Cartography of Naps

A cou­ple years ago, before I took my qual­i­fy­ing exams, some­thing I pre­pared for by read­ing very quick­ly and then tak­ing a lot of naps, I was on the phone with my step­moth­er, a well-regard­ed art his­to­ri­an whose focus is on 19^th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can land­scape paint­ing. We were talk­ing about our respec­tive projects. I was try­ing to read every­thing I could about life writ­ing. She was, she said, putting togeth­er a pro­pos­al for a project about naps.

*

I remem­ber where I was stand­ing. In the park­ing lot of the Wal­greens on the cor­ner of Stu­art and Shat­tuck in Berkeley.

*

—Oh like what about naps?

Sort of a his­tor­i­cal read­ing, a new cartography.

—Car­tog­ra­phy of naps?

Well not a car­tog­ra­phy of maps, no, that would be redundant.

*

—Wait are you doing a project about NAPS?

*

Maps. With an M like Mother.

*

And then maybe a year lat­er or two years lat­er or some­thing, Jonathan Solomon was like hey why don’t you write some­thing for Forty-Five and I was like fine but can it be about naps and he was like yes
and I was like okay fine.
And then the dead­line came along and—
All I want­ed to do is take a nap.

*
What I’m try­ing to do here is make a text like Roland Barthes made texts, texts you could climb aboard.¹ Except, shit, that’s Wolf­gang Iser who said that, I’ve always remem­bered it to be in 1971 though the cita­tion says 1972.² Although this is also plur­al, a sign, approach­able, not an object (fol­low­ing Barthes). The thing about studying/​learning/​reading/​absorbing for qual­i­fy­ing exams — which is why I read Barthes, and Iser — is that the fil­ing sys­tem can get kind of cor­rupt­ed by either mis­hear­ing — like naps for maps, for instance, which is the only rea­son this text I’m try­ing to get you to climb aboard exists — or by mis-fil­ing, by try­ing to mem­o­rize one schol­ar and then acci­den­tal­ly mem­o­riz­ing another.

*

Prob­a­bly my entire career has been because of some sort of mis­hear­ing or mis-fil­ing. When I first start­ed archi­tec­ture school, which is where I met Jonathan Solomon, I real­ly prob­a­bly shouldn’t have been start­ing archi­tec­ture school. I didn’t know how to draw and my hands were too clum­sy for mod­els — I don’t have good hand-eye coor­di­na­tion but I do have per­sis­tence and task com­ple­tion and so I worked what felt like 20,000 times hard­er than every­one else and my projects looked like total­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble garbage and come to think of it (though obvi­ous­ly that’s how it was going to go) the last stu­dio project I did was a bed for naps.

*

And every­one was real­ly nice about it but clear­ly all I’d done was thread some wire through some egg crate mat­tress­es and made this kind of total­ly hor­ri­ble look­ing pile of egg crate mat­tress and wire and I’m pret­ty sure I stabbed myself while putting it togeth­er and also prob­a­bly stabbed the pro­fes­sors who very nice­ly tried to pick up the object and tried to take a nap.

*

I also need­ed a nap dur­ing the crit but this was the Adder­all era so I know that I swal­lowed Adder­all to stay awake all night enough to fin­ish thread­ing the wire through the mat­tress and then right before I went up I did some Adder­all rails. My mem­o­ries of the end of archi­tec­ture school are of (lit­er­al­ly) sweet post-nasal drip and a touch of blue snot. Blue and red and white, very patri­ot­ic, as my friend Emi­ly (not her real name) used to call it.

*

So archi­tec­ture school was a com­bi­na­tion of naps and drugs and acci­den­tal naps. Or like the time I slept after being awake in the stu­dio for 72 hours and then my friend Nick (not his real name) woke me up and I begged him, des­per­ate­ly, for ten more min­utes even though I had told him, like Odysseus, not to let me sleep even if I begged for it.

*

There’s a kind of tired that comes only after you’ve let your­self suc­cumb to sleep­ing for ten min­utes after being up for 72 hours that is unsurvivable.

*

Hence Adder­all. Hence whatever.

*

And so then I moved to NYC and then my soul took a nap for four years while I wrote about archi­tec­ture and learned about how it’s done — pub­li­cists, trips, etc. My dis­ser­ta­tion now is about the ori­gins of that then. The future of a past that was dif­fer­ent from the past I thought I was liv­ing the future of in my own past.

