The Construction of Meaning: 40 Thoughts on the Architecture of Text

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CONTENTS

01 // On Writing: The Architecture of Text............................................................................. 01 02 // Void................................................................................................................................ 03 04 // Space and Place............................................................................................................. 05 07 // Memory as a Singular Event of the Grid........................................................................ 07 10 // On Content, Process and Form...................................................................................... 08 13 // The City of Arzhang........................................................................................................ 09 24 // Grid: A History of Patternists.......................................................................................... 11 27 // Whether by Fate or by Design........................................................................................ 13 33 // Center and Periphery...................................................................................................... 14 35 // On Scale.......................................................................................................................... 16 40 // Beginning, Middle and End............................................................................................. 18 Postscript................................................................................................................................. 20

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01 // On Writing: The Architecture of Text

One of the key functions of this text is to keep the reader reading.

I have a special interest in games of chess when all your cards are open. It becomes more challenging. You become smarter by playing a smarter opponent (1). Come back to the need to keep the reader reading: I will now open my cards. Whatever that can go wrong will go wrong (2). The reader must continue reading much the same as how you tell a story is more important than the story itself (3).

In fact, it is not. The content is what gives shape to the form much as imagination essentially precedes any form of creation. But we tend to adhere to this fact more than is healthy. The form is as important as the content. But since it is, in Deleuzian terms, minor to content, we also tend, in Aristotelian words, to claim it is more important. Concepts suffer much the very same as women in our contemporary world.

Why, then, is it important that the reader continue reading? Because the crafting of the text is as important as its content. What, then, are my open cards? I inform the reader from the beginning that it will be my aim all through the text to keep you reading. This is something that should necessarily affect the text and its content. But then again, that is the exact form in which the following content is perceived as behaving. In more simple terms, as dynamic, sensible, simple and confusing as the world can be.

Thus, the best way to start writing is by writing about writing for the reader to keep reading.

But how to keep the reader reading? In Italo Calvino’s works, we can find the best textual fabric in terms of richness and narrative sequence (plot, more or less). What De Certeau has in01

troduced in social theory as “the everyday”, is what flows out of tactical habit, that is, without strategic planning. Calvino’s texts are rich because they depend on the fabric of the everyday; they introduce themselves as thoughts flowing in the mind of the author as he writes (4), and thus they are real, they never end, have no limits and are agile as a thought process can be.

That is a fabric that is rich; it is never consumed as long as you live to put it down in writing.

Its narrative sequence is versatile. It keeps the reader reading; enjoyable if you wish, by virtue of its craft and logic. It builds up on itself, through a literary and intellectual process. By being both rich and logically persuasive, such texts become both appealing to the reader as well as to the critic. They are important in as much as they are nice to read.

But there is a further extension to this rationale: by thinking while writing, the author goes through the same process that the reader goes through. Jump suddenly to Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and to Albert Camus’ Absurd Reasoning in the introduction to the Myth of Sysiphus, you will find the necessity of equating the writer to the reader.

Jump to Roland Barthes’ proclaimed necessity of reading as a form of writing (5), you will find that the best demonstration of a text is one that the reader contributes in writing, and that the authors find themselves through. A conversation with oneself if you wish.

One more important aspect of this text is that its author is an architect. The visual composition of the text for architects is as important as its format for a publisher, its wording for an essayist, and its methodology for an academic. Since the visual composition can be considered to be a paratext (6), a referential attribute that creates a context without which the text cannot be understood (correctly), it, thus, cannot be separated from the text (content/form) and from the attempts of keeping the reader reading.

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02 // Void

1. Before any story can be narrated, there exists a void. A blank page. A point in time where the story is visualized, or to-be visualized, in the imagination of the author, prior to the existence of the text.

Once that confrontation, between author and blank page, is resolved, writing is assumed to start, as well as reading. From the point of view of the reader, the void is still prior to the text, since once they start to read, a certain emptiness [of space] prevails and is subdued with each passing word.

As if carving, the writer/reader deals with raw material to be shaped. The shape that starts being contrived, whether by design or by discovery, becomes the space of the text, its elements are those of architecture.

2. The author designs, as an architect, the narrative text. So much as a house is revealed, room after room, in real life through movement (in space and time), so is the text. Such revelatory movement takes place essentially through narration, a representation of ‘events’ linked in temporal or causal sequence.

In real life, as an architect sets out to design an object, they do not necessarily advance in a direct route; causally or temporally; they might jump on any point of the map, from vertical to horizontal, from space to space, between drawings and scales, authoring what would be in the end an architectural product that is then possible to be viewed in a direct route.

