By Tom This is the House that Jack1 Built Kendall out of 10763 words Department of Architecture 2013 1 PRE-TEXT - a note on this edition Tom This is the House that Jack Built footnotes 3 out of 10763 words red is used to highlight something of import, like a title or an alteration, addition, or important note on / in the text. By Thomas Kendall Blue is used for words that are more personal or explinatory. Published and bound by Thomas Kendall Department of Architecture Marginalia. Royal College of Art 2013 This essay contains various pieces of marginalia. They are often First Edition an analysis of the main text, so should be read only if you want to interrupt your flow. This space is not just for my marginalia but for yours also, please feel free to indulge in the joy of writing in the margins. 1 ‘Sous Rature is a strategic philosophical device originally developed by Martin Heidegger. Usually translated as ‘under erasure’, it involves the crossing out of a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place. Used extensively by Jaques Derrida, it signifies that a word is “inadequate yet necessary”.’(ref – Madan Sarup, 3 It is important to note from the outset that footnotes are an important part of this An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism p.33). - http:// essay. “I am very fond of footnotes at the bottom of the page, even if I don’t have anything in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sous_rature particular to clarify there.” (Perec, Species of Space, 11). 2 3 CONTENTS Cover ............................................................................................ 1 Afterword ................................................................................. 117 Pre-text ......................................................................................... 3 Epilogue ................................................................................... 119 Contents ....................................................................................... 4 Acknowledgement ........................................................................ 8 Pre-amble .................................................................................... 14 Appendices ................................................................................ 125 Forward ....................................................................................... 21 Opening Prologue ....................................................................... 29 Glossary of Terms ...................................................... 126 Introduction ................................................................................ 30 Study: A - Gallery of theory .................................... 130 The Stories .................................................................................. 39 B - Gallery of the Oulipo .............................. 138 Book ............................................................... 41 C - Gallery of other writers .......................... 144 Bed ................................................................. 59 Desk ............................................................... 67 Utility Room: A - 9 dot puzzle (solutions) ............. 164 B - Unused text ............................... 166 Bedroom ........................................................ 79 Staircase ......................................................... 83 Bibliography .............................................................................. 173 Balcony .......................................................... 91 Landing .......................................................... 95 Estate ............................................................. 97 Kings Cross ................................................... 103 4 5 “WHAT more glorious than to open for one’s self a new career, — to appear suddenly before the learned world with a book of discoveries in one’s hand, like an unlooked- for comet blazing in the empyrean!” 3 * * * Dedicated to my Grandpa. With thanks to my tutor Naomi for sharing and indulging my interests; to my boyfriend Joseph for his patience and to my mum Sally, for her keen eye. 3 Xavier De MAistre, A Journey Round My Room, (New York, Hurd and Houghton, Cambridge Riverside Press, 1871), p.1 6 7 ‘WHAT?’ This text and the exploration therein is not written in the traditional ACKNOWLEDGEMENT sense (see PREFACE), instead, as you will see, it is more of a of you, dear reader construction, ||ARCHITECTURE|| and this “assemblage of bits and pieces […] forces an abandonment of the idea of [the] reader as a passive receptor. The reader must engage, work on, rewrite this “ We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything: in text. The reader must be a writer.”5 & 6 the landscape, in the skies, in the faces of others, and, of course, in the images and words that our species creates. We read our own lives Along this path you will find various textual exercises and and those of others, we read the societies we live in and those that lie beyond our borders, we read pictures and buildings, we read that which experiments from the physical and visual, to the grammatical lies between the covers of a book.” and etymological, seen through the examples of others as well – Alberto Manguel 4 as TEXT-speriments of my own. This journey of the reader ‘WHY?’ 5 Jennifer Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: the (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi (Yale: It is hard to know if this should have been called an Yale University Press, 1995), 13 6 She then quotes Kristeva - “For the Ancients the verb “to read” has a meaning ACKNOWLEDGMENT; a more precise word could have been a that is worth recalling and bringing out with a view to an understanding of literary practice. “To read” was also “to pick up,” “to pluck,” “to keep watch on,” “to recognise FOREWARNING, (and forewarned is forearmed). I say this because traces,” “to take,” “to steal.” “To read” thus denotes an aggressive participation, an the journey, |…and yes, reading a text, any text, is a journey of sorts, active appropriation of the other. “To write” would be “to read” become production, industry: writing-reading, paragrammatic activity, would be the aspiration towards a a movement through…| the journey you are about to embark upon total aggressiveness and participation.” - Julia Kristeva, Semiotika, p.181 expects you to be not just a reader, but I guess a PATA-reader. (See Sub Note - This aggression put me in mind of this quote by Michel Leiris with regard to the paintings of Francis Bacon, but I think that it stands up well when talking about the For’w rd for a greater explanation of the term “pata”) the creation and interaction “Beauty must have within it an element that plays the motor role of the first sin. What constitutes beauty is not the confrontation of opposites but the mutual antagonism of these opposites; and the active and vigorous manner in which they invade one another and emerge from the conflict marked as if by a wound or depredation.” - Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon: Full Face and In Profile (New York, Rizzoli) 1983 4 Alberto Manguel, A Reader On Reading, (United States of America, Yale University Press) 2008, p. ix 8 9 into the world of PATA-modern writing is an unfamiliar adventure. You are being handed a text, a space to explore, a story-world where you will find “a struggle between antagonistic” reread subnote to footnote 6 “realities, inducing an ontological flicker, the fiction’s reality and the book’s coming into focus by turns, first one, then the other. And The Written World: The Tectonic World: this flicker seems to induce instability.”7 These structures and the In writing ‘“[v]isual and verbal John Hedjuk stated that oscillation between them causes perspectival shifts, alter-experiences effects vie for our attention.” “architecture has the double and new perceptions of what you, the reader, are reading, actively And the reader processes the aspect of making one an engaging with the text, so that you, “the reader [are] no longer a language and “becomes the text observer or voyeur externally, consumer but a producer of the text,”8 a reader-writer if you will. without losing himself as he and then completely “ingesting” reads.”’ 9 Becoming the text is as one internally. One becomes an if one is becoming a character element of the internal system in the story, navigating the text, of the organism.” 10 To become ‘WHERE?’ page to page, room to room, an architectural element is to This construction will focus on two things, simply put, architecture comma to comma. be an inhabitant, someone in and writing. As the reader, it is important that you are aware of the constructed space, to go the space[s] in which these currently occur so that over time, the through a door and navigate ontological flickering can deconstruct these worlds and build them from hall to stair, room to room, anew. cellar to attic. 9 Jennifer Bloomer quoting David Haymans, Wake on the Wake (a text about James Joyce’s, Finnegans Wake) - Jennifer Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: the (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi (Yale: Yale University Press, 1995), 7 Brian McHale, Post-modernist Fiction (Routledge: London, 1987), 180. 10 John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works, 1947-1983. New York: Rizzoli, 1985. Page 90 8 Roland Barthes, S/Z, (United Kingdom, Blackwell Publishing) 2002. p.4 10 11 ‘WHO?’ So dear PATA-reader, who are you really? You are to be the reader of this essay, the receptive writer of it, a character in its story and an inhabitant of the wor[l]d, For in