Malin Zimm Losing the Plot – Architecture and Narrativity in Fin-de-Siècle Media Cultures Malin Zimm Losing the Plot – Architecture and Narrativity in Fin-de-Siècle Media Cultures © Malin Zimm Akademisk Avhandling 2005 PhD Dissertation 2005 KTH Architecture and the Built Environment School of Architecture / xakt Critical Theory in Architecture Royal Institute of Technology SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden www.arkitekturskolan.se www.xakt.nu Cover illustration : Malin Zimm Typography: Peter Gibson Lundberg Axl Books, Stockholm 2005 www.axlbooks.com Printed by Bookpartner, Copenhagen 2005 ISBN 91-975901-1-8 To Peter abstract acknowledgements 8 introduction 11 chapter one 47 Writers-in-residence – Goncourt and Huysmans at Home without a Plot chapter two 71 Clockwork West Orange – Moving Images and Kinetic Architecture in Edison’s Black Maria chapter three 121 Shelf Life – The Primer of Virtuality chapter four Illustrated Notes on 19th Century Media Culture epilogue 175 Notes from the Excitoir notes 200 illustrations 218 bibliography 225 Acknowledgements Writing is not solitary work, and it is not stationary business. This text has taken me to many places and has put me in touch with many people. I wish to express my gratitude towards all those who have contributed to this PhD thesis. These are the people who have helped me not to lose the plot. First of all, my warmest and most heartfelt thanks to my main advisor, Dr. Katja Grillner, for her brilliant mind and professional instincts, for her way to make things happen, for her courage and patience, and most of all, for her way to share all these qualities with such warm confidence. No one could have done it better. Since my licentiate thesis presentation in 2003, Dr. Rolf Gullström-Hughes has been co-advising my PhD thesis work, adding skilled guidance and bright ideas on many levels to this work, not least concerning the art of putting words together to form a dissertation. For being my rock – but not a hard place, I want to thank you both specially. I am very grateful for the support of Prof. Jerker Lund- equist, my first co-advisor, who encouraged me to embark on this journey. He has been a great teacher and initiator. The research group xakt: critical theory in architecture, has through its first years developed from a seminar group to an important forum for researchers both within and without the KTH School of Architecture. I wish to thank my colleagues of the xakt group for their valuable feedback and energizing comments, Thordis Arrhenius, Pablo Miranda, Catharina Gabrielsson, Lars Raattamaa, Ulrika Karlsson, Jenny Wik- lund, among others, and especially Katarina Bonnevier whose perspective is as fresh as our friendship is old, and Jonas Run- berger who has just started his research trip, but whom I have shared the journey as a friend, co-tutor and fellow researcher since my Diploma year at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College of London. This work has benefited immensely from the reading and support of my guest opponent at the final PhD seminar, Dr. Charles Rice, lecturer in architecture at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, helping me to build this thesis from the solid support of his constructive critical comments. Pre- vious readers of my work include Dr. Jane Rendell, The Bar- tlett School of Architecture, as guest critic for a higher seminar in 2002, and Dr. Robin Durie, guest opponent for my licen- tiate thesis presentation in 2003, whom I wish to thank. For bringing my work into a global research context, I would like to thank Neil Spiller, The Bartlett School of Architecture, and Prof. Roy Ascott, University of Wales College Newport, for inviting me to contribute to their publications, which has been very motivating, and thanks to, once again Dr. Charles Rice, and Dr. Barbara Penner whose session Interiorities at the 2004 SAH conference in Providence was published in The Journal of Architecture. My attendance at international conferences, for example the Caiia-STAR conferences and Congress- CATH, has been graciously supported by travel grants from Knut & Alice Wallenbergs Stiftelse, Forskarstiftelsen Theodor Adelswärds Minne and FoFu-Arkitektur. I am also very grate- ful to all the helpful staff at the KTH School of Architecture, whose efforts range from administrational support to serving capricious computers. In the last few weeks of intense work, Staffan Lundgren at Axl Books made an offer as unexpected as it was welcome, to publish this thesis. I very much appreciate his brave enterprise and immense patience and support in this project. I am grateful to Alan Gibson who has been very help- ful with last minute proofreading. My most beloved ones; my beautiful sister Tomasine, my mother Kim, my father Bengt and my grandmother Karin, are never far away and always helpful, supportive, full of energy