Whjat is worth Knowing 3 (newsletter from the Hotel Architecture

Last week at this time I had taken a trip in the metro to see Perrault's library, the Francois Mitterand National Library, in Bercy, Paris. It was pouring with rain and the elegant black pack-a-mac from Muji was doing its job; preventing serious saturation. The wet decking looked spectacular as the four huge glass and steel structures cornered the site within which lay a deep, artificial forest. It was a stage set that the French seem to do so well in order to convince everyone else (not themsleves) of the need to be uncompromisingly modern.
I entered, took off the by-now sweating Muji overall and sought out the exhibition on Jean Paul Sartre. The library had presence, held itself well, the red carpet gleamed; there was a sense of hush about a place that appeared so holy as to be ordinary. The merchandising was
in full swing, the security men in place, and I picked up books by Michel Onfray (Esthetique du pole Nord) and Daniel Arasse, 'On n'y voit rien'. I do this often; the French language being one of those that can drown you pleasurably in your own ignorance.
The Sartre exhibition was suitably National Library aesthetic, glass cases, sample documents and scripts, chronology, film and the essential blow-up, computerised sequences and cubiccles with extracts from Sartre's theatrical oeuvre. In sum, when I was asked later, I realised what I didn't realise walking around: despite the mass of information, there was a lack of vibrancy. Despite Che, Fidel, Danny the Red, the Algerian war, the Hungarian invasion, despite les deux magots, the myth and micro-histories of the Paris left bank and St. Germain-des-Pres
the appeal of all sorts of reason and un-reason, there was an emtpiness, a void which was not filled in.
Perhaps this is what happens. History must empty itself to be re-written. Without re-writings we are lost. I left wanting to start Sartre all over again and the one book of his that made such an impression on me at 17, Nausea (originally entitled Melancholia).
Outside the rain had ceased, the decking had dried somewhat and the most appropriate thing to do was to take the ramped escalator and set the Sony Cybershot camera to film clip and record the passing of the joints in the wrapped stainless steel and the blurring of life and architecture as I reached the deck level, and breathed earth, wind and fire again.
Paris!
We were to rendez-vous at 4'o clock. It was just past 1. It's love, you see, love always makes you wait until the arms open again and architecture enters just to deflect you once more.
I will be with you next week, probably April 6th. Please have your narratives finished and a
board game' idea to begin the second part of the I Am Architecture seminar.
Until then, be careful of the sweating black plastic.

What is worth knowing 2 (newsletter from the hotel architecture)

I just came back from walking in the thin drizzle here in North Wales. A delight to put on a raincoat here. The weekend snow has finally disappeared from the hills, and there is a promise of warmer weather. Though nothing like Texas. I have been writing most of the last two weeks,
so the Glenlivet whisky has remained relatively untouched. I guess you are all off on spring break now polishing up the narratives that tell us about each other in ways we never thought we could. I'd like to tell you all about the book I am writing right now called 'Architecture or Life',
but I guess it will have to wait until it is published next year. It is about the Finnish architect
Reima Pietila with whom I spent off and on nearly 20 years. I decided to write about an architect's mind: the meanderings, the routes he took to convince people of his work, or the stories he told, the inventions, the chaotic musings. It will be drafted by the time I return to seminar class in early April. Here, for example is an extract of the way he thought.
It is a piece from my journal kept about our meetings in the crucial year 1989. Enjoy spring break. I will be in Paris for the weekend and will try and send you a mail from a cybercafe
or Beaubourg. Though I have been to Paris many times, this time it is like the first time.
The thrill is immeasurable. We dream Bataille's 'impossible' into reality and we will, I promise, take a 'calvados' for you all!

