Textual Cities/Working Drawings: Rereading the Space of Drawing

Urban Planning

In the context of increased interest in literary methods for spatial design, this article argues for a reconsideration of narrative methods for urban planning. It holds that when narrative is taken not as a reified object but as an active mode, in which a strategy for organizing the phenomenal world allows for form to be created from and within the profusion of signs, the importance of heterogeneous non-narrative elements comes into full force, in particular around figurative or metaphorical language, even or especially within the narrative frame. Drawing on work from Bernardo Secchi and Paola Viganò on and around the “porous city” figure and the Greater Paris international consultations, the article makes a case for a narrative of poetic practices. By identifying the polysemic agency of the poetic function, the territorial figure becomes not a comparison between two terms, but a complex linking of similarities in multiple dissimilar states, creating an effect of rapprochement with ...

Productive Universals–Specific Situations. Critical Engagements in Art, Architecture and Urbanism, 2019

The following stage play features a fictional conversation between people of radically different cultural and social backgrounds on the question of living together in the collective high-rise housing of Paris’s banlieues. Its object is Les Espaces d’Abraxas (hereafter: Abraxas), a monumental neo-historic housing complex of about 600 apartments realized between 1978 and 1983 in the new town Marne-la-Vallée by the Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill and his office Taller de Arquitectura. Publicized as one of the first visible manifestations of postmodernism in France1 and subsequently used as a backdrop for several dystopian Hollywood movies—Brazil (1984), The Hunger Games (2015)— the associations related to this building range from a penal colony to a surreal dream. The main subject of this conversation, however, is not the building and its spectacular façade, but the transformation of collective housing during the social and political upheavals that occurred in France and other northern European countries after thirty years of welfare state provision came to an end. Apart from being a postmodern icon, Abraxas is also an exemplary case of the consequences of the debt crisis that ensued in France after the neoliberal reforms of 1977. Its accelerated decline in less than a decade resulted from the mortgage credits with which it was marketed: their flexible interest rates led to the bankruptcy of Abraxas’s housing company in 1985. On the other hand, the building complex conveys intentions of welfare state policies of social redis- tribution and was built by procedures that emerged out of the logic of Fordist production. Its eclectic pillared façade made out of prefabricated concrete panels originates in the mass housing pro- duction of the postwar boom years; and its seemingly excessive monumentality can be traced back to the ambition of the Parisian new town planners of the 1960s to structure the Paris region with modern, thriving centralities that were to fulfill not only a right to housing, but also a the “right to the city. This play confronts the memories of Abraxas’s first generation of inhabitants—which I collected in narrative biographic interviews during a six-month stay in the building in 2012—with the cultural discourse that constructed it and which permeates its social spaces. Taking the lived experience of the inhabitants as a starting point and situating the discussion inside the building changes the viewpoint from which the narrative of the demise of the social housing high- rise is usually told. The resulting polylogue of testimony and stories as well as excerpts from publications explores the emancipatory potential of discourse, which occurs at the moment when this dis- course opens up towards what, for the sake of its functioning, has to be kept outside. Torn out of context, oral statements and fragments of sentences can lose their original meaning, but their reassembly creates new relations between otherwise often incommensurable registers of speech. I have left temporal incongruencies intention- ally unresolved: discursive utterings, which extend over a time span of fifty years, remain in the present tense whereas the memories of inhabitants recalling in 2012 their experience of the 1980s and 1990s are narrated in the past tense. Finally, my own voice as an author is transmitted in the stage directions that transform Abraxas and the new town center of Mont d’Est into a stage set and thereby into a central agent of this piece. “Architecture,” then, becomes an instance that occurs in specific settings and exists only within the simultaneous entanglement of practice and representation within which it makes sense.

InfoDesign - Revista Brasileira de Design da Informação, 2022

How can the drawings contribute to the understanding of the complexity of the city? The discussion begins with the researcher’s attentive eye on the city during the process of drawing. When seeing the city from the drawing, it can improve the understanding of the urban phenomenon and suggests patterns and shapes collected in the sketchbooks, also called the graphic journals. Such shapes are related to the categories of identity, imageability, and urban quality present in the studies of authors such as Lynch and Cullen. The systematization of these morphology patterns, found when walking through the city, can be a way of relating a sensitive investigation method (the drawing) with a rational abstract method, suggesting the quantification of these forms as an index of urbanity. This article reports the investigation process of this method through a teaching experience practice when it was proposed to reflect on the practice of drawing using the graphic journal.