and joy, in anything from accommodating the cats to stirring up a good stew and a good laugh, thank you for everything. Lastly; closest to my heart, Peter, for your brightness and glow, where I always want to be, and Joel, my best co-driver and most trusted swordsman. Finally, my greatest debt of gratitude is to Peter who has put so much skill, time and energy into the graphic design of this thesis, in the process of shaping it into the book in your hand. Here is where all the work put into this work, by all con- tributors, really matters – as it materialises. Enjoy! Introduction The plot is an invitation into a story. The plot offers entry to narrative space, structuring desire into a forward motion through the text. The plot is the instrument for navigation and organisation of any linear storytelling. As architecture aspires to organise space in time, the plot seeks to create meaning and order in narrative space and time. A significant semantic leap unites the dictionary definition of the modest bean plot to the great machinery of conspiracy. The ontolog- ical range from the cemetery plot to the control-instrument of the map is tantalising. It provides structure and progression in fiction, enabling the author to weave a web of intrigues and the reader to navigate the network of a story. In physical real- ity, the plot is a virtual instrument that brings together the field and its governing plan. To plot is to make a plan, map, or diagram of an existing object, as a portion of the earth’s sur- face, or a building.1 The plot signifies the measured piece of land, the planning or drawing to lay this down on a map, and introduction the resulting plans or diagrams governing its delineation and temporality. Plot is a term that instantiates space, time and the course or result of any action or process to represent the potentiality of these in the form of actual or virtual reality. Thesis Overview Within the range of the various senses of the term plot, from a signifier of place to denoting storyline and intrigue, this thesis investigates the relations between narrativity and architecture, and brings the notions of plot and spatiality together in a dis- cussion about the production and consumption of, in particu- lar pre-digital, virtual spaces. It identifies a set of literary works (Joris-Karl Huysmans, Edmond de Goncourt, Xavier de Mais- tre, and Neal Stephenson) and architectural spaces (Thomas A. Edison’s film-studio Black Maria), where spatial organisation bears a particular and curious relationship to plot-making. The three core chapters are built upon three papers, of which the first two have been previously presented at research conferences.2 In the first chapter, the operations of text and image in narrative space are examined through novels by Huysmans, Goncourt and de Maistre. This analysis is followed in the second chapter by an investigation of the first major attempts at moving image technology and its related spatialities. The third chapter analyses a fictive technological evolution of the concept of the book into a form of media with virtual powers beyond the narrative qual- ities of both novel and film, developing into a personalised and spatially plotted game. A fourth chapter is distributed alongside the three core chapters, providing a lexicographical view of late 19th century media culture. By studying examples from literary fiction and architecture, the thesis attempts to problematise the use of organisational methods in the creation of real and virtual spaces, on the one hand by novelists who have resisted the con- ventions of plot in the text, and on the other in the “accidental” architecture of nascent film technology. introduction 1 In the absence of the plot, these examples expose a partic- ular kind of spatiality, bared to the imaginative perception of the reader and the spectator, and allow for a way of think- ing about virtual spaces, not as a pre-history of digital virtu- ality, but as a product of the time and space in which they are created and experienced. The physical space of production is reflected, not to say doubled, in the spaces where fiction meets its reader or audience. The architecture of the plotless novels and the proto-cinematic experiments of the late 19th century modulate between physical reality and fiction, and are ripe in their descriptive narrativity, which expands in the imagina- tion of the consumer. The refusal of narrative plot deprives the reader from the vehicular function in the story, but empha- sises the fictional spatial creation in which the reader becomes immersed. These spaces, by virtue of their disengagement from plot, allow us to revisit the possibilities of virtual space without preconceptions of neither the creation, nor the experience, of digital mediating technology. The plot is the link and common denominator in the text, the game, the built and the performed.