Writing itself is a privileged house. A communication within walls which you can either share or keep private. A whole structure of expression and meditation that its revelation is as active as the writer’s intention.
The bricks and the feathers of writing are accurately clear and blurry at the same time. Whereas most of the time solitude comes as a force of flow, so does the mingling with others and our surroundings.
Isolation and contact are side A and side B of the same meal for the writer. The architecture of the process is absolutely personal. All references of methods of other writers are mere maps of possibility. One might write knowing all the layers of the plot in which the characters follow a schedule of traits, events and consequences. But also, one can easily feel drowned into the need of writing and that necessity could end right there, with the act of the written expression.

However, the daily need of writing is a clear or disguised vocation and those who feel it live in this privileged house. A place where the cost of the living is based on a life strictly related to a constant analysis. That inherent lifestyle comes with the self and the act of making it a professional path is a lifetime decision. When you are writing, your life revolves around writing and when you are not writing, you live knowing you should be doing so. A backpack that is either being filled or emptied and applied to words.

The roots of the structure come with a highly integrated system of our senses directly connected to being alive. Firstly and before consciousness comes the attraction, an input that affects the writer like a sharp pin. It is normally a feeling what inaugurates the awakening of the consciousness and then observation takes place. The writer analyzes the past event that was still in the darkness and brings light to it by scrutinizing it or comparing it to other known events. If the occurred sensation, emotion or event lingers in the writers need to write it, that becomes a focus. And focus is the big topic to disintegrate until it becomes a whole story filled with life around it.
Disintegration of the focus is the architecture of it all. By compartmentalizing the wide picture, the writer accesses curiosity, imagination and research. These are the rooms that one enters firstly to embrace them and later on as a habit in which all the details of the story are envisioned, formed and processed. These rooms first are pictured with walls, to understand which is the stage of the architecture of the story but during development, the walls become laces that unite and associate information. During this stage, when all the fragmented house is already conceived as one, is when side A and side B, solitude and contact, become two phases of a same behavior. An introverted and closed being that writes everything that has already been incorporated in the self like if it was a mere torrent of known information. And the extroverted being that still needs to relate with the context and others to keep the story alive, somehow spontaneous and open to the unexpected. The privilege of the writing house might be the capacity of locking and unlocking the whole place in order to maintain the equilibrium of the writer and the written story.

Up close and personal: This is how Marguerite Duras in ‘Écrire’, Lucy Luppard in ‘The Lure of the Local’, and Rosalind Krauss in ‘Passages in Modern Sculpture’ describe the ‘spaces’ and ‘places’ they write about. The stories they tell are always about personal experience, even private in Duras’ case, and this allows readers to picture themselves in the narrative. It is a very effective technique, one that architects have often taken advantage of, both in the design process and after the fact when the time comes to communicate the work. I find the cinematic intensity of these excerpts very inspiring.

C’est dans une maison qu’on est seul. Et pas au-dehors d’elle, mais au-dedans d’elle. Dans le parc il y a des oiseaux, des chats. Mais aussi une fois, un écureuil, un furet. On n’est pas seul dans un parc. Mais dans la maison, on est si seul qu’on en est égaré quelquefois. C’est maintenant que je sais y être restée dix ans. Seule. Et pour écrire des livres qui m’ont fait savoir, à moi et aux autres, que j’étais l’écrivain que je suis. Comment est-ce que ça s’est passé? Et comment peut-on le dire? Ce que je peux dire c’est que la sorte de solitude de Neauphle a été faite par moi. Pour moi. Et que c’est seulement dans cette maison que je suis seule. Pour écrire. Pour écrire pas comme je l’avais fait jusque-là. Mais écrire des livres encore inconnus de moi et jamais encore décidés par moi et jamais décidés par personne… .

