Now the Shadow of the Column

Now, the shadow of the column—

Alexandra Savtchenko-Belskaia History and Theory Studies Year 2 Term Two 2014 | Tutor: Alison Moffett

Poetry is more philosophical and profound than history. —Aristotle

A single source, happily chosen, can do duty for a whole multitude of possible sources, since [she] who is really determined to learn can, by a simple function of [her] mind, discern and feel the general in the particular. —Jacob Burckhardt

Cultural memory. ‘Stone Capitals, St Saviour’s Cathedral, Southwark’ from Augustus Pugin’s Gothic Ornaments.

In the centre, on the northern side of the square, stands a heavy hybrid construction formed from three adjoining mansions.1 First-rate Georgian terraces. Four stories of neatly pointed brick darkened by pollution and ennobled by time. In the center, number thirteen faces the ample park. Its shallow triple-story loggia in bright soft Portland stone projects onto the street. In 1829, seventeen years after it was first built, the loggia was glazed and enclosed on three sides. Its promenade, now swallowed by the internal space of the house is more of a screen—superimposed, projecting, vertical. Inexplicably, as if by decree of aesthetic requirement, doubtless aided by some sympathetic individual, planning law abided this exception. Ever since, the facade is firmly considered by the town to be enriching the visual aspect of the square, rather than encroaching on it.

Walls of massive polished ashlar, only seven stones to an arch. Voussoirs and keys interlock, sustain each other’s pressure heavy on the springers. Two hundred years. A stone was set upright and it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and on each hieroglyph a group of ideas rested, like the capital on a column.2 The ground floor is raised above the street. This first storey is a smooth vertical field with only barely perceptible grooves where the stones meet, perfectly flush, no mortar, no rustication. But what would appear monolithic and laden with the past is rendered elegant and light. Three sharp incisions and tall narrow rectilinear depressions modulate the surface to give narrative quality. It is a stone tablet inscribed not metaphorically—but literally. Like letter-forms their signification is an unshakeable construction, agreed-upon over millennia. An architectural typography, their voice is restrained, imperturbable. If the facade alludes in conversation or convention to the Classical, it is more to do with the rigour of its round Roman arches, carved from the heavy wall, rather than the figurative gesturing of any ancient orders.

She read it from left to right. Three stark silhouettes. The leftmost an open portal leading to a wide green door. Two to the right are glazed. Original fenestration. She could tell because by slightly inclining her head, she could engage in immersive pattern play with the warped movement on the surface of the sash lights. Dappled, deformed Gothic grimaces, beckoning; glass of preindustrial manufacture. Dark tunnels.

What is darker recedes, what is light comes forward; strong contrast always advances in spatial perception.

Terse drama between surface and depth enhances the projective effect of the screen and forces the surrounding bricks to recede into the background. The facade pushes itself up onto the street. Only three crucial and controlled incisions offset the curve of the arches’ slender shoulders. Polite but firm indications of a strict boundary. Like that of where the black and white meet on a printed page.

Narrow narrow verticals extend from stringcourse to stringcourse between the windows. One is between the leftmost arch and the central, and one between the central and the rightmost. Each one is eighteen centimetres wide. Its perpendicular faces sink into the wall by a shallow margin, only five centimetres deep.

In the middle of the screen, a wide but also shallow area is depressed by only four centimetres. The vertical

1 Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris, tr. John Sturrock, (London: Penguin Books, 1978) p.80 2 Ibid., p.189

1

faces bordering the central depression only sink by one centimetre, not five. Something she hardly noticed because the shadows were strong enough for articulation. Shallow voids where columns might have been— suggestions enough to render the vertical direction primary over the horizontal.

Another three arches are directly above. They appear slightly bigger, different proportions. An optical thing caused by black bands for window frames (absent at the bottom), and low balustrades in runs of eight, like long teeth. Above the windows, horizontal meanders of Greek key framed by fine rectangles. Links of four curl to the right and four to the left. In the middle they meet in a symmetrical smile. Between them, the offset lines from below are straightened and triple. Tall stalks, drawn parallels in sets of three. They reach up and turn down at the horizontal stop like ‘snakes’ in that Nokia game. A continuous ribbon with narrow compressed loops falling to each side, resembling the canopy of a stylised palm tree. Carved in a slightly raised surface like pilaster strips. They are: one on the far left, a window, two together, another window, two again, a window, one on the far right. A momentary memory of fluting, only lightly touching that image.

The shallow depression around the central window is absent. The weather has shown itself more markedly where there is greater contrast in relief between the expanse and the narrow niches. The stone is strewn in the recessed parts with patches of darkness, like ink stains, and lighter areas where weather chafes the surface without interruption.

At the third storey the whole facade shrinks to the breadth of one central bay. A rectangular window, now a blind panel of painted ply fitted between rectilinear niches. On the extreme left and right, two identical miniature caryatids (sans baskets) stand proud in splendid classical contrapposto. Shoulders upright, square, left leg engaged. A stone chiton gathered at the waist hangs down. It’s straight folds seductively pushed apart by the right thigh. Higher still, black bricks in the background, and crowning them, between the chimneys, is a low parapet of twenty-three tiny openwork arches. Six finials of rounded acanthus punctuate the termini of the vertical bands.

Cold diffuse light alternating with low evening sun causes shadows to emerge and dissipate in turn. The coloration of the soft stone rhythmically oscillates between cool and warm tones. It was nearly closing time, but she hesitated to enter. She crossed the street and turned to face the building again, a sort of holy place, so perfectly suited to her that it was enough for her to be there, to be.3 Her gaze scanned the rise of the imposing edifice. Imposition—like Hugo’s preemptive profession.4 She was reading. She was reading with unsurpassable attention to every symbol.5 Aware of her own presence, she saw herself seeing through a portal which was the relation between her and the object of her gaze. It was a space like looking through

3 Maurice Blanchot, Tomas the Obscure, tr. Robert Lamberton (New York: Station Hill Press, 1988). p.9 4 ‘Imposition’ is a term from printing, which means laying out of pages on large sheets for the press; ‘profession’ refers both to his profession as a writer, but also alludes his prophecy “this will kill that” meaning that the printed word will kill architecture.

5 Blanchot, p.25

2

a void from which time had been sucked. Her own experience in time was becoming more perceptible.6 Through the void, it was sight and the object of sight which mingled together. She blended with herself, entering into this place which none else could penetrate.7 She saw four stones, heavy like human heads, torsos torn off, floating forward of the face at thirteen Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Two stones to each storey embedded in the hollow of the vertical bands between the arched openings. Pins in a rectangular array spaced evenly two meters across and three up; a grid, like a Modern inflection, grafted over the facade’s Classical intimations. It flattens the underlying hierarchy and constitutes a new order. Do the fragments float or does everything around them swim? She caught herself thinking they resembled capitals of indeterminate Gothic or Romanesque stock. All four similar in appearance. Octagonal in horizontal section, and all the way down the stepped abacus in the shape of an inverted pyramid, tapering to a body carved in high relief. At the necking, fat astragals separate the capitals from the shafts, or—what would be shafts if they didn’t suddenly end twenty centimetres lower and look more like stumps.

They appear to have been severed from their natural context and placed here as relics, the whole facade made a reliquary. Their form stands in contradiction to the arches and unadorned ashlars beside them.

They are time traveling fragments. They speak only to one-another and seem to keep a secret between them. In the violence of their insertion into the present circumstance they are in a juxtaposed relation to their surroundings. But in this state, they prompt the observer into a questioning, a process of reconstructing narrative—the ultimate continuity. A fragment such as this, of which just enough positive form is left in order that it suggests the shape of the negative, activates an internal, self-consciously subjective, and ultimately creative mental faculty. The overlay has the potential to stir one from the passive consumption of complete and stable, even stale images. It requires the active construction of a holistic and continuous subjective vision.

The octagon is a common medieval geometry. Its use and meaning derived from earlier cosmological doctrines—the joining of a circle and a square, a symbol of peace and resolution between the celestial and the earthly.8 But she couldn’t know this—she was just trying to work out whether it was really an octagon.

Only five faces are visible, the back three are sunken into the stone and hidden from sight. The fragment is engaged, most likely it’s cut flat at the back. Nevertheless, she wondered why they looked Gothic. All she

6 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, (Cambridge Massachusetts: October Books MIT,1994), p. 98. “The shifting process of one’s own subjectivity experienced in time became synonymous with the act of seeing, dissolving the Cartesian ideal of an observer completely focused on the object.” This s a moment of signifying a break in consciousness from Classical subjectivity towards the kind we still have now.

7 Blanchot, p. 17 8 John Mitchell, How the World is Made: the Story of Creation According to Sacred Geometry (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012) p.124

3

knew of Gothic architecture came from a generic mental picture, an amalgamation of every vaguely Gothic image she ever saw. It was filled with a myriad pointed arches, anonymous statues, forests of finials, over the top crockets, and elaborate mouldings. Only—she didn’t know the words for them, their names. This made it difficult to think of them precisely. It was a dusty dark image, a memory hardly ever referred to, even at architecture school. But it was there, stored away with the others. Now, after a while of just standing there—in front of them, the silence of these fragments was beginning to give way to veritable banter.

She crossed the street again, ascended the front steps, stopped half way up and put her hand on the wrought iron railing. Her head was to the left and a bit lower than the fragment, the one at the bottom left, closest to the door. Proximity engaged a sense of scale, a physical relation with her own body. It was bigger than her whole torso. Its mass and volume impressed themselves upon her, permeated her with a non-verbal knowledge. She began to discern some relations within the object of observation.

The top is covered with a sheet of lead,9 grey-green rain-stained metal flaps flattened over the edges. Below the lead flaps, the stepped abacus has a reed moulding also octagonal in horizontal section. It is composed of a fillet, a thick thumb moulding, then another of a smaller diameter, then a low flat facia. Right below it is the body of the capital. In it, an oak garland is carved like a pagan crown. Thirteen leaves are connected by their ribs to an artery, a sinuous branch twisted into irregular sine waves. They make a snug row of inclines, rhythmically flowing the direction of growth. Some ribs double as the ribs of the octagon. Every leaf bears a fan of delicate veins like the back of a human hand, and curly lobes at the ondulating margins, like wisdom teeth. Mature but brittle, their coarse contours eroding into cavities.

The stump has chamfered corners which are narrower than the full faces, so the octagon tends toward a square in the lower section of the fragment. It’s bulky and too wide for the narrow niche it’s loged in. It bulges out, contour flush with the adjacent surface. Like a monstrous tree mushroom. At the junction of the capital and the perpendicular wall, there are deep cuts. The lead is inserted into the stone. Underneath, a chunk of fascia holds the capital in place. Below it, the stump sinks deeper into the niche.

Natural forms lend themselves to mathematical abstraction. A simple rule would suffice to enforce a formal rigour. But these fragments seem to resist it. For example, on the inside of every alternating crest and trough, the concavity might be neatly completed by a tidy leaf-and-acorn flourish. Instead, numerous and variously turned leaves and acorns in irregular progression are crammed into the gaps and overlap the stems. A leaf, some acorns at random, the branch curves upward, then two more leaves crowded below it.

No attempt to make regular or bring nature’s internal, eternal geometry to the surface.

9 Hugo, p.143

4

The shaft is carved with eight pointed arches. The wide faces have two, the narrow faces one. Cusped trefoliated lancets, with tiny blind bar tracery in cavetto moulding. Each lancet is eighteen centimeters tall; each mullion one centimetre deep. The one closest to her head has been disfigured. A whole length lopped off. Like the leaves, the shaft stump appears to have been blunted, corners effaced by some violent act or by the slow and deliberate effect of deep entropic time. In place of spandrels small cuneiform notches are written rather than carved.

