Looking Back Again and Forward Re: Review and Reconstruction in Writing and Architecture

Abstract

The review in its multiplicity of forms and directions can be said to underpin architecture, and is crucial for its dissemination. From the perspective of a writer in and of architecture, the review is a means of both responding to the physical and creating another form on the page. This article focuses mainly on writers whose work moved from print to physical architecture: Walter Besant and Orhan Pamuk. It stresses the importance of “looking again” in relation to forms of architectural review, from the ambulatory glance to the in-depth reflection, through an array of examples including the “artefactual” and archi-fiction, manifesto, monograph and still and moving image. Revisiting the review encompasses notions of paper architecture, reconstruction, scale, weight and titles. It demonstrates how the review, the process of looking again, recovers the building or book itself and also, unavoidably, revisits the historical and political and personal narratives attached to it.

Keywords:

• writing
• paper architecture
• narrative
• reconstruct
• artefactual

Notes

1 In relation to the review’s capacity to unsettle a previously held opinion, it is interesting to note that this “back and again” dynamic is similar to that present in the uncanny, the “strangely familiar” from Freud’s The Uncanny (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2003 [1919]), as distinct from the simply strange. With its movement between the familiar and the strange this has some parallels to the idea of the review, returning to a work, textual or physical, that is known on some level in order to know more, or to know differently. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992) illuminates this sense of almost repetition in the notion of the uncanny, related to the reuse and recovery of buildings: the same, but then also completely changed.

2 This is clearly another, unwanted, form being revisited, in relation to space standards in residential developments and in budgetary limitations leading to specification of underperforming materials and building requirements, as seen in 2019 at the Cube, University of Bolton student housing and, most tragically, at Grenfell Tower in West London in 2017.

3 The fire at Grenfell Tower in West London in 2017 is now called an atrocity in some descriptions, to draw attention to its avoidable nature. Andrew O’Hagan, “The Tower,” The London Review of Books (7 June 2018) offers an in-depth review of what happened to a building, the people and the media coverage.

4 Archi-fiction and the archefactual are interpreted broadly in work by, among others: Emma Cheatle, Part-Architecture: The Maison de Verre, Duchamp, Domesticity and Desire in 1930s Paris (London: Routledge, 2016); Pedro Gadanho and Susana Oliveira, eds., Once Upon a Place (Lisbon: Caleidoscópio, 2013); Katja Grillner, “Stories Down Below: Narrative Practices in Art and Architecture,” in MAMA (Stockholm: KTH, n.d. 22-28); Rolf Hughes, Tim Anstey and Katja Grillner, eds., Architecture and Authorship (London: Black Dog, 2007); and Will Wiles, Care of Wooden Floors (London: Fourth Estate, 2012).

5 Simon Mawer, The Glass Room (London: Abacus, 2010).

6 Tim Murphy, Christodora (New York: Grove Press/Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016).

7 ACT UP, the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power, was a grassroots political group founded in 1987 at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Centre in New York City.

8 Will Self, Umbrella (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).

9 Some examples include the following: Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2016); Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1978); W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants (London: Vintage Classics, 2002); W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (London: Penguin Books, 2001); and Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill, 1943).

10 Hélène Binet and Mark Pimlott, Composing Space: The Photographs of Hélène Binet (London: Phaidon, 2012); Bas Princen, Reservoir (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2011); Steven Jacobs, The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (Rotterdam: 010 Uitgeverij, 2007); and Erik Larson, Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America (New York: Crown Publishing, 2003).

11 Walter Besant, All Sorts and Conditions of Men. An Impossible Story (London: Chatto & Windus, 1882); and Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence (London: Faber & Faber, 2008).

12 Reviewing the building, its purpose and program continues: this “people’s palace” is now part of Queen Mary College’s hospitality suite, and so is inaccessible to “the people” for whom it was originally envisaged without tickets or passes.

13 Walter Besant, “The People’s Palace,” The Contemporary Review (1 January 1887).

14 These important considerations went unheeded by those involved in building Alexandra Palace, north London – another people’s palace and one whose fortunes Besant may have been satirizing in the novel.

15 That said, her hilarious pomposity and limited self-awareness light up the novel, although this reader wonders whether they should also be taken as scorning a woman’s audacity for taking on such a project.

16 Besant, “People’s Palace,” 313.

17 Rowan Moore, Slow Burn City (London: Picador, 2017).

18 Pamuk, Museum of Innocence.

19 Grant Gee, dir., Innocence of Memories (UK, 2015); Museum of Innocence, exhibition, Somerset House, London, January 27–April 3, 2016.

20 Pamuk trained briefly as an architect, and was clearly closely involved in the museum’s physical manifestation, but the museum’s designers were Ihsan Birgin, Cem Yücel and Gregor Sunder-Plassman. Their names are well hidden, and they seem to have worked, not as a team, but separately, at different stages of the process.

21 Now popular in festivals or biennales, but the realities of the book trade make distribution, and therefore sales of material departing from standard book forms, unlikely through shops.

22 Charles-Edouard Jeanneret [Le Corbusier] and Amédée Ozenfant, eds., L’esprit nouveau (Paris, Editions de l’Esprit Nouveau, 1920–1925).

23 Le Corbusier-Saugnier, Vers une architecture (Paris: G. Crès, 1923).

24 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

25 Rem Koolhaas, Content (Cologne: Taschen, 2004); Rem Koolhaas, SMLXL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995).

26 Tracy Kidder, House (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1985).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rosa Ainley

Rosa Ainley is a writer and researcher on architecture, space and buildings, currently teaching at the Royal College of Art (where she produced “Writing Alexandra Palace: Plurivocity as a Method of Cultural Recovery of Buildings” [PhD diss., Royal College of Art, 2016]) and the University of Hertfordshire, UK. Published work ranges from the short story to creative non-fiction to journalism, in digital and print form, and often uses “audio-architecture” as a means of creating spaces through sound narratives. Ongoing work focuses on waiting room and “uncreative writing.” She is a founding member of Rendezvous Projects, a collective of artists/writers engaging with the social history of places.