liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between the book, publisher, and reader’. Johanna Drucker in her essay ‘The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space’ brings to focus the book as a three-dimensional, dynamic and performative structure. See A Companion to Digital Literary Studies , ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. http:// www.digitalhumanities.org/ companionDLS/ 4 Mike Dibb and Charlie Duran, ‘Personally Speaking; Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman - Film 1’ accessed Dec 31, 2021, https://youtube.com/watch?v=19kmqx1-Slw
notes on reading Tristam Shandy
Paula Szturc
I open the 1815 edition of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy , just after restrictions are lifted. 7 The four volumes of Sterne’s works are stored on the top shelf in the Roland Penrose Library section, within the Gabrielle Keiller Library Room – an architecturally charged gallery and mezzanine space that blurs the boundary between library, study and exhibition space. Here, paratextual density brings together works that span half a millennium, with Tristram Shandy and Henri Matisse’s Jazz occupying the same space. Both Keiller and Penrose collections centre around Dada and Surrealist publications. Penrose’s bequest contains small section of books he chose to keep from the vast manuscript and rare books library of Baron Peckover, his maternal grandfather.
The enmeshing of institutional and personal geographies results in a unique situation – the recreation of the original proximities of objects within the collections. Sterne’s four volumes with the remnants of marbling on their covers and tiny evidence of gold in the ornamented embossed details on the spine, share the shelf with the copy of first collected edition of Gargantua and Pantagruel printed in 1564 in Lyon, and a 1545 Venetian edition of Orlando Innamorato .
7 After lockdown and the slow opening of public institutions, 18 months later I was allowed to examine The works of Laurence Sterne, in four volumes, containing the life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. a sentimental journey through France and Italy; sermons, - letters, etc with a life of the author, written by himself. / Volume the Second printed in London by A. Strahan in 1815, now part of Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Archive, Roland Penrose Collection, Peckover Library, GMA A35/2/RPL4/062.
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
confession of the continuous and conscious manipulation of the plot. The marbled page from Penrose’s copy, as per Sterne’s specifications, features mesmerising, fluctuating, tinted waves registering the wetness of the process. 11 There is a crease on top of the verso page, suggesting a rushed application of the marbling cut out. Large pale pink drops swim in rivers of yellow, turquoise, blue and pink. This motley emblem not only disturbs the novel, but marks ‘the outermost limits of the text’. 12 So far I have followed the vectorial movements, the plot line schemata, the entanglements, the curvature. The dislocating gesture however – with positioning liminal devices associated with textual boundaries, in-between the leaves, within the signatures – speaks rather of a liquid architecture of the book . c
White ribbon wraps the volume’s crumbling cover. Its strong scent, signals material degradation. Slightly textured soft cream paper with gentle stains provides a strong contrast to crisp, slightly brown ink. ‘Printed by A. Strahan, Printers-Street, London.’ Sterne’s face on the frontispiece is ambiguous, with care and detail directed towards symbolic objects – a hunting bow and a singing bird. The title page is the last conventional paratextual element in its expected position. The novel unravels with divagated impetus, best described by Carlo Levi (quoted by Calvino in Six Memos ) a s a weapon to save oneself from the death and time . The dedication is found mid-chapter, and a lengthy preface in the third volume. I am guided on this journey by Richard Macksey’s foreword to Gérard Genette’s Paratexts , titled ‘Pausing on the Threshold’. 8 Macksey’s footnotes on this strategy against the time lead me to Victor Shklovsky and his Formalist analysis of Sterne’s various temporal transpositions characteristic of poetics rather than prose. 9 Prolonged dashes and asterisks adorn the pages, exclaiming in dialogues writing themselves into evasive movement. I almost skip the Malevich-esque black page, another experimental paratextual device denoting ‘the innermost and overdetermined limits of the text itself.’ 10 In Sterne’s book I discover a foldout with the Lili Bullero score – the whistling tune of Tristram’s veteran uncle Toby, and diagrams illustrating the story line in Tristram Shandy – a
8 Richard Macksey, ‘Pausing on the Threshold’ the forward to Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretations , by Gérard Genette, trans. Jane Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.Press, 2010. xi – xxiv 9 Viktor Shklovsky, ‘The Novel as Parody: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy’ in Theory of Prose , Viktor Shklovsky, trans. Benjamin Sher. Illinois: Elmwood Park, 1990. 147-170
10 Macksey, ‘Pausing on the threshold’ xi
11 Unmarbled editions reveal a note from the author to incorporate double-sided marble page: ‘ ☛ The BOOKBINDER is desired to cover both sides of this leaf with the best marbled paper, taking care to keep the folio lines clear and to preserve the proper margins’ The copy from Peckover Library that I am working with, has marbled pages simply glued on, rather than laboriously incorporated into the binding process, as in the first edition.
