A few thoughts on the incredibly limited interaction between architecture and contemporary literature, triggered by the occasion of David Foster Wallace's death. DFW is perhaps best known amongst those with only a casual relationship with his work as someone who turned the footnote into a meta digression, a literal subtext that could then occupy another space within the main narrative, a place for digressions, expansions, and diversions. His journalism, if one could call it that, was a particular favourite, dense explorations of the apparently trite or over-worked, extricating fresh meaning and inevitable absurdity from each situation.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is the stand-out essay on the relationship between place and space (originally published in Harper's as 'Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise' (pdf)). For Foster Wallace, the cruise ship was not simply a closed, hermetic environment, but a place for a dense, tragicomic exploration of social interactions and expectations. The piece also touches on suicide and the 'unbearable sadness' of the entire concept of cruising, making much of the ironic contrast between the pristine whiteness of the ship itself and the human decay within - 'every type of erythema, pre-rnelanomic lesion, liver spot, eczema, wart, papular cyst, pot belly, femoral cellulite, varicosity, collagen and silicone enhancement, bad tint, hair transplants that have not taken'.

Those gymnastic sentences and deep pile footnotes were once revolutionary. But even though all text is supposed to be multi-layered and hyperlinked, few have exploited the digital medium with the innovation that Wallace brought to the printed page. A recent visit to the Venice Biennale made us wonder about layering and complexity, and how theoretical and analytical complexity is evaporating like a puddle in the sun, replaced by extreme visual complication. Above all, this is a new world of explication, where clarity is wilfully overturned in favour of multiple paths. In a way, the architectural avant-garde has evolved into a landscape where the footnotes - in the form of half-baked theory and intellectual posturing - are already in place. It's left to the reader to choose their own easy path through a text.

As we walked down to the Giardini for the last time, two vast liners sailed east along the Lido di Venezia, heading from the cruise ship docks at the Bacino Stazione Maritima to the open sea. Each towered above the terracotta roofs and elaborate facades of the palazzos and churches, modern monuments that will forever have a sheen of faintly misguided mechanistic fetishism about them (one wonders what the effect of the last twelve years has on the atmosphere of the cruise industry; bigger, better and more seem to be the watchwords, a trajectory it shares with architecture yet both are strangely reluctant to draw parallels to each other). Corb's passion for the mechanical ultimately turned out to be rather fickle; he was in love with the romance of the machine, not the mechanisation of romance. Strange that such a totemic slice of modernism, an object so integral to the modern movement itself, should enjoy notoriety as the site of a fatal self-analysis.



You can read also the chapter 'derivative sport in tornado alley'. See also Consider the Lobster (pdf) and the selected material from Harper's (The Depressed Person (pdf) is particularly difficult). McSweeneys is running a tribute front page, while tmn has a round-up (Jessanne Collins' My Life in Jest is also a must-read), as does The Howling Fantods' comprehensive collective of online tributes and obituaries.

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Other things. An essay on the Biennale by Jonathan Glancey (whose new book, Lost Buildings encapsulates the sense of modernism-as-nostaglia) / Venice Biennale coverage at the AJ / strange object found in space? / the H1 Fugu helicopter concept; we're living in an age when this kind of aesthetic is starting to be expressed in real products / 5B4 is a weblog devoted to the photographic monograph / artwork by Esther Stocker.

A Little Piece of Mind, creating a quilt from multiple sources / Floater Magazine offers a utopian view of future architecture / Confessions of an awards juror: '... we don’t know what graphic design is for any more' / the work of Neave Brown, architect and artist / Lego instruction scans / more intense cruise liner axonometrics at the website of Beau Daniels and Alan Daniels. See also their automotive portfolio / a cup of tea and a wheat penny, a weblog.

Very happy to be mentioned in RB's The Digital Ramble - tracking sites that are 'meaningless deep down, sure, but still charmingly poignant on the surface.' We (think) we knew nothing of Jjjjound, which more than anything reminds us of a modern day collection of Gainsboroughs, a world of self-aggrandisement in which the perfect lifestyle pose simply mirrors Mr and Mrs Andrews, replacing their sweep of Suffolk with semiotically dense dioramas of urban life. Also, nothing like a big link in to get a post up swiftly.

The man clutching box image is a very modern form of visual shorthand. The BBC website spotted this, noting that for many newspapers the main challenge of a big story like the Lehman collapse is 'how to illustrate the collapse of a bank with pictures of pretty, high-achieving, Home Counties thirtysomethings carrying their possessions in a cardboard box'. It's been a visual trope since Enron, and presumably many years before that.

We'll be away for a week.

Labels: architecture, linkage, writing

posted by things at 00:28 / 1 comments