CityLeaks re:public, 2020

LULU.com, 2020

2018

This paper, and its accompanying suite of drawings and montages, approaches surface through Aldo Rossi's notion of the analogical city. It does so in three ways: firstly, as the surface of the city, secondly as the surface of the drawing, and third as the analogical surface of thought between city and drawing. The first surface emphasises plan-based representation centred on an analytical gaze looking from above or outside to the city as a whole. The second is a quasi-perspectival and frontal surface with the analytical gaze looking at the city from the inside. The third surface is the conceptual hinge between those two positions. Through these three readings of surface I will discuss analogical strategies of formal, representational and disciplinary critique (including critique of scale, situation, form, space, figure and ground). I will discuss how the process of the critical removal of form creates an analogical space for projective possibility, and how the accumulation of form amounts to an erasure of form in Rossi's work. The accompanying drawings and montages operate specifically in dialogue with Rossi's analogical city, but function more broadly as a move toward developing the formal knowledge of architecture as a cultural and critical project. Cameron McEwan teaches architectural design, history and theory at the Grenfell-Baines Institute of Architecture, University of Central Lancashire, and is a Trustee of the AE Foundation, an independent organisation for architecture and education. Cameron studied architecture at Dundee School of Architecture followed by a PhD on the architect Aldo Rossi and the Analogical City at the Geddes Institute for Urban Research. Cameron's work is focused on the relationship between architecture, representation and subjectivity to engage the city as a critical project. His texts and drawings have been published in JAE, Urban Blur, Outsiders for the 2014 Venice Biennale, and elsewhere.

Archtheo ’24 Proceedings Book (XVIII. International Theory and History of Architecture Conference), 2024

2020

The contribution offers a new perspective on the topic of narratives, settling links between the city, cognitive theories and the history of Architecture. As it has been neglected from a historical perspective, the power of narratives in architecture is being investigated at its most intimate roots. The paper succeeds in this work by drawing on the theories of cognitive and semiotic psychology, shedding light on architecture through its users. The individual in society, its construction, and most intimate contamination are intrinsically linked to the milieu of his/her own communities, in a continuous interaction between actions and habits, between phenomena and consolidated, stored narratives. A new space for architecture emerges. A space that not only supports as a shelter but also influences these habits, actively participating in the urban storytelling training process. Thus, as part of a whole, the architect finds his own place in contemporary cultural narratives, abandoning the...

SPACE Studies Publications, 2020

This paper focuses on the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD), established in 1976 by Spazio e Società’s founder Giancarlo de Carlo (1919-2005). This educational laboratory – an extension to Team X – invited students and acclaimed practitioners from different universities around the world to rethink urban form. During ILAUD’s formative years, the physical and social environment of Urbino functioned as a frame of reference: all participants were invited to develop strategies for urban interventions, based on a thorough understanding of the marks left by social, historical and topographical transformations on the physical space. The role of the designer, according to De Carlo, was to empathetically engage with - or read - the pre-existing layers of meaning and relationships and to articulate them through the activity of drawing. By contrasting the studio briefs of the two first ILAUD residential summer courses in Urbino to a series of highly illustrative student drawings, this paper sheds light on the different and often contradictory implementations of this method of reading by drawing. This paper furthermore argues that this experiential planning method became a tool in enabling a critical stance vis-à-vis the figure of the architectural historian and traditional ‘linear’ historiography. Reading by drawing was an attempt to retrieve an ‘essence’ which was believed to be ‘truer than history or words’, and thus involved a search for an architectural knowledge that was embedded in architectural and urban form. The paradigm of direct experience will be framed in the disciplinary exchange between historians and architects in the 1960s and 70s. In the works of De Carlo’s contemporaries such as Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo Rossi and Vittorio Gregotti, direct analyses of urban form for instance often displaced texts. Staged in a binary opposition to textual history, the method of reading by drawing upheld a promise of a more democratic and participatory way of perceiving the built environment and thus formulated a response to the alienation engendered by the post-war urban environments.

Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, 2015

In designing built space, a series of material engagements impress themselves on the process; desires and hopes find shape in the virtual forming of space, and in this drawing, or drawing out, the implacable scale and substance of building has ambiguous presence. This paper discusses the Concrete drawing, a work that hovers between building and drawing, as a lens to re-orient thinking on objects, buildings and the city. Various intra-actions between drawing, building and occupation are expanded upon, using the Concrete drawing as an armature for discussion. The work problematises as much as concludes, but points to how designing and urbanity might impress on one another, with the city having the restless potentiality of drawing.

