Nguyen M.Arch Thesis 2021

T HR E E S T O RI ES

IN SEARCH OF

A N A R C HITECT URE The Shape of Domestic Space in the Fiction of Donald Barthelme

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THREE STORIES IN SEARCH OF

AN ARCHITECTURE The Shape of Domestic Space in the Fiction of Donald Barthelme

Thesis document submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Architecture at Portland State University Portland, Oregon June 2020

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PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE COLLEGE OF THE ARTS The undersigned hereby certify that the Master’s thesis of

AN THIEN NGUYEN has been approved as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Architecture

Thesis Committee:

Advisor Barbara Sestak Professor of Architecture __________________________________ ________________ Date

Committee Member Laila Seewang Associate Professor of Architecture __________________________________ ________________ Date

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Though this thesis arrived out of a deeply personal process, it is not the work of a single person. To everyone who offered support, guidance, and encouragement even when I may not have deserved it: THANK YOU. I could not have done it without you.

To Barbara, whose critical feedback is always framed with kindness and patience.

To Laila, who always pushes for more, and better.

To Anna, for helping me understand the importance of not-architecture in architecture.

To Juan, the best (and only) first teacher in Architecture I could ever hope to have.

To my cohort, for all the hurried bites of food, the late nights in studio, the panic-stricken mad dashes at the end of each term we shared. Even when we are apart, your creativity and dedication never cease to inspire me.

To Dustin, my ever-unyielding foundation even when I retreat into my own walls.

To my mother, for never allowing me to let “good enough” get in the way of “good.”

To my father, for reading me my first books, teaching me my first English lessons; for giving me my curiosity, my desire to make sense of the world around me, my love of reading; for everything. Everything. vii

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This thesis is dedicated to those who fight daily to stay afloat in the languishing sea of stagnation and emptiness that rises up and swallows them in ways unfathomable to anyone else, and to the rare glimpse of the shore that makes the struggle worthwhile.

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PROLOGUE xi

“Books are made not like children, but like pyramids. . .”

—Flaubert to Feydeau, 1857

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In the spring of 2019, I submitted to then-Portland State University School of Architecture director Clive Knights a proposal for my Master’s thesis project: Interpreting imagined spaces in the literary fiction of American author Donald Barthelme into architectural spaces that are dimensional and inhabitable by characters in these stories if one day they were to come come alive.

At this point, the project, in my mind, was very much a process of translation—a precise formal interpretation of the written word into architectural space. I was interested in such an exploration because it is evident that, even though our built environment contains our activities, rituals and potentials, it remains rigid while we are not.

I wanted to find a way to reconcile the tension resulted from this incongruity. In other words, I wanted to use Barthelme’s short stories as the mediator between real and imagined space, a means to explore the dichotomy between the complexity of our inner, most intimate lives and the static environment that envelopes them.

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As I started to delve into research on Barthelme and his particular brand of surrealist fiction, it quickly became obvious that the methods and modes of production for what is widely considered to be Postmodern, in both the literary and architectural sense, are really important in understanding the realm in which Barthelme operated, and a study of the historiography of postmodern architecture would provide a corresponding system of notations that could be used to deconstruct and reconstruct the writing.

By Spring term 2020, I was struggling to find a formal language that could adequately express Barthelme’s stories: the tension, paranoia, longing and humor conveyed through his stylistic signature. Navigating the jagged borders between literature and architecture was an increasingly difficult task, and by this point I was also dealing with the context of site, the implications of the typology (then a theme park) and also the unbearable burden of creating a work of translation that is authoritative to both architecture and the written source material. I felt obligated to find, or invent, a language for spatial construction that could make sense of these stories to both myself and any member of the public who might encounter them.

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At the time, the theme park typology made sense, even if not strictly in our conventional understanding of such an architectural concept: I had envisioned co-opting the idea of the “park” as means of containing these stories, to create a menagerie—a Postmodern playground where the stories can be experienced as a series of follies.

Barthelme, even in his most caustic moments, always had with him a sense of humour; he would have approved.

Yet, the fundamental challenge persists: reading, at its core, is a personal process. Despite the pressure to push the design forward with each passing week, I was growing increasingly uncomfortable with my (admittedly self-appointed) role as arbiter of his works’ meaning: someone who decides which parts of the stories are more relevant than others; which sentences, which obscure references, which layers of self-disclosure are to be omitted.

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Of course, 2020 turned out to be the year nobody thought they would have. Personal circumstances forced my work on the thesis to a halt. Barthelme and his follies were left in a limbo as the theme park drifted further and further away from me.

Having spent more than a year now in isolation and social distancing because of the pandemic, I have, necessarily, pivoted from that original totalistic framework to something more introverted, more integrated with my own lived experience, my rituals and inhabitation of space.

In the end, this thesis is about the way I interact with my own personal space, draped over Barthelme’s critique of domesticity and the architectural expression that arises from that process. Through this exploration, I will attempt to answer or, at the very least, investigate a central question:

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Can imposing imagined boundaries on existing built structures result in architectural meaning?

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INTRODUCTION 1

“Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body.”

—Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

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Before going into the main portion of this thesis, some background on the author, his upbringing and the historical milieu that surrounded his active years is necessary to contextualize his writing.

Donald Barthelme (1931 - 1989) was a writer universally recognized for his role in postmodern literature, especially in America in the post-war period. He writes mostly short stories and the major collection Sixty Stories—from which I chose the stories for this thesis, was published in 1981 as the culmination of his works over almost three decades.

It is noteworthy that Barthelme was named after his father—Donald Barthelme Sr.—who was an architect with a staunchly modernist ethos. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1930 before moving to Texas where he practiced, taught and raised his family. He made many contributions to the urban landscape in Houston and viscera at the time, but one of his most striking projects is, in fact, the family home that he designed for himself and his family—the house in which Barthelme Jr. was to spend the formative years of his life.

