Preface

Jennifer Bloomer begins her book, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi, by (dis)claiming:

Though my project is vastly different, I make the same disclaimer. I am not objective. And unlike Bloomer, I am not an architect, though I finished the course work of a graduate program in architectural studies. My relationship with that discipline is one of love and hate. I wrote once, in a short story about language and architecture and my passion for both, that we all follow the paths of our pathologies. Producing this text leads me back to that line again and again. This project is the path of my pathology, my return to a dysfunctional home: I know now there are better places to live, but none of them are quite home.

Here, up front, is a truth as far as I know it: I couldn’t cut it in architecture school. There were many reasons, some having to do with the discipline’s callous treatment of women, the lack of female faculty, the lack of female peers, and courses peopled by what seemed an unending stream of the worst sort of conservative, anti-intellectual little boys. I so internalized the discipline’s discourse that I feared being a feminist, because I knew viewing the discipline through a critical lens would interfere with the pleasure I found in beautiful buildings, and feminism, I knew, taught that beauty came with a price. I pushed on through all that. But when I wanted to write my thesis on Marion Mahony Griffin’s The Magic of America and its connection to the accident that I saw as history, I was told by my major professor that to do so would be academic suicide, and to focus instead on a contextual analysis of Walter Burley Griffin’s Rock Crest/Rock Glen housing development in Mason City, Iowa. I like to think that this kind, gently paternalistic man, who was a very fine scholar, saw scholarly potential in me, and wanted to shelter me from the potential fall-out of such a project–fall-out like being unable to gain admission to a doctoral program.

But it was ten years ago and I was a very good girl and I tried to do the thing he wanted, only I could not. I had no idea what a contextual analysis was, except I was fairly certain my goal in writing one was to show that history was no accident, that a logically linear path of causes and effects led to an entire neighborhood of Sullivan School houses in Mason City, Iowa. I never defended that thesis (and I likely could not have "defended" it, as its goals and claims were entirely foreign to me, written with the objective, third person disinterest of a person truly disinterested). So I am a failed architecture student and a good girl who was so good that rather than disappoint my professor, the kindly controlling father of my dysfunctional family, I preferred to walk away from a degree into which I had invested thousands of dollars and more than two years of my life. That passive act was my avoidance of the discipline’s attempt to discipline me–to make a man of me.

Ten years later, the paths of my pathology lead me home, to the thing unfinished, the story untold. The story is larger and more compelling than I could ever have imagined ten years ago. It is a story in which all my preoccupations are central: the crossing paths of gender, discourse, architecture, and the machinations of an interested history written by the victors. My preoccupations are central because it is my story–if I slip briefly into that disinterested third person voice, do not be lulled into thinking this project is in any way objective. It is auto/bio/graphical; my text writes me as I write my text. When I’ve finished, I hope to have come to terms with my anger at all those years of being a good girl in a dysfunctional discipline, not questioning abusive academic practices, and always feeling embarrassed because this thing I loved and hated, the discourse that is architecture, could steal away my breath and my self esteem, simultaneously, assuring I would never really leave, no matter how horribly it treated me. Every path(ology) leads home.

This is an unobjective truth, as far as I know it. This is why I can write about Marion Mahony Griffin; this is why I can’t not write about Marion Mahony Griffin.