Writing in 1993, Bloomer’s research represented the birth of the hypertextual turn in architectural studies. Bloomer begins her work with "a constellation of questions" that quickly fan into complexly interwoven text. The rich texture of this research project connecting architecture and text is, in fact, a web or a net of intertextuality. Five years later, Catherine Ingraham's 1998 book, The Limits of Linearity, makes an effective argument for the pleasures of the non-linear in the historically "line-focused" discipline of architecture. These examples are not isolated, but represent a a shift, or turn, to hypertextual thinking in architectural theory. This new interest in non-linear theory, which might be best understood as the import of hypertext theory to architecture, provides contemporary scholars with a lens for reading a long history of non-linear architectural treatises, from Louis Sullivan's Kindergarten Chats to Frank Lloyd Wright's The Genius and the Mobocracy to Marion Mahony Griffin's The Magic of America. These little known treatises have proved confusing to readers expecting linear texts; discussions of hypertext like George Landow's Hypertext 2.0 provide a network or web of theoretical that help clarify these texts, which are themselves responses to a wide range of professional, historical, and cultural concerns.

The Project
The work I undertake examines the hypertextual turn in architectural theory, and argues for the appropriateness of reading (and redefining) a group of related, non-linear architectural auto/biography/treatises as hypertextual documents, and then briefly describes my current research project, preparing Marion Mahony Griffin's unpublished, 1200 page architectural treatise, The Magic of America, for publication as a searchable CD-ROM. Mahony Griffin's archival manuscript was already hypertextual, just not accessible. It contains over 1000 pages of text (letters, speeches, poetry, plays, autobiography, biography, treatise, theory, genealogy, and news clippings) and over 200 pages of illustrations, original architectural drawings and sketches, photographs, and postcards. By converting what is literally a scrapbook pastiche to hypertext: annotated, searchable, and linked to other important scholarship about and related to the text, this project provides scholars of architectural history with an "embodied" example of the hypertextual turn in architecture.

The project I propose, then, consists of a lengthy ready list and writing three related texts:

• A grant-in-aid proposal for $8000 to fund preliminary research and travel to begin the CD-ROM project. (This is a 12-15 page document.)

• An outline and summary of a chapter entitled, "The Limits of Linearity: Architecture/Text/Hypertext" for my book project. (This draft should be 5-8 pages)

• A 20 minute presentation for the Great Plains Association for Computers and Writing. (This is about an 8 page paper.)

Objectives:
These proposed projects meet the requirements of the assignment in the following ways:

• They will meet the needs of outside audiences, helping me get my semester’s work done.

• They will produce approximately 25 pages of text.

• They will help me better understand a complicated topic that is very interesting to me, but very new—a topic I do not have time to explore otherwise.

Methods:
The projects I’m proposing all require a single set of data. I will begin this project by reading the materials listed in the bibliography contained in Appendix A and describing the hypertextual turn in architectural studies, where it came from, and the form it has taken in architecture. I then use this theory to frame my reading of earlier closely related architectural texts (Wright, Sullivan, and Griffin), suggesting that these texts are better understood as hypertextual, and would literally become more accessible by converting them to hypertext formats. These methods are closely related to those of literary analysis, where one set of ideas is used as a lens through which a group of texts is read. This research will then become the three documents I propose; though these are different document types, all three will make this basic argument.

Evaluation Criteria:
Because these projects require a lot of work in a short time, I think that just finishing this amount of self-directed research and polishing it through three drafts, should assure me an A for the project. Moreover, the criteria for an A will be well met if I complete the work on my reading list and write these papers.

Benefits:
These projects should all be useful to me; the proposal could bring in needed summer funding for research, while providing me with practice writing up this research as evidence to support a proposal’s claims. The chapter prospectus will help me organize my research so that I will be ready to complete a chapter of my book project as soon as I am finished with classes in May. Finally, I am already committed to giving the talk at the Great Plains Conference on Computers and Writing; this opportunity to do the work as part of my class preparation will force me to get the paper written.