Bogdanova / Places Built by a Character

Places Built by a Character Transforming a Literary Tool into a Design-oriented Perspective Multiplicity

Author: Viktorija Bogdanova, University of Ljubljana

Supervisor: Tadeja Zupančič, prof., University of Ljubljana; Paul O Robinson, doc., University of Ljubljana

Research stage: final doctoral stage

Category: Paper

Introduction

When we read a novel, we often feel indirectly invited to dive in the life of personalities who co-create the story, immediately, on the first page. We try to understand what does the character feel, what happened to him/her, who does s/he encounter, how does s/he relate to the inner life, to other humans and to the physical and metaphysical environment. It is as if we were seduced by the author: we are opening up our own memories and experiences; aiming to put ourselves in the skin of that person, we unconsciously become ‘naked’ and vulnerable in front of our own eyes. In some of the characters we may recognize parts of ourselves, while our innerness may completely disassociate with others. However, probably the most meaningful novels ever written make the reader to emphasize, to understand – or at least to search for – the reasons behind the behaviors of each character, de-stabilizing the certainty of the personal values, de-stabilizing the protagonist-antagonist dichotomy.

What if we try to write architecture through a conscious active imagination of the future inhabitants?

What if we try to speak through the (imaginary) language of various personalities: a grandfather waiting for someone on the window, a child holding a warm bread in his hands on the bakery’s entrance, two sisters discussing the meaning of life on a table near the river, a family having a Sunday walk, a young couple discovering joyful corners of sharing in a single neighborhood?

What if we try to imagine the new structures we design as living being in an intense discussion between each other? A discussion or a noise? A discussion or a (verbal or physical) fight?

What if we try to imagine one’s design proposal as an architectural novel, and to read the world of its heroes, semi-heroes and anti-heroes (needs, desires, vices, fears, dreams) as a mold for the future spatial idea? Can this reading help us to understand reality ‘as life itself’ before we try to organize spatially the living of the new generations? Can this reading teach us to listen to the different voices present in a specific place? And finally, can it help us re-read and re-evaluate our own architectural lines, models, statements, beliefs and philosophies?

What if we try to build our environment upon a critical and embodied understanding of the present experiential narratives and the future imagined experience of another?

This exhibition / research paper aims to trace and to re-formulate the characterization experiences of my personal design practice in the past few years. The elaboration aims to offer an insight in the modes of characterization covered by the dissertation, and the ones out of it (the ‘grounded’ practice and the art therapy experiments). Some of the characters dwell in hypothetical projects, far from the actual reality, while some of them are ‘built’ upon interviews with real personalities. Some of them are architectural entities themselves, while some of them are mixtures of personal stories alternated with a different / alternative plots of development. All of them communitcate between each other in a perplexed manner. The paper/discussion/exibition aims to trace the meshwork of discussion between the characters from different projects of my design practice, that is – to offer a panoramic view on the varieties of the inner world of the characters, and at the same time, to offer the reader a perspective through the eyes of the characters, in writing, drawing and poem-drawing.

Characters in poem-drawings – PhD research experiments

Through the eyes of another, I tried to observe the modification of my understanding of spatial experience. The aim of my dissertation Emotive immersion through experiential drawing 1 was to discover how and when can the entwinement of literary and visual instruments enhance one's sensitivity in re-reading and imagining places.

But this reading happens on levels beyond the spoken: it is a product of dialogic imagination 2. I re-read not what I think I see at first sight, but I have a dialogue with my different personalities on different levels of depth: the architect, the inner child, the writer, the emotive dreamer making a story of the waves coming from the senses, while interpreting this story into a meaningful spatial narrative. I re-read not what an interlocutor or an interviewee is telling to me, but I aim to understand what is happening beyond those words:

A dialogic listening skill is when somebody says to you something you look at the intent of what they are saying beneath the words. That is, you don’t take language at face value as carrying abounded set of meanings. But you are trying to look at intentions about what people mean to say but don’t have the words for, or the things they are afraid to surface. 3

The trope of character brings to the architect the possibility to imaginatively understand the perspectives of different place-inhabitants, the passerby, the fountain, the candelabra, the porch column, the tower, the maple tree, the chimney, the river, etc. In the case of the mentioned objects, the character trope merges with a personification trope since the objects behave, speak, and interact with each other as living beings. I create characters through poem-drawings. In poem-drawing, words may appear along/over/inside the drawing, in the format of variations of inhabitant’s feelings (embodiment of multiplicity of perspectives), technical descriptions of elements (detail drawings), short stories of imaginary places, naming, comparison, short explanations of narratives unfolding in the building, lexicographical excerpts, references associations.

