Ghost Buildings, Public Places: Re/writing the User Narrative
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| Ghost Buildings, Public Places: Re/writing the User Narrative
Rosa Ainley November 2013 Royal College of Art This paper looks at ways of writing on the built environment as a research methodology. It begins with a focus on methods for site research, and moves on to examining the narrative of the user, in terms of transcription: re/writing from one type of page to another, from one place to another, from one form to another. Interleaving the critical content of the presentation will be readings on the two so-called ghost buildings in the ‘public realm’ in London that are my case studies, from the speculative practice element of my research. Through the practice of critical and speculative writing my Phd project, Ghost buildings: writing the architectures of memory, examines the relationship between physical presence and language, in order to culturally recover a building that has moved beyond its original use, or has lost any function, at least temporarily, and that may have been repurposed and relocated, in order to inform its future uses. It explores how a building can exist, and have its life extended, in words, through incorporating how the user experiences the building, aspects of the process by which architecture is (Borden) ‘recomposed and reconstructed every time someone … reads, thinks listens to imagines, or otherwise encounters architecture’. The case studies selected are Alexandra Palace (1873) in north London and The o2 Arena/Dome at Greenwich Peninsula (1999), both innovative structures of their time and both originally built as exhibition spaces. The research into the lives of public buildings and spaces unfolds the role of architecture in imagination and memory, examining how memory is generated by, and attached to, architecture, and how writing can express the immaterial traces (of memory) in the material (of the building). 1 site research In this project alternative methods of site research, at the site and about the site, take the inclusion of the user – actual and imagined – as a starting point. It assumes not only that use inscribes meaning and therefore that the user contributes to the meaning of the site, as well as the architect, but also that there can be no single or definitive outcome of site research; that the site continues to be made and transformed. This research could be described as renewing or forming a relationship with the site, both as memory and as physical building: with its past in the present, in order begin another relationship for the future. Once basic project annotation has been consolidated: what is there now – typology, materials, style, programme; what was there then – historical research and reading off the building – it can lead into what might have been there and what still might be to come – speculative fictions as well as critical commentary. Along with researching into the site itself there is a concern with its contextual neighbourhood – the topography, the infrastructure, the transport links. As with the writing of place, location, culture, attributes, socioeconomic character are part of my subject. In-situ site research starts with author as user as interviewer; documenting impressions (olfactory and auditory, as well as visual impressions). This becomes a databank that continues to grow throughout the project – visiting for diverse purposes, as a visitor, as writer, as researcher, in different seasons and at different times of day, to observe or participate in events. Again, this is in order to mark what can be imagined from what can be heard and seen. In addition to the watching and listening is the walking and wandering akin to psycho-geography. Walks on site with diverse users including the architect are also planned: to document how people experience the building, and their memories, how it looks through their eyes, how it felt and feels to them. It might be said that there are transcriptions across space and time, folding, opening and refolding. The approach to site research is one aspect of transcription here, taking readings from the building on to the page, to increase understanding of the role and experience of the user. These processes eventually provide material to write from, to transcribe impressions. Reading1 Visit July 2013 At the back of the arena there’s a plaza moment, the kind of space that centuries of town planners and tyrants have striven to erase (not too much danger of massed citizens gathering here). Behind barriers reassuring that ‘there’s nothing to see behind here, honest’, the sublime scale and the design and the achievement are visible, and the sense of space makes clear the extent of the spoiler vandalism of the giganticised dolls’ house structures within. With the benefit of summer light levels the pastels of the Deco-doom frontages look an attempt at playfulness, if ill-advised. The dimness during the rest of the year, like being in an auditorium during the day, shows how reliant the Dome is on exterior light. Inside, scanning the backlit information pillar, merchandise, box office and cash machines are the three named places to go. The outside is on sale as well as the interior delights: ‘Now you can walk over one of London’s favourite landmarks’. Paths break up space rather than guiding walkers anywhere in particular, except to anchor block attached to ring beam, with inconsequential metal writing inlaid, pseudo-scientific factoids and evocative couplets of poetry. Station blue and beautiful, enviably cool on a heavy day. After 9.30 the tide of employees is replaced by the first sprinkling of tourists. A living green wall (gabion in bloom?) thrives along with the high-profile weeds. The run of seating by the water wall is marked out with metal studs into individual portions. Don’t leave