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The house is modeled after Mies’ Villa Tugendhat, and resembles it to an almost uncanny level. Barthelme the author would later recall that, on Sundays, after-church crowds would drive by to gawk at the house which stood out in the Houston suburb like a sore thumb. It is possible that these moments first created the sense of resentment for all things modern that he seems to harbor, including his father, and also impressed on him the power and potential of domestic life as a spectacle, a theme that dominates his writing.

Left: Barthelme residence (1952) Right: Villa Tugendhat (1928)

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But his rejection of the moralistic rigidity of modernism is also a result of historical and political events happening during his active years. The Cold War and its associated paranoia is something that would play a major role in his life, and his writing career is almost perfectly book-ended by two wars—World War II and the Vietnam War—both of which would define the generations that were involved in them. Barthelme himself fought for one day in the Korean War. At the same time, America was witnessing a period of unprecedented advances in technology. Here was a society stunned by the devastation of nuclear warfare but also excited by space travel and the moon landing.

This duality of progress and destruction also brings about a skepticism for Barthelme in science, technology and all of its promises in a better social and domestic life.

This skepticism, and the manner in which it manifests in his writing, is oftentimes conflated with a skepticism for Modernism. This brings us back to his unease for it and its effect on personal interations and domestic life, along with all the trauma generated therein. Barthelme himself went through four marriages, three of which ended in divorce.

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And so we can observe emerging in his writing a couple of key characteristics of Postmodernism, both in a literary and architectural sense. There is the lack of a fixed perspective, which in itself is an attempt to rally against the rationality achieved since the Renaissance and fortified in the Enlightenment. Lacking a fixed perspective, or a grounding point of view, renders our reality a field of fragments which, in turn, affects the way we itneract with said reality and other people or objects it contains. There is also a mode of creation wherein the form is continuously questioned and interrogated, and meaning is produced in that process.

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Yet, with that context, it is important for me to reiterate that this project is neither an analytical dissecting of the stories’ architectural qualities nor an attempt at a faithful translation of the written word to concrete space. It is, after all, is my own reading of the stories, my process of communicating with my environment and the physical, psychological processes generated within it.

And so, I would like to introduce you to my own apartment in North Portland, where I have spent the better part of 2020. It contains all the mundane details of my life, my rituals and idiosyncrasies. It is a microcosm of the universe that is accessible only to myself. As a design exercise, I have imposed my spatial interpretation of the stories onto this space and see how they overlap, overwhelm or contradict my own patterns.

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“We experience the most obvious manifestions of the structuring role of architecture almost constantly in our everyday lives. There is hardly a place or circumstance that is not organized by spatial intentions (or, in the case of natural surroundings, experienced as so organized). The encounter with things and their spatial order is an encounter with the otherness of our situation, accessible through the dialectics of revealing and hiding.”

—Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation

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FIRST STORY

THE INDIAN UPRISING 15

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“The Indian Uprising” is widely considered to be Barthelme’s most accomplished and most challenging work. It is also strongly indicative of his signature style, with fragmented paragraphs, collaged scenes and ideas moving between various scales and realities—from city to apartment to body—sometimes in a single sentence.

An analysis of the story breaking down its narrative components and techniques reveals the richness and potency in Barthelme’s ability to layer metaphors. Still, not all these details are important for my own reading of the story.

At its core, this is a story of an argument unfolding in a livingroom between two partners, which then transmutes in scale to take place in a city defending itself from a Comanche chief, and again tranformed to be a meditation of the narrator on the impending doom of his relationship, of his doomed past relationships which compounds in him a deeply melancholic sense of insecurity.

The story, to me, is best understood as a series of thresholds, or barriers, crossing between the tension of the metaphor of the barricades that the author employs, and the amorphous sense of yearning and regrets that he experiences.

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“We defended the city as best we could. The arrows of the Comanches came in clouds. The war clubs of the Comanches clattered on the soft, yellow pavements. There were earthworks along the Boulevard Mark Clark and the hedges had been laced with sparkling wire. People were trying to understand. I spoke to Sylvia. ‘Do you think this is a good life?’ The table held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. ‘No.’”

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“Fragments are the only forms I trust.”

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Applied to the context of my home, this is expressed in a series of fragmentations that pulls apart the living space until it can no longer function as such, while elements of the domestic life are preserved in pristine glass boxes, observable but never accessible, a memorial to the life that never was.

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What remains is the interstitial spaces between these boxes, symbolic of an existence that is relegated to the margins. In the margins, there is only longing for the picturesque domesticity that cannot be authentically experiences.

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“The city officials were tied to trees. Dusky warriors padded with their forest tread into the mouth of the mayor. ‘Who do you want to be?’ I asked Kenneth and he said he wanted to be Jean-Luc Godard but later when time permitted conversations in large, lighted rooms, whispering galleries with black-and-white Spanish rugs and problematic sculpture on calm, red catafalques. The sickness of the quarrel lay thick in the bed. I touched your back, the white, raised scars.”

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SECOND STORY

GAME

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The second story, “Game,” is about two men going into a bunker where they are charged with watching for a sign, at the appearance of which both are supposed to operate a key provided to each of them to activate a nuclear warhead. They do not know what this sign is or if it will ever come. They are also supposed to watch each other for signs of “strange behaviours,” the parameters for which is also never provided. The story is a hallucinatory trip of their descend into delirium.

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In the beginning, life in the bunker follows a rigid pattern, where actions are defined by and limited to the spaces in which they take place. This static, rational occupation is an attempt at conformity, but it is also breeding ground for distrust and isolation, as we will soon see.

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“Owing to an oversight we have been here for one hundred thirty-three days. When it became clear that an error had been made, that we were not to be relieved, the norms were relaxed. Definitions of normality were redrawn.”

