Paper Castles | A guide to literary architecture in order to explore books (and oneself) in an innovative way

by Andrea Fioravanti

For eleven years Matteo Pericoli has been teaching students around the world how to analyze the narrative structure of a story and creatively and imaginatively transform it into a building. Out of this experience came “The Great Living Museum of the Imagination” (il Saggiatore), itself written as if it were a museum to explore, complete with a map and bookshop

Dickow, Niddam, Porat, Topaz based on a short story by Yonathan Raz Portugali – Hebrew University of Jerusalem

For Ennio Flaiano, the great books are not the ones we browse carelessly, consume out of envy or emulation, finish in haste, in anger, to keep up with the literary fashion of the moment; they are the ones we read so many times that we inhabit them, feeling them on us like certain corners of our house. We keep them on the bedside table, in our purse or on a precise shelf in the bookstore to take refuge when we need them most. To seek answers to questions that life distractedly poses to us. Some books are shaped like a tent, some like a penthouse, some like a house on a hill.

However, it took the multifaceted nature of an architect, illustrator, teacher and writer to discover how to analyze the architecture of a story and transform it with creativity and imagination into a building. For eleven years Matteo Pericoli has been guiding students all over the world (the United States, Italy, Israel, Switzerland, Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates) in a game that has now become a surprising experiment where there are no mistakes, because there is no dogma to follow: the Laboratory of Literary Architecture. This multi-year work has become a book: “The Great Living Museum of the Imagination” (il Saggiatore), written in turn as if it were a museum to explore, complete with a map and bookshop.

n this generous guide that is attentive to the reader’s pace, Pericoli reveals the secrets to opening up to the mysterious but continuous link between fantasy and construction. And so Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness becomes a soaring inverted pyramid whose apex lies dozens of feet underground; Elena Ferrante’s L’amica geniale is transformed into two buildings that support and repel each other. And so on it goes, building. This cultural construction site does not end with the book, but expands into a constantly updated bilingual site.

“Eleven years ago a flame was lit in me, igniting a fuse whose effects I had not foreseen. I had just returned from the United States, and when I was offered a workshop at the Scuola Holden, at the time a small space on Via Dante in Turin, I decided to delve into a concept that had been rattling around in my head. Why is it that a story is said to have structure, to have a foundation, or to “not stand”? Yet I realized that in talking with students about narrative structures, words were not enough. There was an amount of information that was missing. So I asked them, ‘Why don’t you show me using cardboard, scissors and glue?’ This trivial question led me to a surprising discovery.”

Which discovery?
We all have a giant underground reservoir of unexplored knowledge. A cauldron of creative energy given by reading that we often fail to access because if we go to search for it with words we only dig up the same concepts that we had worked out in the past by copying other people’s thoughts. Instead of continuing to use words to explain something that was made of words, we try to give tangible form to our thoughts about the book. By doing so, I have noticed that knowledge increases tenfold. And it applies to everyone. From the high school students who take my classes to those who have not read as many books or are not familiar with architecture. This phenomenon is repeated at every workshop.

Let’s pause for a moment at the entrance of this museum-book in which you invite the reader to leave in the wardrobe the cumbersome baggage that prevents a better understanding of the links between stories and architecture. What are the most difficult obstacles to leave behind?
For example, thinking that the relationship between architecture and literature is an insurmountable intellectual endeavor; not feeling up to it and necessarily proving that you are intelligent and prepared before reading a book. But above all, skepticism; the same skepticism I encounter at the beginning when I propose this game. At the first workshop meeting I see some dismayed, terrified faces. Then on the second and third day I am overwhelmed by the crazy enthusiasm of those who understand how good it feels to be on the other side.

On the other side with respect to what?
With respect to preconceptions. Beyond our prior knowledge about style, narrative, the labels we give to books. Stories are not punctual roads to be traveled based on directions given by others, but buildings to be explored freely, immersing ourselves in a literary space. Obviously this space is constructed by someone else, the writer, but in the end the constructions are almost entirely done by us, in our own minds. The hope is that once the museum-book begins the reader will say, you know what? I’m going to leave these bulky bags there and come out lighter than when I went in.

So let’s go in light and give an example of an architectural construction inspired by a narrative structure.
During a workshop, I was struck by the different ways in which Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” can be viewed. For the architects, the love story between the two characters was square, like a parallelepiped, while for the high school kids it was cylindrical, perhaps more idealized. These responses fill your mind and body with a positive feeling, because with a text they would not have been able to deepen the relationship between the two main characters like that. The same happened with Amy Hempel’s extraordinary short story entitled “The Harvest.” In eleven years of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, no two buildings ever looked alike. The point is that our thoughts have a pre-verbalized shape and feeling, different for everyone, which we often ignore, jumping immediately to the next step to feed our inner monologue. The workshop enhances what the written words deflate. There are continuous results because this process is something extremely natural that only comes out if we relax.

