I don't really know how to open it except to say that I met Max through my wife while we were living in London, at that point he was taking a course at the Architectural Association. I remember reading his thesis at the time and being incredibly impressed by the erudition and style he had in a second language.
He approached me a few months ago to read some texts he had written in english and I was so blown away by them that I ended up coming on board as the editor.
I'm an architectural lug-head, i have no real knowledge of the field what so ever and that's been one of the real pleasures of the project, to gain some insight into a world i have very little knowledge of. What hooked me at first about this work though was it's style and how it firmly refused attempts to classify it.
Excerpt from the Author's introduction
"The following texts were written during an 11-month trip to look at architecture through Europe, Japan and Sri Lanka. Some can be read as guides, others as comments, while others still take the form of short stories, but most of them touch upon all these genres. I would say they are more about travelling to see architecture than they are about architecture itself, though the appreciation of architecture is not wholly disregarded. I would rather say that the travelling aspect couldn’t be separated from the architectural object itself. There is no such thing as the building alone, and every attempt to look at it has invariably some impact on what you see in it at the end."
"All this is to say that I am preoccupied with the gaze’s dependence/freedom on/from texts – the subjugation of the naked eye to the interpretative precedent, constantly trying to figure out what is there to see without them, if there is anything at all to be seen without them, if there is such a thing as authentic liking, and what the mechanics of liking are."
About the trip:
February: Vicenza (near Venice)
March: Venice
April: Rome
May: Paris
June: Paris
July: South of France
August: Vienna
September: Prague and around
October: Athens
November: Kyoto
December: Colombo (Sri Lanka)
About the "rules"
1. Take up "residence" in a city for at least 1 month. I did break this rule sometimes, with 3-4 day trips to Naples (from Rome), Marrakesh (from Paris), Switzerland (from Paris), Munich (from Prague), Armenia (from Athens). But my HOUSE was in a city per month. For example, I had a painting (reproduction) I took from home which I hung in every room I slept. So 11 months, 11 "homes".
2. I also tried to select very few buildings to see per city, so that I could go to them at least 3 times. Some of them I went to more. The motto has been "reading is re-reading". I don't know who said this really, I heard it from my IB English Lit Teacher, and it never really left me. The first time you are just in awe, the second time you start finding other stuff, the third time... well.... I tried to let an "idea" develop per place, and that took time.
I'll try to pinpoint the moment where I decided I wanted to travel. I guess the beginning was in 2011 when I learned about Le Corbusier's deviant "Grand Tour" of 6 months which he says was a sort of epiphany. But I tried to see that through a historian's point of view. There is also a talk I heard of an architecture historian who talks about learning architecture like a medical student learns medicine: they give you a CADAVER on Day 1, and you spend a year dissecting it. So he came up with the idea of DISSECTING THE CADAVER of architecture. But that without the appropriate guidance (maybe it means reading?), buildings do not give up their meanings easily.
Then one night I was watching a DVD about Frank Lloyd Wright (THE cantankerous American architecture GOD from the 20th Century, one of the most revered figures ever) and he spoke all bullshit stuff. He didn't care about the truth of his words. But he got all the historians trying to understand him...
NOW: At that point, I was reading Miyasaki's Temple of the Golden Pavillion snd I was also teaching 1st semester Architecture students about FORMATIVE TRIPS. So with that image in mind, I decided to do this.
I took about 20 books with me, bought many others.
I wrote to a teacher at the AA asking for good books to take, and he kinda said, well you're gonna need novels. I was a bit reluctant at first.
I could not write anything in Vicenza... but as soon as I got to my apartment in Venice, I wrote those 3 Scarpa essays one after the other. It flowed so easily. Venice was the beginning. I am indebted.
About the writing... It started more "essayish" following my readings of John Ruskin, an English "style" critic, who wrote a lot about architecture and lived in Venice. 19th Century, Arts & Crafts Idol.
