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Cataloguing architecture: the library of the architect

This substantive chapter is published in a book of wide-ranging literary scholarship (contributors include professors Bennington, Cohen, McQuillan and Wortham). Moving beyond a comparative consideration of libraries designed by two European architectural practices: of the immediate past identified with the work of O. M. Ungers and of the immediate future, in the shape-shifting, globally successful, Swiss practice Herzog and de Meuron; the text is structured in a series of six episodes (paired between buildings and books). This evolves, as if a library, developing an original investigation from buildings to books. That is from the aspiration towards ‘completion’ in the gradual evolution of an architect’s own library and in the publication of an ongoing ‘Complete Works’, to ‘readings’ of texture in library buildings and of an oeuvre inventoried in a visual treatise, and finally to mining micro-histories of the past and of the design process itself, in the composition of a library and the constitution of an exhibition book, Natural History. While accepting the distinction between a library designed by the architect and the library of the architect, the study thematically brings the two together in order to focus on the catalogue-ing mentality that recurs in different aspects of the design practice, publications and publicity produced by both these ‘architects’. The chapter provides the groundwork for the forthcoming publication by Peckham, Architecture and its Imprint: the building and the book, which explores this theme within a wider frame of reference.