reading peripheries stephanie white
books bookcases geography erotica childhood
Writing about my books and what they mean to me would be like talking about your children: vital to you, but less so to people who don’t know you, aren’t particularly interested in them, but are interested in children to a point, and books, to a point. Somehow writing about books has to fit into a less personal context, although the personal is key, but rather more important is what books mean in the arc of a life. An arc of a life, what is it? This is the author’s subject, the critic’s preoccupation, the artist’s focus: everything folds into it – learning, love, identity, place, daily life and life-long hopes and fears. I am an architect by training, in a kind of unrequited love for the subject. As it doesn’t give much back in terms of professional accord, it is, rather, the paper on which I place other non-building things. In 1989, in Barcelona, I spent a lot of time at Herder’s bookstore where I found Barbara Harlow’s Resistance Literature , a book that was the key to understanding my apparent marginal position in the world and why I taught architecture the way I did, why I drew the way I drew; it taught me how to recognise the periphery where I lived and worked, and the core where everything supposedly happened. I discovered world theory, which came from the Latin American periphery and which explained so much, so much about everything I had ever experienced. Including the practice of architecture, the education of the architect, being one of the 5% of women in the field (at the time). I didn’t learn resistance from the book, I learned to recognise it in myself, in others, and that turned my thinking. It explained what I was in Barcelona to do, which was to find out why there was the early-1980s explosion of magical new modernist architecture, specifically in Barcelona, after the death of Franco and the transition to a socialist government after forty years of isolationist repression. Little was known about Spain during the Franco years; it had two borders, the stony Pyrenees between it and France, and the deceptively glittery Costa del Sol, inaccessible to Spaniards, not unlike the tourist edges of Cuba — a border of apartheid between decadent foreigners and a righteous, impoverished hinterland. Francoista architecture was heroic, heavy, monumental; modernity was seen as an internationalist force to be resisted by the nationalist and isolationist Franco regime. When he died, a repressed international socialism, stewing since the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, burst forth. Barcelona, the heart of the
Republican side of the Civil War, had remained peripheral to Madrid, turning instead to its historic relationship wtih northern Italy. Carlo Scarpa, who died just four years after Franco, had been a surreptitious beacon to Catalan architects, drawing them particularly to the romantic modernity of 1960s Italy. The explosion of sculptural, acrobatic, purely beautiful architecture under the directorship of Oriol Bohigas between 1980 and the 1992 Olympics was radical, exhilarating and completely inspired. Moneo, Miralles, Calatrava— their early work unfolded buildings to the urban realm, the street, the plaças, the parks — they were magical. This was why I went to Barcelona near the end of the 1980s, I had just wanted to see it all, to live there, to understand how such freedom leaps out of a recently rigid culture and society. Such innovation does not emerge from an allegedly free society, or from free speech, or from libertinism; it seems to develop in the dark corners of oppression, things denied, or politically denigrated, youth denied and denigrated, where internationalism is a threat, not an opportunity. For me, the 1992 Olympics and Spain’s entry into the EU — its entry into the core, was the end of this remarkable flourish. After the epiphany that was Resistance Literature , I spent the 1990s reading 1960s dependence theory and 1970s world systems theory: Walter Rodney, Emmanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank et al . Core and periphery, it all made sense to me, the layers of core I belonged to, but peripheral in them: the structures were the same as any decolonising country. Whence comes this peripherality in the midst of plenty? Black Lives Matter is a first world protest precisely because many people living in the first world are considered irrelevant to core values and ambitions. Decolonising the mind is a structural proposition that starts with recognising core-periphery relationships. It’s a construct; maybe accurate, maybe not. But the books, the books, they bred in the night, filling shelf after shelf, springing off into side shoots, film theory, novels, art history, colonial theory, war studies — the world was explained to me in a way that I’d never encountered. I needed it. Architecture was still the domain of great white men; I was no longer interested in how it was written about, practiced, critiqued, taught or mythologised.
It started with a book, this re-slanting of the world in which I lived.
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
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