I have chosen to consider how Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces & Other Pieces (1974) along with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972) relate to my enquiry for Methods of Investigating. Both readings relate to my approach in different ways, with Perec’s showing formal similarities while Venturi and Scott Brown’s relating more thematically.
Perec’s work takes an open-ended but rigorous approach to observing and analysing his physical environment, breaking this environment down at different scales through the chapters The Street, The Neighbourhood, and The Town (pp. 46 – 57). He starts by exploring the noticeable minutiae of city living at a street level, meticulously commenting on what can be seen on a day to day basis in Paris. “Write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious,” (pp. 50) are some of the parameters he applies for his own and his readers observations of the city. In the following chapters, he expands his view to larger denominations of his physical environment, struggling with the inexactitudes of the terms neighbourhood and town. Arguably, my investigation into the site of St Mary at Hill church is similar to Perec’s in this way, and likewise I have used scale as a method of deconstructing, and subsequently reconstructing, my space. I started by examining what was visibly clear, making drawings to document this, and dissecting the site through its most obvious components from where I was observing them. I created a sort of drawn inventory of shapes and forms from the site, initially focusing on the small remnants of gravestones, the written information and other details within the church. On subsequent visits, both the scale of my drawings and the level at which I was observing things expanded. I started making sizeable graphite rubbings and also started to consider the spatial elements of my site on a larger, more zoomed out level, both physically (where do all these elements of my site sit in relation to one another?) and conceptually (do these positions have symbolic meaning in a church context, and, how do I make sense of this?). Both mine and Perec’s work aims not to define these sites of investigation through our methods, but offer different levels at which these spaces can be observed; making public the component parts of a space itself.
My investigation also shares similarities to Venturi and Scott Brown’s analysis of the Las Vegas strip in Learning from Las Vegas (1972). The text looks at their sites’ visual, textual and symbolic structure existing within “the phenomenon of architectural communication” (pp. 3 – 4), primarily exploring the signage which besieges the area. Their investigation posits that, architecturally, the signage around the strip “dominates […] the landscape” (pp. 8), creating a hierarchy of communication [signs] over physical space [buildings / architecture]. Thematically, I see a connection between my own enquiry and that of Venturi and Scott Brown, as part of my investigation looks at the typographic information around the church and the spatial significance of this. Interestingly, my site doesn’t exhibit the visual or architectural elements of a typical church, as it is largely concealed from street view and outwardly difficult to decipher as a religious site from a purely architectural point of view. Therefore the signage around the site and the stone dedications within the site become important communicators of the its symbolism. My exploration looks at how the words, messages and dedications are situated within the church, and the relationship between these typographic and symbolic elements depending on where they are positioned. “If you take the signs away, there is no place,” assert the authors (pp. 18), prompting me to consider a question along similar lines; if you took the signs away from St Mary at Hill, how would you know it was a church at all?
Bibliography
Perec, G. and Sturrock, J. (2008) Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London, England: Penguin Books.
Venturi, R., Scott Brown, D. and Izenour, S. (1972) A Significance for A&P Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
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