Write the City: A University of Virginia Nix Traveling Fellow Project

Margaret RewUniversity of Virgina, Nix Travelling Fellowship Recipient 2015

scenes | 2

“I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like

stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc

scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling

you nothing...

The city does not tell its past, but rather contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of streets, the gratings of windows...

every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

This exhibition is the record of a project begun in the spine of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, propelled into paper through a research trip to Paris in June of 2015, scraped along mornings from July to March into the drafts assembled along the base of the exhibition.

My subject is the process of writing of my text of the city as a productive and experimental act.

This model is a continuation of the historically Parisian project of the nineteenth century flaneur, whose “writing of the city in texts results from the walking of the city as text.”1 In my research, I recorded my practice of Rebecca Solnit’s Field Guide to Getting Lost through photographs, books, and pages and pages of notes.

1 Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Threshold. A doorway, a gate. A line in the sand. A piece of yarn, unrolling.

The space that I raked with my fingers along the wall so far: The walls here lean towards you, over the street. Haunched or bursting to be closer – both. Roofs patina against each other, knowing to fade together as planes. These stones must be somehow conscious, pulling grey out of their sky into blue slate. Quick, tiny feet; dust rising; cloud raising; squeal. There are children everywhere. At the corner I turned onto again, lost on purpose – she held his face and he angled out, carefully not to move his face away from her kiss. Paper doll windows float over gutters – these are not the heavy cornices of Florence. Paris speaks through thick windows, eyes in pretty array.

My threshold is a line, carved and traced and traipsed into sidewalks and street corners. It wobbles and teeters and absorbs its one point perspective, searching for the moment when it will next run into itself and weave a network over this city. This line of mine carved from sky to street will soon be a backbone of axes and alleys, corners and points of reference. But in these first days it is skinny and I teeter on it as I lay my yarn out across this strange new place. Look back tomorrow and it will snap shut into first impression.

This exhibition is the record of a project begun in the spine of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, propelled into paper through a research trip to Paris in June of 2015, scraped along mornings from July to March into the drafts assembled along the base of the exhibition.

My subject is the process of writing of my text of the city as a productive and experimental act.

This model is a continuation of the historically Parisian project of the nineteenth century flaneur, whose “writing of the city in texts results from the walking of the city as text.”1

Space in a painting is the illusion of depth. It is structured, though not quite grounded to be stepped on. Moments between built and ethereal space draw us in for magic. Making space in a discourse means an opening up for new contributions, room to be built out. What does it mean to make space with words? This installation is an attempt to put that experiment on display.

1 Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

scenes | 6

scenes | 7

scenes | 8

scenes | 9

scenes | 10

scenes | 11

scenes | 12

scenes | 13

scenes | 14

scenes | 15

scenes | 16

essays | 17

People, shoulders

People shuffle down the aisle in formation. The plane is a familiar no place between home and there. Shoulders fitting into sleeves. Notebooks, computers clutched. Everything is a mirror, that person in relation to me. This person whose blood and cheeks and fingernails are separate, are their own. I see these people and I watch. Don’t make yourself choose between them. Focus on those people in this space, this tiny rocket to Paris.

Everywhere I am drawing a still life - me in relation to these things I know. Her hair is mouse brown, her jacket fits her shoulders like it was a gift, thankful but she never thought of it. We make ourselves a theater. We watch and act, unknowing, unseeing. We think of the self we will never see and we clutch at window reflections in the comfort of the crowd. The line stretches obediently along this skinny skinny hallway, not quite a car. Retreat into the top of your eyes, back of your head.

essays | 18

A line through this city

Arrival. Out of Charles de Gaulle customs and squeezed through a plastic tunnel escalator across a circular atrium. There is so much space so close to around you, but you cannot feel it through the plastic. Baggage claim is radial, but you understand it as an arc from escalator to bus station. From one place to another, I carry myself from sign to sign. Bus stop, pause. Waiting, time extends in this bright white box of strangers waiting until the bus rumbles in, ordinary.

Threshold. A doorway, a gate. A line in the sand. A piece of yarn, unrolling.

The space that I raked with my fingers along the wall so far: The walls here lean towards you, over the street. Haunched or bursting to be closer – both. Roofs patina against each other, knowing to fade together as planes. These stones must be somehow conscious, pulling grey out of their sky into blue slate. Quick, tiny feet; dust rising; cloud raising; squeal. There are children everywhere. At the corner I turned onto again, lost on purpose – she held his face and he angled out, carefully not to move his face away from her kiss. Paper doll windows float over gutters – these are not the heavy cornices of Florence. Paris speaks through thick windows, eyes in pretty array.

My threshold is a line, carved and traced and traipsed into sidewalks and street corners. It wobbles and teeters and absorbs its one point perspective, searching for the moment when it will next run into itself and weave a network over this city. This line of mine carved from sky to street will soon be a backbone of axes and alleys, corners and points of reference. But in these first days it is skinny and I teeter on it as I lay my yarn out across this strange new place. Look back tomorrow and it will snap shut into first impression.

It is with this dreamy sense of carving that I begin my thirty days in Paris. In this month I will build these lines into a web – peek beneath it, through it. I will weave together a city and sculpt there in the air in front of you what I have found.

essays | 19

The proposal

To draw the city of Paris through writing.

I propose to write a 400-600 word provocation of place every single day for 4 weeks. The works will accumulate in real time on a website and then into a book upon my return. The website will give space for experimentation, recording the dive into knowing a city. The book will reveal an invisible city.