anything to chance. That would be a fine thing, here. My practice-based research uses writing as research methodology, which I move on to now, for an exploration of the properties and possibilities of the scriptive, and of literary methods for architectural research, in order to construct a system of methods for this field of study, between the disciplines of writing and architecture. I write about architecture, building architectures of writing and write spaces into existence. The intention is that this will lead to an expanded field of writing architecture, and new interpretations of contemporary and historical traces including resources for future uses of buildings. Documenting case study sites and gathering data through site research then allows me to begin the process of creating the texts. Ekphrasis, the sustained description of an image, is an aspect of writing and storytelling that has been in use since antiquity, and will be employed as one tool in the research, part of exploring the possibilities of writing as methodology. I use this as a structuring device, as an aspect of disruption, punctuating the text to generate stories and responses to the factual and remembered, to introduce a different narrative voice and, in some cases, a literal interruption of an image on the page. With its visual and linguistic basis, ekphrasis is a useful device for writing about architecture, but the more general sense is that any art can describe any other. Working speculatively in practice-based research makes more crucial the need to have an understanding for which routes and methods are chosen and how; in other words, to explore with purpose and method. Mine is a critical–speculative practice through which multiple user narratives can be (re)written, explored and experimented. Stephen Muecke writes of the need for a name for this: ‘We must invent [a name] for those “critical” interventions which belong to literature while determining its limits’ (Muecke:2002:108). In this work, the name is fictocriticism. In particular, the appeal of fictocriticism here is that it disrupts the ideas of the ‘authority’ of the critical and the ‘authenticity’ of the creative. It allows the possibility of bringing the critical and the creative or speculative together in order to examine the relationship between them, to ‘mutate them’ as Amanda Nettlebeck puts it, according to the needs of the project (Kerr and Nettlebeck: 1998). Itself a mode of writing as research, fictocriticism insists on the necessity of process. More than a synonym for creative-critical, it might be described as a singular methodology; an experimental model of critical thought; and what Anna Gibbs calls an ‘entirely tactical response to a particular set of problems’ (Gibbs:2005). The method is one of written assemblage of fragments underpinned theoretically with phenomenology, the ways in which people experience or think about something; as stories working together, in counterpoint or against each other. Other aspects of the methodological approach are designed to draw out a multiplicity of contrasting and conflicting tone and voice and opinion. In this way, the role that architecture plays in the social, personal and political narratives of people’s lives is revealed and foregrounded, narratives that in turn through memory of intention and delight and disappointments create the architecture. These methods include too interrogation of the use of language; of numbers and marketing; of speculative and fictional construction; capturing conversation (literally, eavesdropping); and use of secondary sources, such as newsletters from groups using the building, in order to catch the tone, excavate implied meaning. Internally there is the language of the site: the advertising, the branding, the grey literature (leaflets, badges, stickers, info packs), the signage, though which the building relates a version of its own narrative. A case study approach brings specificity of focus: the singularity of those buildings and the correspondences and differences between them, from which the plurality of voices of the narrative can be developed. While documentation and other secondary materials provide responses to the determining questions of what a building is for, where it is sited, who designed and built it and when this happened, material from interviews with users and practitioners may help to uncover why (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, how) this happened – the open-ended, the subjective response, and the ‘how’ of how people related such stories. This is not to suggest that this type of material is somehow more ‘authentic’, but it is to assert again the importance of the user or experiencing subjects as part of the meaning of architecture. Through examining the response to buildings at different times, through studying contemporaneous as well as contemporary literatures, the work underscores ‘the process by which architecture is continually being redefined and reproduced’ (Borden in Handa and Potter 2011:xi). Reading 2 Inscription prescription transcription A leap of imagination planted palace on hill, high above London in an area a few decades from suburban, on land beyond the sprawl of the city. This palace for the people was already a reinscription in a multitude of ways from its inception. Imagined as a north London version of Paxton’s iron and glass pavilion that became known as Crystal Palace, this version attempted to replicate that success at the International Exhibition at South Kensington. Part of the structure was bought and relocated to what became Muswell Hill. With Edwardian ideas above its station, its streets named fit for a palace: avenues for princes and queens, for dukes only a road. What was prescribed was the same again – the display of the wonders of the world, astounding in what was itself a glittering spectacle of modern