Four jaundiced objects protrude from pinkish Portland stone. Their coloration is sickly as if they had been buried beneath the shameful paint clogging the sharp edges.10 Many layers of renewal and repair accumulate their own density. And the contours look to be dissolving into the acid air. But communication persists in the immanent memory beneath the yellow piss paper of London past. Perhaps once their utterances were clearer, in a mythical instance preceding, coming right before, the moment when articulation overcame and dominated pure gesture. Do many repetitions of a word dull the pointedness of its meaning, or do they carve a finer boundary around the empty space occupied in the mind by the corresponding concept? What blunts their articulation? The paint? Or the friction of remote order against the instability of the given moment? Are they just tired of always meaning something? Maybe they would prefer it if the observer took it upon herself to make something meaningful of them.

Now, she watched the point where the shaft abruptly ends. One centimeter from the bottom, the lancets come to a neat chamfered sill. The design is decisive and complete. A deliberate detail, it is consistent in all four objects. Clearly, it could not have been hacked from a full-length column since the lancets end right there. Their placement also suggests they are not what they seem. They are aligned precisely at specific points in the facade. The arches are regular in proportion: two stacked squares, and another half for the rise of the arch. Each hanging capital is aligned with the top of the bottom square, that is two fifths up the height of the arch. On the second storey, this is just above the balustrades. These strange capitals do not support an entablature, nor any architecture at all. Above and below there is only empty space.

She continued.

These four are corbels, supports at one time engaged under statues on the outside of a Gothic cathedral.

They are casts of corbels of Richard II’s time.11 They had been rescued from the debris of the fire at the Palace of Westminster in 1834, five years after this loggia was glazed.12 The acorns inscribed in them are keepers of strength and power, and the patience needed to attain goals over long periods of time, perhaps ages. The oak was sometime the sign of deities who interact with mortals; rulers often wore crowns of oak

10 Hugo, p.79 11 Anthony Emery, Greater Medieval Houses of England and Wales, 1300–1500, Volume 3. Southern England. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) p.259 12 Phillis M. Rogers, Medieval fragments from the Old Palace of Westminster in the Sir John Soane’s Museum (Parliamentary History, Libraries and Records, 1981) pp.1-8

5

leaves to signify their connection to the divine. But this symbolism is lost on most. If she imagined a time immemorial, it was only a fantasy. Even as they were installed here, no one spoke of such blasphemous mysteries. These lumps of matter and the empty space beneath them are merely memes.

But the forms made themselves distinct and articulate. As if with words, the whole architecture was beginning to speak to her of vastly spanned relations and deepening complexity. Signs of seeking truth in geometry, signs to display the power of a rational mind, signs that embrace the multiplicity of nature’s chaotic proliferation. Architectural order is an abstraction through which nature passes as if through the filter of determination, driven by the instinct for reason and rationality. In antiquity it was commonplace to restrain natural forms to symmetry­—the general which even then, perhaps especially then, we derived from the particular. We thought. By the application of mathematical rigour, the human intellect could divine the truth, perceive that which is hidden beyond. We have taken steps to know nature’s intrinsic order. It persists at the scale of a molecule, still hidden from plain sight and maintained by mathematical abstraction.

An internal memory of matter, dynamic and changeful, evolving and paradoxical. We are no longer turned in the direction of sublime beauty—we’ve in the valley. There is such a thing as too earnest, and a sea of multiplicity, and no measuring stick with which to make it whole. Except, this tablet, at this moment.

She is sometimes overwhelmed by incidental things. A simple presence, unfathomable beauty. In this moment, she feels as though just beyond their nonchalant—just hanging there—something fundamental rests. It makes the back of her eyes well up with pressure and a liquid seep through to coat the surface. The visible world becomes blurred and distant. For a brief moment, the inner one comes into focus; certain relations are intensified and drawn into a virtual perspective. Then again, too soon, a return to the external presence of things. The stone in front of her. The others like it. The building to which they cling. The sky beyond. The sounds that fill the air, the hum of the city. The shadows again gather and dissipate underneath the corbel. Now, the shadow of the column—the column which supports nothing.13 Below it, empty space made all the more apparent and available for contemplation.

Now, there is no conflict between classical and modern. Language is fragmented. Dissolve: pure continuity.

Signifiers draw only vague allusions to enrich the present reading. Perhaps, this is attributable to the strong separation between the inner space of the house and the external world that envelops it. The facade stands fast, reticent and beautiful. Its text is so dense that individual symbols stand in only for themselves. Inside, a labyrinth so hermetic that even bonds of signification tend to turn back on reaching the threshold.

13 Alain Robbe-Grillet Jealousy, tr. Grove Press Inc, (London: Calderbook, 1987) p.9

6

Plate showing Westminster Abbey, Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture, p.127. In the top left (circled) are two corbels in niches. Although this is the Abbey, not the Palace, the comparison with Soane’s facade is productive.

Fragment of a plate from Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture, p.144, showing decorated founts with variations on the octagonal theme. The trefoliated lancets in D are similar to the fragments in Soane’s facade.

7

The language of architecture. Elements of the Ionic order from Serlio’s I sette libri dell’architettura.

8

A selection of many reference images collected from websites listed in the bibliography and others. Numerous Internet sources were consulted over and over again while writing to clarify details of architectural vocabulary.

9

The text above is creative writing—a literary study of an architectural phenomenon. It is submitted as an alternative to the traditional essay. Its intentions are to acknowledge language as a form, to be critical of academic structures, to explore the overlaps between fiction and fact—abstract thought and analysis, to question the role of creativity and subjectivity in acquiring knowledge and experience. To be a reader who is also a writer. It is a step in the pursuit of an ongoing interest in the relationship between language and space. Language as the dimension and driver of the cognitive aspect of perception and space as the source of sensory perception. My thought is that in architecture, creating spatial and semantic relationships is more interesting than making iconic shapes or memorable gimmicks. I’m interested in developing this thought as a kind of theory of now, of a changing and evolving society expressed through its architecture.

I suspect it to have historical and theoretical implications that are unfortunately at odds with currently dominant architectural thinking in the public and corporate eye. It is known that ideas that are too complex or not easily slotted into the market’s commercial objectives take longer to be realised, especially if they are not geared towards mediation. This is a problem outside the scope of this assignment, but an interesting one to grapple with in the future.

To acknowledge language as a form is to acknowledge its nuances and specificities. To become aware of the relationship of reading to writing, and its parallels with the subject/object relation. Language as a form has interesting semantic potentials in overlapping meaning and drawing allusions­—its ability to mean more than one thing at once is a productive quality. Narrative is the construction of a whole that prioritises the reader, wherein continuity is constructed from parts by the subject. To acknowledge language as a form is also to acknowledge the material of words—that they constitute the capacity to have a thought, and sometimes even to have a vision. To take the position that words are not one’s own —that they exist in a vast langue, and the speaker plays out a script of meaningful expressions parole (Saussure). This is a philosophical relationship between the general and the specific which is very relevant for contemporary thinking in architecture. It seems there is a change in thinking from the perspective of the specific into the position of the general. For example, in relations between algorithms and instances in computational design (Carpo/Deleuze). In the realm of individual experience, this begs the question: how to see in a way that is one’s own invention (since a general can only be expressed through the performance of the specific)? Is contemporary subjectivity both the object and the cause of its own alienation under the guise of individual freedom? How to be creative within a structure that seems to be aimed at preventing it?

The text wants to be self-consciousness and critically engaged in the task of essay-writing itself, to understand that an essay is a form within a self-propagating discipline, an institutional framework. Through the imperative of the argument, the emphasis on the verity and validity of facts, the use of citation and the appropriation of an (alien) authoritative voice, it shapes a certain type of thinking. Admissibly, because of a writer’s relative inexperience, these things have in the past gotten in the way of unpretentious writing, and cast thoughts in a contrived and false tone. The assignment then prompted a choice between another attempt to interpret or re-articulate complex notions already historically determined anyway, or—to select a specific object and examine it directly. Sometimes the accumulated wisdom of the world seems stuffy and unmanageable. Then, reading turns to writing. For an approach especially given to learning through a continuous synthesising and pattern-making process, to make an argument is only the provision of an entry point into the vastness and complexity of an inter-related ‘everything’—like an endless narrative, words in a state of relation in order that they convey a story. This text has the ambition to be a portal into the fundamental questions which persist beneath an ocean of admirable arguments and arbitrary assertions, now of this view, now of another.