An explicit literary use of character in architecture can be found in Tschumi’s Manhattan Manuscripts 4 or Hejduk’s Vladivostok 5, where the urban creatures are the characters/heroes of the narrative. Character as a trope is also present in Van Den Berghe’s Book of Narratives – the fourth part of his doctoral dissertation. He writes a poetic prose through the skin of the 5-year-old Van Den Berghe. He is not just writing: he is excavating the importance of his own memory through drawing and model-making of a house, while interpreting its meaning as an external researcher. It is a story about his relationship with his grandmother’s house, consisting form drawings, writings, models that aim to trace the design principles present inside his own mental space, as core spatial childhood memories. In the dissertation, Van Den Berghe builds upon an interpretation of Husserl’s concept of alter ego in transcendental subjectibity: “the indispensable intermediary between the self as given and the self as other” 6. Van Den Berghe created different inner personas to be able to reflect on his own work from another perspective: “Each of us is several, is many, a profusion of selves” 7. The persona creation has a crucial role in the practice based research; it is necessary to step out of myself as a maker and to inhabit myself as a research critic and an architectural scientist.

In this research paper, the aim is to point to the varieties of characterization as research-through-design project instruments, and as instruments applied in the practice out of the dissertation. A further information on the methodology, the approach and the state-of-the-arts can be found in Introduction and the Approach, criteria and methodology chapter of the dissertation.

I will show two different examples where poem-drawings served as mediums for trascending my self from my own body in the experience of another.

a) The Imaginary Visitor (fig. 1-4);

The Imaginary Visitor was born at the end of a design process. It was a design proposal for Observatory Houses in Roccascalegna Castle. If this (wo)man visited the Castle as it is now, (s)he would see a beautiful abandoned fortress, detached from the town spreading bellow. When walking the beautiful traditional street bellow around the Castle, (s)he would end in a blind corner.

The Travelogue of the Imaginary Visitor aims to discover, test and emphasize the validity the design proposal built to resolve the three core problems of the location: 1) the inadequate connection between the city’s being and its most important marker—the Castle; 2) the blind end of the main street below the hill; 3) a current deficiency of care about the specificity of the spatial, cultural treasures of the place.

b) The trans-temporal trialogue: a Young Woman (1944), a Girl (2018) and an Old Lady (2084); 8

The transtemporal trialogue happened at the beginning of an experimential research with two of my collegues, Danica Spasevska and Maja Nikova. We were talking about the possible variations of poem-drawings in re-reading and imagining places. They wanted to discover how will the combination of writing and drawing methodologies manifest in their language of expression. After the first cycle of reflecting upon our own relation to the place of research (Ohrid), we tried to inhabit three different personas from different time frames. The aim was to discover if there were timeless spatial values that need to be respected regardless of the period. The construction of the personas happened as a combination of our spatially re-visited and interpreted personal experience (participatory observation) and the interpreted interviews we did with the Ohrid's citizens.

An inspiring step of fiction courage was the imagined experience of the Old Lady (through Spasevska, fig. 5). While walking the dystopian wall between the Lake and the amphiteatrically structured Old City, she is reflecting on the feeling of suffocated beauty. Comparing her childhood memories with the present condition (2084), she is explaining how the desire to protect the old core has lead to overprotection. The living city turned into a suffocated archeological laboratory, deprived from the love relationship between the city and the lake. The story is an apophatic way of reflection: not pointing to what should be done, but circumscribing what should not be done. At this point, the fear of drawing the extreme of what should not be built or designed disappears: “Drawing may work as a tool for the liberation of the spirit though play, expressing a series of possible critiques and taboos, which do not need to be read as an offense or a damage … drawing solutions which would fall under the stroke of these critiques.” 9

The 2084 story was inspired by two true stories spoken by two different interviewees. First, the owner of the house on the lake, transformed into a prison during the war, occupied as a strategic point that controls the port in front of the house. Second, the citizen of the new city, with the opinion the “nothing can be added, nothing can be changed” in the old urban tissue. 2084 represents a prison born from the desire for aggressive protection.