Could this innovative approach be used in schools to bring young people, as well as older people, closer to reading?
Certainly. Realizing that reading is similar to exploring a place whose ultimate shape is embedded in our synapses might be a drive to approach stories in a different way. That is, not trying to replicate what others have previously said or thought about that book. Because a work has been presented to us as beautiful, ugly, simple or complex, we should not look for a feeling in the text that others have already found. We know much more than we think we know. By going back to the source of ideas that have weight and form, we can all find our own spaces, building, deconstructing, tearing down and starting over. And mistakes no longer exist; there are no teachers and no students.

In the book you delve into two important concepts that literature and architecture share: emptiness and context.
Architecture is the constant companion of our entire existence. We spend our lives crossing, passing through buildings and spaces one after another. To understand them we talk about styles and forms, but we often neglect the most powerful effect of architecture: what is not there. Our rooms are surrounded by walls, but we live and work within the one space that has not been built. And so also in stories we give so much importance to pages, paragraphs, sentences and words, neglecting how important the space within a story is. An ineffable element that we have to reconstruct in our minds. And how we do that necessarily depends on the context. Not only the one within which the book or building escapes, but also my context: everything I have learned, heard, believed so far; my expectations and ideas that make me always approach the story or space differently according to my existential condition at that moment. Focusing on different details and spaces each time.

You talked about how much architecture is in literature, but how much literature is in architecture?
Architecture is impregnated with narrative. Each compositional choice made by whoever designed the spaces we live in (from the sequence of volumes to their connections, from what is revealed to what is concealed, from the impact of light to the mystery of darkness, and so on) is actually a narrative choice, sometimes made consciously and sometimes not. Architecture then determines the narrative of our day. Think of the moment when you cross the threshold and leave your house in the morning: in your head you think something new is beginning but that something actually does not exist because outside the door nothing has begun and nothing has ended, everything has always existed. Architecture is our device for framing our daily narrative: opening the window to change the air in the morning, leaving the house, returning home, going up the stairs, going down the stairs. This interaction with architecture is unconscious but deeply narrative and determines how we frame the narrative of our lives. Every movement we make is a reading of space, and without knowing it we are already able to understand the concatenation of narratives of the architecture around us. Why do we exit a building and go right instead of left?

And by instinctively knowing architectural spaces are we able to analyze narrative structures?
Yes, everyone in their own way gives meaning to different elements by privileging one over the other. The door has a clear narrative potential, but for someone the height of a ceiling may be important. A window put in the right place may be a revelation for someone. But if you convey that to another narrative need, it doesn’t work at all. Imagine the first time someone with a hammer or sledgehammer knocked down a piece of wall in a building of any kind, primordial or otherwise, and saw the world outside without being able to walk through it. Who knows, maybe every architectural element has its literary counterpart, after all, that’s how stories are born.

Castelli di carta | Guida all’architettura letteraria per esplorare in modo innovativo i libri (e sé stessi)

by Andrea Fioravanti, published on Linkiesta on November 26, 2022:
https://www.linkiesta.it/2022/11/museo-vivente-immaginazione-pericoli-saggiatore/

The Great Living Museum of the Imagination

It doesn’t seem real.

After four years of work, what at first looked like a confusing sequence of rooms has become a real book-building.

The Great Living Museum of the Imagination: A Guide to the Exploration of Literary Architecture, published by Il Saggiatore, comes out Friday, November 25.

A Window Open Onto the Mind

Saul Steinberg: the legacy of a genius

by Matteo Pericoli

 
Published in the March 2022 issue of L’Indice dei libri del mese
Saul Steinberg 1978. Photo by Evelyn Hofer

One of the greatest challenges we encounter when trying to interpret Saul Steinberg’s work is trying to find the right angle of approach. The typical mistake we often make is trying to classify him: Is he an illustrator? No, or maybe yes; Is he a cartoonist? Sure! No, of course not; A brilliant draftsman? Yes, a draftsman for sure, or maybe not? Is he perhaps more simply, or more generically, an “artist”? Well, that’s a given. However, as we carefully approach the complex figure of Saul Steinberg it feels as if not even the all-encompassing word “artist” is accurate enough. He was not just an artist; he was something more. But what?