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As the days go by and the space shifts with their mental deterioration, the men descend a different level where the rational, rigid layout ceases to exist and in its place is an environment designed to prevent direct lines of sight, to create confusion and despair. They can no longer keep watch over each other despite growing paranoia, and the structure of the space both reflect this mental state and conduce it.

29

“Sometimes I cannot sleep. Sometimes Shotwell cannot sleep. Sometimes when Shotwell cradles me in his arms and rocks me to sleep, singing Brahm’s “Guten abend, gute Nacht,” or I cradle Shotwell in my arms and rock him to sleep, singing, I understand what it is Shotwell wishes me to do. At such moment we are very close.”

30

In the final and lowest level, the space appears to converge back to the rational, but it is also the final stage in the progression of their madness. Despite false entries and doorways giving the appearance of being connected, each men can only occupy their own space while fully aware that the other person is still there. There are moments where they can see but cannot reach each other, and any opportunities for connection only result in an intrusion on the other person’s space.

31

32

Like many of Barthelme’s works, “Game” is spatially self-contained. It carries on completely agnostic and without regards to external context.

This is what I attempt to represent with this section: the possibility of entire worlds unfolding within a space outside the knowledge of those immediately adjacent to it, much like the nature of typical domestic spaces and relationships.

33

FINAL STORY

REBECCA

34

In this story, Rebecca Lizard is having a very bad day. A judge denied her request to change her last name. The doctor admitted to not being able to fix her skin, which has a slight greenish tint. She is deeply insecure with her skin, and it is the root of her anxiety and unhappiness.

Rebecca comes home after a bad day and gets into an argument with Hilda—her lesbian partner who had gone out drinking with another woman (“nice, pink Stephanie’). Hilda confessed to disliking her greenish skin, even though she had thought it beautiful at the start of their relationship.

35

Rebecca went into the bedroom. The color television set was turned on, for some reason. In a greenish glow, a film called Green Hell was unfolding.

They sit down together. The pork with red cabbage steams before them. . . The story ends. It was written for several reasons.

Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page.

Hilda placed her hands on Rebecca's head.

"The snow is coming," she said. "Soon it will be snow time. Together then as in other snow times. Drinking busthead 'round the fire. Truth is a locked room that we knock the lock off from time to time, and then board up again. Tomorrow you will hurt me, and I will inform you that you have done so, and so on and so on. To hell with it. . ."

[Hilda] hugged Rebecca on the sofa.

"I love you," she said.

"Screw that," Rebecca said plainly, and pushed Hilda away.

She thought about sticking her head in the oven. But it was an electric oven.

When Rebecca got home the retroactive rent increase was waiting for her, coiled in her mailbox like a pupil about to strike.

36

Very often one "pushes away the very thing that one most wants to grab, like a lover. This is a common, although distressing, psychological mechanism, having to do (in my opinion) with the fact that what is presented is not presented "purely," that there is a tiny little canker or grim place in it somewhere.

The conflicts of the story take place in this apartment of Rebecca and Hilda, and it is also the home that I share with my partner. Within these walls, the living space where the most mundane activities of daily life becomes a site of conflict—a landmine that we must navigate in order to maintain and preserve our relationships. The building, the apartment, the furniture, they are witness to every quarrel, every tender moment that, when stitched together, become a living record of our cohabitation.

37

38

Tracking the movement of Rebecca and Hilda throughout the apartment and overlaying it with our own reveals areas of overlap, each of which is a potent node where the interpersonal friction is most amplified, as well as the resulting sense of isolation.

The sofa where they are having a drink is also where Rebecca pushes Hilda away. I notice your irritation when we are talking about work. Rebecca storms off into the bedroom; I get up to make dinner while you scroll distractedly on your phone. We are in the same space but not together—I feel oceans away from you.

Hilda comes to find Rebecca in bed and they have dinner.

Sometimes we go to sleep angry at each other. The weight of the argument hangs over our bed like a dark cloud.

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40

These invisible barriers between us become tangible.

They rise up as ugly green walls that bisect our shared space. They isolate and divide, disrupting our normal living pattern. We can still see each other and occupy the same space; we just have to overcome these green walls in order to truly connect.

41

42

Much like Rebecca’s insecurities, these barriers stand in the way of human connection. With their shape and placement, they wrap around the apartment’s inhabitants and isolate them, creating a detachment from the external world.

43

44

Sometimes we go an entire day without speaking more than five sentences to each other, despite being in close proximity. I can see us there, lying side by side in bed. I want to reach out and hold you, but the green wall gets in the way.

Even moments of reconciliation take place in the space delineated by the green walls. They happen with the acknowledgment that we can still have love, in spite of our shortcomings and the walls we erect to keep others out.

45

46

“They sit down together. The pork with red cabbage steams before them. They speak quietly about the McKinley Administration, which is being revised by revisionist historians. The story ends. It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page.”

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48

EPILOGUE 49

[. . .] with Stein and Joyce the literary work becomes an object in world rather than a text or commentary upon the world. . . Interrogating older works, the question is: what do they say about the world and being in the world? But the literary object is itself “world” and the theoretical advantage is that in asking it questions you are asking questions of the world directly.

“After Joyce,” 1964

The prior history of words is one of the aspects of language the world uses to smuggle itslef into the work. If words can be contaminated by the world, they can also carry with them into the work trace elements of world which can be used in a positive sense.

“Not-Knowing,” 1983

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These two excerpts are taken from Barthelme’s essays “After Joyce” and “Not-Knowing” about writing fiction.

They are, produced two decades apart and spanning his career almost entirely, meditations on creative productions that can be applied to not only writing but also space-making practices. In “After Joyce,” written in 1964, the writer asserts the agency of the created “object,” positing that it has the ability to contain within itself a representation of the world as it is and as we imagine it. It is a means through which we can connect with larger universes which transcend human time and scale by engaging and interacting with it. This “object” is wholly our creation, our tool. It is subservient to our desire for “being in the world” and “asking questions of the world.”