Bogdanova. Ascending. The very first sketch: the hill and the curtain seen from the front, the “necklace” of houses.

Figure 1: Bogdanova. Ascending. The very first sketch: the hill and the curtain seen from the front, the “necklace” of houses.

Bogdanova and Spasevska. Observatory Houses 2017. Embracing. Plan and axonometry: the previous cut-off of the Castle and the Church from the town is developed into a vertical curtain—a meshwork of streets that connect the backside of the Castle with the main street of the village (spreading on the right side of the Castle on this image).

Figure 2: Bogdanova and Spasevska. Observatory Houses 2017. Embracing. Plan and axonometry: the previous cut-off of the Castle and the Church from the town is developed into a vertical curtain—a meshwork of streets that connect the backside of the Castle with the main street of the village (spreading on the right side of the Castle on this image).

Bogdanova and Spasevska. Observatory Houses 2017. The unfolded vertical and horizontal sections of the designed part of the embrace. The variation of observatory houses is intertwined with a few branches of pathways. The rooms in each house are exploded into a configuration that creates many open terraces, making it possible for visitors to observe the sky from unexpected places. The border between private and public is softened to the edge of melting.

Figure 3: Bogdanova and Spasevska. Observatory Houses 2017. The unfolded vertical and horizontal sections of the designed part of the embrace. The variation of observatory houses is intertwined with a few branches of pathways. The rooms in each house are exploded into a configuration that creates many open terraces, making it possible for visitors to observe the sky from unexpected places. The border between private and public is softened to the edge of melting.

Bogdanova and Spasevska. Observatory Houses 2017. Travelogue of an Imaginary Visitor, with a comparative illustration of the first concept drawing (above) and a fragment of the axonometry (below). In-between the two drawings is a list of the things that the Travelogue brings to the reader through metaphorical circumscription rather than description.

Figure 4: Bogdanova and Spasevska. Observatory Houses 2017. Travelogue of an Imaginary Visitor, with a comparative illustration of the first concept drawing (above) and a fragment of the axonometry (below). In-between the two drawings is a list of the things that the Travelogue brings to the reader through metaphorical circumscription rather than description.

“2084”. Danica Spasevska. Hypothetical dystopia. Beauty enslaved. 2018.

Figure 5: “2084”. Danica Spasevska. Hypothetical dystopia. Beauty enslaved. 2018.

Characters in poem-drawings: experiments beyond the PhD research

The construction of the characters of this design solution happened somewhere in the middle of the design process. It was a design proposal for a dwelling neighborhood. It was done in the office Ravnikar Potokar in Ljubljana, by Robert Potokar, Ajdin Bajrović and me. The solution is a story about transforming a former territory of communal services into a dwelling neighborhood and an underground waste menagement center. We proposed a necklace of houses growing in height: a reflection of the typology of the surrounding.

The necklace of houses: the new architectural character. Ravnikar Potokar d.o.o., Robert Potokar, Ajdin Bajrović, Viktorija Bogdanova. 2nd award.

Figure 6: The necklace of houses: the new architectural character. Ravnikar Potokar d.o.o., Robert Potokar, Ajdin Bajrović, Viktorija Bogdanova. 2nd award.

Character’s narratives. Mestni Kare Povšetova. Ravnikar Potokar d.o.o., Robert Potokar, Ajdin Bajrović, Viktorija Bogdanova. 2nd award.

Figure 7: Character’s narratives. Mestni Kare Povšetova. Ravnikar Potokar d.o.o., Robert Potokar, Ajdin Bajrović, Viktorija Bogdanova. 2nd award.

