Seven Oaks Magazine.

Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, by Lisa Robertson. Coach House Books (2003, 2006).

I adore little books. Small, compact, unobtrusive, inviting, humble. They fit in your back pocket, in your breast pocket, and weigh easily in one hand. Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture is one such book; I, however, foolishly mistook this texts’ humble size for levity.

In a phrase, don’t be fooled by its appearance. Calvino, Rousseau, Huizinga, Benjamin, De Certeau, Bachelard, Foucault, Aristotle, Derrida, Agamben, Proust, and Levinas are sources which imbue these lovingly constructed ‘occasions’. For the avid art theory junkie, this is an excellent companion. Work represented by Sharyn Yuen, Josée Bernard, Petra Blaisse, Keith Higgins, Allyson Clay, Renée Van Halm, Elspeth Pratt and Liz Magor also makes this a lovely catalogue of Vancouver and Canadian artists, all of whom share an affinity for surfaces. But I would advise against deconstructing and piercing this text too sharply. Much can be taken from maintaining a soft gaze and a soft mind, where the light folds and clouds of Robertson’s infused theory with the day to day deliver tiny surprises to our roaming eyes.

Moreover, another surprising inclusion in this little art book is approximately nineteen colour and thirty-two black and white photographs: visual saturations of varying degrees that soothe the eye and maintain a triangular delivery of sight, sense and thought throughout the book. The relationship between the two is inevitably reciprocal.

This two-hundred and eighty paged work includes thirteen dense essays and seven ‘walks’. Of every single writing, it would not be too much to say that each one could harken a reflection, a commentary, a poetics of its own. Therefore, it is with the lightest brushes of my favourites that I attempt to introduce this book.

Site Report: New Brighton Park catalogues the “inverted utopia” of Vancouver’s first real estate transaction. Leisure grounds and industrial economies of cement and timber are overshadowed by a looming bridge, which we call this ‘park’. Robertson suggests that Vancouver began here, with this first monetary transaction of land that has now become a kind of quizzical and faint memory. ‘Oh right, that place, I always forget about that park,” I think to myself. The land sold for fifty dollars in 1869 and one-hundred and fifty thousand in 1909. Japanese-Canadians were interned here. Exhibition grounds used to dot the space. It has an outdoor wading pool.

The Fountain Transcript’s first pages are adorned with Maxwell Stephens and Hadley Howes’ hilarious postcards of Vancouver tourist attractions, frothing at the mouth, spitting slimy trajectories, boiling over and climaxing. Robertson wryly suggests they refresh us, enlighten us, allow us to take a kind of wakeful little nap, but asks, ‘why are they not bombastic?’ She quickly discovers that fountains in Vancouver are private gifts, not designed for public misting. Rather, these fountains dribble and drool, creating light glossings over the corporate grid – controlled and polite. They don’t make noise. Are they moving? Robertson suggests that “our peninsula [is] a liquid-filled decorative paper-weight.” In that case then, perhaps we’re tired of all this water.

Spatial Synthetics: A Theory discusses the teflon inflation that looms or greets us at the end of the Georgia Viaduct, a hard fabric inflated with its proposed idea of access. Robertson suggests that a synthetics of space doesn’t stop the “flow of items and surfaces”, but can be used to articulate “the politics of their passage.” And what is the response when this synthetic ruptures? A brief flash of excited chaos amongst harsh winds, as our cell phones snap the liberation of trapped air to its larger cousin. “What is the structure of Freedom?” Robertson asks. “It is entirely synthetic.”

Rubus Armeniacus opens with photographs by Lloyd Center and Mia Cunningham, a rich and saturated variety of greys, capturing a plant that lovingly drapes and enshroudes architecture with its impressive thorns. Imported, hybridized, prolific, stubborn. The Himalayian Blackberry isn’t Himalayian, of course. In Center and Cunningham’s pictures of architecture smothered by chaotic surface, we ask ourselves, “who is subordinate to who?” Like marginalia that overtakes an imprinted text, Robertson suggests that Rubus Armeniacus’ ability to invent it’s own surfaces on, around, and through architecture is a testament to this plant’s “calling of style.”

Atget’s Interiors also includes rich greys in its catalogue of staged Parisian classist interiors. ‘This is what a stockbroker’s bedroom looks like, a modestly independent woman-of-means’ study, a female labourer’s modest one-room interior.’ Here, Atget is assuming habits, assuming lives. Robertson asks, “How are we to understand the relation of intuition to habit?” By favouring intuition, she answers, and its present-ness, sincerity, truth, admittance of change, value of experience, and refusal to clutch the past. In this way, she suggests that these photographs, or rather, the surface itself, seems to act. “The pleatings of potential bodies” invites a kind of curiosity into the “neutral support” of a room that knows our ‘moeurs’ better than any other place. In this safe cradling, we are free to let intuition ornament our space, via furnishings and what those furnishings say about our sense of time, and it’s eventual passing into decay. This permission to touch that makes interiors dreamlike.

The Value Village Lyric dissects our intentions while “selvaging” in the “House of V” through gauche archival failures, imagining a future self. These failures come to the ‘House of V’ in large compact blocks, where I imagine they appear from above on a crane, or out of a freightloader that arrives at a back door carefully. We talk of and display our luck, discuss sorting techniques, and as the author suggests, agree that boredom is the best state for a lucky ‘happening’ to unfold. We’ve con/formed to a society that capitalizes on the limpid and the tossed, and our new sheaths imbue a temporary giddiness until they too, are set aside.

Finally, Robertson’s Seven Walks invites us into phenomenological reveries that can both soothe and tense the passing of places and experiences. We walk through Vancouver ports at sunrise and hear the silent murmurings of persons classified as cargo, while trying to forget. We appreciate the extension of ‘parks’ hidden in cracks: the sidewalk, the building, the back alley, and sit on a stained bench, contemplating, “am I inside or outside the diorama?” We recall anxious memories of a relationship punctuated by frenetic descriptions of food courses and horrific dessert shops. We saunter through scraped out factories, trying to figure out the rules of city planners and their gouging tracks. We take a claustrophobic and short taxi ride from point A to point B. We get trapped between bridge discardings and a suffocating forest with no guide, and somehow manage to survive intimacy.

Lisa Robertson lived in Vancouver for twenty-three years and saw the surfaces and architectures of the landscape change drastically. These collection of works are an ethical attempt on her part to “question [her] own nostalgia” for decay, but rather than a brandishing tone, these essays present ever-changing spaces with a loving regard. “I tried to recall spaces, and what I remembered was surfaces.” And so she has softened the edges of ‘space’, that boxy and somewhat contentious void. Moreover, she maintains a common thread in these essays touching on the fear of our own dissolve, the slippage of our history and legacy, our tendency to become frightened and overwhelmed at maintaining the willful ignorance that time really is passing – for us.

Robertson’s criticality is soft, just like “memory’s architecture”. Her manifesto suggests she reaches for no utopia, yet for every thing that wants to be, and in that she has succeeded well. This book gives us many pauses to think about the changing city, and the complicated aspects of what was then, is now, and why it is we hang on. Gentle steering starts and stops amid this light agenda, and we begin to think about our own touchings of skin in the city. The Office for Soft Architecture is a timely and lasting collection that continues to make us think and re-think our own little theories, and the surfaces we inevitably create.