Paula Szturc is currently undertaking an Architecture by Design PhD at the University of Edinburgh (ESALA). In her collaborative research project with National Galleries of Scotland, she explores material, spatial and sensorial aspects of artists’ books.
12 Macksey, ‘Pausing on the Threshold’, xi
obsolescence: encyclopaedia nicole dextras
weathering uselessness
books paper mulch
I am from Alexandria. No, no the ancient port of knowledge in Egypt but a small dull town near the St-Laurence River in Ontario. But nonetheless the namesake of my birthplace has forged strange neural pathways in my imagination to the fabled lost city of books, instilling a penchant for the tactile and ephemeral nature of ink and paper. As an artist I have created words in ice that melt and of grass that grows. I am fascinated by the morphing of language. Maybe it is because this town of my childhood lives on the border of Ontario and Quebec where the central thoroughfare is called Main street at one end and rue Principale at the other. To my juvenile ears both languages danced endlessly between division and alliance, while the transmutation of words themselves were an incessant sharpener of wit. Obsolescence is a series based on lost material technologies such as the typewriter, the darkroom enlarger and the encyclopædia, whose relevance has vanished in my lifetime. Installed outdoors, I documented their transformation over the course of four seasons. A full set of hard cover encyclopædias was once a proud affirmation of middle-class aspirations towards progress but now they are displayed as relics of a bygone age in upscale vintage stores. Today these photos of books portray the A to Z of knowledge as their appeal and importance diminishes through the ravages of time. Their pages turn as the leaves fall and the snow blankets. Their mutation is recorded as they are pierced with blooms, then frozen in ice, their pages glued together with mould, with words isolated and blurred, full of nostalgia and loss but also with an ever-hopeful eye for detail and life. c
© nicole dextras
Nicole Dextras graduated from Emily Carr College of Art in the interdisciplinary department in 1986. Her art practice is rooted in the environmental art movement with transformative installations and film that mark the nature of time. She has exhibited in Canada, the USA and Asia.
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
© nicole dextras
monument to the end of bookishness barbara cuerden
indexes libraries material culture keywords eco-art
The sense of loss of three-dimensional physical reality led artist Karina Kraenzle and I to construct Monument to the End of Bookishness, built out of discarded books. In the countryside outside of Perth, Ontario and created from a thousand books, our mute Tower of Babel was gathered, struggled with, collected, amassed, transported and installed by us, in a pine forest at the Fieldwork eco-art site. This was our ultimate book return, back to the (tree) gods that made them. · As a professional indexer for scientific research as well as being an artist, it’s my daily occupation to work with books, texts, records and digital files on and off the screen. The On Site review issue 40 call for proposals called me to reflect on “…books… bought, inherited, given away, stolen, returned, used to level table legs, prop open doors…” and, as immediately came to mind, books as building materials. An index re-builds the content of the book it serves through networks of
words. Eyes scan a paper index much like a screen. Useability and browse- ability pertain to its structure. The spaces contained in an index act as neural synapses. We jump from one thing to another, re-constructing meaning through an alphabetised wordlist. As an artist and indexer, I’ve noticed that a great index is like a work of art; it’s a code for something culturally deeper, unfolding a lineage of related works and words. From the indexer point of view, the backbone of an index reveals itself as you build from the content, which I feel is akin to the limitations of artists’
Does the scanning activity of online reading reach only surface depths? Skipping on and offscreen, scanning sideways, sliding down under or even deeply, the hyper of hypertext transfer protocols and https take you outside yourself to external realms, under glass, away from where you are then back again. Command click, or double click, are there enough live link dimensions to re-construct a monument (built from books)? Grounded in a back story of material culture, and having abandoned thumbing through books with no- longer handwritten marginalia, cracking the spines or dog-earing pages earmarked where eyes have scored a treasure, the escape from materiality lingers as physical loss. Eyes sliding over a screen is an act of differently slippery sensations.
