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
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