What structure over there awaits the end?

L’Indice dei libri del mese

review by Francesco Gallo

Matteo Pericoli
Il grande museo vivente dell’immaginazione
Guida all’esplorazione dell’architettura letteraria
168 pp, 25 €
Il Saggiatore, Milan 2022

January 30, 2023

Who knows where Italo Calvino would have placed a book like this: among the Books That Are Missing To Put Next To Others On The Shelf, or the Novelties Whose Author Or Topic Attract Us? We like to think that the author of If One Winter’s Night a Traveler would have placed The Great Living Museum of the Imagination among the Books That Inspire Sudden, Frantic And Not Clearly Justifiable Curiosity.

More than a book, in fact, it is a guidebook; a Guide to the Exploration of Literary Architecture. There are Maps (Ground Floor, First and Second Floor), a Legend of Spaces (Entrance, Rooms 1 and 2, and Inner Courtyard). And there is a guide, of course: the author himself – speaking in a voice that is not his, but ours (but we will understand this as we read on…). A guide who, instead of escorting us along a series of obligatory steps, as a first thing wants us to feel free; free to go where we please, observe what we please, and, most importantly, imagine what we please. He is quick to reiterate, in fact, that “museum” comes from “mūseóon,” meaning the place sacred to the daughters of Zeus where one could contemplate and imagine in full autonomy.

But what is literary architecture? It is an ongoing discovery. Not only that: an attempt to increase our awareness when we relate to spaces (and the void). More: a series of educational workshops that, over the past twelve years, architect, designer and author Matteo Pericoli has held around the world; from Turin (where it all began) to New York, via Dubai.

Inspired by the discovery of a lexicon common to both architecture and literature – how many times have we heard, about a story endowed with uncertain logical connections, that it “lacks structure,” “wobbles,” or “doesn’t stand up”? -, Pericoli has traversed the history of architecture as an attempt to narrate; at first simple, then increasingly complex.

What is the impulse that unites the first hut – when the basic idea was that of a “roof-over-the-head-so-I-don’t-get-wet” – to the first “house-with-a-window” – an “architectural element that connects what is tangible (the frame itself) with the intangible (the view, the outside) and thus the real with the imaginary, the everyday with the absolute” – if not a narrative impulse, the incipit of a story destined irrevocably to complicate itself?

Alice Munro writes: “A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows.”

By stripping architecture of its least relevant elements – the style, the name of the person who designed a certain project, its historical value – Pericoli shows us the spot where the essential lurks; that which “can neither be touched (the space) nor read (the architecture of a story).” Removing the walls, ceilings, windows, etc., removing the envelope, in short, what is left but a void, the void? And setting aside the words, sentences, punctuation and paragraphs of writing a story, what is left but an essence that “can only be intuited and deduced,” as when we confront the ghostly voice of Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or try to intuit the subject matter of the dialogue between the girl and the American in Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants.

Having delved into these reflections from a theoretical point of view – Room 3 contains an enlightening lecture on creative writing; Room 4 reiterates the importance of reading as a wonder-generating activity -, Pericoli, with his characteristic lucidity and politeness, invites us on a tour of the Great Hall where it is possible to view no less than twelve interpretations of literary architecture. Then, a moment before the bookshop (unfailing: as in any museum), he gives us instructions for making our own literary architecture so as to display it in our own, very personal living museum of the imagination. (And reminds us, too, that in architecture it makes little sense to distinguish between “expert” and “non-expert” people, since we all experience our relationship with space.) The only rule in this game – because there are no games without rules – is to always maintain a literary approach, never a literal one. What are we to do with a model of a lighthouse if what we are actually excited about is the dense web of relationships that governs the behavioral dynamics of the Ramsay family during a famous trip to the Isle of Skye? Why not give it a try, then? In between reflections, we may be able to free ourselves “from the inevitable burden given by preconceptions and preclusions due to the judgments and interpretations of others,” and discover something new about the mysterious relationship between architecture and literature. And, why not, about ourselves.

https://www.lindiceonline.com/letture/matteo-pericoli-il-grande-museo-vivente-dellimmaginazione/

A walk through twelve masterpieces
“These stories are fantastic palaces.”