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Likewise, the movement of the text, through its narration, is not necessarily sequential neither temporally nor causally. What concerns us is that the text moves, and it can only move through reading: a furnishing of 'events’ that uncover a form - the form of the text.

Thus, starting from the void, the form of the text takes shape and is uncovered/carved through narration.

3. This is to look at the text as an architectural object/form, as if from a bird’s eye’s perspective. But then, there is also a shift in scale, when we look at the internal architecture of the text, having content and structure, spaces turned into places, movement and fixity, center and periphery, etc.

So much as a city, at a relatively macro-scale, is an architectural artifact [made up of urban and architectural elements] that deserves to be looked at as a whole form in itself, a careful look at the micro-scale elements that make up a city, its buildings and streets, is central to its understanding.

Likewise, the narrative text can be seen as a multiscalar architectural entity not separated from the room in which it is being read, the city or the world. As Deleuze writes, “the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world.“ 4. A figure-ground relation is thus established between the form of the text and its internal architecture, i.e. its content. Similarly, buildings, streets, movements, stories embodied in space all become content whose form is the city.

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04 // Space and Place

Let us begin by distinguishing between space and place. According to renowned geographer Yi -Fu Tuan, space is conceptual and denotes position; coordinates that are 3-dimensional.

Space is the ideal form of a place and it does not exist in reality. It is only an abstract understanding of a geographical location.

Place, on the other hand, is real. It is a space with which a (human) relation has been made, thus withstanding memories, emotions and familiarity. Therefore, in the beginning there was space. Once encountered (by man), this space has become place. The only difference, addition, annexation that it underwent was that of establishing ties, relations (memory, emotions, familiarity).

Much like the Little Prince’s plant, in the beginning it was empty. It was just another flower among a hundred thousand other plants. Until it tamed him. Basically, they spent time together. What happened during that time was not important (watering the plant, listening to it, talking to it). What is important is that time has established a relation between the little prince and his plant. Because as such, it became his plant. When the little prince had to leave the fox, it told him that it would now cry for his departure, having been tamed by him. Crying for someone, is an emotional expression due to a relation/tie.

Space is objective, abstract, grey black and white. Like how you would imagine a cube if i didn’t tell you any of its attributes. Space is empty, like the desert and seeks your exploration to fill it with signs, discoveries and newly found emotions. Space is thus movement. Place is subjective, real, colorful. Place is saturated with emotions.

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Place has been territorialized previously by you. It has acquired meanings, emotions, and landmarks. Place is like home. It’s full of comfort and prescribed notions. Place is familiar.

Place is thus denoted with fixity.

For a comparison between space and place, you can imagine yourself hiking in a desert without landmarks. You are exploring it. As harsh as it is – a new territory, your drive comes from your satisfaction and will to discover it. Imagine encountering an oasis on your way, full of trees, shade, food and a little lake. If you had been traveling for a long time, you would like to stop, to rest, to drink of its familiarity and comfort.

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07 // Memory as a Singular Event of the Grid

I held a pen and drew a line. And then beside it i drew a line. And then beside it i drew a line. And then beside it i drew a line. And then beside it i drew a line. And then beside it i drew a broken line as my hand twitched suddenly. And then beside it i drew a line. And then beside it i drew a line. And then beside it i drew a line. I rotated my hand 90 degrees and then drew a line. And then below it i drew a line. And then below it i drew a line. And then below it i drew a line. And then below it i drew a line. And then below it i drew a line. And then below it i drew a line. And then below it i drew a line. And then below it i drew a line. And then there i was with a grid. With each 2 vertical lines and 2 horizontal lines forming a square, there remained only 1 square visibly different. It was not that one formed by straight lines. It was not that one formed by straight lines. It was not that one formed by straight lines. It was that singular one that had broken the grid in the event that my hand twitched. And the rest of the lines, and though i can intuitively see that they form a grid, i vaguely recall to have drawn them.

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10 // On Content, Process and Form

We dropped literature, and our discussions revolved around the city instead. How the city and the individual were shaped after the image of one another lingered in the back of my mind. It was as if my silence was shouting that a work of literature should not present itself as complete, but as one in a process of formation. It does not matter for the reader then if the text starts from the beginning or from the middle. What matters is for the reader not to find theirself being offered a sealed text organized so as to be received, but that the writer himself is in a process of inquiry, searching for oneself within the text. That despite his attempt to narrate the text to the reader in an understandable form, the writer does not claim to fully understand. In this reciprocal attempt lies writer and text, both actors and objects, each shaping to one another at the disposal of the reader.

The city, too, lies equated with its inhabitants.

This is the case in the writings of Calvino, as an example. In ’If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler’, Calvino begins the story with thoughts on how to begin writing a story, only for the reader to realize with the end approaching that the story is nothing but the account of an attempt to write a story. The text, offering itself as a process through its momentary spontaneity, nevertheless succeeds in maintaining the reader spellbound within its dramatic unfolding. The idea behind this is that Calvino’s writing contains as much intentionally unconscious secretions as in the writing of diaries. The writer does not focus his attention on the literary form as he narrates, but lets the stream of his consciousness flow acknowledging the wealth within the fabric of the everyday, the moments before one sleeps, the thoughts one has while they read a text without reflection - or while they pray.

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13 // The City of Arzhang

This is the story of a city north of Iran called arzhang.

The hero that laid it’s foundations -and to whom its name was given- it is said in popular myth, has reached a certain unrememberable level in fighting the beast. He was so courageous he mesmerized the heart of the people of arzhang. It moved something in them. Something as mundane and daily as their awe at how strong a door was shut or that shoes were introduced inside a space.

They were a fighter people, much as the geography that has contained them. Their temperament was that of stubbornness and defiance. Their behavior as rough and confused as any rock at the edge of the mountain.

Yet, from the inside of the city, away from its borders, there lay homes at night with yellow brownish lights, with drinking fellows who make sure they are warm and having a good time until they end up sleeping in the morning.

Those homes were completely safe and almost oblivious not just to the fighting at the border, but more to the existence of any space outside their kitchen table gatherings. If there was wine, a nice company, an honest discussion, everyone at the end of the night would be warm and go to sleep as if nothing else was there to exist.

The people of arzhang, held themselves steadfastly at high esteem. It was the fact that they and their nature go back way a long time in the story of man. So much things have been told 09

between that ever so continuous flow of society settling around the narrow stream of a river.

This cognition they had towards themselves as descendants antecedents of something ancient, though, only made them heavier as a people. A certain humidity had saturated them, like grease would on veins. This you could see in how slow they were… In work, they were slow, in action, they were slow and it all was because of the decisions that any such act had to live up to or stem from. It was all about the bureaucracy of the decisions.

It was phenomenal how slow they produced work, and equally so how the little work they produced was finely articulated, thought out, as a mechanical device, to the very last detail. It was this that the people of arzhang made sure to assert as their first article of their constitution that recognized the “importance of every single constituent of the bureaucracy of decision making as much as the quality of the work produced.”

And for this only article, they gather every year, in the park on the edge of the mountain, with nothing but wine and continue to drink it all night until they slept in the morning for- twice for 182 consecutive days. In the evenings, everyone would display their work -in the street confused-for-being a market- for visitors to question and admire. And how heated were the debates on the work produced.

You could see that in their humid hot summer, they kept themselves more in the shade, and the market would have very little to display of last year’s same produce. Flees roam around the stillness then instead.

But the buzz, the chatter, the stories, around which they gathered at night - was of that kind.

A chaotic but magnetic kind of flow. You could really tell it goes way back and be convinced to sense that none other around arzhang exists, nothing out there. The river stream passes from its border and there at the end of its horizon it ends. But when you are in arzhang, you are completely in.

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24 // Grid: A History of Patternists

The blank page effect: when you hold down your pen and start gazing at the blank page in front of you, and get suddenly lost in its emptiness. Although it is empty, it feels complete. How can one break the completeness of this page? What words can stand up for this task? Blessed are those who can hear the blank page asking to be carved, sculpted, begging for mistakes, for humanly flawed expressions.

Once upon a time, blank pages were royalty. Stories of blank pages on paperback territories have passed down to us by ancestors. Times when the blankness of a page could not be contested in nobility. How for a page to remain empty and all the more expressive was the common debate among the Blankist population.

It was all until the Minor Revolts of colored and etched pages. In hiding places and beneath the surface of paperback, cults emerged calling for the abolishing of blankness. Their increasingly popular communion was established during their Color and Detail fests, in which the underground paper mobs would commit sacrilegious acts of introducing color and infinite detail to themselves. Each community would then show off how unique they were in their general assembly around a blazing fire.

Of all the trends of color and detail, none were more detested than those who divided themselves into uniform grids, manipulating the lines with varying degrees of detail and orientation, but almost always in symmetric structures. They were accused of compromising the magnitude of the Minor Paper Revolts in courtliness to the ruling Blankist monarchy.

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The Patternists, as they called themselves, although upset by such claims, dismissed them modestly in their communes. They understood that they were mere violent reactions of an angrily-colored and excessively-detailed minority. Despite their sensitive participation in the Minor Paper Revolt, their role was subdued in consecutive attempts to establish a new paper hierarchy.

