THE SHADOW OF AN INVISIBLE CATHEDRAL
Change how a person conceives of space in his or her mind, I reflected, and you transform how they experience it in the world.
I was in a state of near panic when the phone rang. Broke and unemployed, I was startled to recognize the voice of Berkeley’s architecture department director as she told me that a senior faculty member had died during the final days of summer and the school wanted me to teach her graduate seminar, Theories of Architectural Space. Frightened by the prospect of teaching a class for which I was grossly ill-prepared, yet desperate for work, I quickly reshaped the course in my mind into something I felt qualified to teach. “Sure I can do it,” I told the director after an awkward silence, “no problem.” My life at that point was falling apart. I had just completed my Ph.D. in architectural history and theory, and I was already weary of architecture as both a discipline and a means of employment. Unable to afford Berkeley rents, I had moved to a rundown Oakland apartment by a highway overpass. There weren’t any jobs, and I spent most of my days fantasizing an alternative life for myself as a successful novelist. Teaching was my only chance of supporting myself, so I used my love of fiction writing to jump-start my interest in architecture and molded the course into a seven-week graduate seminar I re-titled Spatial Narratives. Rather than presenting a survey of discursive touchstones on space, as the deceased professor had, I would have the students read short stories and excerpts from novels in which buildings figured prominently. The aim of the course would be to demonstrate the degree to which our experience of space is as much the product of other, non-architectural narratives, including films, paintings, video games and literature, as it is the purview of architects and theorists. Change how a person conceives of space in his or her mind, I reflected, and you transform how they experience it in the world. Having studied Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch for my dissertation, I decided to draw links between literary and formal narratives as they had in their books. Species of Spaces comprises chapters sequentially organized from
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The small seminar room was packed on the first day of class. Afraid that my posted syllabus may have misled them, I asked the students what had attracted them to the course. It was not difficult to recognize the usual cast of characters in the room as they spoke, though I hadn’t met any of them before. Having spent the last decade in various architecture schools, I was familiar with the primary student archetypes and had names for each: “Everything’s a Question,” “Knows More Than They Show,” “Talks Without Thinking,” “Inarticulate Genius,” and “Finishes Other People’s Sentences.” When a young woman stood up suddenly during discussion as though about to speak, and then sat down abruptly without saying anything, I recognized a classic “Panic Button.” Inspired by everyone’s enthusiasm for the topic, I outlined the aims of the course, trying to convince myself as much as them of its value, and asked them to submit written responses to each week’s reading by 9pm on the evenings before classes. Needing to reduce the size of the class to a workable number, I assigned the longest reading of the semester first:w .g. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. Packing up my things as the students left the room, I felt for the first time in many years the force of my own creative juices flowing at a velocity greater than my anxiety.
WEEK 1: SIGNS OF NOTHING Sitting in my apartment staring at my inbox the following week at 8:59pm, I awaited the first responses with a mixture of curiosity and dread. They were good. Some of the students focused on Sebald’s main character Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian, and on his descriptions of railway stations and libraries, fortresses and concentration camps. Others conjectured upon the ways buildings
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performed as mirrors of the protagonist’s inner state, citing the Salle des Pas Perdus, where people “wasted” their footsteps, the Noctorama, where animals see in the dark, or the Breendonk concentration camp in Belgium, in which victims were erased from the world. I was half asleep when the last summary arrived. The sender’s name had been replaced with X’s in the address, and I quickly speculated that it had been written by Panic Button to describe in writing what she couldn’t express in class. The response began, “A man chases his lost memory through a sequence of obscure spaces in an effort to reconstruct his view of a deteriorating world. The story presents a paradoxical outlook on the impact of architecture in its protagonist’s life, communicated as much through what he fails to apprehend, as through his nuanced descriptions of what he has elected to observe. The reader is never sure if the architectural descriptions are of the physical features of the buildings or embodiments of his view. The more Austerlitz searches, the less he seems to discover.” A little reductive, I thought, but definitely on the mark. Below the body of the text I found an interpretive map-diagram of Austerlitz’s travels. The map showed his arrival in Britain in 1939 as an infant refugee from Czechoslovakia as well as his travels back and forth to various sites of wwii death and destruction where, haunted by fragmented memories of his past, he ultimately has a nervous breakdown. It also showed Austerlitz’s travels to Prague, where he learns of the fate of his mother, and his ensuing trip to the Theriesenstadt concentration camp. The map was cut up, rearranged, and taped back together, with its margins in the middle and previous center cropped halfway off the page. It was also riddled with numerous holes and redactions, voids and erasures that, as far as I could understand, represented gaps in Austerlitz’s memory. The effect was startling. Not only did the map express the main character’s subjective remapping of European geography, but it also presented a graphic taxonomy of “missing space” echoing the main character’s conflicted inner state. Riding my bike up Telegraph Avenue through the early morning fog, I pondered which of the students had composed the anonymous response. Panic Button was the only one not to have sent in a response, yet the cold sophistication of the analysis seemed more like the outlook of a Knows More Than They Show and the brilliance of the graphic format the work of a Steals Other People’s Ideas.
