workshop B

10.00 - 13.00

SOTIRIOS VARSAMIS, Bartlett, UCL
“The creation of space in George Perec’s literature”

Georges Perec used mathematical (bi-Latin square, grid) and linguistic (lipogram, palindrome) constraints as the main creative tool of his literary production; for example in Life A User’s Manual (1978), La Disparition (1969), Le Lieux (not completed), Le Grande Palindrome (1969). Constraints were considered to be, according to the Medieval and Renaissance tradition, mnemonic devices (mnemonics); devices capable to stimulate memory and the mechanisms of recollection, by creating a topological distribution of images on someone’s memory where the ‘orator’ of the past could access knowledge and experience spatially the book. For Perec constraints were considered to be machines for the self-production of literature, able to liberate someone’s imagination with an effect on memory, recollection and experience of the space of literature. Focusing mainly on Life A User’s Manual we will analyze how constraints have been applied by Georges Perec, in order to create an imaginary building and distribute the characters and events into it. In architecture constraints (like the grid) have been used extensively but for the reverse reason; for the building to be structured as a book or a narrative. There are examples of buildings where elements were placed on a grid to facilitate memory and ‘teach’ people like books (gothic church) or post modern examples where constraints (grids) were used to design the building as a narrative (Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi). The main questions for this paper are: how constraints were manipulated from Perec in order to structure his book as a building and with what effect on the experience of the space of literature? How constraints were manipulated in architecture in order to structure the building as a book and with what effect on the experience of architectural space?

JO MELVIN, Slade, UCL
“Kierkegaard’s Seesaw: The event, its fictions and the archive”

Kierkegaard’s strategies of authorship provide a methodological structure to read the Studio International archive 1965-75 as ‘documentafiction’. It draws on contemporary obsession with our own archives, sites for the impossible marriage of public and private thoughts and events, rendering visible the dichotomy of personal experience as historical ‘fact’ and our interest in the study of systems and hierarchies, individual/institutional divide through wilful connections of disparity to eschew and absorb contradiction.
Kierkegaard posits humour and irony as the two ends of a seesaw, humour slightly above the point of balance and irony slightly below-life is a ‘monstrous paradox’ summarised by the absolute necessity of the accidental, the chance occurrence that ruptures a unitary reading. Kierkegaard plays on dualities for instance, the desire of the archivist for a unitary reading to enable the presentation of a coherent and scholarly text predicated on ‘life understood backwards through the idea’ as a backward but simultaneously forward motion embracing the causal (logical reading of history) through its apparent refutation. Ideally refutation ensues through chance encounter with the definitive idea found in some hitherto undiscovered or forgotten documentation. The space designated by wit is strategic-with editorial practice in general structuring and orchestration is necessary to function.
Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous characters open spaces of encounter and the mind’s interior becomes a real space for philosophical enquiry. These characters and their habitations create fictive spaces, likewise his titles, (in themselves sources of pleasure) direct narratives of dialectical possibility. Descriptions of bourgeois spaces are the stages for these projective investigations and they’re envisaged as we grapple with his propositional encounters-just a brief indicator of titles illustrates this strategy; Stages on Life’s Way, Point of view of my life as an author, Concluding unscientific postscript to philosophical fragments (the conclusion is five times the length of its apparent generator!).

KRISTEN KREIDER, Slade/Bartlett, UCL
“Faces and Folds in ‘the vastest earthly day’: Page and Spatial Practice in Emily Dickinson’s Later Manuscripts’”

In this paper, I shall undertake a close reading of one of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts with the poem ‘the vastest earthly day’ inscripted upon it (A449). The manuscript is one of Dickinson’s later writings – poems written on ‘scraps’ of paper and domestic debris. These works have been printed in typed editions of Dickinson’s work; however, the manuscript facsimiles have never, themselves, been published.
My intention in this close reading is to look at how the materiality and architectonics of the ‘page’ in this original manuscript impacts a reading or interpretation of the poem itself. I examine Dickinson’s spatial practice of the page: how she contours her lines in relation to the page border; her use of variant word choices; her practice of folding. All of these have an impact one’s reciprocal reading practice and, hence, one’s understanding of the words themselves.
Throughout the reading, I draw in historical and biographical material about the poet herself in order to relate Dickinson’s practice of the page to her spatial practice in the Dickinson homestead – what one might call a ‘poetics of agoraphobia’. (After the age of thirty, the poet did not leave her house nor show her face to anyone.) How does Dickinson’s poetic as well as spatial practice – of page and home – relate to her decision never to print her works? How does this reflect her standing as a woman poet in the late 19th century? How can one re-read her poetry on the page in order to glean a new understanding and insight into her language? These are some of the questions I address in this paper.

WILLEM DE BRUIJN, Bartlett, UCL
“In the Space of the Book”

In this paper I would like to seize the opportunity to talk about the role of book making in my otherwise predominantly historical and text-based research into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ‘architectural’ books. I will address the way in which the making of books provides me with a means to explore the visual and spatial potential of the historical material as a form of engaged or ‘inspired’ research. But what is the critical potential of this making or re-making? In order to address this question I will describe and show a few examples that have come to inform chapters of my thesis. It should become clear that the role of these hand-made books is not unambiguous, for on the one hand they can come to stand on their own and may refer uniquely to themselves; on the other hand, they prompt me to ask new questions in relation to the historical material. They both divert and inform. It has become increasingly clear that in an age of digitisation of information, it matters greatly how knowledge is presented. Thinking about books, it has become insufficient to see the book as a mere medium for the dissemination or containment of knowledge. Instead, we need to look at the book as a form of knowledge in itself. In the field of architecture, this means that one might begin to ask what form of architectural knowledge is materialised in the space of the book.

Evening Event

17.30 - 19.00