Writing (on) Architecture

Tower Block, São Paulo

I have a very open mind as to what constitutes literature and architecture and see no reason to restrict the definition of either. I have little time for arguments that make distinctions between high and low culture, literary and non-literary fiction, architecture and ‘mere buildings.’ If we are to democratically embrace all of the different ways people write, create art, and make buildings, then it seems vital that we maintain an open field without value judgements.  And so, in the same way that I consider the bus-stop and public toilet important chapters in the history of architecture, so the comic and epic works of graffiti, pincho in Brasil, take their place in the history of literature. I dare say for many this rather extraordinary tower block in São Paulo is neither architecture nor literature. For me it is both. Occupied by the homeless and marginalised it was subsequently transformed into what is nothing less than a literary-architectural canvas in which the lingua franca is a unique fusion of hieroglyphs, runes, and geometric symbols.  If an epistolary novel, is one based around letters and documents, then I like to think of this as epistolatory architecture. It is a building that narrates the lives of the many individuals who passed through its corridors, dangled precariously out of windows, pivoted on narrow ledges, and with spray can in hand, wrote encrypted messages to persons unknown.