In August I went to London and spoke with this teacher at the AA, the one who suggested novels, and I asked for a new batch of architecture books to read, now I was asking for books with more "style" in them rather than PhD formats. And he just said "why don't you just read novels, period".
He's a bit of a nihilist, he runs the AA's Journal.
In Japan the monk wrote "Once Only, Only Once" and I've been trying to say figure it out what it means... for me. Someone has brought up the fact that "Once" means "Eleven" in Spanish, so eleven months...
Anyway, that made an even further impression. And then in SriLanka I found a book by the same historian (Adrian Forty) about architecture and language.... and that got me thinking about style more. And then I found Stein's PICASSO among the books of Geoffrey Bawa (the architect whose works I went to peruse) and that changed it all.
I don't think I deserve too much space to say all this, maybe it would sound pretentious to go into the anecdotal.
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Prologue
To read ‘Once only, only once’ is to be taken on a tour through the parallel spaces of art, architecture, aesthetics and identity. Our guide and intersectional point of reference in this quest is the meticulously structured voice of its author whose finely planed sentences and rhythms of description reveal the multitude of stories already present, overlapping and inscribed within each term.
You’ll have noticed that I have invoked the notion of quest and I do not use the term lightly. This work speaks to the dissipation of time and aesthetic while armed to the teeth. As a leader in the guise of a companion Moya the narrator is unfailingly genial, gracious but resolutely clear and instructive. There is always an intelligence present, unafraid of itself, ranging across the broadness of its interests with the highest spec of accuracy and leading you into the layered questions that you must try to rescue yourself from. Make no mistake, to undertake the demands of this writing, the experiences and ideas nurtured within, is to follow Moya on his search, a search predicated on the subject and possibility of beauty, its qualities and manifestations and the potential of constructing both the habitable and the memorial. It raises, at various points, the question of beauty and its practicality with neither term attempting to renege on the other. Moya’s analytical eye scours beauty and when it emerges through a sublimely rendered detail, or an elegant solution to the problem posed by living, having to live, already homeless somehow— needing always to construct a time to live in— then the work enters a space of its own, a space in which the sudden relief from the promise of something a-temporal emerges (itself transcendent!) in a suturing of past, present and future.
Moya’s work then, for all of his complex investment in the classical, strikes me as curiously and triumphantly modern. This work of auto-architectural theory is full of the hidden spaces of the personal which it takes delight in elegantly arranging, providing all manner of hidden passages reminiscent of the Loos so joyfully described in the ‘Pseudo-diary of the Events that Lead to Meeting Michael Brummell.’
In the opening triumvirate of stories Moya toys with the notion of playing the travel guide in the style of Ruskin but the force of his own emotionally engaged aesthetic, the horror of an incomprehensible system, cannot help but plunge the reader into the book’s underlying structure: the hidden and alterable architecture of a self in which the threat and gift of travel, the identity in exile, at times trembles above and beneath the surface of what it touches.
For there is a parallel narrative at work, evidenced in the subtly transitioning mood of these stories, a sense of a consciousness that is at first chastened and bewildered, a consciousness whose intellect has been grated against both the success and failure of architecture, a consciousness that becomes tempered by the unexpected and moves towards the calmer, meditative serenity of the final few stories.
And all this is achieved with such lightness! The prose is not bombastic but instead accumulative, lighting up, drawing itself together like a constellation into a structure that can speak across disciplines. It shuns didactism while maintaining an unhesitant p.o.v and rigorous attitude. The force of Moya’s gaze is unsparing yet ruminative, the style designed and disarming.
Most importantly though, beyond all of this and deep within the playful particularities of the voice, one can clearly discern in this work the depths of an orphic attention, moving through the past and present towards life, trying to recall what it was that first shadowed its desire.
