Notes from Source: Think of Mies van der Rohe’s Famsworth House . Transparent in the landscape and reflecting the landscape back seamlessly-inside, outside. The landscape we largely inhabit now resists subsuming architecture in this way. [Deleuze]’s deterritorialization, de Solà-[Morales] points out, situates architectural objects in “non-places, in non-landscapes . . . their presence not connected to a place,” where estrangement may be the building site. So we’ve gone from a situation of ’50s integration to its related obverse condition of estrangement. “Architecture,” de Solà-Morales writes “cannot conceal the depths of its wound: the absence of a felicitous relationship with the territory, with nature and with life.” I can only think of this as heartbroken architecture. In a poignant cri de coeur, he says additionally, “We live today in the estrangement between self and others, between the self and the world, on the margins even between self and individual. Our perception is not structuring but nomadic.” Unrootedness, splinters, breaks, fissures. My prevalent goals and the goals that led past artistic production-of integration, coherence and synthesis-are the ones he describes as unattainable. In the fissures of a world where the centre cannot hold, in the “Seventh Elegy,” [Rilke] writes of “these spaces, these huge spaces, these spaces that are ours. I (How incredibly huge they must be if, after thousands / of years of our feelings, they still aren’t filled.)” So, provisional, imaginative spaces are called up in poetry, exist there palpable, if not measurable. And to a specific site, in the “Eighth Elegy” Rilke anticipates, “Never, not for a single day, / do we have before us that pure space the flowers continually open into. For us it’s always a World, / and never a Nowhere without the No-a pure, / unguarded space you can breathe and fully realize / and not be longing after.” Provisional, contingent, speculative. He and architectural theorists at one on the contemporary dilemma. And here, in the “Ninth Elegy,” perhaps in conjunction or consultation with Nietzsche, with Deleuze, with de Solà-Morales, “More than ever things are falling away-/ the things that we live with-and what is replacing them / is an urge without an image.” In her book of essays and poetry, Plainwater (Vintage Canada, 2000), Anne Carson has a section titled “The Life of Towns.” She introduces the series of poems by writing, “Towns are the illusion that things hang together somehow, my pear, your winter.” This anomalous pairing of fruit and weather speaks to the issue of cities, the issue of dwelling, of learning to inhabit a space, to finding a central, private core where the individual, the diverse subject, is asserted-my pear, your winter-and the collegiality that at the same time allows for such disparate unities. “I am a scholar of towns,” she adds, “let God commend that.” She can claim scholarship, she says, because “a scholar is someone who takes a position.” Brave, sound, necessary. To take a stand, a subjective stand, say “I” and place yourself out there. Importandy, she clarifies further, “A scholar is someone who knows how to limit himself to the matter at hand. Matter which has painted itself within lines constitutes a town.”

Further Notes: Place: Winnipeg Publisher: Arts Manitoba Publications Inc