2019

The relations between literature and architecture are so complex that, from an epistemological and methodological perspective, a great variety of approaches can be adopted in order to study them. And, actually, the rather chaotic bibliography that already exists on the mapping of those relations is a reflection of this complexity, crystallized variously within the fields of architectural theory, urban theory, semiotics, and literary theory. Firstly, sometimes authors from the discipline of architectural theory use expressions such as "architecture as a language", or "architecture as a (literary) text" or "the city as text", to create a kind of loose "analogy" between the two disciplinary fields. On the other hand, from the viewpoint of textual poetics or narratology, we can find similar, vague metaphors such as "narrative as a space", "narrative spaces", "the space of language", the "architecture of the text", or even "textual space". There seems to be another, second, family of approaches, that tends to establish a parallelism or a quasi-structural correspondence between space and narrativity, architecture and narrative, or building and narrativity, that goes beyond mere metaphors. The cases of Philippe Hamon's studies on the French realist novel or of Paul Ricoeur's famous article on "architecture and narrativity" immediately come to mind. In this paper I will argue that there is another, third, epistemological possibility of relating literature and architecture that is deeper, more significant, and may prove rather fruitful if we would wish to extract design or creative principles from such a comparative procedure. I would like to call such an approach a functionalstructural correlation that focuses on the roles and the conceptual content of the elements used to construct the above relation. The aim of the paper is to outline this possibility by organizing and typifying the bibliographical field under three distinct epistemological models usually at work when investigating the relation between literature and architecture, or between narrativity and space. Those models are conceived of as ideal types, in Max Weber's sense. In the exposition, I will specifically analyse the spatial literary theories of Gérard Genette, Elrud Ibsch, Genealogy and Prehistory of the Relations between Space and Narrative/ Language Postmodern theory played a major role in revisiting the problem of the relation between architecture and language, long after the early discussions and musings about the "architecture parlante" of the 18th century. Charles Jencks, George Baird, and Geoffrey Broadbent were some of the protagonists of those debates during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This era was exactly the heyday of semiology or semiotics. What Jencks and others tried to do is simply copy and transfer some models from linguistic and semiotic theory into architectural discourse. Jencks's argument in favour of a triple articulation (form-function-technic) of architecture, in direct relation to the famous semiological triangle developed by Ogden and Richards, is such an attempt (Jencks and Baird, 1969: pp. 13-17). And despite Gillo Dorfles's hesitation on the epistemological validity of such transfers, due to the complexity and "stereognostic" texture of architectural codes and their irreducibility to those of common spoken languages, people like Broadbent and even Christian Norberg-Schulz went on. They wanted to investigate how meaning was created by architecture, how signifiers were related to signifieds, how material buildings created "symbol-milieus" (according to Norberg-Schulz's catchy phrase) (Jencks and Baird, 1969, pp. 40-48, 51-56, 223-226), and they wanted to know whether architecture is a language or speech, following Saussure's famous dualism (Terzoglou 2018, pp. 121-123). The quest for meaningful form was a kind of heroic dimension of postmodernism, despite the fact that the protagonists themselves were supposed to nurture suspicion towards "grand narratives". This fervour attracted the attention of famous semioticians such as Umberto Eco, who started addressing the specific problems of a semiotics of architecture. Eco significantly added a flavour of scientificity to the whole debate. In his article on the architectural column, he claimed architecture's double function, the signified one being types of possible functions, but, most importantly, introduced the problem of the specificity of architecture as a discipline. The fact that when addressing spatial contexts we have a mixture of synchronic and diachronic "languages", an array of hybrid morphological and historical features that persist in time, makes the semiotic analysis of architecture not an easy task (Eco 1972, pp. 98, 113-115). My point of view, developed in a recent article, is that facing architecture, if we aspire to adequately analyse it from a semiotic perspective, we have to adopt an interdisciplinary methodological stance, merging literary theory, modal narratology, architectural theory, urban theory, and semiology, at the least (Terzoglou 2018: pp. 123-124). Juri Lotman's idea of a "semiotic continuum" could be useful for such an endeavour. Moreover, Lotman introduces the concept of "the space of the semiosphere" (2005, pp. 206-208), which is diachronic, related to cultural memory, and therefore more relevant to architecture, which addresses, basically, social values, cultural hierarchies, existential distinctions, and collective memory, through the articulation of space within a temporal continuum or framework. Note Ideal Type Two: Critical Epistemological Models There seems to be a different family of approaches, a second ideal type that articulates the relation between space and narrativity, architecture and narrativity, or building and language. This second type tends to establish a parallelism beyond mere, vague metaphors: a kind of quasi-structural correspondence between the two disciplines, architecture and linguistics, or architectural theory and literary theory. I claim that this second type of relations is based on an external comparison between two fields of inquiry, based, however, on abstract concepts. This comparison is no longer a collation but a sort of abstract but strict analogy or correspondence, making use of expressions based on "like", "such. .. as", or "between" to institute a parallelism or homology among distinct disciplinary frameworks. I would like to call such approaches, from an epistemological perspective, critical or representational conceptualisms. "Critical" because they transcend mere empiricist epistemologies using only vague metaphors, "representational" because they tend to assume a kind of one-to-one correspondence between the elements comprising each discipline, and, "conceptualism" in order to account for the fact that this family of models actually makes use of concepts in the articulation of the comparison between the disciplinary matrices at hand. Therefore, if I could compare the second ideal type with the first, the differences are striking, but, however, there is one, common element in both of them: the relation between the two parts of the comparison, architecture and language, or space and narrativity, is always assumed to be external. That is, it is presupposed that those disciplines are already readymade entities, so to speak, and then they come into contact or dialogue. To give some examples of this second ideal type, I will briefly analyse the major works and articles by Gérard Genette, Philippe Hamon, and Paul Ricoeur. Genette, in his 1966 article on the relation between space and language, already notes that "il y a toujours de l'espace dans le langage.. .. Tout notre langage est tissé d'espace " (Genette 1966, p. 107) [there is always space within language.. .. All our language's tissue is spatial]. Since language spatializes itself (1966, p. 108), we would expect why poets such as Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Proust, Claudel, and Char are obviously fascinated by place and space, claims Genette (1969: p. 44). Therefore, in his other seminal text from Figures II, on "Literature and Space", published in 1969, Genette tries to unravel the complex relation between the two concepts. The interesting feature of this article is that it somehow avoids the pitfalls of the general and vague metaphors pervading the 1966 article, inaugurating a methodology resembling ideal type two. Genette asks the crucial question of whether "space" is only one "subject" of literature among others, therefore just an object of representation for the temporal mode of existence of literary narrative (Genette 1969: pp. 43-44). If that were the case, then space would be something passive and external, and literature would only speak about space, in a kind of empiricist