This is intended as an extension of the Art for Breakfast project – an independent writing project from the year before I started my architecture masters. Since then, I have wanted to explore how this project would translate from art to architecture. My Nix Traveling Fellowship is an exploration of that translation.

I read writers of place. The work this summer will cross place into drawings, pulling Annie Dillard into the hard banks of the Seine, and Geoff Dyer’s slicing observations into Carlo Scarpa’s layered details. The study will be modeled as a cross between Rebecca Solnit’s New Orleans Atlas and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I bring with me the work of Manuel Bailo on human scale public catalysts, including his observations on the irrelevance of the distinction between formal and informal in the success of a public space. I see his autocad drawings as a meter for the specificity of my intended inquiry – a research based on trust in measured observation.

I do not know Paris. This project is proposed as an investigation into the perception of place, as an surgical examination of the nature of exploration and of our relationship as students of architecture to the fabric of the cities we build. The city provides an intense layering of time into material. I am interested in the way that the layers of Haussmann obscure and reveal the Romans. I want to see the way that these histories stomped on or are made precious by the contemporary city.

essays | 20

Place des Vosges + Hotel Sully

Place des Vosges - old and new, familiar, gravitate towards that back corner, or feeling the ache of garden behind tall solid walls. Paris leaves you guessing at those precious courtyards, you know they are there. There is something about knowing a space you can’t see but feel on the other side. How did you trace that brain line through the heavy door into dirt clouds. A tiny person kicks wildly through the dust, chasing. The formal garden is a strange background for play.

Scale shift, window comes to the ground. Roofs patina against each other, shouldn’t they be conscious? Mustn’t they know how to fade just right against each other in the sky? They tell time against the wall, pulling grey down into the courtyard with their blue slate.

An empty pedestal. Was it meant to be empty? The window frame leans. Adjusting to what? For how long?

Why do they play here? What happens to me when I take the picture?

You are a coward with questions.

essays | 21

Lay your love on the street.

People lay their love on the street here. On the corner I turned onto again and again, lost on purpose, she held his face and he angled out to pull up his pants.

Two women, one crying, are the only ones on the street behind the metal sidewalk poles. There is an exchange of blame and betrayal for comfort, it holds there in the air. They stand where that street bends around a triangle, which I know now to be impossible to find. Places float fixed in my jello memory.

On how people sit on benches. On heat lamps in cafes and the edge they make the sidewalk. On the color of cities, in which we soak. The qualities of white - surprise cleanliness purity, light in the air between you, squinting. Can you pin your finger on the foggy light? On the materials of street and facade. People sit as if they might watch the city from here. But what can they see? No more than 10 buildings lining a dense street, the side of a grocery store beneath them. They can see heels clicking along and a woman wiping her nose as she waits for the light. Is this the city?

essays | 22

Windows

Paper doll windows float over gutters - these are not the heavy roof lines of Florence. Instead, Paris speaks through windows. Big voids, geometric excisions. They are gaping holes, or eyes in pretty array. They chatter of many happy lives together. Proud windows stand themselves up in front of the street in careful posture.

In a window hands whip cream in sleeves rolled up to elbows. A strip of frosting obscures their faces, only the work of their hands is on display. This street is filled with women in their thirties, in the windows labels face out announcing status on the second hand shelves. We have crossed into that west side of paris.

essays | 23

Louvre

Where is Alec? On a first night, the city stretches ahead of you. A walk anywhere threads me across the grain of the loud boulevards, along an invisible edge of Seine. Memory is foamy, pockets of air hold together and drive you to somewhere. Along a string to a fortress wall.

In the square I am smacked with the tininess of humans. Audacity and courage and preposterous wealth. The opulence of empty space. Three sets of windows high but the square towers 60, 80 feet. Manipulations of scale undercut perception. This building has how many floors? Louis must’ve been a tiny man.

The magic of water and the secrecy of music. Ducks hide from the wind. Strings plucked ride the air.

**flip into how to write these facts in, names of kings and architects.**

Maps, history, writing, photos. You lack intention and substance in your description. Cut down, through into fact. What do you know? How does that make what you have seen? What do you recognize?

I imagine my feet carving down through these paved stones, 6 x 6. Time stretches along this line - look back tomorrow and it will snap shut into first impression.

The Louvre courtyard (real name?) is a huge stone square, It is huge because it is wide - it would take two minutes to run to the far side. Huge tall I see a tiny person head scraping below a window sill. The pavestones six by six curve up slightly to the fountain at center - or that is just the world tipping over round, look up for evidence we are swinging around that axis still. The fountain at the center is studded with ant people in shadow against the setting sun on stone behind them, a deep acid yellow royal facade. Hugeness made normal by complete surrender. The three stories must reach 60 feet over four entrances. A musician presses out against each of these archways, notes tumbling into the court. All deep strings. A man whistles along from the poche of the wall, throwing his wind into the air.

These four competitors are the only program besides four men selling eiffel towers for your camera phone. The latter are not having much success. I watch them from a cold bench while they take turns walking up to the tourists but when they sit it is thirty feet back from the fountain. Everyone else rushes through this space between center and edge. The man sets his arms wide behind big shoulders and sags his chest.

essays | 24

Why does the space work so well acoustically? Is it the unrelenting symmetry? It holds three different (four?) thin songs and lets them run through open fingers. The music moves around the courtyard with the wind. A piece of light shoots through the huge wall to my left - the sun has struck from one side to another of the palace, starting as a muffled triangle and strengthening as it stretches out to evening. Wind seems to move through it too and more and more this palace seems like four thick walls to make music for me here. Inside flips and I am in a perfect turrell theater. The palace’s stone ornaments grab and fold the music inwards. The notes might change but it is always too slow to tell. The whistler is gone now.

essays | 25

Luxembourg, mottled

The public slips into this agriculture, trees in a grid hold firm over wherever you decide.

