Spatial Perspectives

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Illustrations

TERRI MULLHOLLAND AND NICOLE SIERRA

Introduction

Figure 1.1:     St Cross Building, Manor Road, University of Oxford, by Leslie Martin and Colin St John Wilson, 1964. Courtesy of Bodleian Law Library.

JULIAN FERRARO

Comics and the Architecture of Nostalgia: Seth’s Dominion City

Figure 3.1:     ‘Life is but a dream’, George Sprott: (1894–1975). Drawn & Quarterly (2009).

Figure 3.2:     Coronet Lecture Hall, George Sprott: (1894–1975). Drawn & Quarterly (2009).

Figure 3.3:     ‘A confection for the mind’, George Sprott: (1894–1975). Drawn & Quarterly (2009).

Figure 3.4:     ‘Channel 10 on your dial’, George Sprott: (1894–1975). Drawn & Quarterly (2009).

Figure 3.5:     ‘Enjoy our high-hat service’, George Sprott: (1894–1975). Drawn & Quarterly (2009).

NATHANIEL ROBERT WALKER

Crystallizing Visions: Glass Architecture in Utopian Literature before and after 1851

Figure 4.1:     Glass palace from David M. Moore, The Ages of Progress, 1856. Courtesy of the John Hay Library, Brown University. ← vii | viii →

HENDERSON DOWNING

To the Roundhouse: Returning London Psychogeography

Figure 5.1:     Exterior of the Roundhouse from Regent’s Park Road, London. Copyright Henderson Downing.

LISA MULLEN

Literature and Distraction: Poetic Inscription at the 2012 London Olympics and the 1951 Festival of Britain

Figure 6.1:     The wall inscribed with lines from Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’. Commissioning architect Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. Photograph courtesy of Timothy Soar Archive.

Figure 6.2:     Interior of the Lion and Unicorn pavilion at the 1951 South Bank Exhibition. Crown Copyright 1951 / Royal College of Art archive.

DARREN R. DEANE

Louis Kahn’s Translation of the Fairy Tale: A Study in Literary-Architectural Interaction

Figure 7.1:     GM Pavilion Development Sketch, Louis Kahn, 1964. Louis I. Kahn Collection, Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, USA.

ESRA ALMAS

Representation, Refuse and the Urban Context in Orhan Pamuk’s Museum(s) of Innocence

Figure 8.1:     Collection of 4,213 cigarette butts. Image courtesy of The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul. ← viii | ix →

GREG THOMAS

The Tower of Babel: Concrete Poetry and Architecture in Britain and Beyond

Figure 9.1:     Augusto de Campos, ‘Quadrado’, typescript, 1 March 1959. Author’s private collection, São Paulo. Reproduced by kind permission of Augusto de Campos.

Figure 9.2:     Edwin Morgan, ‘Construction for I. K. Brunel’ and Dom Sylvester Houédard, [‘puffpuffpuffpuffpuffpuffpuff’], in Link [8] (1964), [12]. Reproduced by kind permission of the Edwin Morgan Trust, Carcanet Press and the Prinknash Abbey Trustees.

Figure 9.3:     Ian Hamilton Finlay, ‘Homage to Malevich’, in I. H. Finlay, Rapel: Ten Fauve and Suprematist Poems (Edinburgh: Wild Hawthorn, 1963), n.pag. Reproduced by courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay.

Figure 9.4:     Ian Hamilton Finlay, The Four Seasons in Sail (1968), marble, Little Sparta, Dunsyre, Edinburgh. Photograph Stephen Bann. Reproduced by courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay, with acknowledgements to Stephen Bann.

Figure 9.5:     John Furnival, [The Tower of Pisa] ([Woodchester], Openings, 1964). Reproduced by kind permission of John Furnival.

YASMINE SHAMMA

‘Room in the room that you room in?’: Ted Berrigan’s Structures

Figure 10.1:   Ted Berrigan, perched outside New York City apartment window. Photograph by LaVerne Harrell Clark, 1981, courtesy of The University of Arizona Poetry Center. Photograph copyright Arizona Board of Regents. ← ix | x →

MAGDALENA J. ZABOROWSKA

No House in the World for James Baldwin: Reading Transnational Black Queer Domesticity in St Paul-de-Vence

Figure 11.1:   Street view of the property [Chez Baldwin] in 2000. Copyright Magdalena Zaborowska.

Figure 11.2:   Front door in 2014. Copyright Magdalena Zaborowska.

Figure 11.3:   Interior with mantel assemblage by David Baldwin. Copyright Magdalena Zaborowska.

