On Writing Well(s)

How can writing abet the cause of architecture?  Often it is explanatory, when architects describe the intentions of their built work.  Or it is didactic, when it frames material conventionally, and the reader is asked to accept what are offered as facts.  Or it is prescriptive, as in manifesto writing, when the reader is given precise rules to achieve a desired end.  Here, however, I wish to address another possible relation between writing and architecture, that of speculation.

On Writing Well(s)

Michel Serres, whose writing forms a topologic language riddled with wells, describes them this way in "Language & Space:  From Oedipus to Zola":  "The well is a hole in space, a local tear in a spatial variety. It can disconnect a trajectory that passes through, and the traveler falls in, the fall of the vector, but it can also connect spatial varieties that might be piled upon one another: leaves, layers, geological formations. The bridge is paradoxical:  it connects the disconnected.  The well is more paradoxical still:  it disconnects the connected, but it also connects the disconnected."  Through writing we excavate wells of architectural potential.

Writing can be an evocative and slippery medium.  It can blur meaning, propose possibilities, and elicit subtly varied readings.  The field of literary interpretation exists because good writing resists capture.

 In contrast to the apparent fixities of conventional architectural representation, writing can propose alternative spatio-temporal configurations.  Jorge Luis Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths" challenges temporal continuity as his "The Library of Babel" challenges spatial continuity. Alain Robbe-Grillet, in In the Labyrinth, establishes a network of impossible spatial connections, built only through language.  Italo Calvino, inThe Baron in the Trees, writes of an architecture which denies gravity as it embraces bark, twigs, and fruit.  The same author's Invisible Citiesgives us a dizzying array of holes into the already topo-illogical Venice.  His calls for multiplicity, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, might be an anthem for these writers who propose an architecture of spatio-temporal tears, of paradoxical disconnections and connections.

On Writing Well

 On Writing Wellis the name of a book by William Zinsser on the subject of writing. It advocates a clear, direct, economical use of language.  This approach is stressed by legal writers, technical writers, journalists, architectural practitioners, and other professionals.  Its intention is simple, noise-free communication.

 Critical theorists believe such a communication is impossible.  Their writing often uncovers ambiguities and logical lapses in the construction of a text. Yet deconstructive strategies, practiced carelessly, often miss their mark.  Among architects and students of architecture, whose chose craft is seldom writing, the resultant prose lacks to potency of Calvino, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, or Joyce.  As a cautionary postscript, intended to be partially self-reflective, I will propose a balance.  Between Serres's well and Zinsser's well lies an architectural writing which is speculative and provocative, yet crafted:  a well written mapping of spatial wells.

c. 1994