Writing Architectures

Ficto-Critical Approaches

Hélène Frichot, Naomi Stead, Hélène Frichot, Naomi Stead

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350137929
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Architects and fiction writers share the same ambition: to imagine new worlds into being. Every architectural proposition is a kind of fiction before it becomes a built fact; likewise, every written fiction relies on the construction of a context in which a story can take place. This collection of essays explores what happens when fiction, experimental writing and criticism are combined and applied to architectural projects and problems. It begins with ficto-criticism – an experimental and often feminist mode of writing which fuses the forms and genres of essay, critique, and story – and extends it into the domain of architecture, challenging assumptions about our contemporary social and political realities, and placing architecture in contact with such disciplines as cultural studies, literary theory and ethnography. These sixteen newly-written pieces have been selected for this volume to show how ficto-critical writing can be a powerful vehicle for creative architectural practice, providing new opportunities to explore modes of writing about architecture both within and beyond the discipline. The collection represents a broad range of geographical and cultural positions including indigenous and non-Western contexts, and includes a foreword and afterword by important thinkers in the domains of architectural criticism (Jane Rendell) and cultural studies/ethnography (Stephen Muecke).

CHAPTER ONE

Prelude: The Ways in
Which We Write

Jane Rendell

Architecture Writing

Writing Architecture

‘Writing’ is both a noun and a verb, but ‘architecture’ is only a noun; it doesn’t exist as a verb.

As both a noun and a verb, ‘writing’ can team up with adjectives and adverbs.

Architectural Writing

Writing Architecturally

But as a noun, ‘architecture’ can only work with adjectives.

Writerly Architecture

Semantically, as well as materially, it would seem that architecture is far less flexible than writing, considered, that is, through the perspective of language.

Language. Between a noun and an adjective, there is a lot at stake. In the current education system, which trains students to qualify (or not) as professional architects, architecture’s position in language as noun or as adjective indicates an important distinction. A degree in Architecture allows one to practise as an architect; a degree in Architectural Studies does not. (But of course many chose the latter precisely because it can be more interesting to study architecture through its adjectival form, and to go beyond designing buildings according to professional codes, to somewhere else entirely).

Architecture

Architectural

Architecturally

In debates around architecture and research, distinctions can be made between architecture as subject, discipline and method.¹ In bringing architecture and writing together as a pair, writing’s role as verb and noun challenges architecture’s noun form to think again about its verb form – about the way that it is, about what it is that it does, and how. Between and around the thing of the noun and the way of the verb, how is power distributed?

Architecture-Writing

Once upon a time I came at the intersection of architecture and writing, with a hyphen in my hand, and I placed it between the two words – making architecture-writing.² And then I met Katja Grillner and found she had placed the words the other way around – writing architecture – but left the hyphen out of it.³ What of it? And then Naomi Stead did things the same way.⁴ The ordering … the one before the other, or after, thing. And the hyphen of it, or not? And there we were tumbling along, flipping things back and forth, between us, messing about with words, and sometimes hyphens.

So what.

Like what.

Words matter to architects?

Like hell they do.

But why?

And how?

Because playing with the ways we do things with words can expose the power systems that set the rules for those often-taken-for-granted ways that tell us how things with words are (to be) done. Words can do things, sometimes beyond language, as J. L. Austin has pointed out.⁵

Following conceptualism’s collapse of the distinction between theory, criticism and practice, and its interactions with art history and performance, the term art-writing emerged. David Carrier⁶ discussed the importance of the writerly aspects of criticism and how the formal qualities of writing were an important part of critical argumentation.

In the literature of art, it is impossible to absolutely separate or entirely distinguish, the arguments of an art writer from the literary structures used to present the arguments.⁷

Influenced by art-writing, I was interested in the writerly qualities of architectural criticism, and in the practice of writing architecturally, in how one could make architecture in words. This led me to initiate site-writing as a form of situated criticism, and to explore through research and pedagogy the ways in which critics perform their interpretations of works to, for and with others, through written and other languages.⁸ And to find out the changes writing can make to subjects, in the world. Even hyphens.

A hyphen can step in as if to banish any claim to hierarchy, and instead to say, look we are in this together, differently and equally. Get over the before and the after – it’s just that in sentences written words have to do that, line up in sequences. In architecture, chronologies are not what it is all about, words can come up against each other in all kinds of ways – spatially and materially, as well as temporally. And in fiction, outside the usual ways of the sentence, that’s where the fun of this book really begins.

But have we begun?

I think we need to begin again, this time with the other pair.

Ficto-Criticism

Critical Fiction

Here, things appear a bit more straightforward. Apparently. But even if it were simply a reversal of noun and adjective, which it is not…

Fiction Criticism

Criticism Fiction

Fictional Criticism

Criticism Fictional

Critical Fiction

Fiction Critical

Critical Fictional

Fictional Critical

Is there anything important to notice about the ways of reversing?

Criticism that is fictional

Rather than

Fiction that is critical

It might depend on whether the reader identifies with fiction or criticism as the term that they feel best describes them as writers, or their writing, or the ways in which they do their writing. On the one hand, fiction writers might imagine the ways in which the alternative worlds they offer provide critical potential, as in Philomena Mariani’s post-colonial collection titled Critical Fiction,⁹ or Saidiya Hartman’s use of ‘critical fabulation’ as a way of doing decolonial feminist history.¹⁰ On the other, the languages, styles and genres of fiction can offer new ways for reinvigorating criticism, as for example, in Emily Orley and Katja Hilavaara’s edited collection, The Creative Critic, or Hél...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Prelude: The Ways in Which We Write
• 2 Waking Ideas from Their Sleep: An Introduction to Ficto-critical Writing in and of Architecture
• 3 From Site to Situation: Cutting Up as Fictocritical Composition
• 4 Construction (and Connection)
• 5 Incompossible Constructions of an Island Paradise
• 6 Archaeologies of Exile on Trikeri Island: Listening to Stones and Speculating on Prison Matters
• 7 In Which Robert Smithson Visits Christchurch: Ficto-criticism and the Field Trip
• 8 Hiroshima: Notes on the Expanded Field
• 9 Writing Walking: Ficto-critical Routes through Eighteenth-century London
• 10 The Indelible Traces of Her Footsteps
• 11 Sydney Letters: A to E
• 12 Outrage on Calle de Alcalá
• 13 The Aesthetic Recycling of Cultural Refuse
• 14 The Architect Who Couldn’t Write
• 15 Return to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory after The Marriage Plot
• 16 The Bannister
• 17 Nice House, Woodland Lakes
• 18 The Door Left Ajar: On Dissident Waiting and Collective Fiction
• 19 Postlude: Fictocriticism after Critique
• Index
• Copyright