When the future looks back on the present, it will see everything and nothing. Thanks to the proliferation of cheap digital cameras and the accessibility of photo-sharing websites, events are recorded and uploaded to the net within hours of taking place. Current affairs is simple, when you have thousands of pictures of Knut the polar bear, or the death of Concorde at Gonesse, within hours of them being taken.
A virtual record of the world has quietly usurped the physical one. In the late 1980’s, “The End of the Book” was gloomily predicted by newspaper columnists. Funnily enough, the book is still with us, as are those Cassandras, but other kinds of printed matter are disappearing. More traditionally-run architects’ offices still have what might be called a “paper library” of product brochures, samples and literature. Some of the material is a few years old, yet although out of date, it still forms a useful record of what was used on previous schemes. But physical catalogues began to be replaced by CD-Rom’s in the mid-1990’s, then websites with downloadable PDF’s by the start of the 2000’s. Although paper-based catalogues are still available, many architects go immediately to the website because it tends to be up-to-date. We have faith in the currency of information on the web.
Yet what happens if you want something which isn’t up to date – say you’re trying to match a radiator installed fifteen years ago in the first phase of a project; or track down vaguely-remembered old product; or perhaps you’re one of those insatiably curious people who research old things in order to write magazine articles about them? The strength of the internet becomes its greatest weakness: if it is instantly up-to-date, the corollary surely is that there is nothing out-of-date to be had there. Even when an old PDF file or screen grab is lurking on your hard drive – can it be dated accurately, and does it have any integrity? After all, everything on the internet is mutable – an image file can be Photoshopped so readily that Uncle Joe Stalin might have written the software himself.
So you are forced to fall back on the old ways, to collect dusty catalogues which too often tumble off shelves into the wastepaper basket. If you have access to a product library that hasn’t been cleared out in a while, there may be some interesting stuff lurking there. This is true particularly when trying to establish the trajectory of a company which has been taken over – the old brochures may give you lots of background on its history, which the new owners have no interest in. Whilst the graphics and production of brochures have changed over time, it’s certain that today’s ephemera will become tomorrow’s collectables, particularly as the current slew of printed matter may be the last we see, before it goes “all digital”.
Specialist book dealers maintain a small but valuable trade in old catalogues and manuals – though predictably they concentrate on those with visual appeal, such as Victorian-era compendia from ironfounders featuring hundreds of engravings of fancy castings; or unusual sales pamphlets bound in silk cord and leather boards. As many have said, the internet takes away the pleasure of holding something in your hands and feeling some connection to the people who made it.
Then, of course, we also maintain a record of our own ideas on paper. The working sketchbook is a home for ideas which would otherwise be homeless. Architects aren’t unique in using sketchbooks or notebooks, but we use them in a different way to artists or writers. I’ve got a line of them on the shelf, 15 years’ worth, which range from smaller than A5 to foolscap. Not nearly so many books as Bruce Chatwin kept – he used little black-covered Moleskine pocket books which he bought in Paris, and went through a dozen in a year; as he recounted in “The Songlines”. Once he discovered that the sole remaining bookbinder was to stop making them, he made a special trip to buy them up in bulk. Nor as many as Lebbeus Woods, who has an inexhaustible supply of notebooks bound in coarse linen and filled with his cryptic sketches: he occasionally scans some pages to put on his blog, which is an inspirational place in itself.
At degree shows, a small pile of dog-eared sketchbooks is a good sign, and the first thing I tend to do is pick them up and leaf through them. If you’re fortunate, you will see the inner workings of a thought process, which culminates in the final sheets tacked to the wall. For others, the sketchbook is a place to jot down disconnected thoughts, in the hope that a pattern will emerge in time: the book is a means rather than an end, it will be carried around and stared at until something jumps out. That method also leads inevitably to the working sketchbook’s typical character, that of expediency. The pages are covered in scorings out, tippex, doodles in many different inks. It’s creative death to treat it as presentation material.
Similarly, it’s irrelevant what the physical book is. If, like Bruce Chatwin, you’re hung up on the book’s appearance, then the vessel has become more important than the cargo. Mine came from countless different places: a local stationer, an art store in a distant town, off the Ebay website, from a bookbinder in the Black Mountains, and via a mail order company which stopped selling them immediately after I bought one and decided it was ideal! One even came as a free sample after the charming rep of a French papermaker took pity on me. Yet what they are when new doesn’t matter: what’s important is what they become. Most are old and battered by the time they’re full … full but never “complete”.
One strength of these working sketchbooks is that you can go back to use them as a quarry. They are a tool for thinking with, returned to at intervals as the thinking develops. Using bound books also saves back-of-envelope sketches from being posted in the bin, accidentally.
Quite different is the holiday sketchbook, in which the privileged record southern France in quavering pencil and insipid watercolour: the drawings, and how they’re made, are self-conscious. They are seen as an end in themselves; because of that, they’re no place for creative experimentation. They’re too precious, which means they are never taken where they might be left on a subway train or dropped in the Med. That’s a great waste of an opportunity, since they should be a means of prompting what Marcel Proust called madeleines – a visual cue that makes you recall a memory or sensation.
In the very last book of “Remembrance of Things Past”, Proust’s protagonist is tired, depressed and sickened by himself as an artist, and his failure to find a way of working. However, something happens to show him that he’s been looking in the wrong places for inspiration: he steps out of his carriage and slips on a cobble. Suddenly, a wonderful happiness comes back to him, as he recalls the same happening to him when he was in Venice. The memory, which he wasn’t able to recall by deliberating, comes flooding back, down to the details: the chill of the night, the sight of St Mark’s, and the smell of the sea. The sketchbook can act in the same way.
So the gradual abandoning of product brochures, and the slow retreat of architects and students from sketching, may not be changes for the better. Their homeless ideas need to be given somewhere to stay.
