The literary text, Finnegan’s Wake, was used as the program for a project involving a dozen contributions by different students on a “real” site, London’s Covent Garden. The intersections of an ordinance survey grid became the locations of each architectural intervention, using the regular spacing of points to accommodate a heterogeneous selection of buildings. Moreover, the point grid functioned as a mediator between the mutually exclusive systems of words and stone, between the literary program and the architectural text. more

The literary text, Finnegan’s Wake, was used as the program for a project involving a dozen contributions by different students on a “real” site, London’s Covent Garden. The intersections of an ordinance survey grid became the locations of each architectural intervention, using the regular spacing of points to accommodate a heterogeneous selection of buildings. Moreover, the point grid functioned as a mediator between the mutually exclusive systems of words and stone, between the literary program and the architectural text.

Joyce’s Garden in no way attempted to reconcile the disparities resulting from the superimposition of one text on another; it avoided synthesis, instead encouraging the opposed and often conflicting logics of the different systems. The abstraction of the grid as an organizing device suggested the disjunction between an architectural signifier and its programmatic signified, between space and the use that is made of it. The point grid became the tool of an approach that argued, against functionalist doctrines, that there is no cause-and-effect relationship between the terms of “program” and “architecture.” back

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Program: Master Plan, Theoretical