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.
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