Steinberg was born into a Jewish family in Romania in 1914. He lived in Bucharest until 1933 when he moved to Milan, Italy, where he studied architecture at the Regio Politecnico. Within a few years he began to publish drawings in various Italian magazines and enjoy a certain success. Yet, his situation got complicated by the racial laws, so much so that as soon as Italy entered the war he decided to immigrate to the United States. However, he was arrested before he could leave and spent a period of several months of internment in Abruzzo. In the summer of 1942 he finally managed to arrive in New York.

Steinberg’s work at that point was already well-known in the United States. In fact, thanks to several acquaintances, in the period right before entering the country he had already published many drawings in various American magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and Life. Upon his arrival in New York, Steinberg started practically immediately to collaborate with The New Yorker magazine, contributing covers, illustrations, drawings, cartoons and so on — something he would continue to do, with exceptional and perhaps unparalleled success and freedom, for the rest of his life.

Many clues to the difficulties in describing him are found in quotes from Steinberg himself, such as: “I was born in a complicated country, one had to pave one’s own’s way through several contradictory truths, a magnificent school for a novelist. The only characters I respected, the only ones I could converse with, were characters from novels. I believed that books were of divine origin, and when I realized that they were written by ordinary people (who were therefore unknown before they became famous), I was so impressed that I said to myself, ‘Then I can do it too!’” (Riga, p. 111)

However, his conflictual relationship with Romania, the “infernal homeland” (Lettere a Aldo Buzzi, p. 278), his betrayal by Italy and its racial laws, and his being an immigrant, albeit a naturalized one, in the United States meant that Steinberg lacked a language with which he could express himself with total ease and with the same familiarity of the novels he adored.

In an incessant search for himself, his identity, and a language of his own through his work, Steinberg sought on the one hand to define himself, find himself, know himself, and make himself known, while on the other hand simultaneously create and erase any traces and images of himself.

It was Steinberg himself who recounted how in the midst of this dogged research he ended up inventing “a language that did not exist before as a language.” He chose a “raw material,” i.e., drawing, and used it “to express his poetic or philosophical ideas” (Riga, p. 106). It was not the kind of drawing that comes from the tradition of life drawing, because, as Steinberg said, “life drawing reveals too much about me […] I become a kind of servant, a second-rate character” in which “I see […] my own defects.” In drawings “made from imagination,” however, Steinberg could both hide himself and introduce multiple levels of reading and interpreting his work: “I show myself and my world in the way I choose.” (Riflessi e ombre, p. 59)

And so we, the viewers, through his work, do not have access (as is usually the case) to what Steinberg “sees” as he draws; rather, we are faced with an open window into his mind and thoughts, as in a literary text or essay or treatise.

In all of this I think architecture played a very significant, albeit indirect, role. Steinberg said that the study of architecture was for him “wonderful for everything but architecture. The frightening thought that what you draw can turn into a building makes you lean toward perfectly reasoned lines.” (Riga, p. 38) His lines then, so reasoned, precise, and with crystal clear intent, are the visible imprints of his intuitions, thoughts, and reasoning.

But not only that. Just like the greatest architects, Steinberg even seemed to know what we, in turn, think or know. In fact, his drawings remind me of the Parthenon in Athens. In wanting to convey a sense of harmony, proportion and clarity, the builders of the Parthenon knew that our minds correct, modify and see in a distorted way. For example, they knew that the columns at the edges should be slightly enlarged and pushed a little closer to the others, otherwise they would risk appearing farther apart and smaller than the others; or that the base of the tympanum should be slightly curved downwards, otherwise its ends would give the impression of turning up instead of appearing horizontal. Therefore, the relationship that is established between those who build and those who absorb (in this case, an architectural space) is a sort of interconnection or collaborative effort between two creative sources: that of the designer and that of the viewer.

It is not by chance that the philosophers Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi wrote that “commenting on a drawing by Steinberg is […] like commenting on the work of a colleague” (Riga p. 398). Non only did Steinberg want and know how to speak to everybody, he wanted to be heard by everybody too.

To better approach his work, we therefore have no choice but to linger in front of his drawings, resist the desire to classify him, let his lines seep into our minds and land in his fantastic world.

— March 2022

Books quoted (citations translated by me):
Riga 24, Saul Steinberg, Marcos y Marcos (Italy, 2005)
Saul Steinberg, Lettere a Aldo Buzzi 1945-1999, Adelphi (Italy, 2002)
Saul Steinberg con Aldo Buzzi, Riflessi e ombre, Adelphi (Italy, 2001)