Almost twenty years later, this outlook had evolved considerably for Barthelme. In “Not-Knowing,” he considers the creator a mere participant in a process.

Style is no longer a choice but is an inextricable part of the “object,” emerging out of interweaving personal and collective histories. The act of creation, then, is neither inquiry nor profession. It is itself existence. By living we are creating. “Art,” he writes, “is always a meditation upon external reality rather than representation of external reality or a jackleg attempt to ‘be’ external reality.”

that have been percolating beneath the surface? In either case, what implications could there be for having this awareness of the nature of our creative pursuits?

While I am not completely ready to attempt an answer to these questions, I do want to, through the work presented in this thesis, acknowledge the invisible and intangible undercurrents that affect even the most private, intimate details of our daily lives and, consequently, how we engage with the built environment around us. Buildings, even ones intended for generic uses, are not tabula rasa. They are the backdrop for our activities; our lives unfold within their walls. We, in turn, impose on them our messes, our human tendencies, our aspirations and vulnerability. It is, in my mind, this interaction, this dialectic process that gives buildings their purpose and architecture its raison d’être.

Considering these two contradictory perspectives in architectural practice brings about a dichotomy that we designers often have to confront: is the emerging work a product of our creation or is it borne out latent forces

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APPENDIX A

Literature Review: Understanding Barthelme’s Postmodernism

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Barthelme, Donald. Not-Knowing. Edited by Kim Herzinger. New York, NY: Random House, 1997.

This posthumous collection of non-fiction works by Barthelme provides great insights into the writer’s mind regarding writing, literature and aesthetics. Two essays in the book— “After Joyce” and “Not Knowing”—present his views on writing and therefore, in my own extrapolation, on the conception and production of creative “objects.” In “After Joyce,” he poses important questions about the ontological nature of creative pursuits and their output: “…[T]he literary object is itself ‘world’ and the theoretical advantage is that in asking it questions you are asking questions of the world directly.”

This observation resonates with me very deeply and it makes me consider the agenda of design and the outcome (intentional or not) of such a process. It can also be related to architecture in that our built environment is a representation of the world we imagined in our minds, which connects us to the metaphysical universe that contains us. “Not Knowing” is another meditation on the creative process wherein his view on style and the nature of writing has become much more deterministic. Style is no longer a matter of choice but is an intrinsic part of the “object,” arising out of constraints and circumstances. Art, he writes, “is always a meditation upon external reality rather than representation of external reality or a jackleg attempt to ‘be’ external reality.” While it is interesting to consider these two perspectives back-to-back even though the essays were written twenty years apart, I think that they are not entirely opposing views but rather an evolution in his thinking about the (intended) role of writing and its capacity to intervene on our perception and interaction of the world.

Daniele, Daniela. “The Collage City and the Displaced Narrator in the Short Stories of Donald Barthelme.” In The Woman of the Crowd: Urban Displacement and Failed Encounters in Surrealist and Postmodern Writing. Amsterdam, Netherlands and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi B.V., 2000.

This book tracks the genealogy of Postmodernism in the works of artists and writers from Baudelaire to Breton, positing that the eclectic language of Postmodernism finds its roots in the “Surrealist

poetics of ruins and collision.” Daniele analyses the writing of Postmodern American writers such Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon for the image of an urban landscape presented in their writing. In her view, lost direction in the big city, the space of the crowd as an area of disjunctive encounters and narrative fragments are thematic in the Postmodern literary discourse. In the essay “The Collage City and the Displaced Narrator in the Short Stories of Donald Barthelme,” the writing in his stories is dissected stylistically so that an understanding of the urban space created in them can be achieved. The author discusses his techniques of synesthetic pastiche, collage and “heterogeneous languages” and their effect in creating an urban environment of a densely populated and hybrid conglomeration, a “phantasmagoric geography” that incorporates all countries and nations, disregarding the historical sites and corners of the urban topography celebrated in traditional fiction. In his stories, Daniele posits, the notion of the city as an integrated, local community is dissolved, replaced by a quintessential multiracial field transcending the domain of any specific urban community. This point of view is informative for a design project that places Barthelme’s fiction at its metaphorical center because it alleviates the anxiety of selecting an appropriate site that can house the narratives which, in turn, acts as the background for the unfolding of the events and the livelihood of the characters.

Daugherty, Tracy. Hiding Man: Biography of Donald Barthelme.

New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2009.

This biography of Donald Barthelme, written by one of his former students, provides an encompassing yet familiar and intimate look at the writer in his role as an author, a teacher and a mentor turned friend. It is a portrait painted with an impressive body of research using archives, interviews and study of materials—artistic, philosophical, literary, historical, and even architectural—that influenced Barthelme and are visible in his work. The book is also a documentation of the milieu that surrounded Barthelme and, inevitably, contributed to his character and writing. The early chapters provide especially powerful insights into his family background which left an indelible mark on his later life and career.

We are told that Donald Barthelme the writer emerged as a response 53

to his exacting father, Donald Barthelme the architect. The senior Barthelme is a prominent modernist architect in Texas (he built the family home in the Houston suburb, modeled after Mies’ Tugendhat house) who spent his life preaching and teaching about the need for a new and uncompromising modern style. Even though the book goes on to chronicle Barthelme’s life, both creative and personal, in the following years during which he moved to New York then moved back to Texas, married four times and fathered two children; it is this tension between father and son—neither one approved of the other’s creative inclinations—that appears most significant to me.

In his writing, Barthelme Jr. goes to extraordinary length to avoid conventional narrative methods, to the point of fragmenting the plot beyond recognition before reconstructing it into an identifiable story.

This aversion for a cohesive narrative, a reasoned, logical progression of the plot seems very much in line with the disdain he feels for the unapologetic Modernism for which his father advocated. Perhaps an Oedipal reading on his life is irrelevant in the eventual design project and even uncalled for, I still find it informative to feel for the boundaries against which Barthelme spent his lifetime pushing.

