A conversation immediately following my post from last night:
jonesy: what about like, aggressive repurposing of existing space?
jonesy: like you take over the apartment upstairs, and knock down a wall to the building next door
me: what in the what! this exact idea was in my dream last night!
jonesy: a secret urban labyrinth!!! that you walk right by every day and never notice
me: an apartment carved out of multiple buildings
jonesy: a bookstore would be better
jonesy: claustrophobic teetering shelves and the smell of old paper
me: and that’s in a book I’ve read! The Raw Shark Texts!
First, about my dream 2 nights ago. It was quite elaborate, as I slept in Sunday, allowing more time to dream. Part involved going to this apartment that was on the second floor of a house, which was built behind an apartment building, and another house was inexplicably built between those two. It was a convoluted path from the street to this apartment. And the detail was incredible: on the back side was a door to a roof terrace, and I noted that on the floor below, there was a similar door, but it was plastered over, from the inside. The door had glazing and a side light, and you could see the plaster backing beyond. There is so much more that I can still see, I wish I was a better artist, and was able to quickly capture what I can see in my head.
In another part of the dream, I passed a number of row houses and apartment buildings, and I could perceive that there was an apartment built through them, hidden inside, spanning multiple buildings: precisely what Jonesy suggested the following evening!
The Raw Shark Texts is a rather unusual novel. It is noteworthy for its typography/layout alone (with passages of the text formatted into sharks, etc.) but the ideas within are fascinating too. Relevant here, is un-space, which I have defined previously. Part of the novel takes place in a structure in un-space, which is made entirely out of books. It is labyrinthine, dangerous, and beautiful.
I feel I should also mention my favorite novel of all time, Remainder. Read a good, succinct synopsis here. This is book is a part of me; it is critical to the understanding of me as a person.
I once read a short story about a king who became obsessed with maps. He wanted an exceptionally accurate map of his kingdom, and the maps he orders become more and more elaborate, eventually becoming models, while also increasing in scale. At the end of the story, he orders the creation of a 1-to-1 scale model (an exact duplicate of his kingdom!).
The closest I’ve come to relating anything above to existing architectural texts is in linking “un-space” to Rem Koolhaas’s “Junkspace” (read the article in a PDF here), but his Junkspace is truly something very different, and only connects if forced. This is why I don’t have a “thesis project”—I don’t know how to connect my thoughts to established architectural literature.
I would like to make a map of unspace. I would go door-to-door, and investigate every house for unspace. I could also pick a number of well known architectural works, and study their construction documents for unspace, and diagram it.