I am haunted by english and a city of image. Vacuous granite. My sense of direction is suspended. Looking only for quiet and a certain color of the air. Thoughts tossed into the sky, over the breeze. Promenade is obscured under these trees.

We people of the city arrange ourselves strange around this circle to watch the water or ourselves. Do you see yourself smack up against the hugeness of a city?

Road drops off the hill into garden, pleasantly unkempt. Where you thought there are two people laying like one in the grass. My afternoon walk is repeated, extended. The grid of trees are a huge hypostyle hall pressed flat against our heads. Light hits faces with an accent of green. The grid structures distance between strangers. We each claim our territory on the stone carpet beneath, a movable chair angled just enough away that I can’t read his face while he reads. The 20’ diagrid makes a play on privacy, trees both protecting and endless. I had trouble deciding where to sit, all of the chairs seemed just the same amount of sticky.

I remember differently from words. The place comes together I see my ankle crossing on my knee and remember licking the ice cream that we bought together but really I ate the whole thing. I know the way the light came soft below the trees and how the man sat with his back to us. I remember more than I wrote down, folding open again. The less words the less I remember. The drawing does not help the same. It is romantic, this notion that I have that to draw or to write is to save the moment for later in an envelope, pressed between pages carry it around for when you need a breath of hot June air. From the drawing the trees read heavy and the figures cartoonish, the memory comes from where the ground is mottled like water. It is easy to remember the horizon, bright on the other side. All of this effort on memory, on recall. What of it was the space? How to access the true sweeping under those regular trees, how to describe the pace they inscribed.

A scattering of benches and chairs appropriated. Paths through trees are marked by asphalt on an axis, only a suggestion. People in single chairs become new trees and we are a forest. Quiet trees, wind beneath lifts leaves and strands of hair.

essays | 26

Pompidou

Exploit, explore thickness. Tourists snake a thin line across the sloped plaza and duck inside the metal machine, a cave of glittering wires. The cave is an entrance hall, cavernous and full. Thickness in all directions; mechanical systems and structure breathe as a sponge. The space does not have walls but mezzanines, the floor gives out into another layer of atrium below. Stairs and signs hang from the ceiling as a wire screen. The density and expanse of a forest.

The Arts Center was conceived in the early seventies as a new cultural center for modern Paris within an urban renewal strategy by President Georges Pompidou. The project, originally called Centre Beaubourg, was controversial for the razing of surrounding neighborhood fabric – another piece of the renewal project took down Les Halles, a historic market. The museum displaced townhouses on Rue Beaubourg, one of which became the subject of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect during the museum’s construction. The competition for the design was won by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano and built from 1971-1977 as a modern art museum that is also a library, a gallery, playground, a public square, a viewport out to all of Paris.

From the atrium onto an external escalator, looping up diagonal across the city. You might melt in this plastic tube, hanging off the edge of that tangle of trusses. Glass doors reach out at each floor but you keep moving – Paris roofs tilt towards you as you stretch to the top. George Pompidou’s jewel tops out head and shoulders above the city.

This idea of a public institution as park, a point of relief in the city. A comma. Give space, time to change direction. A phrase made circumspect, reflexive. The Pompidou is a seat on the roofs of Beaubourg. A bastion of the public, an attempt to turn inside out the barren fortress of the Louvre.

To turn a building inside out. We talk often in architecture of a thickened edge. Paris understands this thickness in shutters and curtains and window sashes, in courtyards and terraces and sidewalk cafes. The Pompidou bathes in this thick function and conditioned space disappears behind truss and duct.

In this way it is a building to take on political meaning overtly. Democratic, inclusive, critical and explicit. Declaring what might be the role of art in the city: to weave the beautiful into the messy, allowing for criticism and productive frictions between neighbors. The homeless camp out beneath dirtied white trusses, teenagers from the public library stare over their

essays | 27

cigarettes at the conveyor belt of tourists moving always up and left. Matisse coexists with the ventilation system, which in the galleries has in turn been painted deferentially white. This agenda of multiplicity from the postmodern project is fertile in a city well-versed in the monolithic facade as assertion of power.

It is harder to write when you also have to move. Stillness takes on new speed to catch up to your revving pen. People crowd into here, how do you keep dignity? Torn between exposure of the mechanical systems and deference to the art, the galleries try both. The lights are fluorescent bullies in a rigid cell structure. The light shelves blast white and don’t bounce like they did in Piano’s drawing. Now I am watching these defunct mirrors instead of Henri Matisse’s cartoon of a woman as she should be (Blouse Romaine). Ah but if I could look down she would be spellbinding - blues in flat, feeling planes of paint holding and glowing from the surface.

The lighting system has been adapted to the works displayed - sometimes a wall is dark because the works are paper, or on showstoppers the cells lift away, replaced by real spots. These paintings you can really see. I suspect that these working moments checkerboard the galleries, the finally well lit walls pulling an unconscious crowd from masterpiece to masterpiece.

