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 256 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/THLD_a_00023 by guest on 27 September 2021 a room, to a house, to a town to a city, and Hopscotch comprises inter-dependent storylines that, depending on which of Cortazar’s directives the reader follows, present the same material in different sequences. Both approaches, I thought, would make interesting premises for architectural designs: a building of nested interiors that expand in size and significance from one to the next or a subversive corridor that transgresses the hierarchical sequence of rooms by cutting across them. Additionally, the course would introduce students to different types of critical and creative writing, and a final project would enable them to adapt their analyses of the readings to a speculative design. If nothing else, I reasoned, students would learn from good writers how to speak more eloquently about their creative work. 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 257 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/THLD_a_00023 by guest on 27 September 2021 MITNICK 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 258 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/THLD_a_00023 by guest on 27 September 2021 THE SHADOW OF AN INVISIBLE CATHEDRAL 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.