ARCHITECTURE PASSES NOTICING ENTROPY ANXIETY AND INDETERMINACY tiago torres - campos
In her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse , Virginia Woolf narrates the stories of the Ramsay family in their holiday house in the Hebrides, Scotland. 1 In ‘Time Passes’ – a short middle chapter with no people in it – Woolf weaves ten turbulent years of family misfortunes during WWI with observations about the house crumbling while it is left unvisited. Time both contracts to offer glimpses of war devastation and expands to the point where the reader becomes attuned to dust accumulating on the window sill. The simultaneity of the two radically different temporalities increases distortion. We learn about the death of important characters – mother, two sons and a daughter – in short parenthetical sentences. Lengthy descriptions ‘give voice’ to the house: people disappear, walls crumble, furniture dissolves and so does space itself. Small air currents creep indoor to inspect the different rooms. As day and night go by, and seasons, and years, the house is suspended in a viscous entropic state. Objects and materials inside and outside the space are not completely solid anymore, but also not yet completely dissolved. The narrative, at times congested to a point where time can no longer be measured, gains contours of delirious prose.
Though the tone in ‘Time Passes’ is apparently calm – or calm enough to notice and care about dust falling – it coats anxiety, obviously related to war and death, and possibly the influenza pandemic as well. Dust becomes a way to read entropy as disorienting depression. The viscous states of matter denote a disquiet sense of groundlessness before a world undergoing profound and uneasy transitions. As the house and its structures slowly disintegrate, so too do the world orders and systems of reference, changing irreversibly before and after the ten years in the middle chapter. Extending beyond the novel, Woolf’s prose carries fraught significance with its undertones of melancholy, anxiety and paranoia. These are recurring themes in her work and personal life, punctuated with mental and physical illness, and they are foregrounded more explicitly in some of her essays, such as ‘On Being Ill’ (1925) or ‘On Gas’ (1929), where she links hallucinatory experiences at the dentist with the trauma of physical pain and emotional distress. 2 If we can read Woolf’s unsettling account of ashes and dust as architecture – which I’m willing to, in the way one accepts architecture as a temporary suspension of entropy – we should also be prepared to labour through our states of anxiety and paranoia brought forward by the inevitable disintegration of any architectural condition, especially when it reflects any ethical, political, and social tension in key moments of transition. In this short essay, noticing a most humble material – dust on a windowsill – is also studied as a work of the mind as it begins to recover from these states. Thus positioned, architecture perhaps verges on the idea of geologic, 3 through which an ethics of matter opens the possibility for noticing conditions connected at radically different scales. 4 * 3 Geologic is here defined centrally to the Anthropocene theory, as a set of entangled relational conditions that emanate their own aesthetic and cultural sensations. It enacts ways of thinking geologically with and through landscape and architectural conditions, by accepting human existence entangled within more-than-human materialities that unfold across deep time and at multiple scales. Ways of thinking attuned to the geologic can only partially reveal the complexity of infinitely connected conditions. 4 In conversation with architect Tom Wiscombe, Timothy Morton refers specifically to ‘Time Passes’ to discuss architecture. He says that in Woolf’s narrative of the house ‘there’s [ sic ] no people in it. It is just dust falling in the sunlight in the window frame and that kind of stuff. And it is so beautiful. … And it is how you have to think if you are in architectural space.’ (Morton with Wiscombe, Sci-Arc ).
1 Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (1927) London: Penguin Books, 2000
2 See Virginia Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ in The Criterion , T. S. Elliot (ed.) 1926. p32 The essay was reprinted in Forum (1926) under the title ‘Illness: An Unexploited Mine,’ and later, in 1930, as a standalone volume by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. See also Virginia Woolf, ‘Gas,’ in The Captain’s Death Bed & Other Essays. London: Hogarth Press, 1950, pp219–22. The relation between the experience of being under anaesthesia and the trauma of psychological distress has been studied before. Eberly, for example, relates expressions such as ‘waters of annihilation’ and the experience of feeling through a narrow hole that progressively dilates both to the metaphor of childbirth and to the ‘dissociative state related to sexual abuse,’ which Woolf survived from at a young age (See David Eberly, ‘Gassed: Virginia Woolf and Dentistry,’ in Virginia Woolf Miscellany , Issue 89. New Haven: Southern Connecticut State University, 2016.
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on site review 43: architecture and t ime
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