*

And then I couldn’t take any­more naps so I quit it with the Adder­all and the what­ev­er and then I moved to Port­land and pub­lished a book and then anoth­er book and then—
I was like OK let’s go back to school.

*

Where naps were nowhere on the agenda.

*

Instead it was like read­ing to have a read­ing con­test with yourself.

*

My first week of grad school I said I want­ed to read everything.

*

My sec­ond week of grad school I went into the library and saw how many books there were JUST ABOUT HEN­RY JAMES and I cried because I would nev­er be able to read all of the books and know everything.

*

That’s when I had to take my first nap. Just the effort of accept­ing that I would nev­er read every­thing was enough to push me over an edge.

***

When I teach my stu­dents at UC Berke­ley I almost always show them a video of faint­ing goats. If you haven’t seen any of the many faint­ing goat videos, these are goats that get so excit­ed when they get star­tled that they faint. I show this to my stu­dents because I feel like that’s what hap­pens with them — they get so excit­ed (freaked out/​startled/​worried/​terrified) about their work that they almost faint.

*

I used to fall asleep the minute any­thing got too exciting.

*

Now I fall asleep when I look at the archives for my dis­ser­ta­tion.³ I fall asleep when I think about Dou­glas Haskell.

*

I have some light form of Der­ridean Archive Fever.⁴

*

It took me thir­teen years to be able to go back to Der­ri­da after the way the French decon­struc­tivist was intro­duced to me in archi­tec­ture school. There was a pro­fes­sor who was famous and sort of still is famous and he would read Der­ri­da to us every Fri­day morn­ing. The sem­i­nar was sched­uled for Fri­day morn­ings because every­one at school went out on Thurs­day and Sat­ur­day nights (only the hard­core among us also went out on a Fri­day), and so hav­ing a Fri­day morn­ing sem­i­nar was a way of weed­ing out all the stu­dents who would oth­er­wise be sleeping.

*

I basi­cal­ly napped with my eyes open.

*

I wrote a paper between naps that was about absence as pres­ence in re the World Trade Cen­ter. I wrote it in 45 min­utes while eat­ing two Easy Macs in the din­ing room of a house in Pen­ning­ton that my then-boyfriend was rent­ing with two friends.

*

Some­times I get so excited/​freaked out/​startled/​worried/​terrified about my past that I have to fall asleep.

*

You know what made me real­ly want to take a nap?

*

Ron­champ.

*

Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut in Ron­champ, France. I vis­it­ed when I was twelve, prob­a­bly, apoc­ryphal­ly (I’ve told this sto­ry before; nev­er writ­ten this text before). I’d nev­er seen a build­ing like that, one that swooped like a whale and seemed impos­si­bly struc­tural­ly sound. And then, the inside, the three light wells and the box­es for win­dows. I’d looked at pic­tures of mod­ern archi­tec­ture but nev­er been inside a build­ing like that, and I felt like I should sit in a pew, which I did, and then felt like there was some­thing mag­i­cal there, some­thing big­ger and greater than me, that I could access if only I stayed still enough.

*

So I basi­cal­ly went comatose for twelve years, maybe because it was too much. Too exciting.

*

Can you be comatose while you’re awake and high-func­tion­ing? I could.

*

What’s the dif­fer­ence between a coma and a nap?

*

The inter­net says a coma is non-respon­sive sleep and sleep is respon­sive. So you can wake some­one from a nap but you can’t wake some­one from a coma.

*

Sounds about right.

*

I was in a coma for twelve years and now I just take naps, lit­tle breaks, here and there.

*

Car­tog­ra­phy of naps, not car­tog­ra­phy of maps, even though car­tog­ra­phy of maps is com­plete­ly redundant.

*

What does any of this have to do with architecture?

*

Once, dur­ing the coma years, I was play­ing triv­ial pur­suit with some­one. We filled each of the lit­tle wedge spaces with cocaine, and if you got a wedge you could/​had to/​should snort the whole wedge.

*

And then way lat­er, I found out even lat­er that I could have actu­al­ly been in a coma. Was almost. But that time I was total­ly awake.

*

It’s a fuck­ing mir­a­cle that I’m alive, you know?

*

Any­way, we were pos­tur­ing to each oth­er, all around the table, and some­one said some­thing like ​“I dare you to write a sto­ry about the archi­tec­ture of Radio­head,” and I was like ​“I WILL DO THAT.”