times. The marvel of its transparency, the democracy it suggested. No exclusions, open to all to view, even when closed. The container still as exotic as the contents. So a copy of a copy or a transcription of a copy. It struggled to repeat this prescription, with commercial failure and financial disasters and fire. A site of technologies and renewal still, it sank like a dead body or rose like a phoenix in tides of dereliction, rebuilds, reuses and fire again. Despite the subsidence that troubled it from the first, it stayed up on the hill, always loved and always a disappointment. The narrative of the user is still largely absent in the way that architecture is written about. Architecture is written about in terms of product – how tall, how many, how big, how much. It is written about in the language of hyperbole, and in terms of producer, about the architect. And once that relationship is over –at handover, the architecture is finished, the story complete. Instead it’s just the first act or the first paragraph, beginning the process of how use and the user inscribe meaning; how the user, successive or conflicting groups of users, inhabits the building, how they make the building work for their needs. Hans-Robert Jauss’s version of reception theory privileges the reception (audience or user) over production (author or architect) and in Towards an Aesthetic of Reception (1982) he provides a useful theoretical underpinning for a consideration of ghost buildings and the effects this focus on reception might have on literature and urban narratives, concerned with meaning created through dialogue between writer and reader, or architect and user. In particular for this presentation, Reception Theory highlights the relation between the individual and the collective, and this can contribute to an understanding of the changing characteristics of our cities. Jauss defends cultural particularity in time, allowing the development of different responses: changes in reception, in fact. It encompasses the historic and contemporary, forward- and back-looking, changing audience response and making new again by looking. The ‘ever necessary retelling of … history’ in what he calls the horizon of expectation, the background upon which the new is silhouetted and stands out against the received wisdom or shared given of a cultural response. It is a theory that encompasses the objective – the body of knowledge constructed by codes and conventions – and the subjective, the collection of particular personal memory/experience. It allows a dynamic understanding, rather than a passive reception, that the building or text is therefore subject to change and development, assessment through the standards of its time and the time of the current user, as individual or collective understandings that evolve in time are incorporated. This research is designed to help populate the absence of the post-construction life of architecture, which has also been largely missing from debate. If the reality of the building is always being ‘brought into being … never fixed or stable’ (Handa and Potter:2011:xii), the processes of the writing must somehow follow or match this, through developing methods and approaches to writing architecture with a view to the future use of buildings. In this work in progress, this might be described as a further transcription to come. In my intention to contribute to understandings of the workings of the public realm through developing a particular form of writing architecture that experiments with relationships between writer/reader, user/architect, writing/architecture, I am in the process of transcribing from one time to another, from one building to another, from the physical to textual, the built to the imaginary, and fiction to commentary, looking to the future from the past to the present and back again. References Books:
Tim Anstey, Katja Grillner, Rolf Hughes, eds. (2007), Architecture and Authorship, London: Black Dog Publishing Gaston Bachelard (1994), The Poetics of Space, Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press Iain Borden (2011), ‘Foreword’, in Rumiko Handa and James Potter, eds., Conjuring the Real: The Role of Architecture in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (pp.67–86), Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press Hans Robert Jauss and Timothy Bahti (1982), Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Alexandra Lange (2012), Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities, New York: Princeton Architectural Press Alastair Lansley (2008), The Transformation of St Pancras Station, London: Laurence King C. J. Lim and Ed Liu (2011), Short Stories: London in Two-and-a-half Dimensions, London: Routledge Jane Rendell (2010), Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism, London: I B Tauris & Co Ltd Articles: Stephen Muecke (2012). ‘Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism Without Judgement’ in Cultural Studies Review pp.40-58, Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing. Websites: Anna Gibbs (2005), ‘Fictocriticism, Affect, Mimesis: Engendering Differences’. Retrieved 12 June 2013 from www.griffith.edu.au/school/art/text http://www.alexandrapalace.com/about-us/our-history/ http://www.alexandrapalace.com/about-us/regeneration/the-heritage-lottery-fund-project/ http://victorianweb.org/ Directory: 2013 2013 -> Annual InStructional unit plan 2013 -> The Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine 2013 -> #1 a lifesafer of virginia inc 2013 -> Name(s): your name here team or Group #(if applicable): Professor’s name 2013 -> Alcott Local School Council (lcs) Meeting Minutes 2013 -> Table Of Contents introduction 2 2013 -> Supplemental demographic information 2013 -> 【Education&Working Experience】 Download 24.54 Kb. Share with your friends:
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