7.4.1989 “guidelines not credos.. .not the Marxist way…I cannot say what rules are good, what rules are bad…. A return to history will save us…. I am much more naïve like a real animal…someone asks me what is ‘transcendental’ but I am unable to understand it in a proper way.” ………..There is often a pause between these sentences, the statements he makes. Breathing pauses, I think. Or re-thinking pauses, a chance to deflect or alter the thought as it emerges from the mind and makes its way out into the public. Strange but we don’t speak of this. I think back to the Dipoli manifesto. The challenge on good taste. Really, Dipoli is the summa of all his thinking. This was why I came to this country, it is what I have ended up with and it is what I will take away. Or is this completely wrong: a grand cognitive illusion; the alibi for my own life, nothing to do with architecture at all? “I am changing my opinion about matters so fast that some of my recent ‘letters’ are now out of date…Ålander used to say that Pietilä has no permanent principles…but I am very consequent…is that how to say it…about changing my mind…” This sums him up. To be serious about how the mind changes, how one changes one’s mind...to know at least this. I think of this as Pietilä’s anti-machine. “The Steiner school uses the literal metaphor, the image…Wright uses process and Corb….Corb used both...process and image. It’s the word realm I am interested in. Regionalism is too complex for me…local is better. When I mix images I do it chaotically, not in any ordinary way…I always have done.”
Then came one of his dialogue-stopping lines. His attempt to keep the conversation going suddenly comes to a stop. “K is trapped in such things as ‘transcendentalism. I have no problem with this because elks do not have any transcendental ideas…” Elks with no transcendental ideas! I laugh. He laughs too. The rules of this unruliness force us into a rather wild laughter. Yet there is a painful reality behind this continuous talk and I let the laughter subside. He continues: “certain times of the year, certain aesthetics are not acceptable…a kind of deconstruction…the building is there but it does not exist...existing means that one can compose such and such whereas the Graeco-Roman idea of existence…” He trails off. The hand seeks something. It begins to draw the word in thin air, shaping it. “What is it then? I cannot imagine something existing. Using other ways to think destroys K. (Who is K? Why did I not ask?) I must rely on the non-verbal, things I cannot see or touch but I am convinced they are there somehow….like a hunter always in the present and aware of the present before it becomes visible, that zone between the future and the past which we no longer call the present…this is Pietilä’s thinking machine, a strange idea in grammar…the ‘sanamaa’.”
I remember this Finnish word, sana=word: maa=land. It has come up very often over the years. The word-world, the realm of the word, and the land of words: I remember Hollo’s translated lines of the poet Haaviko:

We fly
Against the door-jamb
Of the air

The air
Weeps for us

We were the King’s bowmen
We are leaves on the trees

The leaves
Touch air

Not heavy
Like the king’s treasure

We go
Trees
Into the reddening glow.

Good or bad translation, good or bad fiction. I would award the Nobel Prize to Haavikko and I dream of that ceremony and the curmudgeon finally recognised.
After this, nothing stops; Pietilä continues disrobing, undressing his own words, his own text, his own thinking. The machine is unstoppable.

What is worth knowing 1 Newsletter from the Hotel Architecture 7.3.05

It's been a week since arrival on the big bird from Atlanta, tight spaces,
sitting next to a computer game fanatic who was returning
from meeting his 'girlfriend' - fellow 'quest?' gaming member -
in Oklahoma. Colder than usual here in the Hotel Architecture,
so the open log fire has been in use, outside it has even snowed
and the winds come down from Siberia, eastwards across
Scandinavia. The writing goes well, the new book is called
'Architecture or Life' (what a choice huh?) and I must complete an
initial draft/ outline scheme for the publishers by first week April,
ready to work on it in Autumn for publication next
spring 2006.
In the meantime I have been looking around at all the books
here in the cottage and thinking of something Esther said
about the notion of a 'lost' or partial education. What exactly do
we mean by this? Why are some names, references appearing
now and how have they (suddenly) gained currency at SOA?
Is it the introduction through new faculty? Is it a representation
of what has happened eslewhere and the 'tickle down effect'
as it comes into the SOA? Why, if modern/conemporary
philosophy is more talked about, should we attend to this?
And how would we attend to it? By a reading list, by a chance
route, by intense investment in things we at first do not
understand, or by attempting to understanding for example
Robert Smithson's work? Do you sometimes feel you
have to graduate to realise we wish no longer to question or engage
deeply with knowledge as experience but accept learning
as 'example' (and become professionals: remember the US army
recruiting slogan - learn, lead, succeed!!)? Or do you graduate
to realise you only just begin engaging with knowledge
and experience when you begin questioning it?
Which are you? And is it either-or?
I think not; the world is both-and, and the difficulty is oscillating
and sailing between the two. How many of us are comfortable with
uncertainty?
A good friend of mine, the architect Volker Giencke, teaches in
Innsbruck and believes that architecture students, first year, must also
begin with a course on art...not Renaissance art or Greek Art, but art
today, art tomorrow in all its messiness and 'incomprehension'.
He believes the first grapple with 'incoherence' and 'incongruities'
becomes the first step into the potential world in architecture that has not been
scripted, not already existing. And the references the artists use are those
very same that you have suddenly found appearing in your various
seminars and studios!!
What is your take on this? Is it a 'lost education' or a late-education?
Take a look at the following: "An Ideal Syllabus" (Artists, Critics &
Curators choose the books we need to read) edited by Jerry Saltz,
Frieze, London 1998.
Early morning greetings from the Hotel Architecture.
Frank.

(I will post this on the seld-education blog as well).