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
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