22 May 2019
Paris, France
An email appeared in my inbox sometime in the spring of 2017, informing me of the AA Visiting School in Paris to be held in July: Architecture & Ecriture. I was immediately enticed by the name, and by the fragments of text describing the programme, which would explore the 'mobile' space of the essay and its contribution to the development of architectural and spatial thinking, whilst also investigating translation, encountering poetry, and visiting libraries and archives. I am British but, a few years in London aside, Paris has been my adopted home since 2002. I have worked as an architect in Paris, using French and hardly ever English, for several years. I have always made time to write, about landscape and architecture, almost exclusively in English. A moment to pause and make sense of my personal movements between producing architecture and writing about architecture, between two cultures and two languages, was timely and appealing.
Putting together my thoughts about the workshop, I am struck by how its form could be compared to the form of an essay. In her introductory lecture Caroline Rabourdin drew our attention to the fragmentary nature of the essay, 'one damned thing after another' in the words of Aldous Huxley writing about Montaigne (preface to Collected Essays, Harper Bros. 1958). The art of the essay writer is to draw a thread between these damned things, creating an image of something bigger, but remaining open ended, speculative. And to navigate between three poles: the personal and the autobiographical; the objective, factual and specific; the abstract and the universal (Huxley again).
The workshop could be considered as a series of fragments. The structured fragments of the programme: talks by diverse practitioners; visits to exhibitions, an archive and an atelier; group writing exercises and the creation of a new text; all held together by a myriad of unstructured fragments: discussions and encounters that happen whilst milling around between events, travelling to places elsewhere in the city, stopping for a coffee. Combined these form a whole, which to me could be described as a feeling of opening up the possibilities of writing, of affirming the connection between architectural space and textual mobility, of getting back to my intuitions.
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Writing workshop with Kristen Kreider. Photo by Caroline Rabourdin[/caption]
