Reading Architecture

Literary Imagination and Architectural Experience

Angeliki Sioli, Yoonchun Jung, Angeliki Sioli, Yoonchun Jung

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315402888
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Why write instead of draw when it comes to architecture? Why rely on literary pieces instead of architectural treatises and writings when it comes to the of study buildings and urban environments? Why rely on literary techniques and accounts instead of architectural practices and analysis when it comes to academic research and educational projects? Why trust authors and writers instead of sociologists or scientists when it comes to planning for the future of cities? This book builds on the existing interdisciplinary bibliography on architecture and literature, but prioritizes literature's capacity to talk about the lived experience of place and the premise that literary language can often express the inexpressible. It sheds light on the importance of a literary instead of a pictorial imagination for architects and it looks into four contemporary architectural subjects through a wide variety of literary works. Drawing on novels that engage cities from around the world, the book reveals aspects of urban space to which other means of architectural representation are blind. Whether through novels that employ historical buildings or sites interpreted through specific literary methods, it suggests a range of methodologies for contemporary architectural academic research. By exploring the power of narrative language in conveying the experience of lived space, it discusses its potential for architectural design and pedagogy. Questioning the massive architectural production of today's globalized capital-driven world, it turns to literature for ways to understand, resist or suggest alternative paths for architectural practice. Despite literature's fictional character, the essays of this volume reveal true dimensions of and for places beyond their historical, social and political reality; dimensions of utmost importance for architects, urban planners, historians and theoreticians nowadays.

Section 1
Readings On (Un)Familiar Places

1
Oran, the Capital of Boredom

Christian Parreno

Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing.

Albert Camus, Death in the Soul, 1937

In the writings by Albert Camus, boredom and modern architecture are en countered together. The built environment exudes the condition, contaminating everyday life. In a circular and self-referential manner, boredom is symptom and ailment. In The Plague (1947), Oran is portrayed as a restful city in the coast of Algeria, somnolent due to a specious modernity that had failed to install the accelerated rhythms of capitalist production.¹ The buildings are unattractive, with “no vegetation” and “no soul,” composing “a town without inklings, that is to say, an entirely modern town.”² The same lethargy foisted by the surroundings is imperative in The Stranger (1942). In a space characterized by monotony, Sunday afternoons offer respite when everyone goes to the cinema and the streets become deserted. With the exception of “the shopkeepers and the cats” who invariably remain in their customary places, everyone looks for distraction in settings dis similar from those occupied during the rest of the week.³ The regular pace of work and rest allies with the repetitive cycles of nature to perpetuate boredom—the sky “alone is king,” always clear and blue, “intolerably dull.”⁴ In nature and the city, rhythmical sameness outlines a ter rain of apparent stasis that defies mental stability. If every reality has multiple equivalents, then referential coordinates of existence disappear, rupturing proto cols of social, moral, and ethical engagement. In The Stranger, a man is remorselessly and inexplicably killed by another who appears insanely bored. The criminal is deranged and dislocated, unemployed and unoccupied, escaping an empty house and feverish due to the implacable sun of North Africa.

Equally, in “The Minotaur, or the Stop in Oran” (1939), boredom is effect and cause of modern architecture. Enthused and informed by recurrent trips from Algiers to Oran during his university days,⁵ Camus describes the city as “the capital of boredom,” “besieged by innocence and beauty,” surrounded by magnificent nature that architects decidedly ignore.⁶ Its constructions, flat and taut, protectively turn their backs to the ocean. Rather than being a realm of latency, Oran is a realm of endless waiting where nothing happens and nothing is expected to occur. As a result, its inhabitants are simultaneously idle and restless. On the one hand, they are passive in their efforts to explore where they live. On the other, they are vigorous in adopting imported models of behavior, acting as if they were in the United States. In between the built environment and the practices of its occupants, the Minotaur reigns in a labyrinth of boredom—a state of ambiguity and ambivalence that exposes absurdity. For Camus, Oran is a space of pause and delay, which corroborates the suspicion that the world is unfathomable.⁷

Labyrinthine Boredom

Becoming evident midway through the essay, “The Minotaur” is written in first person. Its alternate title—“The Stop in Oran”—denotes that the omnipresent narrator is a visitor, forcibly or accidentally caught in the city, in a moment of rest in the journey to another destination. The foreign voice imposes critical distance, not only separating itself from the conditions of Oran and dissociating Oran from the rest of the world, but also creating a parenthesis for reflection. Within this enclosure, five sections tell an anticlimactic story.⁸ “The Street”, “The Desert of Oran”, “Sports”, “Monuments”, and “Ariadne’s Stone” diagnose and elliptically confirm boredom as the essence of the city. The condition is ubiquitous and porous, permitting the infiltration of parallel dimensions and temporalities through the many fissures of modernity. Like ghosts, Flaubert and his friends, protagonists of the novels by Gogol, temples from antiquity, the edifices of Florence and Athens, the twelve Apostles, and other characters meander amid the people of Oran, as luxuriant and convoluted figures that contrast with the scarcity and simplicity of the city:

Atlas’s task is easy; it is sufficient to choose one’s hour. Then one realizes that for an hour, a month, a year, these shores can indulge in freedom. They welcome pell-mell, without even looking at them, the monk, the civil servant, or the conqueror. There are days when I expected to meet, in the streets of Oran, Descartes or Cesare Borgia.⁹