The article examines how the concept of the addressee of architecture has transformed throughout the twentieth century, demonstrating how the mutations of the dominant means of representation in architecture are linked to the evolving significance of the city’s inhabitants. It presents the ways in which the reorientations regarding the dominant modes of representation depend on the transfor-mations of architects’ conceptions of the notion of citizenship. Through the diagnosis of the epistemo-logical debates corresponding to four successive generations – the modernists starting from the 1920s, the post-war era focusing on neorealist architecture and Team 10, the paradigm of autonomy and the reduction of architecture to its syntactics and to its visuality in the 1970s and the reinvention of the notion of the user and the architectural program through the event in the post-autonomy era – it identifies and analyses the mutations concerning the modes of representation that are at the heart of architectural practice and education in each generation under consideration. It traces the shifts from Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s fascination with perspective to Alison and Peter Smith-son’s Cluster City diagrams and Shadrach Woods’s “stem” and “web”, on to Peter Eisenman’s search for logical structures in architectural components’ formal relationships and his attraction to axonometric representation, and finally to the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and Bernard Tschumi’s concern with uncovering the potentialities hidden in the architectural program.

'Text' has been a frequent notion in analytical conceptualizations of landscape and the city. It is mostly found in analyses of textual representations or suggestions concerning a metaphor of " reading " an (urban) landscape. In the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics the idea of the text of St. Petersburg has also been applied in analysing particular cities as organizing topics in literature and in culture more widely, but it has not happened to an equal degree in studies of actual urban spaces. The understanding of text as a semiotic system and mechanism is, however, more promising than revealed by these conceptions. Some potential can be made apparent by relating this textual paradigm to a more pragmatic understanding of the city and its planning. My project in this paper is to uncover an analytical framework focusing on the concepts of 'text' , 'textualization' and 'texting' in studying the planning of urban environment. The paper observes the case of the urban planning process of the Tartu city centre in Estonia during 2010–2016, and is particularly concerned with the roles that urban nature has acquired in the process of this " textualization " of the local environment, societal ideals, practices and possible others.

The Journal of Architecture, 2016

Ars Aeterna, 2022

This article seeks to explore the parallels between the spatial turn embraced by contemporary literary theory and the so-called textual turn in architecture. More specifically, links between the contemporary developments of architectural theory and practice and literary criticism are established. In order to highlight the nature and origin of the connection between these two contemporary tendencies, this paper draws on a number of authoritative texts of both literary criticism as well as architectural theory, predominantly within the Anglo-American context. Architecture is presented from the viewpoint of the 20th and 21st centuries, which accentuates its liberation from a purely formal understanding by emphasizing the human involvement in its interpretation. The conception and structuring of physical spaces are therefore regarded as conditioned by processes similar to those involved in the construction of meaning in language and literature. Thus, while literary studies benefits from the extension of its field of study through the inclusion (and contemporary primacy) of the spatial point of view, architectural criticism invites active participation in the construction of its meaning, in other words, its reading. The processes of the mutual influencing and enrichment of both the textual turn in architecture and the spatial turn in literary studies is exemplified by means of contemporary architectural works that embody the synergic relationship of the two traditionally separate fields – (literary) text and architecture.