WEEK 2: PARALLAX GAPS For a long time I had doubted the “rightness” of architecture for me, though after a certain point, I had invested too much in my studies to even consider turning back. Writing novels had been my childhood
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dream, but lacking the necessary talent, the prospect seemed outlandish. I decided to write a dissertation instead on the subject of architecture in literature and promised myself that I would one day return to creative writing. My favorite writers all seemed to have a strong background in some other, non-literary world upon which they drew for subject matter: former lives as musical prodigies, cancer survivors, or childhoods spent with famous parents. I could have it both ways with architecture, I told myself entering grad school. Architects would care about my writing because of what it said about architecture, and non-architects would be drawn to it because of the way it used buildings to speak about the world. Intrigued by the anonymous response and the ideas it had triggered in my mind, I anticipated the following week’s summaries with excitement. The second reading, China Miéville’s The City and The City was a detective novel about the murder of a foreign student staged in a divided city. Miéville invented a complex assortment of spatial devices and tropes that allowed mutually exclusive conceptions of a place to coexist. In the terms of the course, the narrative demonstrated the difference between abstract and physical space and the degree to which we confuse one for the other. In the book, inhabitants of two overlaid cities are trained to “unsee” the others according to the spatial logic and visual cues of their surroundings. The twin cities are composed of “crosshatched,” “alter,” and “total areas.” “Total” areas belong to the city one is in, and “Alter” areas to the other city in which one is not. Between the Total and Alter areas are patches of “crosshatch” in which inhabitants of both cities walk alongside one another without acknowledging one another’s existence. A single building, known as Copula Hall, exists in both cities and functions as the border and official gateway between them. Ignoring the separation, even by accident, is called “breaching,” a crime worse than murder. The second anonymous summary arrived at the last minute, as had the first. I went directly to the end of the document hoping for another map. As suspected, I found a complex drawing that diagrammed the spatial techniques used in the book, but whereas Miéville had described the two conflicting territories one at a time, the anonymous student’s diagram represented them in relation to one another from a variety of shifting viewpoints, graphically enacting repeated breaches and producing a myriad expanding and contracting maps overlaid one atop the other. “Holy shit,” I thought to myself studying the drawing, this is exactly what I wanted to see, though I was shocked that a student had done it so well. By now Panic Button was no longer a suspect: her summary had come in the night before and was far more analytical than anything
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the anonymous sender had written or drawn. She was eccentric, but not enough to submit two such different responses, and the visual components of both anonymous submittals had been too bold to be her. I ran through all of the usual suspects. Perhaps it was the work of someone who hadn’t spoken in class at all, I reasoned, or perhaps “Knows More Than They Show” knows even more than I could imagine.
WEEK 3: SEEING GHOSTS The third reading, John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” begins with the main character, Neddy Merrill, lounging by a friend's pool on a mid- summer's day. Contemplating the surrounding suburban landscape from the hillside pool, it occurs to Neddy that, by swimming across his neighborhood from one pool to another, he can swim all the way back to his own home. He names the route “The Lucinda River” after his wife and starts off on his journey. Neddy is greeted at first by friends who welcome him to their backyard pools, and then his visits grow darker as people become increasing hostile towards him. At the end of the story, he staggers out of the last pool, cold and exhausted, only to find his own decrepit house abandoned and for sale. The anonymous summary of “The Swimmer” arrived at the usual time and began with a provocative synopsis: “As with the previous two readings, missing space signifies information withheld, and operates as the displaced center of the reading. Where the self-absorbed main character creates a false sense of continuity for himself on his journey from one pool to the next, the reader perceives a growing disconnection between Neddy’s physical surroundings and his view of them. When Neddy’s neighbors reject him, the unacknowledged interstitial spaces, bushes, fenced off areas, traffic medians, and public ways stand out like tangible blind spots, allowing us to witness the protagonist’s inner narrative concretized in physical form.” Following the written portion of the summary I found a photograph of a model of the swimmer’s odyssey. Rather than stringing the pools together into a seamless experience from Neddy’s distorted perspective, the model featured detailed representations of all of the in-between areas Neddy had failed to acknowledge, linked together around the voided figures of different pool shapes as seen from an aerial view. “No longer looking preoccupied with the description of individual things and isolated events,” the summary concluded, “Cheever punctuates the reciprocal relations between them.” I was fascinated. To me, the most interesting part of “The Swimmer” had always been the masterful way Cheever had rendered the gaps between the different swimming pools that Neddy, in his advanced state of denial, was unable to see, using them to perform a kind of double-
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duty as both settings for, and symbols of, his oblivion. Contemplating the anonymous student’s response to the reading, I recognized that he or she was doing something similar. Wanting to figure out who the author of the anonymous responses was and realizing that the students were far more sophisticated than I had predicted, I expanded my repertoire of stereotypes to account for unexpected crossovers: “Multiple Personalities,” “Accidental Insights,” and “Paradoxical Views.”