In “The Minotaur”, boredom is a system of organization rather than a formal configuration, unceasingly informing the production of architecture and therefore characterizing Oran. Far from being subjective, the condition is the result of a process of historical layering, shaped by Spanish, Ottoman, and French invasions, but unsuccessful in creating identity. It holds Oran in limbo, a space devoid not only of past and future but also of permanent materiality. Similar to being in between locations, the city does not provide a stable here nor represents a significant there. Instead, it establishes a field of suspension that paradoxically depends on the particularities of its architecture but is detached from its physical attributes. Although unwanted at first, boredom turns incantatory and captivating, magnetically seducing the sensitive narrator who becomes intrigued with the possibilities of exploration, even rejoicing in them—“she bursts the unfortunate stage setting with which she is covered; she shrieks forth between all the houses and over all the roofs.”¹⁰ Nonetheless, Oran defers engagement and immersion by reductively appearing as a maze of solid fences.¹¹ The periphery is simple and clear, only to turn convoluted and confusing as the center approaches. In this domain—challenging the immaterial, inspirational, and vertical connotations of ennui—boredom signals to the material, ordinary, and horizontal, without possibility of sublimation:

In the beginning you wander in the labyrinth, seeking the sea like the sign of Ariadne. But you turn round and round in pale and oppressive streets, and eventually the Minotaur devours the people of Oran: the Minotaur is boredom.¹²

The Dustiest City

Oran is the opposite of Paris or London, capitals of fabricated excitement, full of the revolutions of the past that have produced many expressions and left several residues. For Camus, the boisterous exhibition of historical data constitutes empty stimuli. Regardless of their elaborate architecture, the cities of Europe are no more than silent wastelands that promote introspection and aloofness—“the great value of such overpopulated islands is that in them the heart strips bare. Silence is no longer possible except in noisy cities.”¹³ In this respect, Oran is simultaneously similar and different. In the first instance, the Algerian city is also made of stone. But in the second, its architecture exposes its mineral tincture by being formally simple and lacking reverberations from previous eras. The edifices are incapable of suggesting more than their “heavy beauty,” haphazardly scattered over a rocky landscape, like a matrix of alien appearance.¹⁴ This “magnificent anarchy” is candidly arid, impossible to understand or redeem—as Santa Cruz, one of the three interconnected forts constructed in the sixteenth century, facing the bay,

cut out of the rock, the mountains, the flat sea, the violent wind and the sun, the great cranes of the harbor, the trains, the hangars, the quays, and the huge ramps climbing up the city’s rock, and in the city itself these diversions and this boredom.¹⁵

The “very ugly constructions” configure a “walled town that turns its back, that has been built up by turning back on itself like a snail.”¹⁶ Like the mollusk, Oran carries its architecture as an unchanging shelter. A contorted yellow wall protects the inhabitants from the persistence of nature, creating an indifferent dialogue between land and sea that produces too much despair as well as too much excitement. Since the people of Oran have forgotten how to live among the stones of nature, they have taken refuge among the stones created by themselves, with a sensibility closer to the coarse ground than to the smooth sky, but with neither poetry nor spirituality since human development is outlawed and thus impossible to historicize. According to Camus, the opposition of the built environment to the natural surroundings is the merit of Oran, demarcating a sanctuary of boredom, protected “by an army in which every stone is a soldier.”¹⁷

Figure 1.1 Oran from the fort of Santa Cruz, photograph by M. Lavina (Oran, 1930).

Courtesy of Henri Lavina

In the “dustiest of cities” where “the pebble is king,” the slowness of pre-modern time becomes evident in the obstinate presence of dust.¹⁸ The fine material covers and homogenizes the city, flying and resettling to subtly configure new surfaces. It moves if there is wind and its density changes if the weather varies—the streets become sandy in high temperatures and muddy when it rains. Furthermore, dust thickens the air. As Camus observes, the few trees in the city have turned into “petrified plants whose branches give off an acrid, dusty smell.”¹⁹ Unlike the grey pollution of the metropolis, the dust in Oran extends the ochre desert into the urban and architectural, instating untidiness, blurring the relation between figures, ground and sky, and mattifying and texturizing. The mineral coating “contributes to the dense and impassible universe in which the heart and mind are never distracted from themselves, nor from their sole object, which is man.”²⁰

Stone Monuments

Notwithstanding the dryness, the architecture of Oran is consistently extravagant, always with an “absurd look.”²¹ The entirety of the fabricated environment—from buildings to furniture and products for sale in shops—is vulgar and kitschy:

All the bad taste of Europe and the Orient has managed to converge in them. One finds, helter-skelter, marble greyhounds, ballerinas with swans, versions of Diana the huntress in green galalith, discus-throwers and reapers, everything that is used for birthday and wedding gifts, the whole race of painful figurines ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface: On Reading Architecture
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Reading Architecture: Literary Imagination and Architectural Experience
• Section 1: Readings on (Un)Familiar Places
• Section 2: Readings on Architectural Research
• Section 3: Readings on Architectural Design and Pedagogy
• Section 4: Readings on Contemporary Architectural Reality and Practice
• Image Credits
• Index