4 Tip Scott We all use words such as pervasive, active, or passive to describe our ongoing relationship with books. Brett’s relationship is both active and passive – he uses his books in his design work and maintains an active research library. He also maintains a passive resource collection in a different city – one that has not been touched in years. Tom’s relationship is pervasive and never as active as he would like. Late in his career, Tip would have used the word indifferent . His passion for books was initially active in that they provided a deeper understanding for his architectural projects, primarily through his life-long romance with philosophy via DePauw, the Sorbonne and Oxford. The first project we collaborated on was the Tibetan Cultural Centre in Indiana. By way of design research he gave me a copy of The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation , which still holds a prominent place in my library. 4 Tip’s studio had few books; those present were stacked, in no specific order, on tables and custom designed and manufactured moveable sets of drawers. Magazines and journals stood on the long work table in his studio. Most of his library was in his house, on bookshelves that spanned the length and height of one wall, over two floors.
Late in Tip’s career rumours began to circulate he was carrying on affairs with books outside his home; casual affairs, to be sure, with audio books from the public library. He claimed these were not serious encounters but only undertaken for companionship during his solo, late-night studio design sessions. However, I knew his relationships were changing when he packed almost all of his books into boxes. They were labelled and placed in storage, never to be opened again in his lifetime. In his studio, his collection of design magazines were put in cupboards and the only books that remained in the open were those actively needed for construction, pricing or detailing. During all of this, he did stay faithful to one book – a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass , carried with his sketch book and drawing tools in a hand-woven Ecuadorean bag. 5 One particular summer day we stopped for coffee on our way to dinner with a client. As we sat and chatted, he began to read from Leaves and at one point began to cry. When I learned that Tip had died suddenly, I found the best hard cover copy of ‘Song of Myself’ – the core poem in Leaves of Grass , 5 commemorating Tip’s love of Whitman and our long and close collaboration and friendship. Despite its emotional value, ‘Song’ does not sit on my desk. It lives beside the Great Liberation in the architecture section of my library. No longer a book, but akin to a paper gau , it stands as a reminder for Tip, now gone. c 4 Evans-Wentz, W.Y. The Tibetan book of the great liberation . New York: Oxford University Press, 1982 5 Whitman, W., & Crawford, A. Song of myself . Portland & Brooklyn: Tin House Books, 2014
dennis rovere
In his mid-twenties, Dennis Rovere left the fast-paced world of oracle bone translation to pursue architecture. When not designing, or rearranging his library, he practices Taiji and Chinese painting. www.dennisrovere.ca @disegno.dennis
Adrienne Rovere
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