Davenport, Guy. “Style as Protagonist in Donald Barthelme.”

Review of Contemporary Fiction 11, no. 2 (July 1991): 69 – 75.

In this article, Guy Davenport situates the writing style of Donald Barthelme in the twentieth-century literature landscape with other writers such as Hemmingway, Faulkner and Welty. Barthelme’s unique style, he argues, arrives out of a desire to fill an unoccupied niche.

This led to a number of techniques that we see utilized again and again in his short stories: the sequitur non-sequitur, literary collage and pastiche, and fragmentation. Still, his style has implications on not only his writing approach but also the content produced. In the universe created in Barthelme’s stories (which is never quite the universe), all processes function interestingly, fascinatingly, but are never free of static, abrasion, turbulence. This tension is acutely present between the density of his prose and the gratuitous nature of his subject matter. Style and content grip at each other, though Barthelme gives them both chaotic reigns.

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Spurr, David. “The Architectural Turn in Contemporary Literature.” In Reading Architecture: Literary Imagination and Architectural Experience. Edited by Angeliki Sioli and Yoonchun Jung. New York, NY: Routledge, 2018.

This book, emerging out of the symposium of the same name, is a collection of essays investigating the interdisciplinary relationship between architecture and literature. It includes several major themes, such as aspects of urban space revealed in writing but are otherwise invisible in architectural rendering modes, the capacity of literature to regard and discuss the lived experience of place, or the confluence of literary techniques and architectural representation methods.

In the essay “The Architectural Turn in Contemporary Literature”

by David Spurr, the author examines two stages in the relationship between literature and architecture in Europe and Northern America. In the decades leading up to World War II, he explains, the avant-garde in these two cultural forms progressed without concerns for one another, even though they can both be understood as original and innovative responses to the new conditions of a modern existence. In the last fifty year, however, literary works have become increasingly aware of the built environment created by trends in globalization. Through this exploration into what he calls “the circulation of images,” Spurr detected a “space of flow,” the flow of capital, information, technology, sounds and symbols as well as images. Similar to the avant-garde that happened in the first stage, architecture has now been conferred a new role to orientate us in this new mode of living. History and place, from where form, function and meaning were once generated are now superseded by global economy; the openness, transparency and clarity of Modernism, embodied in the open-plans and glass facades have given way to surveillance and controlled access. Spurr goes on to analyze several works of literary fiction designed to reflect the Zeitgeist. This article is very helpful in contextualizing literature and architecture after the Modern era and putting the writing of Donald Barthelme into perspective with architectural trends at the time. Barthelme stories have always been, to me, astonishingly open and startlingly honest, but you can only arrive at this clarity after meandering down an unknown path. This indirectness, a literary game of hide-and-seek, relates very strongly to the intentional concealment that Spurr

discusses in his essay, even if they may not have been commentary on the built environment that he was observing.

Fluck, Winfried. “Imaginary Space; Or, Space as Aesthetic Object.” In Space in America: Theory – History – Culture. Edited

by Klaus Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005.

Drawing from the writing of Hayden White, this book offers a catalogue on the perception of space in American through a variety of discipline including nature, literature, performance and visual arts.

Throughout this collection of essays, the paradoxical nature of the perception of space in America is revealed, rooted in the continuous social and cultural conflict. From the founding days of the nation, our sense of space has been tied to the “narrativization” of real events and the history ofthe nation is always a history of fierce struggles to gain and maintain power over the geographical, social and political spaces and their concomitant narratives. In his essay “Imaginary Space; Or, Space as Aesthetic Object,” Winfried Fluck explores the concept of space as mental constructs that only gain meaning when its viewer can link physical and sensory components of space with an ordering principle and the process which takes place therein.

Using John Dewey’s concept of aesthetics as potential function of an object, he takes on the task of examining the ontology of an object which can now be experienced in various possibilities of revelations, criticism, intensification from this new perspective which he names “the aesthetic attitude.” Using fictional representation of spaces in cultural references such as the American South in Gone with the Wind and the melancholy and isolation in Edward Hopper’s paintings, Fluck argues that space as an aesthetic object is internally empty, leaving the reader or viewer to assign their own values and associations to it, thus giving it meaning.

bombarded by happenings, sensations, reactions and general noise that he can no longer distinguish the self from the surrounding. Gillen analyses the sense of confusion and anxiety that exists in a number of Barthelme stories and use it as proof of the writer’s intention of creating a world of mingled “real” and “unreal.” He takes this as commentary on the image-oriented society whose expectations of love and life are formed according to the movie magazines they have read. This frustrating quest for meaning, exhibited elsewhere in the stories as a giant balloon floating down Manhattan one day, is a manifestation of the inability to trust in memory and intuition, of the loss of the “Wordsworthian sensibility” that was once central to one’s identity.

Kearney, Richard. On Stories: Thinking in Action. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002.

In this book, Richard Kearney, a protégé of Paul Ricoeur, presents a four-part meditation on the importance role of stories and narratives in human culture. He looks closely at the constitutive agenda of narrative in consciousness, how it promises “a form of understanding which is neither absolute nor relative, but something in between.” Kearney explores the narrative nature of the “self,” and if selfhood is itself a narrative or if narrative is a means of selfreflection. This distinction also carries over to stories and the use of stories, especially in Kearney’s separations of events and stories that incorporate them. He questions the nature of events, whether they exist outside of the narratives that render them after the fact or if narrative constructs of such events are the only reality. This inquiry very much aligns with the view presented in Barthelme’s “After Joyce,” wherein he regards the literary object is an all-encompassing entity in itself and is capable of producing and containing an entire world within it.

Gillen, Francis. “Donald Barthelme’s City: A Guide.” Twentieth Century Literature 18, no. 1 (January 1972): 37 – 44.

Ricoeur, Paul. “Architecture and Narrativity.” Études Ricoeuriennes 7, no. 2 (2016): 31 – 42.