Il faut toujours une séparation d’avec les autres gens autour de la personne qui écrit les livres. C’est une solitude. C’est la solitude de l’auteur, celle de l’écrit. Pour débuter la chose, on se demande ce que c’était ce silence autour de soi. Et pratiquement à chaque pas que l’on fait dans une maison et à toutes les heures de la journée, dans toutes les lumières, qu’elles soient du dehors ou des lampes allumées dans le jour. Cette solitude réelle du corps devient celle, inviolable, de l’écrit. Je ne parlais de ça à personne. De cette période-là de ma première solitude j’avais déjà découvert que c’était écrire qu’il fallait que je fasse. J’en avais déjà été confirmée par Raymond Queneau. Le seul jugement de Raymond Queneau, cette phrase-là: ‘Ne fait rien d’autre dans la vie que ça, écrivez.’ Écrire, c’était la seule chose qui peuplait ma vie et qui l’enchantait. Je l’ai fait. L’écriture ne m’a jamais quittée.

Ma chambre ce n’est pas un lit, ni ici, ni à Paris, ni a Trouville. C’est une certaine fenêtre, une certaine table, des habitudes d’encre noire, des marques d’encres noires introuvables, c’est une certaine chaise… .

On ne trouve pas la solitude, on la fait. La solitude elle se fait seule. Je l’ai faite. Parce que j’ai décidé que c’était là que je devrais être seule, que je serais seule pour écrire des livres. Ça s’est passé ainsi. J’ai été seule dans cette maison. Je me suis enfermée – j’avais peur aussi bien sûr. Et puis je l’ai aimée. Cette maison, elle est devenue celle de l’écriture. Mes livres sortent de cette maison. De cette lumière réverbérée de l’étang. Il m’a fallu vingt ans pour écrire ça que je viens de dire là.

This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (2013) review of ‘Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities’, Canadian Architect, No. 4 2013, 38

Jane Hall begins her Introduction to Woman Made, Great Woman Designers (2021), with a reflection on Alison Smithson’s analysis of Beatrix Potter:

Few contemporary designers would cite children’s book author Beatrix Potter as an obvious source of inspiration for interior design. For mid-century British architect Alison Smithson, however, Potter’s fictional rendering of Peter Rabbit’s home and his kitchen filled with pots, pans, and instruments of everyday use epitomized what she conceived of as a deeply personal form of design, with the kitchen utensils providing decoration revealing the honesty and authenticity innate to family home life. Like many designers of her time, Smithson’s approach was predicated on the notion that design should both do something and look good doing it. Her memory of Peter Rabbit’s kitchen emphasizes the centrality of one’s habitat to the concept of so-called Good Design, an idea popularized in the postwar period, communicating that how something is made, what it is made from, and the function it performs have integral value to the maintenance of everyday life.

In the nineteenth century, urban criticism was often formulated by the pen of travelling women, such as the Peruvian-French publicist and walker Flora Tristan (1803-1844), who processed her experiences as a single, working woman in her socio-politically committed writings. Five years before the publication of Friedrich Engels’ Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, Tristan published her observations on the conditions of the English working class. In London, the ‘ville monstre’, the cauldron of capitalism and mass misery, she explored the quarters and the living environment of the marginalised and excluded population, the prisons, the mental institutions, the brothels, and the slums.

Of the numerous books and scores of articles – in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Review of Books, and elsewhere – all are important, but these three (Kicked a Building Lately?; Goodbye History, Hello Hamburger; and The Unreal America) come to mind as perhaps the most emblematic of her work. They reveal her sharp eye, critical mind, her awareness simultaneously of both the tiny but telling detail and larger societal trends. What is so extraordinary about Huxtable was her ability to touch the lives of so many people in major ways – the public at large unsophisticated about matters architectural, affecting their attitudes about the buildings in their midst. Her lively, often fiery essays brought those inert buildings to life, not arousing just an awareness of them but how they affected their daily lives, what to love about them but also to hate. While buttressed by her deep knowledge of architectural history nurtured not only by renowned architectural historian Henry Russell Hitchcock but also by Philip Johnson, curator of architecture and design at MoMA, the weight of learnedness never showed, and her prose remained free of pretension, academic jargon, always accessible to the average person. Born, raised, and living in New York City within walking distance of Central Park, Huxtable was keenly aware of the big city on multiple scales, from the modest sidewalk storefront to towering Wall Street banks and company skyscrapers, and had an invaluable firsthand experience of how cities work. This was complemented by an insider’s view provided by her husband, an industrial designer operating alongside but distinctly outside the highly competitive ranks of architecture, which served to enrich her keen awareness of how things work in the design professions. As Paul Goldberger so aptly put it, she made architecture matter.