Thomas Patrick Kendall
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CONTENTS
1 Brion Vega Cemetery
2 Possagno
3 The Nightmare of Scarpa
4 Cats in the Hospital
5 The Trees of Rome
6 A complaint about the Exhibition at the Pompidou
7 The Stapler at the MAXXI
8 The Postnuclear Family
9 Wagner’s Postal Savings Bank
10 The Story of the Little Whale
11 Pseudo diary of the events that lead to meeting
Michael Brummel
12 Idrissa
13 On becoming a sort of theoretical architect considering
Corbusier as precedent
14 Once Only, Only Once
15 Corbusier’s Paradise
16 Mr. B
Book details
Hardcover (2.5mm)
textile cover
200gr paper
150g paper
Colour photography
Approx 122 pgs
200 first edition, individually numbered.
Available for pre-order
Website: http://www.onceonly-onlyonce.com/#!avance/qig9k
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p.s. Today, the extraordinary writer and beloved, long time d.l. Tom Kendall draws your attention to a very, very interesting book thats's on the cusp of publication. I'm fascinated, totally sold, and anxious to get and read the totality. Please spend your local time today giving Max Moya's work your attention and finding out if you're like me. Anything that springs to mind in that regard that you don't mind sharing with Tom would be wonderful and, I'm sure, greatly appreciated by him, thank you. And thank you ever so much, Tom! ** Schoolboyerrors, Hi, Diarmuid! Oh, uh, I don't know how I do it. I'm all, like, 'what?!' about the blog too. Awesome that the gig lead you places. Okay, I will make the 'FoP' doc into a post. My guess is that the pretty bad quality comes straight from the source. Who knows, but I assume that all there is of the doc is that uploaded rough cut and that it's just been sitting around on old VHS tape(s) in someone's attic for years. The director, Gail Kazinsky, screened the rough cut for those of us who were in it at some gallery to get our feedback right after the filming, and then she was supposed to edit it into final form, but I don't think it ever got further than the rough cut for whatever reason. It's weird because my memory has David Trinidad in the doc, but apparently not. No, he was around, and there's no good reason why he isn't in it unless he declined or was out of town when it was being made. He didn't move to NYC until fairly long after I did. We will have fun, that's for sure! I'm excited already! I'm not a huge Mapplethorpe fan. I think what you said the 'weird interstitial space' is the most interesting thing about the work, yeah. I mean, at the time, the classicism and formal constraint and b&w seriousness had this anti-apropos thing that made it pretty fresh and seductive. Obviously, a lot of people are still seduced by that. I feel like now his work has settled into having more of a relationship to fashion photography than to 'serious' work. Which would explain its ongoing popularity, if so. But his work has kind of gone dead for me, for some reason. I'd certainly love to be there for your intro. And I'm interested to see how the film frames him. With love back from me! ** Jamie McMorrow, Hi, Jamie! Mm, Thursday was a lot like Wednesday, it turned out, I think. Ending with the total shock of Prince's death made it much stranger one, though, obviously. Four songs, sweet! Man, I hope there'll be a way to hear them or hear some of your songs. Your songs aren't on Soundcloud or somewhere, are they? Great about nailing the temporarily troubled song! Oh, no, I'm with you. Anxiety is an unspoken hero of the art making process. Finishing things, yeah. I'm one of those weird people who doesn't have a problem with that. I don't know, I always kind of assume it's basically about something as simple (if also totally complex) as confidence. I always look at finishing things -- which, to me, is inextricable from the action of making things public, I guess -- as an experiment. Or like as a situation where I'm going to get to learn things about what I do and how I do them. I think I have this basic confidence in my ... I don't know, talent, I guess, and an equal amount of curiosity about how I can work more successfully within my given talent. Is your problem finishing things tied to a fear of the reaction they will get? Puce Mary's great. I saw her perform recently, and it was mind-blowing. I you get the chance to see her perform, that's highly recommended. Money, right, duh, of course. Re: where their archives are. If you see this before you take off for Newcastle, fingers massively crossed that you both end up wanting the job and that they give it to you. What happened? Today Zac gets back from his travels, and we have to dive straight back into the TV script because our deadline is looming. Then I'm being interviewed for a French magazine about my novel that just got published here in France. Then I'm going to see a gig -- Thurston Moore and Stephen O'Malley playing live in collab at the Louvre. Should be nice. Best of the best to you on this fine Friday. Love, me. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Is that Richey Edwards book good? Does it have a theory about his death and/or disappearance? Oh, my inspiration books can be anything. I'm aways looking for new ones. And it's kind of random and unpredictable. Sometimes I'll start a book hoping and expecting to be fed as a writer and it doesn't happen. Then I'll read something just for fun, and something about it will set me off writing. It's weird. It's nice. Oh, gosh, I'm so sorry about the serious relationship talk. Did whatever happen end up being something you're okay with? That stuff is really hard. I hope it was okay for you. Let me know. My day was all right, just a bunch of usual stuff and then the news about Prince and being kind of stunned by that until I went to bed. ** David Ehrenstein, I wondered if you knew Downey. Yeah, his early films were very hip and available. My friends and I were very into them and talked about them a lot. And then he seemed to just disappear or something. Or his films lost their currency or something. And now he's largely just RDJr.'s father. That must suck. ** James, Hi. Nice bus listening. That whole record is terrific, obviously. Yeah in Spain. There was a specific location. I think the land was bought and everything. Yes, I got your email! The post is really fun and inspired, thank you! I'll post it on Saturday, the 7th. Very awesome of you, man. Thank you a lot! ** Steevee, Hi. Yeah, an incredible shock. I still kind of don't believe it. Really kind of inconceivable. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Cool that you liked the Lesley Flanigan work. She's pretty interesting in general. She performs live a fair amount. Watch for her. Oh, cool, that the Art Therapy thing was good and fully enjoyable! Get that scan, yes. I'd love to see the handiwork. And positive noises about your funding application too. A good day for you, excellent! ** Bear, Hi, Bear. Two wonderful days in a row is no small thing. Great! I'm pretty good, thanks. How are you doing the silent auction? Is it real world only or an online/crowdfunded thing? Extreme good luck with that! It's really nice to hear/see you feeling so upbeat about the play and the work involved. Hope and diligence in combo are the ultimate weapon. Yeah, I like Psychic TV. They're done so much in many different styles. I don't like all the phases. I'm not so into their 'rave' period stuff. I think it hasn't dated so well. I really like the early psychedelic, pretty stuff from the 80s, the 'Godstar' era, and I like some of the really noisy extreme stuff, and I actually really like the last few Psychic TV records. Yeah, it's crazy that we've been collaborating for 12 years. Gisele and I met back when I was still living in LA. I was invited to give a lecture in Lyon. Gisele, who I didn't know at all, wrote to me to ask if I would into staying an extra few days in Lyon and trying to do a collaboration. She sent me DVDs of her dance/theater work, and I thought they were interesting, so I said, Sure. And it was just one of those magical things where we hit it off personally and artistically right away. Then we spent three days making a piece together, and we wound making all but the final polish of our first piece 'I Apologize' in those three days. Then we had a public viewing, and it was really well received. When I moved to France not long thereafter, it made sense to keep working together, and we have ever since. We get along very well both as people and artistically. We've only had a couple of big disagreements. Ultimately, I think of our works together as being her works because theater is her primary form and it's her ass that's on the line in terms of the pieces' success or not -- whereas for me it's a very interesting thing to do in conjunction with my own writing -- so she has final say about everything. So when I don't agree with her on fairly rare occasions about how she uses my text, it doesn't bother me, and, in those cases, I just think of it as writing on assignment. I feel pretty lucky. We're very much on the same page the great majority of the time. Thanks for asking about that, man. What is it that made your friend think it was difficult working with you, if you feel like saying? Have a great day! ** Okay. Please do spend time with Tom's post and Max's work please, and do report back to Tom if you can. That would be great. See you tomorrow.