Matteo Pericoli’s book stems from his “Laboratory of Literary Architecture”
From Dostoevsky to Ferrante, drawing becomes a form of alternative reading

by Mario Baudino

Conceiving and drawing houses and buildings starting from great literature is not just a game, although maybe we have even done it, sometimes, fantasizing about a novel or a short story: perhaps, however, we have never gone further on this interpretive road, we have not made it concrete. Matteo Pericoli, on the other hand, has been working on this intuition for years now. He had started out with an idea borrowed from Alice Munro, the Canadian writer much admired for her short stories, who had once described ́”stories” not as roads, that is, not as vector narratives, one-dimensional paths with a beginning and an end, but as ́”houses,” entirely three-dimensional – and to be inhabited, and has now come to construct a book of fantastic texts and buildings, The Great Living Museum of the Imagination (Il Saggiatore) a very elegant book that ideally summarizes a long process of workshops around the world (and started at the Scuola Holden in Turin) and presents a wide range of results: stories turned into buildings, reading as a way of living.

Transfigurations that narrate their relationship with the world as living characters

Many avid readers know that they have often had the experience of ́”falling” into a book, and of changing dimensions. Writers, just as often, invite them to precisely this space-time dislocation, when urban architecture narrates their relationship to the world as if they were characters. The examples are countless, some as memorable as the incipit of Ferragus, the first story of History of the Thirteen, where Balzac gives the floor to the Parisian streets, those disgraced or noble, murderous or “older than certain very old ladies,” respectable, clean or always dirty, working-class, trading; because ́”the streets of Paris have human qualities, and by their physiognomy they imprint in us certain ideas from which it is difficult for us to escape.” He is not the only one, of course. Something like this happens in Dickens (read perhaps Bleak House, where a dilapidated and infamous London street behaves like a human being).

Matteo Pericoli has gone further, that is, he has decided instead to make the works of literature speak as if they were as a whole pieces of architecture, aiming not, as he says in the preface of his book, “at that natural instinct we have to imagine or visualize the settings described in the novel, but at that distinct impression of feeling immersed in a kind of construction that has its own functioning and structure.” Drawings, models, fantastic buildings, like Calvino’s cities, are in turn embedded in a super-architecture, that of the “book-museum” (“This is not a book like any other,” he writes, “It is a building”) that houses them: without temptations of “realism” or flat verisimilitude. If we take Heart of Darkness, the magnificent Conradian tale, it is certainly not transformed or described as a hut in the forest: instead, the building into which it is transformed is an inverted pyramid down to many feet below the ground. So for the twelve authors on whom Pericoli worked: they are not arranged as nativities, but as symbolic transfigurations.

“Cuore di tenebra» di Joseph Conrad diventa una piramide rovesciata conficcata nel suolo (dal libro di Pericoli)”
“Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad becomes an inverted pyramid down to many feet below the ground (from Pericoli’s book)

Elena Ferrante (My Brilliant Friend) splits into two buildings that perhaps support each other (and this representation, all things considered, is perhaps the most obvious), Dostoevsky’s White Nights becomes a skyscraper tilted above a kind of labyrinthine checkerboard, Beppe Fenoglio’s Ruin is a house entirely made of roots, a building that grows “underground,” Italo Calvino’s The Rampant Baron is something that contains a sense of unbridgeable distance, a house with a gap visible only from above (because as Cosimo Piovasco’s father says, “rebellion is not measured in meters”). There are also, regenerated and displaced with the work of spatial construction, Annie Ernaux, William Faulkner, Junichirο Tanizaki, Kurt Vonnegut, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Emmanuel Carrère, Juan José Saer, testifying that the process can work on any narrative, on any “story” – with one eye toward the other story, that of architecture, and another toward the possible paradigm of “architecting.”

“We have a natural instinct to imagine and visualize”

“These structures you will encounter,” Pericoli writes, “will take the form you want them to … that is, the form based on your reactions, intuitions and ideas. Each one different for each of you, a multiverse of forms.” The result is a very stimulating reading path-because then Pericoli’s Museum of the Imagination is indeed a “museum” but meanwhile it is a book, not a catalog but a history of stories, especially if one thinks of the sometimes casual and ideological use that one tends to make in public discourse of the classics of today and yesterday: a very bad habit because the risk then becomes that of making of them not free and fantastic constructions, but sad and very boring prisons. —