I love I love I love a plane of color on linen, with a hand behind it. Fall into those greys. Color and light and planes of walls on walls down from mechanical ceilings. Uncanny Balthus, or just a sexist bastard interested only in the objects on a woman’s body. But the colors - let him do anything. He tosses me carelessly between horror and adoration - my stomach churns. It is hard for me to stop looking at the art.

essays | 28

Carreau du Temple

An 1863 market building. Cast iron in thin columns is painted green grey and bridged by lace trusses to fill between huge windows. New cedar louvers reflect into these windows from the inside, mixing with leafy trees and deep white windows from across the street. It is a beautiful shell of bold glass shoulders. With this inside/outside dance the market acts as the centerpiece of a square even while it holds to the edge of its block.

It is not until later that I realize there are two peaks, and what I thought was the long rib turned out to be the short side of an almost square. Buildings can trick you with proportion. Parisians in leather and turtlenecks bask in it across the street as if it were a sculpture.

1863. Ten years into Napoleon III’s reign (fourteen counting his presidency of the second republic). Haussmann is out in full force cutting wide streets into the Saint Germain. Lincoln is signing the Emancipation Proclamation. Archduke Franz Ferdinand is born. 1863 saw the erection of this vast cast iron window and for 150 years people wove into the arches for bread, clothes, the theater of daily lives.

[missing conversation about political erasure of the Vieux Temple, this 150 years as a cover up story]

A pair of stone arches on the corners of Rue Eugene Spuller suggests an earlier history. The imprint of the Vieux Temple should be somewhere near here, hinted by the names around – rue du temple, square du temple, carreau du temple. The complex climbs skinny in the Turgot map of 1739. The site was the original fort for the Knights Templar of the crusades – by legend the fort was so secure in the 13th century the King himself kept his money behind its walls.

Most poignant and gruesome in public memory was the Vieux Temple’s role during the French Revolution – Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were held in its tower (here? there?) before they were taken to the guillotine. From 1808 to 1810 the medieval fortress was dismantled under the orders of Napoleon I, having become a place of pilgrimage for royalists. In 1860, Napoleon III ordered the site cleared for a market. Except for these shining white doors.

Paris will teach you to look for the things no longer there.

Even these monumental turns of history disappear as circumstance and intention under the tint of lives lived and years survived. After a period of decline, a vast renovation by studioMilou Architecture reopened the building

essays | 29

with a new skin and program in April 2014. The building breathes easy and I imagine it is happy to be seen for its own good looks.

essays | 30

Poles, like people

No parking poles keep a meter on the street in material space, ticking off meters and moments past. Think about directionality, along these soldiers and permeability across them.

They are as high as a tall women’s hips, neck and chin at her waist.

3 or 4 meters apart, you cannot touch two at the same time. They are a strange steady screen along tiny streets, gentle enforcers. No parking here. People dip in and out of them, parties of more than two push someone out into the empty street. One on one they do little, but look down the line and they collapse into a wall, impermeable. A loose delineation of the space of the sidewalk, marked but not a barrier.

The barrier has been tested. Some bend over at the ankle, others more awkwardly at the shin. I cannot help but make people of them. Their imperfections make personality. A missing pole is violent, the whole line weakened by the vulnerability.

My friends are painted a dark grey umber but the cool yellow of the sun on granite shimmers under the blue sliver of the sky, rounding out the perfect circles of their heads. People find themselves resting their hands easy on this shoulder and chips of paint mark spots of frequent pausing. At street corners these heads are painted white - a tribute to future marking?

essays | 31

Parc Montsouris

Above me sat (lay, strode) the parc montsouris. Another Haussmanian retreat (oasis). What is the relationship between those streets and these parks? They share a bloodline that had an attitude towards the city.

The RER is tucked behind very green on the edge of a wandering path. Hear it running brakes on steel rims every four to eight minutes, cutting sweetly through this rolling paradise. People gather individuals around the water, looking in at the surface as if it were a game. The city must be far away but I can see it past the trees.

The reservoir de montsouris towers caddy corner. It doesn’t tower because it leans back. Imagine the water heavy against this fat wall. Its relationship to the street is more like a hill, the north side of buttes chaumont. Walk its length looking for the people. To treat landscape and infrastructure as one. Is a very different hand? Where does any hand come through? Ideas of public vs. Ideas of monument. There are overlaps, but often treatments are very different. Tied to the adoption of the British garden? Where am I going with this?

[a brief history of paris water infrastructure]

Choose words, layer them over your ice cream as sundae but soon it is too sweet you will lose it. Better to choose the single freshest cherry, let them turn it over on their tongues. A stone worn by my palm, to shape this place of words.

essays | 32

Cite Universitaire

Sky opens up into lightness of the air and birds are somehow close. This porch is nothing special but to get here I broke through into a university in the summer. Is this the suburbs? I can see a highway across the field.

[history and description of cite universitaire, particularly its relationship with architecture]

Brazil - The concrete is cracking. It comes together as masses passing through each other - beam does not sit on but sinks into the girder. Entrance is guarded by columns long and thin - two feet by eight. Curves and stairs land like old dancers, creaking with intention. Passing over, under, through - the dirty beton never moves but every joint looks like a dare. Windows are glass glued into stubborn concrete mullions (now chipped or eaten by squirrels marking territory for a rabid excape). Ragged bars mark a mystery meter along the curve of the entrance hall - is it fibonaci? Or is that an excuse when really it is tailored to use. Three tiers of structure separate the ground (coming up to a door) from the box (rational, you will see). The pilottis draw up to make a no place space between.