WEEK 4: X-RAY VISION The next reading, j.g. Ballard’s short story “The Overloaded Man,” charts the demise of a man who spends his time alone in a minimal Modernist housing complex learning to “switch off” the significance of everything he sees by reducing it all to abstract geometric forms without names or discernable functions. Picturing in my mind the anonymous student’s model of personal denial in “The Swimmer,” I wondered how he or she might apply a similar technique to the psychology explored in “The Overloaded Man”? I imagined different ways to represent his vantage point like a digital brain scan that allowed him to see through the mind-numbing mechanics of his environment at the same time as it put his inner dissolution on display in the final moments before he kills his wife and drowns himself in a pond. Opening the anonymous student’s document, I was both startled and confused. Lacking a written portion all together, I found a highly annotated perspective drawing of the housing complex in the “Overloaded Man” constructed from the protagonist’s viewpoint. As an idea, it was similar to the x-Ray view I had imagined, but rather than represent how the world appeared to the protagonist, the drawing used a mise-en-abyme to construct two opposing mirrors reflecting one another to infinity. At the bottom, a fragmented sentence read, “fossilized within a wall of compounded reflections.” More desperate than ever to uncover the anonymous student’s identity, I decided to lure him or her out during discussion by citing ideas from the responses that only that student would recognize.
I had trouble getting out of bed when the alarm went off and rode my bike to school like a maniac to make up for lost time. I rushed into the classroom, sweaty, and fifteen minutes late. I stood before them in silence, waiting to catch my breath, and then began speaking. I compared the previous anonymous responses and identified their themes. Whereas the mysterious readings of Austerlitz and The City
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and The City explored the ramifications of missing, redacted, and unseen space; and the response to “The Swimmer” rendered blind spots in both Neddy Merrill's mind and the story’s setting visible; this last synopsis of “The Overloaded Man” made a double agent out of the theme of blankness by describing it from two different perspectives: the way it existed in the physical context of the minimalist housing project and how it was experienced by the main character. Trying to lure out the anonymous respondent, I asked the students to vote between what I had assumed to be two mutually exclusive readings: did they a) understand the setting to be a result of the overloaded man’s distorted view, or b) had the aesthetics of the minimalist setting produced his psychotic state? The students took the bait enthusiastically. Some of them cited quasi-Zen Buddhist notions of transcendent experience, while others believed the story to be straightforward parody of Modern architecture. What was for me an irresolvable conflict was for them “not a big deal.” “The minimalist blank setting is a mirrored-void in the eyes of the overloaded man,” one of them remarked, “and a series of white cubical apartments in the real world.” The crossovers and contradictions between the protagonist’s psychotic experience of his environment and the environment itself was not only tolerable, the students agreed, it was the central thesis of the story.
WEEK 5: PRIVILEGED PERSPECTIVES Though the students’ responses to the course were unexpected, I was impressed by their insights and thrilled to be thinking about the readings through fresh eyes. Taking their lead, I began to divide the terms of each reading into two parallel narratives: the symbolic and the formal. It was easy enough to distinguish between objective literary descriptions of physical settings and characters’ subjective experience of them, but I was curious to identify architectural examples in which the discrepancies between the two had been amplified by artistic means. I could think of many paintings in which the structure of symbolic elements were at odds with their arrangements on the canvas, such as Velasquez’s Las Meninas, where the figure of Velasquez is off to the side of the canvas, but central to the visual narrative; or Magritte’s Apparition in which the names, shapes, and positions of things (clouds, the horizon, a sofa, and a rifle) are variously aligned and pulled apart. But it was harder to come up with architectural examples where the symbolic narrative of a building’s territorial relations—its intimate, public, central, exposed, hidden, and marginal spaces—were put at odds with their physical arrangements.
