MO: You mentioned earlier that your book has been called a “beach read.” As you make evident by the writing process which you’ve just outlined, every part of it is intentional and deliberate. I think readers often have this misled assumption that if something is easy to watch or easy to read, it must have been easy to make.
EH: There is this very pernicious idea that personal writing is somehow this freeflow of words and ideas that just comes out of your brain, whereas academic writing is careful, rigorous, and thoughtful. The chapters that are personal were as carefully and meticulously constructed as the chapters that are academic.
It was important for me to delve into the ways in which women hide behind this semblance of spontaneity or being oversharers, which is actually a meticulous and controlled performance. Aline was very personal in her letters to people, and often pretended that she didn't know where things were, and was chaotic in her presentation. I would say that I'm writing very much in the tradition that she started, which is disarming her reader, disarming her interlocutor into thinking that they're getting a very personal take. Ultimately, Aline manipulates her interlocutors into believing what she wants them to believe and into doing what she wants them to do.
I am also always interested in exploring how to undo this knee-jerk reaction against memoirs—particularly against memoirs written by women, where the praise is often focused on the bravery of the author sharing her story. When someone like Karl Ove Knausgård writes My Struggle, technically a novel but very much based on his life, he is lauded for the qualities of his prose. It’s important to note that my book is constructed as a coherent whole through the careful deployment of different tools. One of those tools is biography, another tool is analyses and theory, and another tool is writing about myself.
My great struggle is that people read my writing and say, it's so easy to read that it must have been so easy to write—but that’s why it took ten years.
MO: How does a narrative around the built work come together and eventually become the work’s identity? Could you talk about how you approach the relationship between narrative-making and history, or narrative-making and knowledge?
EH: There are really good theorists on narrative. From a literary standpoint, I'm very influenced by Hayden White and the discursive turn. It’s a moment in the practice of history where new ideas about the role of narrative and the role of coherent storytelling really came to the forefront. Narrative is often constructed by somebody whose job is to do that—and I show this in the book.
I'm interested in the idea (which many architects seem to believe) that buildings tell stories inherently—that if you just look at a building, you'll know what it's about or you'll figure it out—or that their narratives appear out of ether and get adopted on their own. But stories are co-created, and there are originating moments. I use Saarinen’s TWA Terminal (1962, Trans World Airlines Flight Center, New York) as an example of this kind of co-creation. There’s a moment in the Time magazine profile of Saarinen where he tells an anecdote about having been inspired by a breakfast grapefruit, which is a very legible analogy that I argue was constructed by Aline. Later, a writer described it as a soaring bird, and Aline picked up on the soaring bird imagery and made it prevalent in the press. In my research for the book, I traced the construction and adoption of that narrative. Analogy and metaphor are important elements in constructing narratives about buildings.
When Santiago Calatrava unveiled his proposal for the World Trade Center Transportation Hub (2016, New York), he referred to it as a bird in flight, while others compared it to a stegosaurus. In any case, it was immediately anthropomorphized, and the analogies became central to the way people talked about it. With the aid of its newly adopted narrative, the project became more legible and understandable to the general public, making it one of the landmarks in the redevelopment of post-9/11 Lower Manhattan.
Answering how buildings come to have, or exhibit meaning, is very complicated. I think it’s a question that somebody could devote a career to. My book is an attempt to say: Here is one way to approach that question; here is one mechanism and I'm going to trace that mechanism with exacting specificity with the hope that it shows at least one method.
MO: I’m curious about your thoughts on the limited presence of the press in architecture academia and education.
EH: Architects are not taught to take the press seriously. This is funny because, eventually, they want to get published—and they have a profound misunderstanding of how getting published works. As a publicist, I've encountered architects with completely unrealistic ideas about what's going to happen to their project. I think it's unfortunate that the importance of media literacy and architectural press, and how to navigate them, are not taught in architecture schools. There is a great deal of education about how to speak to the press that is necessary.
I think the downside of architectural education is that architecture is reified as a difficult field. When I was in school, I was often reminded by peers and faculty that architecture is the hardest major. “Three quarters of you are going to drop out,” I was once told. There was this sense that if you are sticking to architecture despite all of its challenges, you must be hardcore or smart. I don’t disagree that architecture school is hard, but it's not any harder than learning to write really well. I've spent twenty years getting incrementally better at writing, and that has certainly taken a tremendous amount of effort and thought. Architects don't take the press seriously because they're taught not to take anything auxiliary to architecture very seriously. I think it's a great tragedy.