*

Obvi­ous­ly I didn’t, but there’s some­thing in there with the archi­tec­ture of a song and the archi­tec­ture of this piece about naps and the archi­tec­ture of architecture.

***

Recent­ly, I applied for three jobs. I decid­ed not to nap while writ­ing my let­ters, and so they were four pages long, sin­gle-spaced, total­ly exu­ber­ant, full of chats. Chats and naps and snacks is how my friend Jason tells me we survive.

*

I wrote this piece called a Design Patient’s Bill of Rights that was all about how I’d been a med­ical patient and also an archi­tec­tur­al one. It was my way of try­ing not to faint from excite­ment etc. at what I’ve ​“been through” lately.

*

My moth­er wrote me an email that said, and I para­phrase, ​“stop writ­ing about your­self and start writ­ing about archi­tec­ture again.” I guess she real­ly want­ed me to write about buildings?

*

So here I am. Writ­ing about buildings.

*

There’s this whole alarm­ing and per­ni­cious and awful trend going on that’s all about self-improve­ment and achiev­ing and good habits and goals. One of my grad school col­leagues sent around a ​“time­line for grad­u­ate school” that includ­ed when to start look­ing for a job and how to do it and what to say and it was real­ly hor­ri­fy­ing, so hor­ri­fy­ing that I had to take a nap.

*

Every­thing was so cat­e­go­rized and strate­gic. Like start mak­ing friends with x pro­fes­sors before you sub­mit z paper and go to con­fer­ences and I am about to fall asleep just think­ing about it.

*

We have prob­lems in acad­e­mia and every­one likes to get a bit hys­ter­i­cal about how we have prob­lems but no one ever wants to fix any­thing. I left acad­e­mia for eight years and then I came back and then I kept try­ing to leave again. I think it’s because I didn’t take enough naps i.e. breaks. 

*

There’s this relent­less focus on being pro­duc­tive. Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. Pub­lish or per­ish, etc. And in archi­tec­ture it’s even more con­fus­ing because we’re sup­posed to pub­lish or per­ish stuff about build­ings but with­out look­ing at build­ings — that’s a dif­fer­ent field, that actu­al­ly looks at build­ings. So we read about towns or streets or psy­chol­o­gy or something.

*

My first week of grad school I want­ed to learn every­thing I could about the psy­chol­o­gy of the inte­ri­or so I took maybe thir­teen books out of the library and tried to read them all. I par­tic­u­lar­ly loved Amos Rapoport.⁵

*

Try not to nap through all the shit that hap­pens in the archi­tec­ture world. Through the pro­fes­sors that show up at a crit and fight with each oth­er instead of talk­ing to the stu­dent. Through the oth­er pro­fes­sors that are stuck in some the­o­ry. Through the archi­tects that believe that the jour­nal­ist is there to be a foil for what­ev­er they want to say. Through the oth­ers that read to you and then tell you that you’re dumb.

*

Try not to nap through the fact that still in 2016 women-owned archi­tec­ture firms are in the strong minor­i­ty. Here are the ones I can list off the top of my head: Galia Solomonoff; Annabelle Sell­dorf; Jeanne Gang. Can you list oth­ers? Like who? Win­ka Dubbel­dam! Deb­o­rah Berke! OK, any­one else?

*

Try not to nap through the fact that at UC Berke­ley, where I am a grad­u­ate stu­dent who works with men, there is cur­rent­ly a vivid explo­sion of a con­ver­sa­tion about sex­u­al harass­ment. And it’s been cov­ered up for years! 

*

If some­one told you the things so many of us could tell you, would you think it was harassment?

*

(You would. You bet you would.)

*

It’s so excit­ing I have to take a nap.

*

It’s so excit­ing I’ve sort of been in a coma.

*

This is a car­tog­ra­phy of my comas and my naps, of the things in archi­tec­ture that have pushed me too far to the beyond.

*

Once, in under­grad, I made a movie for a pro­fes­sor in which I com­pared Le Corbusier’s strict for­mal­ism with a sit­u­a­tion­ist dérive and my actors — my friends who I’d turned into my actors — thought that I meant to say dri­ve.⁶

*

This is a car­tog­ra­phy of a dérive of a map or a nap, and I didn’t mean to say dri­ve.
*

What I’m try­ing to tell you is that it is hard to be a woman in architecture.

*

It is hard to be a woman in grad school.

*

And still there is some­thing in the build­ings, like in that Ron­champ mag­ic, that just — it keeps me here.