Temporarily, we can free ourselves from the genious of the world. What about taking a look around? The 19th century

10

historian Jacob Burckhardt wrote “As a historian, I am lost where I cannot begin with Anschauung.” The word Anschauung comes from Goethe. Its connotations are visual and it means the mental process by which we spontaneously grasp, through observation aided by intuition, a thing in its wholeness.1 This is distinct from analysis. It is a matter of sensing and filtering intuitions through language in order to articulate—to solidify, to make tangible for a moment or for ever.

But what is the nature of seeing? What do we make of what we see and sense? Nietzsche has said “the eye prefers to see what it knows rather than to make new images.”2 It is possible that seeing is rarely unique, that in fact, like we agree on language, we also agree on what we see. Language plays a part in making it easier for us to perceive, by cutting out information that we are unfamiliar with. The same mechanism makes it difficult for us to have thoughts that are new or just theirs. Artists, writers and architects work hard to develop their own languages, to be able to have different kinds of thoughts. To be “active subjects,” readers who are also writers—to be creative in the full sense of the word.

The text tries to take the reader through the successive phases of a creative process, one that goes like this: observation of what is generally known, observation of what is sensed, initial disorientation, a “re-registration” of the mismatch between what is known and what is sensed, self-conscious making sense of phenomena, returning into language, synthesising new information, fabrication of new possibilities for being, reflection on the new object created. The method is observation— in fact, the first step of analysis. However, through observation the object is to appear on the page, without any style or literary inflection (metaphor, verbs in relation to inanimate things and general affect are difficult to shake). This requires closeness and specificity, a self-conscious looking, in order that the object should imprint itself in the consciousness of the observer, and then the reader. In the process of writing, the object makes a transition from being in the world to being in the space of writing. As the contours of the image become clear and discernible, the image transfers itself on to the page.

Architectural terminology is used with care and specificity to be as precise as possible in description, to seek out those points and aspects of the object which it is almost impossible to describe. However, every shape, every curve seems to have a name—it’s own history and thought-form. What is meant by “architectural language?” Here it literally means the language used to describe the elements of architecture—not overall “style” or something ambiguous, because “architecture is difficult to define” (like art or truth). It is important, for example, that the word ‘ogee’ exists. It means that this particular combination of curves has a direct and specific corresponding concept in the mind of the speaker and thinker. When a form exists as a concept, one can experiment with its manifestation, and conversely, employ it to cast new ideas, like poetry. A knowledge of the language of architecture allows one to have clear architectural images and clear architectural thoughts. Reading Renaissance treatises (Serlio, Palladio, Alberti) makes this all too apparent.

Observation in writing is a description, which is a translation. A translation recreates the object from scratch. However, unlike a classical narrative, it is not the aim of the description to create an air-tight “realistic” world. Images layer one on top of another, and perhaps the first one is forgotten by the time the third comes around. Descriptions may even contradict themselves, no matter and no struggle. As Roland Bathes writes, “[the reading] grasps at every point in the text the asyndeton which cuts the various languages—and not the anecdote: it is not (logical) extension, the winnowing out

1 Heller, Erich. The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought. Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1961 2 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, October Books, MIT press Cambridge Massachusetts, 1994, p. 97

11

of truths [...] but the layering of significance [...] the excitement comes from [...] a kind of vertical din (the verticality of language and its destruction);”3 There is a narrative, but nothing really happens because there is no anecdote, no suspense.

When the facts are revealed it is done in a matter of fact way, just like the descriptions. Alain Robbe-Grillet also writes, “The entire interest of the descriptive pages—that is, man’s place in these pages—is no longer in the thing described, but in the very movement of the description.” This aspect of the literary form is with its conventions, (for example, lists and asyndetons) are picked up because they are seen as a parallel with experience, and particularly spatial experience­—a layering of images vertically in time. The text itself becomes an architecture. The object is constructed from the words on the page, but the whole is difficult to grasp. Meaning resides in the spaces between the words—the relationships between them, the tensions, overlaps and discrepancies in the description, its flow.

