Before heading to the airport, I grabbed a few books, including Lisa Robertson’s Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (the pleasingly compact clear cut press edition). It wasn’t until halfway through my flight to Vancouver that I realized that the book is largely about Vancouver. Strange synergy. Then I noticed a boarding pass tucked near the back of the book, documenting another flight from Calgary to Vancouver, in 2005. It occurs to me that I’ve been reading this book, in transit, for years. There are passages I must have read many times, I don’t remember particulars, but the book has become luxuriously familiar, a constant, I can dip into it at any point, it continues. On this reading,
“Thickets, a cave, a hut of boughs…”
called up Lyn Hejinian’s “A pause, a rose, something on paper.” But only briefly. It carries on:
“Thickets, a cave, a hut of boughs are the components of landscape that conventionally provide primordial coverage. Structurally the shack is a thickening, a concentration, an opacity in the lucid landscape.”
Elucidation of surfaces, space, enclosures: shacks, and scaffolding:
“When an immobile building, inevitably bored of its environment, wants a new site, a scaffolding can be constructed around it. Scaffolding substitutes for a site. By compression or condensation it transforms an atmosphere to a condition of access which is also a screen. The idea is easily inflated towards the surreal or the homeopathic, but it is based on observation. When at night we hear the scaffolding rustle, then look up to watch it sway, we feel voyeuristic longing. In darkness the scaffolding is foliage. Sometimes swinging on special leafy scaffolds we feel compelled to loose our little slipper.”
– Lisa Robertson,
Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture