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The fifth reading was Patricia Highsmith’s short story “Black House,” in which an abandoned house outside a small town serves as a screen for the projection of male fantasies to a group of men who meet regularly at a local bar to tell the stories of their various sexual conquests alleged to have occurred in it. Dark and decaying, the house exudes an atmosphere of mystery, which corroborates the blurriness of their fictions and molds itself easily to their imaginations. When a young man returns to live in the small town where he grew up, comes to the bar, and threatens to expose the banality of the black house by entering it during the day, he not only challenges the veracity of the men’s memories, but he threatens to obliterate the house’s symbolic function in their boring lives. The anonymous synopsis read as follows: “The qualities projected upon the building are at odds with the reality of the structure. Where the group of men choose only to see what they want, the young man reduces his observations of the black house to its material features. Over the course of the story a battle ensues between architecture as a symbolic narrative and an affective vehicle devoid of any intrinsic meaning.” The anonymous response was accompanied by a skewed plan drawing, like an anamorphic projection, that only made sense from a privileged point of view indicated on the drawing by a dot. The dot was walled off from the surrounding area by its own orthographic enclosure, representing the existence of a coherent perspective that was nevertheless inaccessible.
WEEK 6: DOUBLE VISION That evening, heading home on my bike down Shattuck Avenue, I stopped at a red light. A few seconds later Panic Button rode up besides me, “They named this street after the prison,” she said, pointing down Alcatraz Avenue towards the distant island framed at its end, like a telescope. “People assume it was built to house prisoners, but I think its real purpose was to remind everyone else what happens when you don’t follow the rules,” she muttered and rode away. Intrigued by the encounter, I thought about the prison’s unusually prominent location at the center of the San Francisco Bay, and pondered the last anonymous reading response about the Black House and the stories the townspeople projected upon it. It occurred to me that while all buildings present a fiction, they become even more “literary” when inscribed with conflicted narratives. Of course architecture was different in books, where it could be presented in contrasting ways through the eyes of different characters, than it was in reality where it had a singular
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physical form; and yet the literary examples of doubled spatial narratives identified by the anonymous student suggested a compelling challenge for real designs. By inscribing physical forms with competing narratives, one could produce spatial conundrums with the paradoxical affects of doubling, redaction, erasure, and inversion, producing in the process an architecture that operated as much like a book as it did a building.
The second to last reading of the semester, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, has an unconventional book format, comprising unusual pages, layouts, and an excessive number of footnotes that reference other books, films, and articles as part of the storytelling. Some pages contain only a few words or lines of text. Others are dense with information. The story follows a husband and wife who return from a trip to discover that their house has transformed. A door has inexplicably appeared upon a blank wall with a new corridor-like space behind it, and the internal dimensions of the house are somehow larger than its outside measurements. At first there is less than an inch of difference, but as time passes the interior of the house seems to expand while its exterior remains the same. Against his wife’s advice, the husband sets out to explore the house’s inexplicable and ever-growing passages into darkness. At 3:37am the morning of the next class, the anonymous email arrived. Subject to an unusual bout of insomnia, I opened the attachment and scrolled to the bottom of a mostly blank page where I found seven numbered footnotes. Unable to comprehend their meaning, I stared into the computer screen confused. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, so I printed the response, folded the page in my pocket, and went out on my bike. Intense physical exertion always sharpened my focus, so I headed to the bottom of a notoriously steep road and began my ascent up into the Oakland hills. After forty minutes or so of hard pedaling, I arrived at the crest of the hill and collapsed beneath a lone streetlight. The light cast an unusual shadow over me as I unfolded the page. The text hovered in the air like an optical illusion. Frustrated, I read the words with a long pause between each.
1. “Needs to erase herself in order to appear.” 2. “The no-man’s-land within a divided home.” 3. “The false silence of unnoticed noise.” 4. “An unpainted backdrop for a play called Rehearsal.” 5. “A hole in the ice the shape of a person.”
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6. “The dust-filled beam from an overhead projector.” 7. Emptiness is not always a void.