Figure 11.4:   Street Naming in Harlem, 2 August 2014. Copyright Magdalena Zaborowska.

Figure 11.5:   Study in 2000. Copyright Magdalena Zaborowska.

Figure 11.6:   Study in 2014. Copyright Magdalena Zaborowska.

Figure 11.7:   Ceiling 2000. Copyright Magdalena Zaborowska.

Figure 11.8:   Ceiling 2014. Copyright Magdalena Zaborowska.

Figure 11.9:   Interior, the writer’s living quarters and study, in 2014. Copyright Magdalena Zaborowska.

Figure 11.10: Chez Baldwin 2014, Window with vines. Copyright Magdalena Zaborowska.

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TERRI MULLHOLLAND AND NICOLE SIERRA

Introduction

Figure 1.1:  St Cross Building, Manor Road, University of Oxford, by Leslie Martin and Colin St John Wilson, 1964. Courtesy of Bodleian Law Library.

On a June day, researchers from the fields of literature and architecture gathered in a Grade II* listed example of mid-century modernism for a conference. The St Cross building was designed to house the University of Oxford Faculties of Economics and Statistics, Law, and English Language and Literature by Sir Leslie Martin (of Royal Festival Hall fame) and Colin St John (‘Sandy’) Wilson (best known for the new British Library). Devised in the mid-1950s and completed in 1964, the building was intended for interdisciplinarity, the idea being that the gallery outside the lecture theatre was to act as a central meeting place, where scholars from economics, law and English would share space and formulate relationships. This attempt at an interdisciplinary hub failed. Rapidly each department developed its ← 1 | 2 → own entrance and its own areas within the building as each Faculty became more insular. Our conference was another attempt to bring diverse disciplines together in this fertile space. While we cannot claim to have solved the problems of interdisciplinarity on one summer’s day, it did result in us commissioning the exciting collection gathered here.

We imagined this as a discursive exchange with literature and architecture ‘speaking’ to each other. The four principal themes that emerged from this approach are: representation, discourse and language, formal comparisons (i.e. can a text be formally structured like a building and vice versa) and finally influence and inspiration. Our authors consider the connections, movements and paradoxes between literature and architecture in relation to particular writers, to literary and architectural texts as well as in relation to architectural theory and practice. The concern of this collection is to reveal the creative potential when literature and architecture meet. Throughout these essays there is an ongoing engagement with the wider links between the social and cultural relationships engendered by these debates. Architecture is more than just buildings, attendant furniture, and drawings, just as literature is more than just novels and poetry. Our hope is that this collection contributes to an ongoing conversation about interart studies; it is by no means the final word.

The book is divided into four distinct thematic units, which all draw together in a productive theoretical debate between literature and architecture. Discussions are balanced between urban and domestic, public and private. The essays are organized around the following four themes: ‘Urban Landscapes: Text and Image’, ‘Architecture as National Literary Event’, ‘Textual Spaces / Spatial Texts’ and ‘Reading the Domestic Interior’.

The first section ‘Urban Landscapes: Text and Image’ offers a new consideration of built landscapes as represented in fictional worlds. The two essays critically explore how text and image work together to create ‘literary architecture’. Focusing on the representative challenges of narrating built space, this section considers unexplored aspects of the urban. The first essay by Douglas Tallack explores the evolving role of New York skyscrapers in the novels of Henry James and Don DeLillo, alongside the developments in the visual arts. Tallack considers how writers have sought variously to respond to the challenge which the emerging and complex ← 2 | 3 → high-rise visuality of New York City has levelled at formal aspects of fiction, notably perspective and narrative. The next essay by Julian Ferraro goes on to consider the imaginary drawn landscape of a Canadian city in comic book fiction, focusing on the work of the cartoonist Seth (Gregory Gallant) who created three-dimensional architectural models of the significant buildings of a fictional town. Seth then incorporated photographs of these models into his texts to provide memorializing simulacra of the comic book originals.

In the second section ‘Architecture as National Literary Event’ the reader is taken through a series of British case studies that demonstrate the long-standing relationship between architectural structures and literature in ‘staging’ and creating event space. It opens with Nathaniel Robert Walker’s essay about the influence of the Crystal Palace on subsequent utopian aspirations in literature and architecture. Lisa Mullen explores the creation of visionary architecture through literary texts further in an essay on the Festival of Britain and the London 2012 Olympics. Connecting these essays is Henderson Downing’s consideration of the London Roundhouse as a notable hub for performing psychogeographical space. The aim of the section is to identify counter-narratives of identity, postcolonialism and empire through a reading of these event spaces.