Literary edifices of magnanimous floral detail and mixed layers of color, reigned. Centuries passed with pure white surfaces or geometrical grids looked down upon as abhorrent sin.

Meanwhile, descendants of the Patternists remained a grid-based tradition that often hovered with prevailing winds. There were those who created floral patterns out of their grids to imply family ties with the organic mainstream. There were those who stood at the crossroads of the color spectrum between the floral Patternists and the Organicists, and claimed that whatever composition you are made of, you could always verify it with some sort of underlying and ever diminishing grid, and that the Grid was not but an esoteric ethos that need not take actual form. The Patternists could never verily defy this claim, or offer sufficient discourse against it. For all they knew, all was valid as long as based on grid: either prior to and underlying all paper marks, or justifying their existence in posterity.

Nevertheless, the grid was the air that the Patternists breathed. Even during their nude blank pages, they could not but imagine the grid underlying the emptiness. They were deemed as pages of humiliation in paper history. But the Patternists remained adherent to their grid.

They laid it in symmetry and asymmetry; within color hues and frequencies; beneath the topography that informs texture, in light and in shade. They made periodical pilgrimage to religiously grid-laid territories. For all they were concerned, the grid was the sublime, whose absence posits a “tranquil terror induced by contemplation of great size, antiquity and a state of decay. “

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27 // Whether by Fate or by Design

I just woke up. I’m on the airplane on my way to Odessa. I was asleep with headphones in my ears. Suddenly, i found myself waking up from a free flowing dream, as if someone had nudged me to listen to what was being played on the radio. Or maybe it wasn’t exactly like that. In all cases, i did wake up suddenly from a free flowing dream. The Quranic chapter of the Cave was being aired. I woke up listening to Al Khedr, the mystic who had accepted to teach Moses some of his knowledge, telling him that now he shall be informed with that which he had previously not known during their voyage: that what the mystic was doing, or what was being done, was all essentially endowed with fateful reasons in each event, and that a time-sewn knowledge was driving what Moses saw, at the present time, to be unexpected and catastrophic. Past, present and future collide.

Let’s flashback for a few seconds to put this event in its context.

This morning, i received an email that held urgent news. To fast forward through the unnecessary details, the morning news held that i am to immediately pack all my life from a two decades’ residence in Yemen, in two bags, two hours, and take the two o’clock plane to Odessa.

Indefinitely.

That’s me on the plane, now, waking up from a free flowing dream listening to Al Khedr passing to Moses his teachings on fate.

I believe in my free will. But i also believe in how dependent on fate this free will can be. I find difficulty in comprehending which shapes the other. All things considered, a determined soul will always manage.

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33 // Center and Periphery

Any traveling is a journey from periphery to center. This especially applies to culture and urbanism. Since any place has its specific culture, that culture becomes most central to it than any other place however close they can get. Since men and places are largely tied to the ground, their cities become the incubators of their culture.

Young men in the center of a culture will share the same wording used in language. They will recall in their jokes and expressions the same memories that tie them as a generation. To a lesser extent, they will also share same opinions. In this center, they feel the more secure and familiar. Of course, within each center there are many smaller componental centers that add up to form the collective (not the best word) center. The componental centers to the collective center are like protons and neutrons to a nucleus. Collective centers shield their components within a membrane [1] of bonding, like atoms are bound together to form a molecule [2].

Like the difference between Cairo and outskirt cities that live out and off of Cairo; they lend them their sons and daughters to work in the shitty tasks that downtown Cairenes would abstain from. But every now and then, they will also lend them the opportunity to acknowledge their difference, and make a laugh about it. They say Outa, or Ayooh, and what a funny thing it is. As subtle the difference becomes, as more the funny and less racially profiling. However, if it is as different as to permit an exclamation or a laugh between those in the common majority, then it does not come exactly from the center, but peripheral to the center, and central to another culture.

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Of course, there are only centers. Centers are nuclei that are made up of an intimately specific common culture. The form and structure of this common culture is an essential investigation to be made in this regard; but in the same time, despite its hinted tininess, it is as vast as how deep it can go. As deep as the rabbit hole goes, and as divisible as the components of the atom can be.

Centers differ in size and influence. Bigger and more influential centers attract people from their centers, to come and become peripheral. In this act, they swallow other centers into their own self, and draw more peripheries closer. In this regard, a view into the urban history of markets cities and global cities could be very useful. Global cities, for example, are defined by a globalized world, where men and their cultures are no longer fixed to their places [3].