WEEK 7: OBSERVING THE UNSEEN The following week was the last of the course. Inspired by the class discussions, I felt something shifting in my outlook, though I was disappointed that the anonymous student’s final response never arrived. While this last reading, Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral,” was for me the most appropriate ending for the course, I guessed that, given the anonymous student’s love of Danielewzki’s graphic and literary fireworks, “Cathedral” may have seemed anticlimactic, but I couldn’t understand why he or she had ignored it completely. “Cathedral” begins with a nervous narrator describing his wife’s blind friend who is coming to visit. When Robert arrives, they eat a large dinner and drink heavily before moving into the living room where the narrator turns on the television. After they all smoke a joint, the narrator’s wife falls asleep, and he is left alone with Robert. On the television, a program documents the construction of a large Cathedral, and Robert asks the narrator to describe what he sees. Unsatisfied, Robert instructs the narrator to get a pen and some heavy paper so they can draw it together. Robert places his hand on top of the narrator’s as he begins sketching. He then tells him to close his eyes, teaching the narrator how to experience from deep within something he has never seen before. Thinking about “Cathedral,” it occurred to me that the anonymous student might have communicated a lot more in the cryptic footnoted response to House of Leaves than I had realized, and I reflected back upon the responses as a whole: the map of Austerlitz’s missing territory in which erasure signified forgetfulness; the diagram ofThe City and The City in which the overlay of divergent conceptions of the same location produced gaps between them; and the model of “The Swimmer” in which the gaps had been rendered paradoxically visible; the perspective of an absent exterior in "The Overloaded Man” whose meaning had been turned off; the “Black House” anamorphic with the privileged view removed; and finally the footnotes of theHouse of Leaves that used enigmatic phrases to echo the effects of spatial incommensurability.
I left early for school on the last day of class and took an indirect route through the Oakland backstreets before turning onto College Avenue, making my way to the architecture school. I was looking forward to seeing the final projects in which the students had been asked to create a speculative design in response to their favorite reading. Walking into
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the seminar room, I found everyone huddled around a collection of photographs pinned to the wall. The images on the wall were of a large model of Alcatraz. From what I could tell, one of the students had incorporated the island into their final project by removing the prison and reconfiguring the land. I recognized many of the same extraction and redaction techniques used in the anonymous student’s reading responses, but instead of simply using them to represent Alcatraz graphically, he or she had transformed the island itself into a landscape of perceptual gaps, blind spots, and erasures. Contemplating the design, I remembered my conversation with Panic Button on our bikes at the corner of Shattuck and Alcatraz. Could it be that she was the anonymous student after all? The photographs were divided into three groups on the wall: Aerial views, inside looking out, and outside looking in. From above, the model appeared to be a flattened two-dimensional map, with empty holes, like exposed basements, that indicated the footprints of missing buildings, and were surrounded by the shadows of various cell blocks, guard towers, and artillery sheds, as though the structures were still there. In another photograph, taken from a lower angle, the same dark shapes that appeared like flat shadows from above were revealed to be three-dimensional faceted forms that rose up around the edges of the holes and sloped down into the ground. The second group of photographs included images of how the surrounding region would appear from the island, looking out from the sunken voids and three-dimensional shadows. Rather than framing stereotypical views of the Golden Gate Bridge, the San Francisco skyline, or the rolling hills of Marin County, the photographs presented a mysterious panorama of missing centers and featureless forms, shaped by the raised 3d shadows, like a portrait painting that’s all background because its subject has been removed. The last group of images showed several large anamorphic projections that had been inscribed in deep grooves upon the surface of the model. The projections included a block of prison cells, stacked like ice cubes, that appeared in X-ray when observed from boats up close; a buried cemetery that looked, from across the bay, as though it had been excavated from the ground; and a long underground tunnel that, seen from one of the many the tall buildings nearby, bypassed the cemetery and connected the cellblocks to the water’s edge before disappearing into the bay. Written in small letters at the bottom of the wall, like a footnote, was the title “The Shadow of an Invisible Cathedral.”
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Astonished by the project, I turned and saw Panic Button standing in the back of the room. A menu of possible explanations mechanically scrolled through my mind: A “Knows More Than She Shows” in the guise of a “Panic Button,” trying to camouflage a “Genius Thinker Short on Technique.” Embarrassed by the feebleness of my categories, I walked towards her as though seeing her for the first time. A smile grew on Panic Button’s face as I neared. “I wanted to design a monument to the hidden and unseen that reminds us of how much we have missed,” she began; “People look at the island from different vantage points and, over time, collect the views in their minds. Once in a while they travel out to the island and try to coordinate their experience of looking out with the ways the island appears from outside, but they can’t. Like a magic trick or a Zen riddle, the missing prison reveals a blind spot that everyone can see. The underwater tunnels suggest the possibility of an escape, but the island’s enigma won’t let them go.” In the same way that the blind man in Carver’s “Cathedral” had taught an unfeeling man to see, Panic Button’s design had unveiled a cathedral in the space of a missing prison.
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