Rendell, Jane;
(2023)
L is for … . Lucia, Laura and architecture’s other lost daughters.
The Journal of Architecture
, 28
(6)
pp. 1057-1090.
10.1080/13602365.2023.2272434.
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Abstract
In rereading Jennifer Bloomer’s Architecture and the Text: the (S)crypts of Joyce and PiranesiFootnote1 through an essay I wrote as student in 1994 called ‘Bloomer’s Babble’,Footnote2 I discover so many ways in which Architecture and the Text is related not only to that essay and my own life then but also to feminism’s re-writing of architectural theory in the 1990s. At that time Bloomer’s blend of theorisation, historical reflection, textual practice, and her uniquely autobiographical voice, offered an alternative direction for many feminist architectural writers of my generation. Revisiting my earlier reading of Bloomer turns out to have been a journey of rediscovery and repositioning. I find now that some things are still there, but in a different place, and others I thought I had lost long ago reappear, somewhere else, while new attractions beckon for the first time. My rereading refigures, as a ‘site-writing’,Footnote3 the ‘Three-Plus-One’ spatial structure that Bloomer’s book adopts and adapts from her reading of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939). For reasons that I only reveal at the end, I decided to take the 13 (One-Plus-Three) poems collected in James Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach (1932),Footnote4 and to supplement these with 13 ‘plus-one’ fragments of my own.Footnote5 Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach consists of 13 poems, each one composed on a piece of thick cream paper, folded and then bound together, and held in an orange box; each poem presents a ‘threesome’.Footnote6 On opening the folded paper, the reader encounters a poem typed on a sheet of transculent tissue veiling two further elements just visible beneath — the same poem this time handwritten by Joyce accompanied by a coloured lettrine designed by his daughter Lucia Joyce. In what follows I reconfigure this arrangement as 13 (Three-Plus-One)s — each ‘threesome’ opens with the title and first line of one of the 13 poems, followed by an image of the full handwritten poem and its lettrine. Next, I write a ‘plus-one’, a supplement, where each time, I take, as the starting point of my own text, the first letter of his first line, that she, his daughter, drew.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | L is for … . Lucia, Laura and architecture’s other lost daughters |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/13602365.2023.2272434 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2023.2272434 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > The Bartlett School of Architecture |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10190546 |
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