bibliostructures

I’m not an architect. I’m not a designer. I’m not an engineer. I’m not a mathematician. I’m not a materials scientist. But I’m an admirer of all these activities. Some of my admiration is at close range, as a journalist. Some of it is a little more distanced and conceptual, cerebral: bits of buildings, algorithms, shards of typography, the yoga-supple flex of suspension bridges, and the recipes for (organic) chemical reactions group themselves together in my mind, like an intellectual still-life, as the inspiration for something I want to translate into the structure of a book I hope to be able to manufacture. 

I once read a review (that I didn’t clip for my scrapbooks so I can’t be sure if I’m recalling it accurately) that said that when the Talking Heads needed to assemble a large number of musicians around them to perform r&b songs like “Take Me To The River”, it meant they’d reached a point where their taste in music had surpassed their abilities as musicians. I don’t think it was a criticism. I took it to mean that at the beginning their music was exhilarating because it took traditions apart, and when the band matured, when their ideas became more complex, re-interpreting traditions in order to keep them alive rather than dismantling them to see what they were made of,  they needed some technical help. That’s where I’m at with book-binding. Let me give you an analogy from architecture: up until now I’ve been snapping together nifty dwellings from Lego. Now I want to build Mies Van Der Rohe’s Farnsworth House.

Photo credit: Dayna Bateman who posts as Suttonhoo at Flickr.

The outer layer of inspiration for me is the way that Mies took new materials, and new manufacturing techniques and used them so sweetly, applied them sparingly and with clarity so that they’re meditations on the emptiness of modernity (in a good sense, the Buddhist notion of letting go and clearing the mind to elevate the spirit). In the early 1990’s I was writing (and am again) for the British architecture, design and culture magazine, Blueprint. In 1991 I was in Chicago for a conference organised by one of my editors, Janet Abrams. She’d suggested I write a book length “biography” of the Sony Walkman. I was giving a lecture at the conference, outlining my research to date.

Sony was about to release its Data Discman, which it had tagged “The Walkman of Words”. In my mind it was supposed to complete a circle, begun with the private, portable, personal qualities Gutenberg had brought to reading with his books printed with movable type, properties that Sony applied to listening to music with their Walkman, and now, the Data Discman was supposed to blend them both into a perfect reading device: a regular book, but with electronic properties. Sony had loaned me a Data Discman, which I didn’t see until I got to Chicago, and it was such a disappointment it destroyed the whole idea of a book about the Walkman for me. The Data Discman was an ugly geiger-counter of a machine, with clunky buttons, ungainly functions and a mere handful of published titles. I didn’t mind that what it was trying to do was technically way ahead of its time, what mattered was that it was a conceptual failure, Sony had failed to understand what “reading” is, that a book (in whatever form, and I have an open mind about that) is something to savour rather than glance at to extract information (which is what computers and mobile phones are able to deliver much better than books these days).

 Jan took me to the new Sony superstore in Chicago and put the Data Discman in context for me. It was at the dawning of the superstore phenomenon, just about when Barnes and Noble turned bookshops into warehouse-sized coffee shops. Sony had “furnished” a house with every conceivable Sony appliance but it had a Jetsons-like cartoon-simple and simply unbelievable quality about it. It was a stage-set not a meditation on life.

My next lesson was at a cocktail party Jan had at her apartment, on one of the top floors of Mies van der Rohe’s apartment building on Lakeshore Drive. The layout and materials and furniture looked as coolly new as if the apartment had been built today, not in the 1940’s. And there was something complete and engaging about being in that space, it seemed designed to be lived in.

A couple of weeks ago I found a book at the City Library about Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, built near Chicago in 1946. The author, Maritz Vandenberg, wrote:

“And there was … a spiritual aspect. Throughout his life the apparently technology-driven Mies van der Rohe was actually an earnest searcher for after the deeper meanings behind everyday existence. Some time between 1924 and 1927 he moved to the view that ‘building art is always the spatial expression of spiritual decisions’ and began to gravitate away from the rather mechanistic functionalists of the Neue Sachlichkeit (“new objectivity”) movement. … Though this period of spirituality seems to have faded somewhat after his Barcelona Pavilion, and he gradually returned to drier and more objective design attitudes … the dignified serenity of pavilions such as the Farnsworth House and the New National Gallery in Berlin (1962-8) bear witness to Mies’s abiding preoccupation with the creation of orderly, noble and indeed quasi-spiritual spaces in our turbulent world.”

Photo credit: Dayna Batemen who posts as Suttonhoo at Flickr.

What inspires me about the Farnsworth House, that I want to translate into the spine of a book, is that the elements seem held together casually, slid up against one another with no force or effort at all. The book suggests that Mies had to go to a great deal of trouble to get that effect, the surfaces of bolts being sanded away to look as if there were no bolts holding anything together at all. I’m aiming for a book that uses no glue: the signatures clip around a comb-brace that’s snapped onto a spine, that’s slid into a cover. I want it to look like the deck and house do in this detail, above, of the Farnsworth House, aligned but not forced together.

Photo credit: Dayna Bateman who posts as Suttonhoo at Flickr.

The second layer of inspiration for me is the intangible, inexpressible one. I wander around making notes on how different things are hinged together, mentally pulling them apart and manufacturing the components in my mind. But what’s almost more valuable to me is the re-inforcement of inspiration, seeing how someone else is inspired by something that’s inspired me. I can’t explain it, but the red rain shoes standing like a worshipper’s shoes at the door of a Buddhist temple, in front of a door at the Farnsworth House encapsulates exactly the quality I want my books to have.