The following historical sketch is excerpted from a longer essay by Claes Caldenby on Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, published in a recent issue of the Swedish journal Arche:

Since five years, we give an elective course at the Chalmers School of Architecture under the heading Material theory of architecture. The name is inherited. It was an ‘empty’ course [i.e. a sort of administrative placeholder] intended to deal with architectural theory in connection with construction. Together with my colleague Peter Christensson, art teacher at the School [of Architecture at Chalmers], I have filled it with something else, with the School’s blessing. It started out with a curiosity about ‘the material turn’ and ‘thing theory’ in the social sciences and humanities. There, we saw a connection to the cultivation of a ‘material culture’ at the School of Architecture, with an interest for ‘the built’ and for the materiality of architecture. Early on, we also decided to end the course with a journey to some city, not to cover the architectural monuments but instead to partake of the city by walking. [The original wording is strictly untranslatable: the Swedish word begå, which literally means ‘commit’ or ‘perpetrate’ (e.g. a crime, a sin) but also ‘celebrate’ or ‘partake of’ (e.g. a feast, a communion), is derived from the verb gå, ‘to walk’.] It then also seemed natural to prepare by reading literature, listen to music and view films that interpreted the same city. The first trip went to Paris, the city of flâneurs. We met up on the first night by the small park next to the 13th century church Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, where the Dadaist group had met on April 14, 1921 for its only Dada excursion to ‘banal places’.

The approach of the course proved to have been much longed-for. For four years in a row, we have made about fifty otherwise rather stressed out architecture students to set aside a couple of hours in the evening every other week for reading and discussing texts from entirely different fields. Some of the students have taken the course more than once. There was something tempting about the crossing of borders and not least in taking on a city as a city and not as an architecture exhibition. The entire course became an educational journey [bildningsresa, from the German word Bildungsreise] for us teachers as well. The search for places-to-read and places-to-visit [läsmål och resmål, another play on words] that we could explore led us to new hereabouts.

We read Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the flesh, a book that aims to set philosophy on its feet rather than on its head. It provided a point of departure with its discussions of embodiment and primary (material) metaphors. In the human geographer Torsten Hägerstrand’s posthumous book Tillvaroväven [The weave of existence], we found an introduction to the geography of time and to “the world’s inevitable next-to-each-other-ness”. It is also a work which demonstrates that the borders between geography, philosophy and poetry are arbitrary constructions. Another human geographer who does not fear such borders is Gunnar Olsson. We tried our hands at a couple of passages from his book Abysmal, about the unbridgeable gap between the map and reality.

In his essay “Translations from Drawing to Building”, the British historian of architeture Robin Evans, all too soon departed, discusses the friction generated by all translatory movements or sideways displacements. He takes particular interest in the friction that resides in the draft, an important component of the material culture of the architect’s work. We also read about tools as our means of understanding the world in the ethnologist Jonas Frykman’s book Berörd [Touched]: “To one who has a hammer, the whole world becomes full of nails.” And of course in the spirit of actor-network-theory in “‘Give me a gun and I will make all buildings move’: an ANT’s view of architecture” by Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, about a hypothetical mechanism that would capture the slow movement of architecture over decades and centuries, making it visible to us in all of its aspects, like an inversion of Marey’s ‘photographic gun’ which froze rapid movements.

We found the story of the Dadaists’ rambles through the city in search of the other, forgotten Paris and their starting point by Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in Francesco Careri’s book Walkscapes. Walking as an aesthetic practice. It deals with the significance of walking throughout 20th century art from Dada to the Situationists and the Land Art movement. Careri is the founder of the Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade urban art workshop which, among other things, has devoted itself to ‘transurbance’, walking tours in metropolitan peripheries. Another walking author is Rebecka Solnit whose book Wanderlust. A history of walking provided us with the long-term perspective on elective walking from English Romanticism to the footpath’s end in Las Vegas. To her, walking is fundamentally a movement of freedom.