“I’ll tell you what to do. Tear down that bitch of a bearing wall and put a window where it ought to be!”

Joan Crawford bellows with eccentric energy on the construction site of her home under renovation, played by Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest, 1981. I use this film to contextualize the words of Sontag.
A camp masterpiece for all the wrong reasons, the film was inspired by the biography of the same name written by Joan’s adopted daughter Cristina Crawford, intended to show the truth behind their mother daughter relationship and her abusive childhood. But as we take from Sontag’s text, “in the world of Camp we see things for what they’re not, because they are simply too much”, and the over-acting by Faye creates a “character” rather than a true depiction of Joan. As John Waters once said, she was the first drag queen role played by a woman. Instead of a dramatic performance, we end up with an unintended comedy, because it’s so bad that it’s good or as Sontag describes “being frivolous about the serious and vice versa”.
This film and scene in particular bring up two main points to what we can aspire from camp. The female architect, having to punch her way through a situation, because she is according to the men surrounding her (especially in the 80’s) not supposed to be vocal or even there. Her eccentric character, stealthy energy and ferociousness all remind us what it sometimes takes to get somewhere in the first place.

And second, the medium to reading Camp. Sontag’s notes are only the guide, and are not the be all end all of the discourse. Camp is best expressed in film, because its extremity requires the most amount of attention from the viewer. This standard of captivation is achieved by the accumulation of all mediums: image, sound, stage/space and body/actor, all recorded and presented through the digital, which can be maximized by creative editing (added sounds, lights, special effects).
Answering the possible question “what is Camp architecture?” one needs to understand the space as an over-designed stage bearing furniture props for the character’s performances to unfold. An opening elevator, a steep, long staircase, a falling chandelier or a broken wine glass can all become dramatic turning points of the scene. The architecture doesn’t work alone and presenting camp as a mere image is overlooking and undermining its qualities, thus missing the point, because it should in fact be overwhelming, even when its being “objectively defined”.
In case you still feel any connection to the text, here is a short list of films to indulge into the topic, in which you can observe the spatial qualities alongside the performance, sound and editing, that are each very bright, colorful and “in your face”. The trinity of unintended Camp oeuvres are: Valley of the Dolls (1967), Mommie Dearest (1981) and Showgirls (1996). It is important to separate these from the self-aware films to which I have selected The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Clue (1985) and Death Becomes Her (1992), a film for each decade.
Of course, there are many other films and I would be interested in seeing your selection of film or interpretations of the text in your annotations.

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Joan Didion, Why I Write, New York Times, 1976

When I moved to Europe from South Korea in February 2015, I learned a new language that I never imagined I would and it became 99% of my life. It was like having a huge part of my life stolen from me because I loved to read and write. People were trying to help me improve my German by correcting my grammar, but that never motivated me in any way, because I was never interested in writing textbook-perfect articles and sentences.

“To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed… The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind… The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture.”

What I was interested in was understanding, as Joan Didion said, that if you change the structure of a sentence, it changes the meaning of that sentence, and it’s a hard ending, it’s a dying sentence, it’s a long sentence, it’s a short sentence, it creates a completely different meaning and mood, because I wanted it to be an expression that came from me, a mood that came from me.

Living a life where I couldn’t express my sensations and thoughts in language made me very sensitive to sensations and thoughts other than language. I had to live by seeing, so I started to observe people’s behavior or attitudes in detail visually, which is also the secret of my last many years of studying architecture.

But for the past year, by assisting women writing architecture, I have been frustrated every day by how difficult it is to write, but also exhilarated by how I am recapturing the joy of life that I had lost.

Why I Write. Three Times of I I I. Taken from George Orwell’s novel, as Joan Didion so bluntly put it. Because it is about how and what I resonate among the multitude of existing beings. These moments of writing are like when you’re in a temple and you would like to mediate yourself, because we need a starting point to stimulate something which is finely tuned to your frequency so that you have the energy to write.

And it can be wild.
or it can be refined, refined, and refined.