materials. Maybe three-quarters through the book matter, cross-
references and page locators, a pattern emerges whereon you can hang most of the terms. It literally starts to make sense, sometimes in ways the author did not foresee. Something new emerges when you get down to the DNA, or you read in-between the lines. Through a pared-down index that includes links to external other sites, I invite you, the reader, to re-construct the book monument (referred to on the website as Still Voices ). You can slip your eyes over this spinal column of index entries, using hyperlinks as page locators, and in the meantime ask: can our internally created spaces be three- dimensional as well? c
Karina Kraenzle
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
INDEX (note: links take the place of page locators)
installation, see https://stillvoices.weebly.com/ blog/archives/04-2014 intertextuality, see https://stillvoices.weebly. com/blog/fieldwork-project-2014-poetry-reading- live-books J Jardin de Métis, see https://www.ledevoir.com/ opinion/idees/295779/controverse-sur-l-usage-de- livres-aux-jardins-de-metis-le-cycle-de-vie-du-livre Jardine, David (2000) ‘Unable to Return to the Gods that Made Them’. See https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/ edit/10.4324/9780203826133-44/unable-return- gods-made-david-jardine K Kraenzle, Karina (artist). See https://www. karinakraenzle.com/ L libraries M material culture monuments O Osler, Susie (artist). See Fieldwork P paper Perth, Ontario pine forest R reading S Still Voices, see website https://stillvoices. weebly.com/blog/category/site-work T texts W words, on the land. See https://stillvoices. weebly.com/blog/fieldwork-words-on-the-land Writer’s Festival, see https://stillvoices.weebly. com/blog/frameworks-writers-festival-event
A academic research art, installation artists
Barbara Cuerden Karina Kraenzle
B blog, see https://stillvoices.weebly.com/blog/
the-site books
library number of (1,000)
bookstores browse C Catalogue Cindex, indexing software. See https://www. indexres.com/cindex creaturality Cuerden, Barbara (artist) See https:// creaturality.wordpress.com/2013-2/ curation, see https://stillvoices.weebly.com/blog/ category/eco-art D donations E eco-art, see also Fieldwork eco-pedagogy, see also Jardine encyclopedias environmental art F fiction Fieldwork, see https://www.facebook.com/ fieldworkproject/ See also https://stillvoices.weebly.com/blog/ category/fieldwork Frameworks (Ottawa International Writer’s Festival) See https://stillvoices.weebly.com/blog/ frameworks-writers-festival-event G givens, the H
Karina Kraenzle
hardcovers hyperlinks I
Illich, Ivan (1996) In the Vineyard of the Text See also https://thefrailestthing.com/2010/12/28/ in-the-vineyard-of-the-text/ indexer, see https://www.index-s.com/ influencers, see: Illich, Ivan; Jardine, David
Karina Kraenzle is a photo-based artist living and working in Ottawa. Using original and found photography, and occasionally other ephemeral materials, she creates series as well as site-specific installations. Barbara Cuerden is an artist and a professional indexer. She lives in Ottawa and works for the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) digital library.
Karina Kraenzle
spiral constellations on books, shelves and libraries tiago torres - campos
books notebooks families
travel home
If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library. In fact, sometimes I think I have never strayed outside that library.1
—Jorge Luis Borges
In my parent’s study room there is a small wooden spiral- shaped bookshelf, an unusual shape that holds fourteen unusual notebooks. My father designed and constructed shelf and books as a collection in which all the artefacts are read in relation to one another: a book constellation organised inside a spiralled wooden architecture, inside a personal library, inside my family home. The notebooks are filled with drawings, paintings, collages, short essays and more diffuse streams of consciousness. My father travelled extensively, mostly alone and especially the latitudes between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn,
his comfort zone. Each notebook began with a journey and ended when he was back in his study. Explorations with composition, materiality, colour, ethnography and cosmogony. Memories from the Amazon forest, the African jungle, and the Indian coast. Herbariums, diagrams, and abstractions. Sedimentations of mental digestions of physical journeys. Alluviations of his never-fully crystallised thoughts that were always the report of his body and mind adapting
1 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘An Autobiographical Essay,’ in The Aleph and Other Stories : 1933–1969 , Norman Thomas di Giovanni, translator and editor. London: Jonathan Cape, 1968. p 209
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
Tiago Torres-Campos
that those constellations are highly influenced by the physical space that organises them. Like all libraries, ours too has a system, albeit unconventional: novels can be paired with art catalogues if, for example, they refer to a same period, or to a same author, or to a same line of study that my father happened to be exploring at the time. Sometimes, small art pieces or memorabilia stand side by side with relevant publications — a long photograph in sepia taken by my great- grandfather during a military campaign in Africa alongside a series of books inherited from his collection. An old book hand-written by an Amazon tribal chief, alongside a pair of drawings of macaws from the same region. Unlike most libraries, however, books do not always occupy the same place on the bookcases. The whole system has always been in constant flux, not from just my father but from all of us. Whenever I needed a book for a school project, it was moved into a lower shelf, so I could access it in my own terms.