This article serves as a guide to the cityscapes created in the stories of Donald Barthelme. In it, Francis Gillen paints a picture of a metropolis where the media are taking over the individual, who is so

French philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote extensively about the narrative and, even though he did not usually make architecture an object of study, he often integrated it into a thought which is 55

elaborated through hermeneutic criticism. In this essay, he considers that the common ground between narrative or narrativity and inhabited space or architecture is time. In this context, architecture is examined in three stages of Ricoeur’s Triple Mimesis: prefiguration (the act of inhabiting), configuration (the act of building) and refiguration (the interaction between the act of inhabiting and the act of building). Narrativity, in his view, when applied to architecture, will allow for built space to become condensed time. In this framework, space-time is where narrative and architecture can interact and exchange, becoming an “architectural narrativity.”

Sierra, Nicole. “Landscapes of Postmodernity: Donald Barthelme’s Architecture.” Pacific Coast Philology 47 (January 1, 2012): 75 – 92.

This article by Nicole Sierra draws from the postmodernist techniques in the writing of Donald Barthelme and architectural practice to establish a connection between the two. Using Fredric Jameson’s theory on postmodern architecture as the realm where “modifications in aesthetic production have been most centrally raised and articulated,” heralded in by “the end of aesthetic modernism.” Using that framework, Sierra examines how Barthelme utilizes the spectacle of commodified architecture as a tool to critique both modernism and contemporary culture. In Barthelme’s stories, architecture is a complex visual pastiche intended to highlight displeasure with the orthodox modernist architecture and its principles that he grew up with. Sierra also posits that Barthelme is less concerned with creating a literature that belongs to the realm of “the visual” and more about transforming the medium of text through the adoption of cinematic and photographic experiences.

This approach is evident in the fragmentation that serves to spatialize the text and render it not as image but as shapes. Barthelme, in his essay “Not Knowing,” confirms this technique: “You grab something outside of literature, drag it into literature and renew the writing thereby.”

Trachtenberg, Stanley. Understanding Donald Barthelme.

Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press: 1990.

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In this book, Stanley Trachtenberg offers an overview on the writing of Donald Barthelme, particularly on his style and what he coined Barthelmismo. Trachtenberg differentiates Barthelme’s style from that of other postmodern metafictionists and places him between the extremes of traditional literary realism and the full-blown postmodernist metafiction. This categorization is based on the observation Barthelme’s fiction is one that includes a reaction to “society and economic order, especially as reflected and shaped in a mass media where confusion reigns, and incoherence and hysteria are the norm.” This is consistent with Barthelme’s own view of his writing, which he stated in an interview: “There’s a consistent social concern in my stories from the 1960s to the present, slipped in while your attention is directed toward something else… but it’s there.” This style, which the author polished to perfection, results in a deliberate formlessness as an expression of uncommitted commitment which “enabled him to combine the seriousness of a revolutionary with the complacency of a bourgeois, the delicateness of an artist and the anarchism of the street hustler.” This formlessness, manifested as fragmentation, brings ambiguity to his writing. As several of these entries suggest, the amorphous, vacillating form in Barthelme’s stories is one of their key characteristics. Basing a design project on his literary work is a task that will require an intimate understanding and an attempt to capture this formlessness into a realistic, dimensional architecture.

Wesselman, Daan. “The High Line, ‘The Balloon,’ and Heterotopia.” Space and Culture 16, no. 1 (February 2013): 16 – 27.

In this essay, the High Line in New York City and the city on Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon” are examined under the scope of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. Daan Wesselman take this concept beyond the immediately spatial; drawing parallels between the balloon in the story and the High Line, both suspended above the city for people to enjoy. The spatial difference that underlies these two entities highlights the heterotopia that Foucault offers in his writing. Both the balloon and the High Line are not inserted in but suspended above the existing urban structure. Their space, therefor, differ from the dominant spatial regime of the street grid with defined blocks, making them each an “other” in the urban landscape.

White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. London, UK and Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

In this book of essays, Hayden White argues that linguistic form is the primary vehicle for content in historical knowledge. While linking form and content is nothing new in either literature or architecture, White conducts a thorough excavation of historical accounts to discern the relationship between the two in history and historiology.

In the first essay of the book, “Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” he examines the Annals of St. Gall between the years 709 and 734 CE. The Annals is divided into two columns, dates on the left and events on the right. The date column is filled in with every year from 709 to 734, while the event column is sporadically dotted in with unexplained event fragments that have no connections to each other. The only principle of meaning here, White argues, is the temporal sequence displayed in the years listed one after the other; other than that rudimentary order, this history has no central subject, no beginning, middle, or end, no importance of events, in short: no narrative. A modern reader would discern no agenda in such a history and assign equal importance to all events recounted.

Yet, White asserts that even this almost empty list has a plot, in the sense of “a structure of relationships by which the events contained in the account are endowed with a meaning by being identified as parts of an integrated whole.” This intrinsic rationality in even a list like this is the undergirding narrative that guides our reading and understanding of history. Even though neither the structure of the Annals, the causal relationships, the meaning, nor the integrated whole are intelligible and no pattern is accessible to a reader’s decoding, the list of dates itself is alleged to furnish the necessary coherence and the meaning of events is “their registration in this kind of list.”

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APPENDIX B

Case Studies: Forms and Narratives

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Zim & Zou (Thomas and Zimmerman) is a French artist duo who work with primarily with materials like wood, paper and thread to create beautiful installations. Of the many materials present in their works, paper is their preferred medium for its capacity to transform into different shapes and forms: “Paper inspires [the artists] for its versatility, infinite range of colors and unique textures. The flat paper sheets turned into volume are giving an installation the poetry of ephemeral material.”

For the Sharing Worlds exhibition held in Dubai’s La Mer in collaboration with the Nobel Prize Museum of Sweden, the artists create paper installations illustrating works of literary works of authors who have been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

Lucie Thomas and Thibault Zimmerman, model illustrating One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez (1967), 2019, paper. Dubai, The Nobel Prize in Literature — Sharing Worlds.

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Some fifty years earlier, the avant-garde poet, Mary Ellen Solt, wrote “Moonshot Sonnet”, a poem that took its inspiration from the diagrammatic codes NASA engineers developed to plan and execute the Apollo 11 moon landing. Solt wrote: “It has not been possible since the Renaissance to write a convincing sonnet on the moon. Looking at the moon photographs in The New York Times, it occurred to me that since the scientist’s symbols for marking off areas on the moon’s surface were presented five to a line and the lines could be added up to fourteen, a visual sonnet could be made of them. The poem is intended as a spoof of an outmoded form of poetry and as a statement of the problem of the concrete poet’s search of valid new forms.

Mary Ellen Solt, “Moonshot Sonnet,” 1973.

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Caroline Bergvall’s visual poetry exists in the intersection between narrative and form. In her collection of poetry Drift, she juxtaposes meditations on traversing bodies on water with explorations of language and its formal manifestions. Publication of the text and research was influenced by Anglo-Saxon and early medieval North Sea literature, alongside a report on a migrant crossing of the Mediterranean left to drift despite being spotted on many radars. The book includes 3 poetic sequences, 2 drawing sequences, abstract maps on black pages, photographic works and longer essays. Bergvall also gave a performance and created an art installation of the same name, upon the completion of which she revised and expanded the content presented in the book. This multimodal approach and the exploration on the capacity of visual forms to represent undergirding meanings place her work at the intersection between art and literature.

Caroline Bergvall, “1,” Drift (Brookly, NY: Nightboat Books, 2014), xx.

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Mark Z. Danielewski, The Familiar (Volume 1) (New York, NY: Random House, 2015), 64.

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Danielewski’s novel about a young girl in Los Angeles living with epilepsy going out with her father on a rainy day to get a dog is another groundbreaking work of literary fiction, bridging the chasm between novel, graphic novel and performance art. The serial novel was originally conceived as five “seasons” of five books apiece, composed into a 27-volume magnum opus. The books themselves are also worth mentioning: printed on huge, glossy, full-colour pages with a ribbon bookmark, they are meant to be perceived on their own physical existence as objets d’art, rather than just the medium or vehicle for the content within. Even though Danielewski eventually cancelled this project after five volumes, its projected manifestation and his ambition in embarking on this genre-bending oeuvre make it a particularly relevant case study for my thesis.

In general, postmodern fiction tends not only to develop the narrative situation, but to place it in the foreground, so as to emphasize and fictionalize its relation to the content and form of the narrated. In Postmodernism, the distinction between typical truth and a history overburdened with conflicting data is blurred; and the decline of the totalizing, rationalizing ideologies that could provide a coherent and seemingly trustworthy interpretation of events in the form of traditional narratives has increased the sense of relativity, to the point that fiction modulates into metafiction, with writers and historians utilizing the same instruments of extrapolation. In a narratological reading of Barthelme’s works, we can begin to understand the text as a construct rather than analyze it as a continuum and recognize its infringement on traditional narrative structure which are numerous, provoking and significant. Because his writing style never hardens into orthodoxy, narratology provides the standard by which to define and assess the deviations from the norm — an instrument of hermeneutic criticism for analysis.

Unknown, Freytag’s Pyramid, n.d., digital art.

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W.G. Sebald, illustration in The Rings of Saturn (1995), gelatin silver print.

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In W.G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn, the story is formed throughout a walking tour of Suffolk, England which was also happening concurrently in the real world.

The book combines memoir, fiction, travelogue, history and biography. His writing, which he called “elliptical,” not only breaches the supposed chasm between fact and fantasy but also erases and redraw the boundaries of narrative fiction. Besides the content presented on the pages, the book also lives in the real world on the streets of Suffolk where the author traversed as he narrates the novel. In this existential duality, the book takes form in both the letters that form it and the setting in which it was conceived and took place. In this sense, the interaction between the built, urban form and the written words becomes seamless, to the point where one is indistinguishable from the other.

1. Where the architectural systems of space, structure, and program are submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form. This kind of building becoming sculpture we call the Duck in honor of the duck-shaped drivein, ‘The Long Island Duckling,’ illustrated in God’s Own Junkyard by Peter Blake.

2. Where systems of space and structure are directly at the service of program, and ornament is applied independently of them, this we call the decorated shed.

The duck is the special building that is a symbol; the decorated shed is the conventional shelter that applies symbols. We maintain that both kinds of architecture are valid.

Martin Maurer, The Big Duck, Flanders, NY (1931).

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: MIT Press, 1972): 87.

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Aldo Rossi, San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena, Italy (1971).

But the question of the fragment in architecture is very important since it may be that only ruins express a fact completely. . . I am thinking of a unity, or a system, made solely of reassembled fragments. I am convinced, however, that architecture as totality, as a comprehensive project, as an overall framework, is certainly more important and, in the final analysis, more beautiful. But it happens that historical obstacles —in every way parallel to psychological blocks or symptoms—hinder every reconstruction. As a result, I believe that there can be no true compensation, and that maybe the only thing possible is the addition that is somewhere between logic and biography.

Aldo Rossi, “The Sacri Monti,” in A Scientific Autobiography (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: MIT Press): 8.

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Finnegan’s Wake was used as the program for a project involving a dozen contributions on a ‘real’ site, London’s Covent Garden. The intersections of an ordinance survey grid became the locations of each architectural intervention, using the regular spacing of points to accommodate a heterogeneous selection of buildings.

Joyce’s Garden in no way attempted to reconcile the disparities resulting from the superimposition of one text on another; it avoided synthesis, instead encouraging the opposed and often conflicting logics of the different systems. The point grid became the tool of an approach that argued, against functionalist doctrines, that there is no causeand- effect relationship between the terms of ‘program’ and ‘architecture.’”

