a tragic web of people in the wrong place at an impossible time. It seemed both relevant and distant. I still have the Faber editions in case they become relevant again. As might Marxism. And Gramsci, and von Clausewitz and Diderot’s Encyclopédie . All these books, most of them rarely mentioned now, hundreds of them, are my literary autobiography. They are what I have read. And this doesn’t count all the books from all the libraries, public and university, nor all the photocopied chapters from them, filed impenetrably in a single-drawer filing cabinet almost impossible to move. Paper weighs a lot. But that is material. And where are the architecture books? They occupy their own case, mixed with lots of other things – an ambiguous zone where architecture acknowledges its crossover with landscape, the vernacular, indigenous building traditions, and conceptual art – some of the first Pamphlet Architectures given to me by their authors — it was Steve Holl who wrote about Glassie in his first pamphlet about music; the first Zone , memorable for a long piece on the destruction of Beirut, Colin Rowe’s Collage City , Nathan Silver’s Adhocism , Coop Himmelb(l) au which gave me an inkling that in extreme almost out of control drawing one can find the direction and the space of the architecture one is looking for. These books slide away from the definitive, the canon, the monograph, the object, and instead raise issues of breakage, improvisation, hybridity, ambiguity, the fragmentary, the ruined. I feel at home here. c
S White
As anyone who knows me knows I do not spend money on anything , believing that one can make lovely things with ordinary lumber, hardware store hardware and Armstrong methods: it just takes a bit of time. Virtue born of necessity. These bookcases are so solid I never have to think about them toppling or overloading, and at the same time are magically ethereal, the glass shimmers; they seem deceptively fragile. Behind the glass is a complex and wealthy world, visual, conceptual, historic and material.
Bosher, J F. Imperial Vancouver Island. Woodstock, Oxfordshire: WritersWorld, 2012 Clifford, James and George Marcus, editors. Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography . University of California Press, 1986 Harlow, Barbara. Resistance Literature . New York and London: Routledge, 1987 Glassie, Henry. Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971 Holl, Steven. Pamphlet Architecture 9: Rural and Urban House Types, 1982 Mo, Timothy. An Insular Possession. London: Chatto & Windus, 1986 Said, Edward. Orientalism. NY: Pantheon Books, 1978 Wallerstein, Immanuel with Etienne Balibar. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities . London: Verso. 1991
Stephanie White is the editor of On Site review.
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