{"id":58063,"date":"2013-08-16T17:00:40","date_gmt":"2013-08-16T21:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=58063"},"modified":"2014-09-17T11:49:48","modified_gmt":"2014-09-17T15:49:48","slug":"literary-architecture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/08\/16\/literary-architecture\/","title":{"rendered":"Literary Architecture"},"content":{"rendered":"

One Friday evening in March, I took the train to Columbia University and walked into one of the strangest and most interesting classes I\u2019d ever seen. It was the Laboratory of Literary Architecture<\/a>, part of the Mellon Visiting Artists and Thinkers Program at Columbia University School of the Arts, and a multimedia workshop in which writing students, quite literally, create architectural models of literary texts. For the past four years, Matteo Pericoli has led the workshop at the Turin-based Scuola Holden creative writing school, and this year, he brought the concept to New York. While the idea seems intuitive enough\u2014each student chooses a text he or she knows inside out, and then builds it\u2014the challenges arise in interpretation. \u201cA text you love is not, necessarily, the best for this project,\u201d said Pericoli. He adds that it is crucial that students work from another author\u2019s text, rather than their own, to facilitate the true objectivity necessary.<\/p>\n

And then of course there is the question of getting away from the literal. \u201cOne student chose \u2018A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again\u2019 and thought she would just make a ship,\u201d he explains, referring to David Foster Wallace\u2019s cruise-ship odyssey. But then they learned the class\u2019s mantra: \u201cLiterary, not literal.\u201d The structure that ultimately resulted (because the writing students team up with architects to build models that must function as well as engage) was very different. Writes Elizabeth Greenwood of her final model,<\/p>\n

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I designed a rectangular structure with many floors.\u00a0Bolstered by concrete brackets, the end pieces represent the hard, inescapable fact of heavy things in the essay: the Harper<\/em>\u2019s assignment, the ship itself.\u00a0But the floors inside these brackets are made of glass to represent the clarity and truth Wallace sees during his time at sea.\u00a0On the outer edges are two parentheses turned away from one another (which might one day be openings for stairs) representing the thoughts and connections between seemingly unrelated things.\u00a0These cuts into the plexi allow light to filter through between the floors, illuminating their invisible links and also tracing seemingly disparate themes and digressions.\u00a0As the floors ascend, these parentheses edge closer to the upper right corner, where an elevator shaft penetrates through the structure.\u00a0This burst of continuity between floors represents the author\u2019s presence, and the author himself, who cannot be contained even within the clearest of glass, and who stubbornly refuses to be subdued even in the most ostensibly light of occasions, like a vacation on the high seas.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As Pericoli explained to me, the process of examining structure, flow, interconnections, the author\u2019s intentions, all managed to both mirror and illuminate the process of writing: rendering explicit that which had been intuitive, forcing students to deal in both interpretation and a little mental detective work. What is an author\u2019s intention for how a piece is read, or experienced? What is a reader\u2019s? As much as anything, the variety of interpretations\u2014and, yes, over the years, Pericoli has seen multiple students take on the same work, with wildly differing results\u2014is startling. J.\u2009M. Coetzee\u2019s Disgrace<\/em> becomes a rectangular structure with a meandering path that evokes the protagonist\u2019s unwilling shifts in perspective. To the Lighthouse<\/em> bears no resemblance to an English country house by the sea, but rather becomes a structure that centers around a vacancy: that of the mother. The exercise demands both serious imagination and intense discipline\u2014qualities essential to the disciplines of both writing and architecture but presented as dauntingly unfamiliar challenges that both force participants out of their comfort zones, and ultimately create new ones: different, yes, from the initial familiar comfort of a beloved text, but functional and fascinating all the same.<\/p>\n