AboutKevin Kilroy
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The Squares of Savannah
We arrived in Savannah at night. We set our things down in the hostel and proceeded to wander through the streets and architectures in search of a drink. Each building had a deep presence. One after another, the streets took on the charm of an antebellum tapestry—a historic congruity which is so rare in the US.
A few blocks into our walk, the residences parted like curtains to reveal a square. A simple walking path, bushes and benches. Eloquent yet mysterious trees with sprawling limbs knuckled, thick and wrinkled by a century of humidity. Spanish moss, like silver filigree, hanging at eye level. At the center, a monument. We stopped to breathe it all in, adorned by the nightbirds’ song.
[+] Image via Mr Chen on Flickr
We moved on. Walked another couple of blocks, and again, the houses parted to reveal a square. The very same as the first. We thought we were moving forward. We thought we were heading towards something—downtown, city center, a bar—but no, a couple blocks more and again, the square. We had found a space to exit sequence and chronology; a disordered space. And we were lost within.
We quickly learned that the streets of Savannah conspire to create an illusion. The Square multiplies itself, for all we knew at the time, forever and in every direction. One Square no different than the next, just as one day is no different than another, except how we name it and what we do within it. The city design of Savannah mirrors the qualities of time: repetitious and symmetrical, the source of this magic—the same tricks at the heart of infinity.
[+] Image via Dizzy Girl on Flickr
A chance to get lost in mystery is rarely afforded by the architectures of our built environment. In this city, which I have interpreted to be a labyrinth of time, our spatial experience becomes a mystery in the way that it mimics our fundamental relationship with time. Through creating spaces which mirror time, space reflects the same qualities—it becomes disguised by the same dizzying, immutable complexion, which we are freed to walk across.
The Squares of Savannah offer a narrative different from our daily lives. During our time there, as we wandered the large neighborhood filled with a haunting, encountering square after square, this repetition of place loosened time’s hold, disbanding us from the day we had known and would know again once we carried on. It offered us the opportunity of a paradise: to let go of our instinct to orient ourselves, and to sit, existing in moments uninfluenced by the linearity of our day. Released into the fictions and re-runs layered so elusively upon our reality.
[+] Image via Patrick Fowler on Flickr
Like a work of literature, Savannah dreams itself upon the reality we share, in order to create a meta-level of existence—unbuilt layers of illusion adorning the surfaces, allowing us ledges and pathways to explore the fictive truths of being.
Book Review: Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture by Lisa Robertson
A poet disguised as an architect. A fictional office of architects. Nothing could entice me more. In her book, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture
Since its publication in 2003, this book has not left my sight. Its blurring of genres and disciplines permits me to do the same. Its playful perspectives on our conceptualization of the material world (and vice versa) appeal to me as a writer and as an reader of the city.
Throughout thirteen commissioned texts and seven “walks,” the Office for Soft Architecture (OSA) commingles the theoretically rich with unique case studies. In discussing everything from fountains to shacks to scaffolding to thrift stores to horticulture, the OSA sources everybody from Benjamin to Bachelard to Ruskin to Foucault to Koolhaus.
Photo: zeitgeistudios.com
In the text, “Spatial Synthetics: a theory,”originally published in Mix magazine, the OSA writes, “We want an intelligence that’s tall and silver, oblique and black, purring and amplifying its décor; a thin thing, a long thing, a hundred videos, a boutique.” The Office desires for our interior worlds—our mental constructs—to be understood aesthetically. That our perspectives, our intelligences have surfaces.
In “Doubt and the History of Scaffolding,” the OSA writes, “We could say scaffolding is a furniture insofar as it supports the desires of our bodies. … Like furniture it is a projection of our bodies, making us bigger, more limber, more elegant and serious.” A synthesis between architectural space and inhabitant is consistently sought by The Office. The boundaries between interior and exterior are folded delicately back and forth along carefully exposed perforations, and then torn to reveal the theoretical thing and the thing as theory.
OSA allows for misreading, uncertainty, and quizzical pauses through the deftness of its syntax. And it is the shifty syntax which evokes the larger theme, as I see it, of the text: revel in the parallaxes of subjectivity and know that the extent of your delight will determine your experience of the phenomenal world. That architectures are rhetorics for us to read. That reading is a playful act of imagination and critique.
[Now available from Coach House Books, truly perfect bookmakers. However, I do want to mention the original publisher, now defunct, Clear Cut Press. Their books were printed in Tokyo by TOPPAN in a standard Japanese format with colorful dust jackets and built-in bookmarks. http://www.toppan.co.jp/english/ Designer, Tae Won Yu, is known for his playful and delicate album designs for many indie rock and pop groups. http://www.taewonyu.com/ An art object in itself, I do recommend seeking out the Clear Cut edition.]
Buy here: Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture
