Theory, religion, philosophy – all constructs, ordering systems to make sense of a life and lives. Some are more useful at some times than others, all are true, all are narratives, all are valuable. At one time, in my teens, I thought the imagist poets described a world worth being in. They occupy a section in my bookshelves. At another, much later time, having discovered Henry Glassie, I dropped like a stone into material culture studies: the world was full of things that had deep cultural histories but remained largely silent about them, mostly because they hadn’t been asked. This interrogation of a material world that we take for granted was revelatory — there is no quick take on anything. At the same time, James Clifford’s new ethnography presented the world as deeply interconnected: thick description, that delightful term, plus Braudel, plus all the books spawned in their wakes, they swept through the universities, for me when I was at the University of Texas at Austin teaching design studios and drawing. Anthropology symposia, MLA meetings, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival conference, post-colonial film programmes — I could hardly sleep it was all so exciting. The shelves of these books are the material flotsam that wave left behind. I read them all, as if I had been dying in the desert and was offered a shower. Such waves of enthusiasms fill my bookcases. Collectively these books represent one of the unmoveable objects in my life, the other two being an 1895 cast iron platen press I bought 30 years ago and a 1957 Austin A50 in the garage which hasn’t run since 1985 after driving it to Kansas. I built twelve floor to ceiling glass fronted bookcases in the early 1990s in an effort to control the chaos of all those sizes, colours, widths, subjects — all that paper and board, all that intellectual history, all that dust. Once behind glass, it all settled down: sequestration belies the instability of the book as a trusted certainty. Materially sturdy yes, what’s inside, less so. It is perhaps a heresy to instrumentalise books, but sometimes they do move one on. I read Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet every year through my twenties; they were different books every time and seemed to offer ways of being unencountered in my own life — there was a loucheness that was Egypt, expatriate, corrupt, all passion and pain: only now do I see this as orientalism in action. Egypt was both central and peripheral – Justine , Balthazar , Mountolive and Clea , such beautiful names, were about a place, and a time, and
S White
The glass-fronted bookcases, made 1992-3. Twelve bays. Very inexpensive: 2 x 2s, a ton of 1”steel corner braces, 1 x 10 and 1 x 12 boards, piano hinges, picture glass and cove moulding from the off cuts bin at Revelstoke contractors division. 18” wide door frames out of 1x3s amd 1x4s run up by a fellow at the end of the street in the old Hudson’s Bay warehouse. Everything screws together, everything is demountable in case I ever have to move it all.
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
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