Article explores how memory is created in narrative focusing on architects' life history interviews

Sandino, Linda

English

UAL Research Online

Title Speaking of memory...Type ArticleURL http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/2936/Date 2010Citation Sandino, Linda (2010) Speaking of memory... AA Files (61). pp. 116-117. ISSN 02616823 Creators Sandino, LindaUsage GuidelinesPlease refer to usage guidelines at http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/policies.html or alternatively contact ualresearchonline@arts.ac.uk.License: Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No DerivativesUnless otherwise stated, copyright owned by the authoraa files 61 127Colin St JohnWilsonInterviewedby Jill Lever, 1996Architects’ LivesTheonly signiﬁcant changes that had emergedreally over theperiodof 20 years or so since thedesignwasput together in 1975 are both todowith the computer. In 1975wehad theheart ofthebuilding, the cataloguehall, and the cata-loguehall was tohave been surroundedby, as ifit werewallpaper, theGeorge III Library, theKing’s Librarywhich is currently thewallpaperto theKings Library inTheBritishMuseum.After that designhadbeen evolved, approvedand everything else, it becamequite clear to thelibrary that the cataloguewas going todisappearinto the computer, and for one awfulmomentwe thought that thewhole haddroppedout ofthemiddle of thedesign. And thenwehad thethought of turning theKing’s Library, not intowallpaper but into anobject. It was part ofGeorge IV’s gift to thenation, that thosebooksought to be seenby the general public, and thiswas suddenly just, youknow, came the rightwayup tous for a change, an absolute gift for a reallymajor visualmonumental jewel to the crown.And sowe replacedwhatwouldhavebeen a sortof enclosure, a cataloguehall, with theKing’sbooks all round it, even though thepublicwouldhavebeen allowed in to it, as it were, for that rea-son, instead into a six ﬂoor high glass-frontedbookcasewith thebeautiful binding, vellumandsoon, as near as possible to the glass so theycouldbe seen andonmobile stacks so they couldbe retracted so that anybody taking thebooksout to be read could go round to the front, takethebookout and then thebookcase returned toits position close to the glass; and thatwouldstand right in the centre to the entrancehall atthe pointwhere, if youwerehaving a coffee inthe restaurant, as it were, you could look at this.But almostwherever you are in the entrancehall,and as you go along thepasserelles that leadfrom theHumanities side to the Sciences, at dif-ferent levels you’rewalkingpast thebeautifulbooks, they are also something else yet againwhichdelightsmearchitecturallywhich is somehint to you, ormanifestationof the fact that thetreasures are belowgroundbut as it were they’vesort of emerged, they’ve burst out of – in fact, I’mtrying to do a sort of polishedblack graniteround thebase at thepointwhere they, as itwere, break through from the enormousbase-mentswhich architecturally havenopresence atall, and I suppose it’s sort of datesmeabit, but Ihavememories of going to the cinemawithmymumanddad in thedayswhen the cinemaorganused to comeup from theﬂoor and thechapplayed [hums tune], and thendisappearedagain. And thenotionof something that isappearing from theunderworld but also in thiscasemanifesting itself as themagic object liketheblackbox inMecca.SergeChermayeffInterviewedbyBetty Blum, 1985TheChicagoArchitectsOralHistory Project,Art Institute ofChicagobb Today is 23May1985and I’mwithMrSergeChermayeff in his home inWellﬂeet,Massachusetts.MrChermayeffwasborn in1900 inRussia.Hewas educated inEnglandand livedthereuntil 1939.He spent a fewmonths inCanadabefore coming to theUnitedStates in 1940. InEnglandhewasassociatedwith thosewhowere inthe forefront of the crusadeofmodernism.His per-sonal commitment is demonstrated throughhiswritings, his interior designandarchitecture.MrChermayeff, in the early 40s you came to theUnitedStates after others in the forefront ofmodernismsuchasGropius,Mies vanderRohe,Moholy-Nagyand through the educational process . . .sc . . . I want tomake a correction. I am84but if wenow thinkofMies, if hewere alive, he’dbe ten years older than I am;Corbuwouldbe tenyears older than I, if hewere alive. I don’t belongtowhat I think is theﬁrstwave ofmodernism.I’m in the secondwave of youngermenwho fol-lowed in their footsteps. They felt theywere lead-ing architecture on totally different paths fromthe eclectic reproductionof various periods,without any contributionof originality andwith-out any concern for the change in time, habit,technology and, generally speaking, theway oflife in urban situations throughout Europe.AndyWarholInterviewedbyGlennO’Brien, 1977Interviewmagazinego Whatwas yourambition?Tobean illus-trator or aﬁneartist?aw Ididn’t have any ambition.go Whowas theﬁrst artist to inﬂuence you?aw Itmust have beenWaltDisney. I cutoutWaltDisney dolls. It was actually SnowWhitewho inﬂuencedme.Denys LasdunInterviewedby Jill Lever, 1997Architects’ LivesTheﬁrst question Iwas askedby a lady at a pressconference in 1967whenweﬁrst presentedwas‘Where is thedecoration?’ Towhich I said, spon-taneously, ‘You are thedecoration’. So youhave aphotographup therewhich shows the stratawithpeople on it . Now thepersonwho saidwhere is thedetail? Is clearly, possibly, put off bytheblandness or theblankness of theparapets,maybe, and is used to looking at buildingswithwalls and lots of things going onbut hewould, orshewould thenhave to come to termswithbuild-ings that donot havewalls; and in the case ofmywork, the interest and thedetail is in the sofﬁt –that is above your head. In the rich,what’s itcalled, the concrete, like thePantheon, Imeanit’s the same, or likeGothic vaulting; it’s theequivalent; and it’s there in thedetail in thehandrail, what you actually put your hands on;it’s in thedetail ofwhichwaydo you go the loo, inthe emblematic signs that tell youwhat; it’s inhow thebuilding is put together. For instance ifyou look very carefully, not you, if one looks verycarefully and if anyone cleaned thebuildingbecause it’s ﬁlthy dirty, theywouldnote that theshutteringboards arenot equal, they’re roughboardswhich are cutwith a sawand they vary aquarter inch in thickness. Theboards get deliv-ered to the site before they’re erected as shutter-ing, pickedupby thebuilding operativewhohasto do that sort of job, but hedoesn’t knowwhichthickness he’s pickingup sohe’s contributing tothedetail of that surface because someare for-wards, someare back; it’s not regular; hechooses. So themore you look – and then forinstance the shuttering itself has a retardedagency on it so it dries at a different speed to therest of the concrete, the result is it looks like anold fossil inside and you seepeople touching theconcrete because all the grain of thewood, notinventedbyme, but thiswas something themodernists thought about in thosedays, and allthe graining of thewood comesout in relief. Andwhen it’s beautifully lit, that’s a detail that’swellworthhaving. So if you’re going to assess a build-ing, not only have you got to look at the outsideof thebuilding, you’ve got to go into it.Hadheorshe gone in, theywouldhavenoticed that all thedoors, everything, the lighting is all integratedanddetailedwith the coffering.126 aa files 61Oralhistory and interview-based researchhasincreasingly become the method du jour forall sorts of publications, from the popular tothe academic, from the celebrity proﬁle to thescholarly interview. With the rise of the inter-view the Q&A is now the deﬁnitive writingform, covering everything from the trivial andanecdotal to in-depth revelations aboutwork-ing methods in almost any creative practice,and has contributed to what sociologists Paul Atkinson and DavidSilverman have coined ‘the interview society’. Listening to othersspeak about the past is now seen as providing direct, unmediatedcontact with history. After the upsurge of interest in heritage,memory has taken centre-stage. More ﬂexible politically and ideo-logically (aswell as economically), it serves as a catch-all trope for thepast, for history, for community and for individualism. In the arts, ofcourse, the interview has always been a favourite means for gainingaccess to ‘meaning’, away for practitioners to explain the underlyingrationale of their work. The author may have passed on, but theorator is alive andwell.Witness descriptions have a long historical tradition. In the ﬁfthcentury BCThucydides drew on the accounts of eye-witnesses for hisownhistory of the PeloponnesianWars. But what really triggered theexpansion of oral history as a discipline was the development ofaudio tape, employedmost notably by AllanNevins, who establishedthe Columbia University Oral History Research Ofﬁce in 1948, andwith this transformed the portable tape recorder into a historicalresearch tool. This model of research was in turn absorbed into theUK from the 1960s onwards, with social historians, in particular,using audio recordings to empower marginalised voices anduncover a ‘history from below’. Apart from their absorption into thewritings of British historians like Asa Briggs and John Saville, inter-views are now increasingly to be found in oral history archives, espe-cially those focusing on the arts. For example, the Archives ofAmerican Art and the Chicago Architects Oral History project pro-vide substantial records of both major and less well-known ﬁguresfrom art and architecture, as does National Life Stories at the BritishLibrary, which includes the Architects’ Lives collection, while theprivately run Pidgeon Digital draws on interviews conducted byMonica Pidgeon, the former editor of Architectural Design, whobegan her recordings in 1979 ‘so as to be able to hear the actualvoices of thedesigners of buildings and listen to their ideas’.The profusion of archives is one factor in the legitimisation oforal history. Another is its use in academic research as both aresource and a topic: as a means of gathering data and understand-ing how communities and individuals are constructed by what theysay and how they say it. As an E M Forster character claims so suc-cinctly, ‘How can I tell what I think, until I see what I say?’ Whileinterviews offer ﬁrst-hand accounts akin to witness statements,these documents provide insights not just into past events but intothe history of thinking. In their introduction to the Oral HistoryReader, Robert Perks andAlistair Thomsondeﬁne oral history as ‘theinterviewing of eye-witness participants in the events of the past forthe purposes of historical reconstruction’. But can the past ever bereconstructed, or is not more appropriate to think of the past as re-presented? The former aims at a veriﬁable realism; the latter admitsto a creative, imaginative dimension because ‘history-telling’, as thegreat oral historian Alessandro Portelli has deﬁned it, is a speciﬁcformof talking about thepast – ‘a formof ver-bal art generated by the cultural and per-sonal encounter in the context of ﬁeldwork’.In the arts, the biographical and mono-graphic approach has also helped to sustainthe aura of the grand practitioner. Great nar-ratives of self-justiﬁcation can pour out,while the interviewer is left to oscillatebetween admiration and scepticism– the lat-ter often only emerging on playing back thematerial. Since all inter-views are based on a personal exchange, they are also always accom-panied by a sense of the uniqueness of the moment or of theencounter. Not only are we recording experience, but as interviewerswe are participating in an experience ourselves. For this experienceto be complete, however, interviewers need to ensure that intervie-wees are able to tell their histories as fully as possible – subsequentreadings of their accounts are a mixture of demystiﬁcation andrestoration, with an ear for the unsaid as much as the spoken. Theresultmaybeasmuchﬁctive as it is historical, but as thephilosopherPaul Ricoeur has argued, history and ﬁction are the two ‘greatmodes’ ofwesternnarrative, interwoven rather than separate.The texts themselves also come to us in various forms, not justdialogue. The Q&A format parodies the consumer survey question-naire although its origin lies in the religious catechism, for which theformprovided the vehicle for ideologic-al induction – ‘Whomade theworld? Godmade the world.Who is God?’ – with an emphasis on cer-tainty and the deﬁnitive statement. The format was brilliantlyexploited in the 1970s by Andy Warhol, who understood that inter-views are always performances of one kind or another – for him theoccasion when ‘Andy puts his Warhol on’. In an interview in 1977,Glenn O’Brien, editor of Interview magazine (itself founded byWarhol in 1969), encouragedWarhol’s deadpanone-liners, colludingin thepresentationof theWarholwhomreaders expected to ‘hear’. Infact,Warhol andhismagazine couldbe seen tohavepromulgated theadvent of the self-advertising interviewee, who both displays and pro-motes him or herself. As O’Brien noted, ‘I think Andy liked the ques-tions, butmost important, that he sounded smart and funny’.Interview conveys its own speciﬁc perspective, which is quite dif-ferent to the purpose of public archive or academic text. Knowingand understanding the context of an interview is a crucial compo-nent in the process of demystiﬁcation and restoration, from whichany attempt to reach the ‘truth’ must proceed; each channel trans-mits via its own particular frequency and vibrations. ‘Listening instereo’might be an aptmetaphor for the dual approach to using nar-ratives of experience as the basis for scholarship. The ethical dimen-sion of using human subjects for research purposes demands thatwe treat their narratives respectfully, but scholars alsohave a respon-sibility to the ethics of scholarship.While pop interviewsmay be thesubject of sociological enquiry, the life history or oral history is toooften taken to mean what is said, and even celebrated as such.However, attention needs to be paid to how such narratives are con-ﬁgured and the conditions under which they are appropriated andtransformed. How stories are conﬁgured is a signiﬁcant part of theirmeaning, because stories about the past are made rather thanfound. As the historian Louis Mink famously remarked, ‘Stories arenot lived but told. Life has no beginnings,middles or ends; there aremeetings, but the start of an affair belongs to the story we tell our-selves later.’Speaking ofMemory ...Linda SandinoInterviewsExtracts reprinted with the kind permissionof the British Library, Interviewmagazineand the Art Institute of Chicago

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