Even when they are, a continuous flow of mutual interaction with other cultures essentially influences how they behave. [break] Any traveling is a journey from periphery to center. Thus, all traveling from all peripheries to all centers take you all the more closer to the source of all things. When you possess all in knowledge you become one of everyone, and everyone in one. [4]

[1] Membranes in cells typically define enclosed spaces or compartments in which cells may maintain a chemical or biochemical environment that differs from the outside.

[2] Atoms are bound together due to instability in charge, positive (lacking protons) or negative (lacking electrons). Their bonds serve all the more a higher purpose: the formation of a chemical substance.

[3] Important references to be read: Etopia, W Mitchells; The Informational City, M Castells; City of Bits, W Mitchells.

[4] Important reference: Invisible Cities, I Calvino.

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35 // Scale

Scale as a tool for reading: architects use different scales to read different types of information on maps. From the scale of the city, to the scale of the building, to the scale of the building entrance, even to the scale of a flooring tile within the entrance (1/Il Sole 24 Ore/Renzo Piano).

Reading the city at different scales warrants an understanding that is not limited to a certain scope; i.e. the city remains open for interpretation at any scalar level (far/near, material/ immaterial), be it that of a city quarter (say downtown) a theater (say rawabet) or a play in which the city is questioned, reinterpreted. Which then has influenced the other? Has the city shaped the theater and the play through defining their spatial context? Or has the city been authored, shaped in the imagination of an author of a play that predates it? (2/Invisible Cities/ Italo Calvino)(2/A Thousand Plateaus/Gilles Deleuze) (2/Rome).

Reading the city at different scales, thus, is a tool to understand the city in whichever form it takes, be it a cultural product, a spatial practice or its built environment.

Scale as a gradient loop: when you’re near to arrive to the city, a signpost tells you how many kilometers are left for you to arrive. But arrive to where exactly? Where is the point in the city where you can benchmark arrival? Is it the city border or is it the center? And if it is the center, where exactly in the center? In order to define a near to exact limit of a place, we may need to draw our observations at a much lesser scale than that of urban fabric or street grid, arriving to individual specifities – that which makes one place unique in relation to others. An example for this could be a memory, a bordering city wall, a circulating urban myth, a domi16

nant ethnic distribution or even a court case that holds a land-plot vacant for decades influencing in turn the definition of the place. The scale of our observations becomes all the more subjective, and at times even selective.

Architects are constantly faced with this philosophical dilemma as they skillfully attempt to denote (with scalpels) where multi-scalar elements are separated (invisible borders, otherness). Where does the center start, where does it evolve into periphery, and where does periphery end - or does it dissolve into desert, sea or countryside? Even when we hold the pen to draw a point (denoting a location) that bears no distance, don’t you occupy around 45cm of space where you are standing? Aren’t the particles of the ink spread over the paper at a distance of minute scale?

Eventually, macro and micro scales come together. Streets akin to river streams or blood circulation. City grids reproduced in column arrangements or mirrored in the curtain walls of buildings (4/Windows over Manhattan/Mies Van der rohe). Dwellings that resemble an ant colony. Walls of the city replicated in subconscious acts of segregation (4/Intertextuality/ Barthes) Scale, thus, is a gradient loop on which we agree to denote benchmarks like beginning, middle, end, center and periphery.

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40 // Beginning, Middle and End

Such are the phases in which meaning transforms into its contradiction.

One starts and ends separately from the other. Black and white.

One dissolves into the other. A gradient of greys.

One starts at the end of the other. A loop.

One cannot be distinguished from the other.

Chaos.

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Postscript

The preceding text is a fragmentary compilation written with the intention of investigating the relation between architecture and text.

Cities have long been depicted in works of literature. Imagined, described, architecture have often been the subject of literature. That is, to write about architecture. Yet, less is done to investigate the intrinsic relation between architecture and text. Instead of writing about cities, to imagine cities as text. That is, to write through architecture.

Starting with a fundamental and abstract understanding of architecture as an act of construction using building elements to convey meaning (as much as they can be concrete, they can also be conceptual), this is thus an attempt at the construction of meaning using conceptual building elements.

Since text has, for so long, been regarded as the ultimate container/conveyor of meaning, it is necessary then to investigate the architecture of text whose building elements are the alphabets, the words and the sentences.

Architectural notions of beginning, end, scale, flow, point, line, grid and void are proposed to be the organizing themes around which a text can be read.

That said, the preceding text is not an attempt at a coherent approach to building a theory on the architecture of text as much as it observes the unconscious secretions erupting from within the writing. In the end, it is the author’s personal process.

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