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ARCHITECTURE AND THE BURDENS OF LINEARITY Catherine Ingraham, associate professor of architecture at Iowa State University, appears to be much better as an original thinker than as a critic, and is much more convincing when she sticks to her own central theme than when diverted by what this or that famous deconstructuralist had to say at any given moment. Her short book looks at what might be called ‘directionalism’ in architecture: the way in which the path of a line, under certain pressures or perhaps charged in some way, can be used as a metaphor to describe the architect’s creative processes. Ingraham comes from an academic background in literary criticism, and her book opens with an analogy between the plot, theme and language of Shakespeare’s King Lear, and its derived architectural connotations. The poetry of broken, improper relations between property and kin is presented alongside a theatrical architecture of stylized perspectival sequences as in an almost contemporary Inigo Jones set for a masque, for example. It is a fine launching point for this business about lines, and nothing that follows in the book quite comes up to its promise. The investigations into Le Corbusier’s criticism of undesigned urban fabric as reflecting ‘donkey paths’, and the interest in handwriting and signs are only a beginning; the short reflections on gender and sexuality seem more intelligent than these things often are, but they are also pretty unrelated to Ingraham’s own subject. As a more disciplined writer, with a sharper line herself, she could do more justice to her chosen field. BOAZ BEN MANASSEH |