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
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