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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