to new environments, the heat and the monsoon, the sweat, the thirst and the fatigue. Vibrant cross-examinations of previous expeditions that were always already entangled in the beginning of the next one. One of my parents’ motivations for moving into a larger house, besides a growing family, was the study room. Connected to the main living room through a sliding door, the space is independent enough to organise and secure the books, catalogues, albums and magazines that fill the recessed floor-to-ceiling shelves on all walls except the fireplace. We call it the library, and that small stuffed space was the entry point to a much richer, weirder and cosmopolitan world than my sheltered youth in a Catholic school could anticipate. It is also where I became conscious that books contain organised thoughts and images, that they too are assembled in wider collections with other books, and
Eventually, the book collection outgrew the study room and spilled into other rooms and bookcases around the house. Publications related to indigenous art were moved into my sister’s bedroom after she got married. Children's books and encyclopaedias, comic books, photo albums, cookbooks, and musical scores filled a more recent bookcase in a smaller adjacent room. My brothers and sisters and I all took some books with us when we moved out, yet my father always kept a mental register of the whereabouts of them all. It was not unusual for him to ask for a book that a relative had borrowed and kept for years. Like all good custodians, he had several mnemonic devices to keep track of the flux. My father was an architect but he seldom read books specifically about architecture. It was something to do more with knowledge expansion and less with disciplinary specialisation, or so he explained. That made the spiralled assemblage all the more curious to me. The fourteen notebooks were not specifically about architecture, yet they were the labour my father went through to construct his architecture. They were architecturally constructed: Beech samples with specific veins were used to increase the spiralling effect; most book spines were hand-stitched and covers bound with textiles from the visited geographies; and papers were carefully chosen to withstand the architectural operations of book construction. Each spread is a standalone curatorial act to distil an impression or a thought, but the transition from one phototext to the next offers a rhythmic vibrance that is hard to dismiss. My father thought “the space of the book as being equivalent to a building.” 2 For scholar André Tavares, ‘both in buildings and in books architect- authors organise sequences and logical paths that generate meaning for those who use them, such that both formats offer similar strategies that can simulate similar physical experiences – from page to page, as from room to room.’ 3 The architect as a book constructor foregrounds architecture as an important character in the whole process, something that tangles with all the minutiae of conceiving, designing, producing and editing a book. 4 Perhaps that was the reason
why the fourteen notebooks were deliberately separated from the all the other books in the study and kept in the spiral. One of the books begins with a visual and written explanation of how to keep the rest of them organised in the correct order. Transitioning from one book to the next is a way of experiencing the spiral. Shelving is as important as reading, the assemblage as important as any of the parts. Every summer vacation my father brought with us a heavy suitcase containing a temporary book collection that on the first day he neatly organised, by theme, on top of a dusty table: light summer reading and novels, memoires and art books. 5 As the summer went on, the books kept changing places. The whole operation resembled, once again, a spiralled constellation in which publications changed piles and alternated positions between the edges or the centre of the table. More rarely, books could leave the table and then come back, in a sort of gravitational push and pull. But no books were ever left behind. Some of the fourteen notebooks were temporarily a part of the summer table to form constellations with other books, before returning to the spiral and sinking in with the rest. In his office studio my father kept hundreds of other notebooks. Most architects usually settle on a type of sketchbook that suits their ways of thinking and drawing. His were A4 spiral grid notebooks with a strong blue cover and filled with sketches, plans, sections, elevations, calculations, lists and minutes of meetings. The gridded paper was mostly a comfort metric and rarely respected. The spiral binding allowed the initial sketches to be photocopied or scanned without damaging their integrity. The notebooks were always the point of departure to any of the firm’s projects and they sedimented the evolution of an architectural approach to the world over almost four decades of practice. They are books of architecture perhaps in the way Bernard Tschumi defined them: “books that do not focus on buildings or cities per se, but rather on the search for ideas that contextualise them … aimed at exploring the limits of architectural knowledge ….” . 6 4 Tavares draws from El Lissitzky’s self-titled konstruktor knigi to define architect-authors as book constructors. El Lissitzky first used the title in 1923 to sign Vladimir Mayakovsky’s book Dlia golosa . 5 Itinerant summer libraries are commonplace in my family. My grandfather had a similar suitcase, and so had his brother, who later in life could afford to buy a second smaller apartment next door just for his books on the history of Spain during the Franco period after the weight on his first house began threatening the physical integrity on one side of the building.
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
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