I think again of Niemeyer and the terrain vague. Who or what does this place open up for? A gutter pokes out from an unseeming face like a scalpel. There is no evidence that water has ever fallen from it, but it sets off the composition of that door. 1 Euro per visitor - oh I see, he made this terrain vague for me while I wait for the lunch hour to be over so they can take my tithe. Mullions are to pull you around the curve - light sets one direction different from the other. To pull the rug out from under you (me) and then offer us each a small stool to sit on from which you can only truly admire the floor.

Wander under the house along a strange site plan and swing beneath Maison de l’Inde - A good detail. Corrugated steel lines up __ so the bending of light washes across as its own material. The building is so simple and holds to an agenda - big, open terraces offset a blank hallway facade. The ground is treated as secondary - a main door instead kicks right into the second floor wide and deliberate - collaborate with india! A low corner has been softened with stiff yellow spray insulation, evidence of violence. Mastery comes into the corners, which bring the sheet of curves to a gentle edge.

Pavillion Suisse. Orientation inverted again on this backwards campus twists hello beneath the mass. The student center is scattered with corb stools beneath a mural that seems to mark the space casual (interact! He says). Huge 12 x 12 windows paired over a green shrub somehow seem small. The room

essays | 33

they have opened up to visitors is hot, 2 o clock and the sun is starting to tilt ouest. The view is boring and the details reek efficiency (economic but not environmental). For the first time all afternoon I do not feel Corb’s lathering of paint here. No tingle. Is it the institutionalization or the efficiency argument ringing dull?

Video of mullions, Steel details of l’Inde, Corb sketches, City map

essays | 34

Metro

I like to ping pong through the subway. I like to wing it. Follow signs through the bright white hallways, trusting when the next one will be. Winging in and out of crowds following your made up purpose - don’t lose the momentum or the world will start to spin. It might anyway when the signs drop out from under you. They were invisible as the rhythm of reliable stair rise and run, holding a tense grid for us to run on.

In these moments it is people who have saved me. I stranded myself at St. Ouen and had to change trains - the signs turned four of us up an accidental escalator instead of down. We went back, a team together against the flow. Laughing, eventually we found our way and one of them led me gently back to the line towards Paris. The spaces were cavernous and empty, grey asphalt and metal panel with stairs cutting down and up across a whole bunch of nothing and no place.

[more in depth description of the st ouen abandon]

I like to bounce through the subway like I bounce through the streets but at this pace it feels wreckless, decision points come too fast and I am pressed to fork again and again without seeing. Beeping through stops are references to what is above but I do not understand them and so they are only words. I ride along a line through names and words that are sounds more than places. Sounds replace the distinction of balconies and rooflines as you pick up speed, blurring machines beneath the sky.

[describe the difference between above and below ground]

The white catenary tunnels (shining tiles work wonders) guide you like a rat to a piece of cheese - no spatial orientation necessary or possible.

It is a pleasure when the metro swings above ground. The whistle of the air shimmied between mmetal and concrete releases and the middles of buildings trip by instead. Cutting through the center of things, surely you have found its heart.

[history of the paris metro]

What might I be jumping over or beneath with these sets of five stairs or slight ramps. Signs at the ends of tubes are lifelines. It is a relief to grab onto their directness, an orange rope in the snow of so many decisions to be made. The vacuum devoid of street corners and modeled facades is also a relief, trust into it and it will pop you into another world.

essays | 35

The metro receptacles are a squished white tube lined with docks for waiting. The cars are tiny ships. Shall you describe this metro or any metro?

essays | 36

St. Ouen

Spun above ground and I am still lost, untethered. This is what an old industrial park feels like. No edges, earth bleeds out under buildings to nowhere. You cannot feel where the density might be, like a suburb. People seem stuck onto the scene with tape, it would look more right if it were abandoned.

But here we are instead, in a park to start a neighborhood. Yes! This is what we believe will work! Have I slipped like Alice and walked onto a model in Campbell Hall? This one straddles city and prairie, moving through tastes of different kinds of places. [But what makes it feel like ‘different kinds of places?] This city playground is sunk below the street. A moat allows this park to be felt and seen from the street, breaking with the french tradition of gate/ hedge as barrier to cars. Crossing over that moat is a fairytale threshold. Step down from street into country, space breathes. Territories are divided by activity: skate park, community garden, gardening education greenhouse; all of which are community centered and include various types of audiences. The greenhouse is a simple structure with louvers and clerestory wings to lift hot air out when unwanted. Glass and wood fit the project into surroundings without pretention and delineate program within each structure without complicating industrial massing. An extension of this attitude is that the whole park is organized by a water management system for the surrounding new development (a park to start is also one to drain a neighborhood). The system is both visible and lovely only removed from visitors to an arms length by a difference in section.

[about the landscape architects, about the urban strategy at city level]

The park is surrounded by new development as a part of the ZAC. It was the first move to start a new piece of the city. It is brimming with the hope that it will set the agenda for a neighborhood of diversity and engagement. That would be the true test of success, but I have no idea how to know that has happened. It is hard to know what makes a successful park in Paris, where families fill all patches, pieces and benches without discrimination. Sand and toys fill up the space. The man with his son who was figuring out springs and weight and balance - he helps and watches as the child throws his little body around to feel the world. I should remember to write that way. Taking advantage of public space is part of culture here. [but wtf is culture??] This is a new park, and not yet part of the public memory. Everyone seems to be discovering it for the first time. Kids obsess over the water fountain, squealing squealing even though the misters are not activated yet. Picnics cling gently to the young shadows of trees, toddlers run tight loops like

essays | 37

giant bees around the lawn. A parade of dancers stomp circles through the park, picking up strangers in their mesmerizing whistle staccato. We move through each other’s private lives in a city. That humming is the sound of a dog sleeping. Shared space. Cities are social beings built on the backs of our overlapping lives. Her high voice breaks through her hands.

Site plan of the park, annotated

City map including metro access (incl. mishap?)

essays | 38

Cafe

Expectations. Three brash Americans decide loudly to sit next to me, getting ready to write quietly to myself. I cannot stop thinking inside their conversation.

Shit prognosis. I was in that same situation. I don’t have any plans for saturday yet, man. I was in that same situation, I think you do whatever you can to get there. What else do you do.

Slip into someone else’s reality, it’s easy. Our tables were so close they shared knee space. Take some of that back for yourself with your elbows. Windows step up and down, floor heights tap along above the street. Try to focus.

Now my bros are talking Poussin.

Analyze that breakdown. Palais Royale plays a staccato behind. Notes on a moment in time in which I absorb everything and write it down, not sure what might be important and what might be trash. Everything repays attention.

No fuckin’ aero shit.

I already can’t remember why I took that photograph this morning. Where is time here.

I am not jealous of people who can understand every language around them, I relish the buzzing of unfamiliar syntax. How does language carve at a city?

I am thinking of these eras named after Kings. That one man would be assigned a time and a style, as if he knew it. Lydia Flea touches my heart with photographing to know the smallest things. I recognize the preciousness with which I am already treating my metro card.

Across the street Piano’s workshop gapes out onto Rue des Archives. They must almost be able to see the blue bulge of systems over the street, the Pompidou is only a street or two away. It strikes me that it is easier to see the architect here. n

essays | 39

Saint Chapelle

Darkness creeps up into light in veins of tracery, browns are black against the bright glass. Circles, foils repeat obsessively up the walls - up, always up. Up from the parking lot, where we have wandered like sheep in the heart of ile de la cite. Up into the walls, stairs are an Escher exercise in depth perception pressing those spinning steps against your eyeballs. Release into a long straight high room, four boxes stacked on each other. But the space is just an excuse to have walls. Squint to forget your fellow humans, Americans who’ve dragged themselves out of hotel rooms to here to see the Culture.

The jewel box is now emptied. Like so many manifestations of power, the relics of Sainte Chapelle did not last the Revolution. Now the box stands as a place holder for the importance of the thing it has lost. The light is not especially bright. Its beauty is in its temporality - clouds ripple across upturned faces. The space is stuffy in its singlemindedness towards this light. Perhaps King Louis was this way as well, in his aspirations for clerical glory.

The glass is obsessive and abstract. Its colors melt into a golden neutral on the faces of tourists. They stand in the mortal world of browns and dingy reds, faces and cameras lifted to catch heavenly light. Darkness cradles light.

essays | 40

Seine bridges

Write soon about the Seine - its orientation, its edges, its crossings.

essays | 41

St. Genevieve

Pantheon. Symbols of Christianity and ancient rome buff into a statement of contemporary nationhood. The intentional and continued production of identity through symbol in stone. The forever mark of a building, which of course it cannot be. Cold floors and big high windows. Making big piles out of empty air, the space is made to shout that something is bigger than me.

Saint Genevieve. Large monumental room of work. The air is still, hot. Your writing is scattered, undeveloped. Lacks structure and so pushes to depth are cut silly. Focus. The windows open on two hinges, but most are closed. Only a few are open and I stare at the rest willing them to move. I can see a tree fluttering outside one such open window. Some kind of torture. The lights’ changes are impossibly subtle and explicit. It breaks through the dirty windows. Yellow fluorescents light up the upper shelves, just under those huge windows. The lights are a pale Parisian ochre oil mixing with water over the books. Wood tables refract both up onto the sweating studying faces. I wonder if they study better here.

The sounds of quiet in an old space - recording.

Iron columns are skinny, made skinnier by the capitals and thin lace trusses arching out of them. I would like to measure everything, columns tables windows arched trusses. You can feel the presence of these people every day for so many years. The everyday nonchalance of the students sits gracefully in the carefully proportioned space between the columns.

essays | 42

Beaux Arts, peeling

There is an exhibition at the Palais des Beaux Arts that might be about reading. Short temporary exhibition walls are plastered with 8.5 x 11, except the bibliography which is granted fancy poster paper. She records her influences out onto a grid. Take a page. She fits loosely into the tall paper peeling. To reject precious. Holes in paintings, mold on the wall. This place is in an unbelievable state of deterioration. It is a commitment to the critique. We trust them but we are also shocked, which is what they knew would happen. The paintings, she says, are student copies of masters from the 19th century applications for the prix de Rome. They are here in limbo.

essays | 43

Bibliothque Lamoignon

Librarians are the able guardians of reverent quiet. Hold apart chaos and order with this thick masonry. Overwhelmed by long french texts that surely have answers I can just barely see, I spread out into quiet courtyard aging tan under the sun. Lunch, a phone call (one calm, one urgent) stake places along the edge with feet tipping over the moat of a drain, the square’s only solemn decoration. Tourists spot us from the marais street but cling to the door sensing serious librarians at large.

Windows are stern and simple, opened and fixed by the city.

essays | 44

Niemeyer, Comuniste

Le Corbusier

(from the exhibition)

A man who looks at shapes of space and style as experiment. L’harmonie in architecture, he looks for a system. To see intention in a drawing - to read lines learning, erasing, retreating, reconditioning. The modular, looking for the universally applicable.

(atelier)

Strange spaces. [define] They have a thumbprint bruise of a big, bold designer. There is a sensuousness to the white walls that is no more or less than paint. It does not feel rationality - the shower looks like an oven. A bedroom door that is also a closet swings large to become more than both. Views are generous, light is treated as precious. It is hot inside, history seeps.

Enter through the tiny staircase, up and up swinging past the glass block windows again and again. Brighter and brighter. Step through the skinny hall and a wide door pivots off center and turns me into the familiar studio with a curved ceiling. Light slants across the wall like you knew it would but the space is smaller and lighter [than what - why]. The small wood furniture continues to enclose a dark den with a square light cut through the thick roof. Is the light precious or do I make it this way?

There is a window looking down over the lightwell. The view is not special but the window sits lovely in the frame.

[bedroom, delight]

It is a gem of a neighborhood. The five story apartment is quiet and self aware even across the street from a huge stadium. A place like this you feel in your cheeks. I walk by houses and apartments - dense enough that walking is easy but still everything is quiet and green.

This modern neighborhood was tucking into a square, where buildings are higher and tighter to each other, but mostly it is the cars and the people. Through them you can feel the beat of the metro underground (heartbeats are like this too - always evident but inconspicuous). Young people flood down the street from the metro, in waves of trains. A concert at the hippodrome, he tells me. I regret asking. The teenage energy buzzes down the suburban street. They are fish, not quite in stride but moving as a school at a pace generic, flooding in 5 minute surges from the train cars. They

essays | 45

barely see the sidewalk, bouncing mostly off of each other. Those moments without them the street feels different and I agree that the sidewalks are only concrete slightly raised. They heave huge waters and open racks of beer on end. I have slipped into this scene from a straight street of the modern town, stopping at a sense of change in the air at the sign of real traffic and these bodies flowing.

(maison la roche)

To sing in the shower of Corb’s house. A sculpture quotidian. That we should ever treat a house as hallowed. At the museum they told us to say, ‘please sir, don’t violate the negative space of the sculpture.’

And so I trespass onto the never ending stairs, the ramp for one. Slope strains calves, my feet slip back sweaty in plastic sandals. Hike to the ceiling. It is hotter there. Wind blows curtains but has nowhere to go. Edges of walls are painted into sculpture. This is not function but something else entirely. He stole that message as a mask, it is clear here.

Pause to write it down.

Reflections on windows and mirrors glance to the next room to bring you through. Electric bulbs string down from the ceiling as an apendage, but sunlight is a form. The entry is a tower of white light surrounded by three stories of circulation. That people could activate and make real a piece of glowing space.

**In my notes I often frame things in awe of the fact of them. It makes a series of sentences difficult to read and so the next iteration the awe in the sentence structure falls away, but the impression remains. I leave it here as a reminder of the amazing fact of things. Not just to state that people make space (which of course we know), but to stand back and admire the awe of that transaction between climbing bodies and white light.

It has the sharp intake of breath of a Courbet and the heady depth of Lewitt.

Plant beds line the house like prescient shadows, soaking wet mulch against the side of the building. Meet the ground with intentional awkwardness (careful!) Skinny window panes with flimsy mullions, I think I can see them bend a little bit under the lip of the ceiling. But the white walls hold steady under flickering light and curtains. The idea of an architectural promenade.

essays | 46

But this house is not separate from the world, a child squeals over the fence. A group of French women in functional periwinkle ask questions about the original color of the paint. Their pixie cuts are in various states of grown out.

essays | 47

What is the project?

Some options: A sliver of Paris cut along the length of a month long walk [draw this walk], a moment in my mind as it builds up into a voice, a teaching tool to learn to write the space made out of the humans in it.

What does it mean to make an exhibition about finding words? How about a book? What do you want the experience of the project from afar to be? Does one approach a wall of text and dive? What is the opposite of a wall of text - translating the essays into drawings? Can the essays be the drawings? Or rather they inform the drawings, making them stronger with intention and analysis. How can I take advantage of my architectural skills and audience?

AFB parallel project - What is the urban equivalent of the largest possible reproduction of the piece?

Annotate a large city map at each point, marking up the city

Each essay must make space inside it. Form (something) by putting parts together to construct the dimensions of height, depth, and width within which all things exist and move. Make space that is thick and rich, that is smelly and breath-taking. A dimension that you could walk through crying and it would distract you with lights winking in your tears.

essays | 48

Make space.

Space in a painting is a depth, an opening. It comes out of an ambiguity in surface but is necessarily structured and grounded to be stepped on. Moments between built and ethereal space draw us in for magic. Making space in a discourse means an opening up for new contributions, room to be built out. Adrian Forty calls for the separation of the physical space from the philosophical space, akin to Lefebvre’s lived and conceived.

Space comes from Raum, room. To define a word you must find to what it is opposed. Semper and Hegel equate creating space with enclosure, Sitte brings that out into the city street, bringing architectural space outside of buildings (but still defined by its edges). Or space is a force field, says Nietzsche, generated by the dynamism of bodily movement. Hildebrand emphasized movement both of the eye and of the body in space as necessary to supply the mind with a range of images for perception. His space is a three dimensional extension of the activity of our imagination.

Make place, space. I cannot know what is place and what is not, nor how it got to be that way. I do believe that space is not an objective fact but is in fact produced by people and materials and time. The spaces that I wish to make are not fixed and true but extensions of my own imagination and my own head space. The challenge here is not to recreate a place in one correct form, but rather to explore the painterly capacity of words to illustrate.

May 28Airplane, Place des Vosges, Hotel Sully

May 28Airplane, Place des Vosges, Hotel Sully

notes | 49

May 28 Le Marais

notes | 50

May 28 Walk from Place des Vosges to the Louvre

notes | 51

May 29 Cafe in le Marais

notes | 52

May 29 Playground, Pompidou

notes | 53

May 29 Pompidou

notes | 54

May 29 Pompidou

notes | 55

May 30 Le Marais, Archives, Sainte Chapelle

notes | 56

June 3 Institute Suédois, Café a la Terasse, Pompidou

notes | 57

June 4 Café on Rue des Archives

notes | 58

June 4 Café on Rue des Archives

notes | 59

June 4Jardins des Archives

notes | 60

June 5 Parc des Buttes Chaumont

notes | 61

June 5 Place des Vosges

notes | 62

June 7, 8Café near Montagne Saint Genevieve, Panthéon, Bibliothèque Lamoignon

notes | 63

June 8Café near Montagne Saint Genevieve, Panthéon, Bibliothèque Lamoignon

notes | 64

June 8 Bibliothèque Lamoignon

notes | 65

June 8 Bibliothèque Lamoignon

notes | 66

June 8Bibliotheque Lamoignon

notes | 67

June 9 Bibliotheque Lamoignon

notes | 68

June 9 Café on rue Dupetit Thouars (across from Marché du Temple)

notes | 69

June 9, 10 Café on rue Dupetit Thouars (across from Marché du Temple), L’Eglise de Saint Martin des Champs

notes | 70

June 10 L’Eglise de Saint Martin des Champs, Café near les Halles

notes | 71

June 10, 11 Café near les Halles, Café in the square off of Oberkamf

notes | 72

June 11 On a chair in a passage somewhere between les Halles and Place Vendôme

notes | 73

June 12 En route to Maison de la Roche

notes | 74

June 12 Maison de la Roche

notes | 75

June 12 Route home from Maison de la Roche

notes | 76

June 14, 15 Attic off of rue Saint Maur

notes | 77

June 15 Terrasse off of rue Saint Maur

notes | 78

June 16 St Ouen Park

notes | 79

June 15, 16 St. Ouen Park, Siège du Parti Communiste Français

notes | 80

June 16, 17 Siège du Parti Communiste Français, Jardin Luxembourg

notes | 81

June 17 Foundation Cartier

notes | 82

June 19, 20 Cafe near rue Saint Maur, Tuileries

notes | 83

June 25, 26 Gare de Lyon, Church on route to Boulevard Saint Germain

notes | 84

June 26 Church, Bibliotheque Saint Genevieve

notes | 85

June 27, 28 Across from Cluny, en route to l’appartement et l’atelier de le Corbusier

notes | 86

June 28 l’appartement et l’atelier de le Corbusier, en route home

notes | 87

June 28 Cafe near the Hippodrome

notes | 88

June 29 Musee Picasso

notes | 89

June 29 Metro

notes | 90

June 30 Cite Universitaire

notes | 91

June 30 Cite Universitaire, Parc Montsouris

notes | 92

June 30 Parc Montsouris

notes | 93

May 29 Airplane, Charles de Gaulle Airport

notes | 94

June 30 Basement of a bar full of American poets

notes | 95

June 30 Cafe on rue des Quatre-Fils

notes | 96

June 30 Cafe on rue des Quatre-Fils, Palais des Beaux Arts

notes | 97

June 30 Courtyard of the Louvre

notes | 98

July 1 Cafe Eurydice

notes | 99

books | 100

John Berger The Sense of Sight

books | 101


books | 102


books | 103


books | 104

Italo Calvino Les Villes Invisibles

books | 105


books | 106


books | 107

Italo Calvino Invisible Cities

books | 108


books | 109


books | 110


books | 111


books | 112


books | 113

Lydia Davis Can’t and Won’t

books | 114


books | 115


books | 116


books | 117


books | 118


books | 119


books | 120

Carlos Maria Dominguez + Peter Sis the house of paper

books | 121


books | 122


books | 123


books | 124


books | 125


books | 126

Geoff Dyer The Ongoing Moment

books | 127


books | 128


books | 129


books | 130

Patrick Modiano Suspended Sentences

books | 131


books | 132


books | 133


books | 134


books | 135


books | 136


books | 137

Georges Perec An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris

books | 138


books | 139


books | 140


books | 141


books | 142

Vestoj (Laura Gardner) On Slowness (The Contemplative Life)

books | 143

Vestoj (Laura Gardner) On Slowness (The Contemplative Life)

books | 144

Vestoj (Lydia Davis) On Slowness (What an Old Woman Will Wear)

books | 145

books | 146

Anne Middleton Wagner A House Divided

books | 147


books | 148


books | 149

Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse

books | 150


books | 151


books | 152


books | 153

Annie Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

books | 154

Annie Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

books | 155

Annie Dillard The Writing Life

books | 156


books | 157


books | 158


Write the City: A University of Virginia Nix Traveling Fellow Project

Documents

Transcript of Write the City: A University of Virginia Nix Traveling Fellow Project