Re-routing architectural practice: from the literary to the spatial, and back again

Klaske Havik, Urban Literacy: Reading and Writing Architecture

nai010, 256pp, £30.35, ISBN 9789462081215

reviewed by Rosa Ainley

The motif of dotted and dashed lines on the matte blue of the cover immediately presents the idea of a series of paths and routes and penetrable borders, crossing and overlapping each other. We’re going somewhere. In modern times everything’s a journey it seems, whether or not tickets are involved. Here this is explicit, and fittingly the journey starts on a bridge, with its suggestion of linkage, separation and connection, departure and arrival. Between these points, the first and last sections of Urban Literacy: Reading and Writing Architecture, a highly structured and pleasingly ambitious book, are the stations of Description, Transcription and Prescription. Referencing Ed Soja’s Thirdspace (1996), Henri Lefebvre’s ‘conceptual triad’ and Martin Heidegger’s essay ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, this tripartite idea is embedded through the work. It begins and ends with Klaske Havik’s use of Ljubljana’s triple bridge as the subject of her prologue and epilogue, establishing the bridge as more than a metaphor.

Urban Literacy can be read as an extended phenomenological methodology for the use and value of the literary in architectural theory, practice, research and education. It’s an extended and extensive manifesto, highly impressive. This literacy of the literary, while arguably essential to architecture, is certainly not basic. The term ‘urban literacy’ – ‘the ability to read, write and understand the city’ – comes originally from Charles Landry, founder of the consultancy Comedia and writer on the urban, regeneration and culture. Havik is taking his ideas forward here to root them in the spatial in order to explore further the possibilities of the role of writing in the practice of architecture. Juhani Pallasmaa’s Foreword posits the still quite radical notion that ‘writing and literature can be utilized even as practical tools in various aspects of design processes of actual architectural and planning tasks.'

Havik’s premise is that literature provides insight into how buildings and spaces are used, experienced and imagined, and that it is in novelistic or poetic portrayals of space by literary authors that architecture is ‘more accurately described than in professional writings on architecture and cities’. In itself this is unsurprising. Literature has the time and space to address experience of places; architecture has to create places in which to have that experience. Architects, like artists, are not generally writers, nor best placed to write about their own work, and not just those who are infamous for their obscurantism or ‘archispeak’.

Although architecture is intrinsically interdisciplinary – and similarly ‘[t]he strength of urban literacy lies in the idea that multiple disciplines and perspectives are used simultaneously’ – an architect is unlikely to have the time to develop the receptivity of a poet, but could employ one. The range of other disciplines, roles and skills necessary for a project might include the impressionistic or dreamlike intensity, which characterises observers such as Calvino and Benjamin according to Havik, along with the precisions or specificity of the design process. Transcription – the second of the stations or sections, about author and reader (or user and architect) – is not necessarily into different media, it can also mean ‘re-authoring’ or rewriting for different audiences and formats. If, as suggested, phases of the project could benefit from evocative description to express the characteristics or specificity of place, ‘fragments of atmospheres’ and ‘perceptual qualities’, the poet or writer’s involvement needs to be integral, not just entering at an early stage as she notes.

With the methodological triad overlapping and merging at the edges, the specific tension (or ambiguity as Havik styles it) of each section is addressed in sequence, complete with an architect as case study. With description, focusing on subject and object, comes Steven Holl; transcription, between architect/ure and user, is Bernard Tschumi; and Rem Koolhaas with reality and imagination is part of prescription. When these apparent opposites ‘come together in design and produce a new, third condition’, such ‘moments of intersection’ are at the heart of architecture and urban design processes for Havik, and urban literacy can create the routes towards them.

For all the certainty of her divisions Havik recognises and celebrates the strength of reverberations between them. Linking specificity with the impressionistic, she cites Benjamin’s ‘impressionistic chronotype’, which combines a ‘fragmented account of space with a momentary account of time.’ Where it is perhaps less convincing is when it appears that categories and authors are being boxed off. A grid showing intersecting concepts; spatial theory; literary instruments; theoretical references; literary references; and architectural references demonstrates the inadvisability of this, although may have been a useful tool in process.

Urban Literacy is bulging with so much material that it seems unhelpful to suggest including more. The bookends of Havik’s prologue and epilogue whet the appetite and it is disappointing that no more of this aspect of her writing is included – a version of more show, less tell. Describing her own experience of Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts in Parc de la Villette, she recounts her own experience and construction of narrative, recalling ‘the atmosphere of possibility’, rather than the route, or shapes or forms. Again, the vigour in this type of writing demonstrates the potential power of urban literacy. It may seem misguided, too, in an architecture book that is so firmly championing the scriptive to make a plea for more visuals, which are included in the architecture sections only. There is an issue of scale here also, in particular with Holl’s St Ignatius chapel in Seattle. Larger images would be invaluable in demonstrating her and his thesis, and the images of Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts are too small to be really legible.

There are questions about terminology: predominantly the use of the word prescription. In addition to its sense of ‘to write before’, it strongly suggests something laid down as a rule, already decided. In its adjectival sense, one of the difficulties of architecture is that it is prescriptive, necessarily pinning down uses as planners and architects dealing with a not-yet-existing situation and site. At the same time, at its most successful ‘alternative realities’ are also made possible. Within literary description, the built environment is described as though employed as decor, as merely illustrative, when it is intrinsic in the work of authors she cites, such as Georges Perec and WG Sebald – standard reading in architectural milieux. Among many examples are the apartment block in Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (1978), which constitutes the entire structure for the book, and the pivotal waiting room, a space of memory and deferral, central to the eponymous Austerlitz’s story by Sebald.

Repeated use of ‘literary fiction’, even though both citations and her own contributions extend beyond this, indicates a lack of interest in genre or what is described here as ‘minor’ literature from ‘cultural and linguistic minorities’ – problematic terms that could stand some unpicking. For example, detective fiction or graphic novels, have both been fertile material for architects in recent years. (Yet another echo: minor literature leads to Jill Stoner’s Towards a Minor Architecture (2013), useful as a companion volume to this.) The influence of Archigram is mentioned as a magazine but oddly not as a practice and no citation for NATØ.

When site writing is discussed in the education section of the book, no mention is made of Jane Rendell, as a practitioner and proponent, even if only to say this is an adjectival use, not a title. Further ideas for instilling urban literacy through architectural education include exercises to address the senses; combining writing with model-making (and seeing what emerges from the gaps); scenario writing; how spaces are experienced by other ‘characters’; and the process of address the imaginary user. To these might be added: talking to actual users in addition to imagining fictional others and a more self-conscious development of imagined possibilities as a positive – not simply an uncertainty.

There is clearly much more to follow, particularly in the final sections on education and research, probably deserving of their own books. Talking about new projects, Havik adds three further themes that echo throughout – atmosphere, appropriation and indeterminacy. In post-recessionary times, a provocation for architecture is often about taking buildings apart, adding to their remains rather than starting from scratch, redevelopment of postindustrial sites, changes in client structure, programme and use(s). Such challenges demand new roles from architects and planners, and alternative research methods to take consideration of ‘atmosphere, the experience of public realm, and site-specific narratives’, which is precisely where urban literacy comes in.
Rosa Ainley is a writer and a PhD candidate at the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art.