The characters were drawn to help us understand the imagined scenarios more thoroughly (fig.6-10). Until this moment, the main characters were the architectural creatures dancing in plans, sections, axonometries and diagrams on the technical drawings, observed from above. But we wanted to learn something else: the perspective of the inhabitant. First, the heroes were drawn: the grandfather taking care of the niece, the little girl discovering the neighborhood as a playground, the lovers living on the opposite sides of the promenade, or the sculptor working among the plants on the roof terrace. Then, the act of drawing called for a verbalization of their daily spatial encounters: short stories were written to trace the advantages of the project from the voice of an embodied experience.

The construction of the characters further helped us in the visual representation of the strengths of our project. These personalities moved further and closer in our perspective drawings, allowing us and the readers to observe the project not as an external evaluator of abstract composition of volumes, but as an inhabitant who may see a diagrammatic view of the environment as a “roentgen” image of the architectural structure’s spirit.

Processual collage / testing perspective in a residential design proposal (unpublished). Authors of the project: Ravnikar Potokar d.o.o., Robert Potokar, Ajdin Bajrović, Viktorija Bogdanova.

Figure 8: Processual collage / testing perspective in a residential design proposal (unpublished). Authors of the project: Ravnikar Potokar d.o.o., Robert Potokar, Ajdin Bajrović, Viktorija Bogdanova.

Processual collage / testing perspective in a residential design proposal (unpublished). Authors of the project: Ravnikar Potokar d.o.o., Robert Potokar, Ajdin Bajrović, Viktorija Bogdanova.

Figure 9: Processual collage / testing perspective in a residential design proposal (unpublished). Authors of the project: Ravnikar Potokar d.o.o., Robert Potokar, Ajdin Bajrović, Viktorija Bogdanova.

Processual collage / testing perspective in a residential design proposal (unpublished). Authors of the project: Ravnikar Potokar d.o.o., Robert Potokar, Ajdin Bajrović, Viktorija Bogdanova.

Figure 10: Processual collage / testing perspective in a residential design proposal (unpublished). Authors of the project: Ravnikar Potokar d.o.o., Robert Potokar, Ajdin Bajrović, Viktorija Bogdanova.

Concluding threshold

The three chosen examples show three different manners of integrating the characterization through poem-drawing. The Imaginary Visitor allows an insight into visitor’s journey to the new structure, leading the reader through the corners that may not be visible in the technical drawings. The Young Woman, the Girl and the Old Lady show how characterization through the poem-drawing language may become transferable in three different dialects / variations, integrating the personal experience and the interviewee’s testimony into a design-project-oriented interpretation. The Grandfather and the other heroes from the dwelling neighborhood show how characterization through poem-drawing may assist non-architectural readers to have a closer insight and understanding of the value of the design process and the design project.

  1. A PhD dissertation in the evaluation stage of research. Supervised by prof. dr. Tadeja Zupančič and doc. Paul Robinson. Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljubljana.
  2. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1983|1975): The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of Texas Press, Slavic series.
  3. Sennet, Richard (2012): Architecture of Cooperation. Lecture held February 28, at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
  4. Tschumi, Bernard (1995): Manhattan Transcripts: Theoretical Projects. New York: St. Martin Press, Academy editions.
  5. Hejduk, John (1989): Vladivostok. New York: Rizzoli International Publications.
  6. Van Den Berghe, Johan (2012): Theatre of Operations, or: Construction Site as Architectural Design. Melbourne: RMIT, University, Australia. Doctoral dissertation. Book 2, 31.
  7. Pessoa, cited in Van Den Berghe 2012, Book 2, 31.
  8. This research was published as an article in (ed.) Havik, Klaske, Susana Oliveira, Jacob Voorhuis and Nortje Weenink (2018): Writingplace Journal for Literature and Architecture 2, Inscription: Tracing Place, History and Memory in Architectural and Literary Practice, pp. 129–143.
  9. Adji Mitrevski, Goce. Clarification drawing. Unpublished essay. Archive of Liljana Adji Mitrevska.