Yet, my father was always reluctant to use any of the fourteen notebooks in the spiral to discuss architecture, preferring instead to describe them as a library inside his library, something that could at any minute be packed inside a bag to become itinerant, a temporary organisation that truly served nomadic purposes. The spiral was deliberately constructed as a piece that oscillates between a way of making architecture and a way of making art. Its books are perhaps the clearest link between my father’s profession and his personal interests. Looking back, I believe they showcase the beginnings of what would later become some of his most interesting projects, or at least the ones where the struggle to push his practice to new territory became more visible. It is where he first upgraded an indigenous form of thatched-roof with local reed that had long disappeared from a southern coastal region in Portugal because it was associated with poor livelihoods and unnecessary maintenance; where he first experimented with bold colour schemes adapted from Mozambique and Cabo Verde, textiles as identity branding of social housing complexes mostly for African immigrant communities around Lisbon; and in general where he more actively merged the legacy of Portuguese modernism in his architecture with a strong site-specific materiality. Growing up among so many books I always took access to libraries for granted, and specifically my parents’ library, my first ever repository of knowledge, my point of departure to the world and my physical and mental point of return to home. There was something about assuming the knowledge is there — potent, stored and protected inside the room, that always gave me confidence. It is perhaps a fictitious idea that constellations can ever be kept stable inside their own architecture, but the Covid pandemic interrupted my regular visits home and, unsurprisingly, this period coincided with my renewed focus on writing about home. For a while, I could only access the library books through the eyes and mind of my mother. Several times we had to devise a way to get them to me, usually torn apart in scans or bad cell phone photographs. The system worked to the extent that I could access the content of a specific book, but it failed tremendously in that it broke the serendipitous spiralling of following a constellation inside the room.
Knowledge acquired inside libraries is not only derived from book contents; it also follows the ways in which that knowledge is linked to other books, other shelves, and other libraries. It is also not always deliberate. These constellations determine and are determined by book architectures that physically and mentally both precipitate and unsettle knowledge. They guide us along lines of flight leading us somewhere, but they also constantly pull us away from anything that is solid, fixed, prescribed, fully known. They allow for a type of journey that other repositories, including the online ones, can’t. In the words of Borges, ‘a book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.’ 7 A spiral is not just a whimsical shape for a bookshelf, it is a way of structuring a book collection architecturally. c
Tiago Torres-Campos is a Portuguese landscape architect and associate professor at Rhode Island School of Design, as well as the MLA program director. He co-edited Postcards from the Anthropocene: Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation , 2022 and is doing a PhD through which he explores architecture and landscape as conditions of the geologic. www.cntxtstudio.com
6 Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts (1981) London: Academy Editions, 1994. p 6 7 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘A note on (toward) Bernard Shaw,’ in Labyrinths (1962) New York: New Directions Books, 2007. pp 213–215
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