With this in mind, the text puts “fictional” ontologies and indexical ones of “real” objects on the same plane. It recontextualises and appropriates images (words, architectures?). There are many images in the world. They can be reused. In any case, most images and words in circulation are not of our own making. Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo was chosen for its closeness in theme and form, its description of change, and the completeness of Gothic architecture compromised.

He describes a stone painted over. The impression fits exactly with the appearance of the hanging corbels, no matter that they are not painted and that they are not stone. The protagonist has no knowledge of this at that point in the description, and is in the process of constructing the object of her experience. Other parts of the text reflect the internal dimension of her experience. In these parts some language comes from other texts, though it is sometimes amended slightly. For example, the sentences from Thomas the Obscure by Maurice Blanchot are woven with others sentences. Alain Robbe-Grillet provides the ambition to be specific and uninflected in description as well as the title, which is the first phrase of his novel Jealousy. Quotes are acknowledged by citations, however the marks are deliberately omitted. Deleting them but keeping the citation is paraphrasing. It is a gesture made to emphasise the suggestion that perception as not so objective and realistic as one would hope or expect. In different ways, these authors pushed the reader into challenging, creative spaces and expanded the form of the novel. They are a source of inspiration for the kind of thinking that is interdisciplinary.

It is not the intention to do away with the academic essay form. Some aspects remain, such as the intention to learn about a given thing in the world. The idea is to put side by side and explore the productive areas in the tensions and overlaps between fact and fiction. In the act of intense and detailed observation, the writer (and the architect) learns the importance of knowing what is necessary. Alberti wrote that the most important skill for an architect is knowing what is necessary.4 One learns that even the simplest mark on an otherwise empty page can be described—created—in an infinite number of ways (further overlaps between writing and drawing—fiction and space). In each case it becomes a different object because, it is literally made up of different things. While writing, one chooses to include certain things, and not others, making the ontology of the work—what constitutes it. Ultimately, the hope is to explore the relationship between experience and knowledge through practice. To pursue an architectural agenda in the relationship between space and language as a productive field. Acting on an intuitive grasp of the currents and difficulties of the present moment, to make sense of what, for me, would be the real and valuable potential of an architecture of my time.

3 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, tr. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1975) p.12 4 O.M. Ungers, “Ordo, fondo, mensura: the Criteria of Architecture” in The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture, ed. Millon and Lampugani, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994)

12

Bibliography Books Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1975.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Blanchot, Maurice. Thomas the Obscure. Translated by Robert Lamberton. New York: Station Hill Press, 1988.

Emery, Anthony. Greater Medieval Houses of England and Wales, 1300–1500, Volume 3. Southern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Fletcher, Banister. A History of Architecture. London: B.T. Batsford, 1905.

Heller, Erich. The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought. Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1961.

Hugo, Victor. Notre-Dame of Paris. Translated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin Books, 1978.

Mitchell, John. How the World is Made: the Story of Creation According to Sacred Geometry. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2012.

Pugin, Augustus. Gothic Ornaments Selected From Various Ancient Buildings in England and France. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Jealousy. Translated by Grove Press Inc, London: Calderbook, 1987.

Rogers, Phillis M. Medieval fragments from the Old Palace of Westminster in the Sir John Soane’s Museum’, Parliamentary History, Libraries and Records, 1981, pp.1-8 Ungers, O.M.. “Ordo, fondo, mensura: the Criteria of Architecture” in The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture. Edited by Millon and Lampugani. London: Thames & Hudson, 1994.

Websites http://www.soane.org/museum/bibliography/the_collections/

Image reference source http://www.cultus.hk/goth/architecture.php http://www.doric-column.com/glossary_classical_architecture.html http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/crane/walter/line-and-form/chapter7.html http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/border+molding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_architecturet http://www.lookandlearn.com/ http://www.lookingatbuildings.org.uk/glossary/ http://www.pitt.edu/~medart/menuglossary/index.htm http://www.quondam.com/dt01/0035.htm http://www.vitruvius.be/palladio1.htm

13