Bernard Tschumi, “Joyce’s Garden,” Bernard Tschumi Architects, http://www.tschumi.com/projects/49/#.

Bernard Tschumi, Joyce’s Garden (unbuilt), London, UK (1976).

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Instant City has no fixed form, no prior constraints. It is an example of something impossible to represent, a city that has no existence as such and which is only an incident in time and space. In the dialectic between permanent and transitory, mobile and ephemeral, Instant City embodies the utopian vision of architecture freed from its foundations, of a flying and aerial city, which transforms architecture into a situation, into a reactive environment.

Archigram, Instant City in a Field Long Elevation (1969).

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Peter Cook, “Instant City,” The FRAC Centre Val-de-Loire, http://www.frac-centre.fr/_en/artandarchitecture-collection/cook-peter/instant-city-317. html?authID=44&ensembleID=113.

La Villette could be conceived of as one of the largest buildings ever constructed — a discontinuous building but a single structure nevertheless, overlapping the site’s existing features and articulating new activities. It opposes the landscape notion of Olmsted, widespread during the 19th century, that “in the park, the city is not supposed to exist.” Instead, it proposes a social and cultural park with activities that include workshops, Gymnasium and bath facilities, playgrounds, exhibitions, concerts, science experiments, games and competitions, in addition to the Museum of Science and Technology and the City of Music on the site.

Bernard Tschumi, “Parc de la Villette,” Bernard Tschumi Architects, http://www.tschumi.com/projects/3/#.

Bernard Tschumi, Parc de la Villette, Paris, France (1987).

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I.M. Pei, Pyramide du Louvre, Paris, France (1989).

Commisioned by Francois Mitterand for the renovation of the Louvre, Pei made several clandestine trips to Paris to study the Louvre, walking its galleries and grounds.

He also studied the historic landscape architecture of famed French designer André Le Nôtre. Pei saw a solution: He could place a new entrance in the gravelfilled Cour Napoléon, an exterior courtyard enclosed by the museum’s existing buildings. Brand new infrastructure underground could create a functional and welcoming reception area, as well as a system of public spaces and circulation for visitors to access the collections. The new entrance would be in the middle of the courtyard, marked with a translucent sculptural gesture to both define the visitor’s arrival and to light the underground addition, all while respecting the historic buildings.”

Elizabeth Dickison, “Louvre Pyramid: The Folly that Became a Triumph,” Architect (April 2017), https://www.architectmagazine.com//louvre-pyramid-thefolly-that-became-a-triumph

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“From a literal perspective, the three sections of my model (the first house, the breezeway, the final house) represent the three chapters in the book: ‘The Window,’ ‘Time Passes,’ and ‘The Lighthouse.’ The negative space (the passageway between the two houses, the shadow under the extended roof off the second building) enacts Mrs. Ramsay’s death, while the retaining wall on the right side, with its sharp edges, registers the void against something solid. I wanted that in the structure, as in the novel, grief and desire should be inextricable.”

Catherine Pond, “To the Light House,” The Laboratory of Literary Architecture, http://lablitarch.com/project/ catherine-pond/.

Catherine Pond (in collaboration with Stephanie Jones), To the Lighthouse, Columbia University.

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APPENDIX C Bibliography

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Agrest, Diana. “Design versus Non-Design.” In Oppositions Reader: Selected Readings from a Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture 1973 – 1984. Edited by K. Michael Hays. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998.

331 – 54.

Barthelme, Donald. Not-Knowing. Edited by Kim Herzinger. New York, NY: Random House, 1997.

Daniele, Daniela. “The Collage City and the Displaced Narrator in the Short Stories of Donald Barthelme.” In The Woman of the Crowd: Urban Displacement and Failed Encounters in Surrealist and Postmodern Writing.

Amsterdam, Netherlands and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi B.V., 2000.

Daugherty, Tracy. Hiding Man: Biography of Donald Barthelme. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2009.

Davenport, Guy. “Style as Protagonist in Donald Barthelme.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 11, no. 2 (July 1991): 69 – 75.

Spurr, David. “The Architectural Turn in Contemporary Literature.” In Reading Architecture: Literary Imagination and Architectural Experience. Edited by Angeliki Sioli and Yoonchun Jung. New York, NY: Routledge, 2018.

Fluck, Winfried. “Imaginary Space; Or, Space as Aesthetic Object.” In Space in America: Theory – History – Culture. Edited by Klaus Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt.

Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005.

Hoberek, Andrew. “Introduction: After Postmodernism.”

Twentieth-Century Literature 53, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 233 – 47.

Kearney, Richard. On Stories: Thinking in Action. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002.

Klinkowitz, Jerome. “Barthelme’s Canonical Village.”

Review of Contemporary Fiction 11, no. 2 (July 1991): 94 – 102.

Leitch, Thomas M. “Donald Barthelme and The End of The End.” Modern Fiction Studies 28, no. 1 (April 1982): 129 – 43.

Raymond, Marcel. From Baudelaire to Surrealism.

Translated by G.M. New York, NY: Wittenborn & Schultz, 1950.

Ricoeur, Paul. “Architecture and Narrativity.” Études Ricoeuriennes 7, no. 2 (2016): 31 – 42.

Sierra, Nicole. “Landscapes of Postmodernity: Donald Barthelme’s Architecture.” Pacific Coast Philology 47 (January 1, 2012): 75 – 92.

Trachtenberg, Stanley. Understanding Donald Barthelme.

Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press: 1990.

Wesselman, Daan. “The High Line, ‘The Balloon,’ and Heterotopia.” Space and Culture 16, no. 1 (February 2013): 16 – 27.

Gillen, Francis. “Donald Barthelme’s City: A Guide.”

Twentieth Century Literature 18, no. 1 (Jan. 1972): 37 – 44.

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