In Paris 2012, we met late every afternoon for a kvällsandakt [literally ‘evening hour of devotion’, a playful allusion to the idea of ‘partaking of the city by walking’] (andenken = to think of) by some historically significant building. The students recounted what they had done during the day and we talked about next day’s assignment. The idea was to become flâneur for a day. One day would be devoted to going to the last stop on one of the Métro lines and see what one found there, in those places that are usually nothing but empty names on the tourist’s mental map. Another day would be devoted to ‘architettura minore’, the furnishing of urban public space in the form of rails, walls, benches, lamps posts and how they could be put to use, possibly in unpredictable ways, in the life of the city. On a third day, we would get lost by stalking some unknown person, following them on their way through the city, finding out  where it led to, and then asking for the way back. As one of the many coincidences during the course, we stumbled over Magnus Florin’s story “Pråmen” [“The barge”], about a man who devotes himself precisely to stalking an what can happen then. We read Stig Claesson’s Efter oss syndafloden [After us the deluge] and saw the film och såg filmen The red balloon [by Albert Lamorisse], both of which take place in Paris 1956. Every day, the students were expected to send us a postcard and two hundred postcards became an entire, freely hanging wall in the exhibition about the course and the trip. The students made comments like “I haven’t been this relaxed since I started at Chalmers” or “How wonderful it was just to walk…”.

In Saint Petersburg 2013, we met by the Bronze Horseman and read aloud from Pushkin’s poem. We experienced the antagonisms in this rich and poor society. By the busy main street, we tried to recall Gogol’s novel “Nevsky Prospekt” which, it has been said, is the first story ever with a street as its protagonist. A street of an entirely different kind is Ulitsa Labutina where the documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky shot the strangely poetic film Tishe! from his window in the course of a year in accordance with his artist’s credo: “We usually don’t see things that are straight in front of us.”In the ruins of the architect Erich Mendelsohns gigantic textile factory Krasnaya Znamya (The Red Banner) where the clothes of the entire Russian marine were manufactured, we wondered what the Russian 21st century could make of this. And during a magical hour in the tiny atelier of the doll maker Victor Grigoriev, we spoke about Saint Petersburg as a city from an entirely different, perhaps the 18th century.

In Trieste 2014, we arranged to meet at the pier Audace, ‘The Bold’, appropriately enough in the season of the almost constantly blowing Bora, the pride of Trieste, that comes down from the mountains to the north-east. On the second day, we met Claudio Magris in his habitual Caffè San Marco. He told us about his works and his relation to the city of Trieste, not least how taking a bath in the ocean was an almost daily routine for him. The city’s extensive coastline is full of baths and beaches for those who have “the gift of knowing how to enjoy what life has to offer” (Mauro Covacich). The next day, the students were assigned to do just that: to take a bath, as an anthropological enquiry. We made a two-day trip with a hired bus to Ljubljana, a mere 80 kilometers away and once connected by the railway line Vienna-Ljubljana-Trieste. That is where James Joyce and his Nora got off by mistake in 1904, on their way to Trieste, in what was then called Laibach. To the astonishment of the locals, the trains no longer run, just one bus every day between the cities, as if they were separated by a cultural iron curtain. Ljubljana is an idyllic place where the circumspect worry about the successful attempts to touristify the city, while the curious charm of Triste is that it is “the world’s most underrated destination” (according to Lonely Planet). Souvenirs, preferably of buildings that have become iconic, was a theme for the [previous] trips. In Trieste, we made an attempt (not entirely successful) to do the opposite. The idea was to bring a valued keepsake along from home and plant it in Trieste, along with an explanatory letter, like a message in a bottle. We believe that this could be developed further.

In Istanbul last year [2015], we met at the Hagia Sophia for one of the many major experiences of architecture that the city has to offer. On the second floor, one can reflect on the passing of time in front of graffiti on the stone railing made by Vikings in the 9th century, three hundred years after the church had been built, three hundred years before the Crusaders passed by and drew inspiration for the big Gothic cathedrals, and another three hundred years before the Ottomans conquered Constantinople and turned the Byzantine church building into a mosque. Our goal, however, was not the monuments but rather the throng between them. Istanbul’s old town, between the Hagia Sophia and the Grand Bazaar, bears the stamp of a trade structured by the guild system where different kinds of goods are on offer in different streets and where the people who make business live with it and in it from morning to night. Here is that intense nearness that we so rarely come across in our modern cities. The students’ assignment was to pick a street corner somewhere in the old town and make a map of that corner. The cartographic technique was free, not necessarily to scale but rather ‘psychogeographic’. From their street corner, they were also expected to bring back some object. The assignment brought together the two themes of the course: what the things tell us, and how we can chart or represent them.

A shorter excerpt from the same essay offers a prospect for the following installment of the course. For additional details about the course syllabus, see the complete reading list, our selection of excerpts from the literature and the list of guest lectures. The postcards from Paris, Saint Petersburg, Trieste and Istanbul are also available for viewing.
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