1. Adam Nathaniel Furman

Artist, Educator, Author, Publisher
London - UK

‘Inbetweenness’

Could you please give us a brief introduction to your library? How did it come about and how do you organise it?

That is a difficult question. We have just moved house and they have become unordered. For 14 or 15 years we lived in Soho where they were organised. But following a period of upheaval, we haven’t managed to sort through them yet. This is our new house and we are just settling in; we are still waiting to buy shelves. At the moment we are having to squash them in anywhere we can find. They are only getting more jumbled up! I like to know where everything is, so this situation is problematic for me. The library is an extension of my brain, so at the moment it is quite confusing. Books are normally collected together in small piles for specific projects. Some areas of the library have retained their cohesion - a group on 90s philosophy, or a set of books about Japanese architecture in the 1980s. Currently it feels like chaos, and not positive chaos.

And how will you organise them when the shelving is installed?

We have too many books for one space, so we are planning to disperse the library methodically between the main house and the studio. We are looking at covering the spare room completely in shelves and creating a small bed with a reading nook, turning it into a wonderful ‘belly of a ship’ reading area. This will likely be filled with paperback books. In the main living space, we are installing built-in shelves, which will hold the larger art and architecture books. Others will then be dispersed around the house; one bookshelf for philosophy; another for architectural magazines; another for ornament and colour; and so on. Other areas will be created by category, or type, which will relate more directly to work.

What books have been particularly influential throughout your time practising?

There have been a few. In terms of directly affecting my professional work, I would have to say, The Eloquence of Colour: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age by Jacqueline Lichtenstein (University of California Press, 1993). An absolutely phenomenal book. It traces the othering of colour and the way in which it has been gendered and, ultimately, diminished within western culture. Lichtenstein charts this from the 1600s, beginning with the period of high French classical painting. Alongside this interpretation, she documents the philosophical division between artificial separation, or opposition between things which are eloquent and seductive being dangerous, superficial, dumb and feminine, and things which are difficult to grasp, boring, dour and sad, as being considered sophisticated and intelligent, even if they are not. Sobriety as depth. Lichtensetin charts this thought process all the way back to the first century AD and the debate within Ancient Roman discourse between rhetoric and philosophy. Those like Cicero who espoused the art of eloquence and the ability to understand how one can access people’s minds and emotions through effect, while also delivering content. Other philosophers opposed this view, arguing that this was feminine seduction and worked against the intellect. These ideas run throughout history to people like Bertold Brecht in the 20th century and the idea that theatre must be both inscrutable and impenetrable; that one must have to actively sharpen and use one’s mind to release and relinquish one’s emotions.1 This thread argues that any film that makes you cry, must somehow be sentimental and therefore, anti-intellectual. Lichtenstein’s book is an astonishing theoretical and philosophical feat, charting the way in which colour has been tamed and controlled at the order of intellect.

And the discussion in the development of modernism is quite clear with Adolf Loos and Ornament and Crime2 (Ariadne Press, 1997).

Exactly. I find that book incredibly stupid, with a poor intellectual argument. It is particularly easy to unpick compared to other areas of discourse in architecture and design. It is a book of prejudice.

Which has been going on for a long time, as evidenced by Lichtenstein.

Absolutely. Although it has steadily gotten worse over the last few decades. This book was important to you after university you mentioned? Yes. I think I started reading it the moment I graduated. I’m not entirely sure how I came across it.

But it wasn’t a resource you were guided to?

Absolutely not. University did not guide me to any resources that aligned with me, or the professional practice I was looking to pursue. It was the usual canon of ‘greats’; the long lineage that forms the standard university criteria around the country. There was nothing for me. I had to find my own histories.

Is there anything more recently that has had such a profound effect on you, similar to reading The Eloquence of Colour?

I latched on to The Eloquence of Colour because colour was important for me from a very young age. In certain forms, I have been ridiculed and humiliated for its use in my work. Architecture can be an inhospitable environment. If I had to choose a more recent text, I would say The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of being Alone by Olivia Laing (Picador USA, 2016). A masterful, genre-bending combination of memoir, research, biography and autobiography. Laing investigates the dense urban context of New York, digging into this relatively superficial truism that the city and its people are lonely. She discusses incredible figures, a lot of them queer, but some who are not, beset by an existential and deeply profound separation from society, for whatever reason. Broken people. Laing then extrapolates that loneliness, discussing the creative channels and worlds that these individuals create to fashion their existence. Worlds that have gone on to inspire generations of people. Laing takes the urban context of density, and rather than talking about it in an abstract, universalist, paternalistic way, that someone like Rem Koolhaas may do, she does the opposite. She inserts herself into the city, finding human stories that are extremely well researched and incredibly profound. They tell the story of modernity, modernism and urbanism from the inside out; the leftovers, the broken bits that generate our cities and the culture found within them. It is a phenomenal book. As a designer who has consistently had negative experiences in a professional setting, it makes me feel empowered. Truly inspirational.

Told with an understanding that encompasses empathy, humility and culture. This people-centric narrative is an element of architecture, or architectural literature, that is often overlooked. Jane Jacobs became revered because her work has some semblance of being centered on people. But even still, Jacobs discusses humans from a very zoomed out scale, as if they were ants. Your work builds upon a multitude of references and traverses trends, eras and genres, seemingly relating to The Eloquence of Colour, which provides a narrative through time, rather than a specific temporal focus. I saw your discussion on an upcoming project in Croydon and your two critical references were the Durham Cathedral nave and Paolozzi’s underground station at Tottenham Court Road. How important is that cross-fertilisation of ideas?

I don’t tell stories and I don’t do narrative. I want to create work where the stories are held in the work itself. I like telling myself stories and it is inherently part of my design process, but I absolutely don’t believe in this top down, unequivocal story that must precede my work. I think I draw on such a wide range of references as I love art and architecture. As I previously mentioned, I have had many negative experiences across both my education and professional practice, yet buildings never beat me up or humiliated me. I was recently talking to Joshua Mardell, the co-author of Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories (RIBA Publishing, 2022), and we discussed similar experiences. He was drawn to architecture for similar reasons. Ultimately, you can find friendship in the built environment; it can offer narratives and stories that help you to define yourself. I have always been sensitive to the visual world and found buildings waiting to tell me a story.

As you fall in love with the built environment, you constantly look at ideas and new ways to question it. What role has literature played in this process?

Literature in that sense has played a similar role as the built environment. It has been my friend. Whilst at university, there was no historiography of immigrants, or queer aesthetics or culture that I could access. All of my predilections and interests were ridiculed by my professors. Everyone else could refer to one of the important canonical writers that had been made available by their tutors, whether they were investigating postmodernism, or parametrics. Everything was available. I looked for references that reflected my interests, most commonly finding these in literature and the arts. I built a community for myself, of writers, books, and references; from Balzac and his writings about Paris; to finding inspiration from the writings of Proust, particularly in my third year of architecture school; divulging in Dostoyevsky; the decadent period of French literature; or in the fine arts, queer artists such as Wilhelm von Gloeden; or the more contemporary discussion on otherness, an area of study in which I found ideas and texts that were articulating the way in which I was feeling. I carved these spaces for myself, where I could find both inspiration and friendship. This archive initially formed my Instagram, where I presented architectural references that I found aesthetically interesting and intellectually stimulating, that weren’t necessarily on the radar of the profession.3 I built an archive that belonged to me; a ghost cabinet of my dead loves, in literature, art, photography, and architecture.

You’ve spoken about your design process in other interviews, but I wondered if you could talk a little about the relationship between research (reading) and making?

One has to become accustomed to the way one’s brain works; to learn how to live with one’s brain. This can take a significant portion of time and unfortunately, some people never find the correct balance. Personally, I can go for sustained periods with little input, but I do like to have a number of readings at all times that I immerse myself in. It tends to be one theory, or political theory book, alongside one factual, or historical book. There used to be a fiction strand to this process as well, but since the pandemic I have struggled to read fiction.

And what is your process like when working in this way?

I make a lot of notes, which I find to be a useful exercise. This helps me develop new source material. This intellectual stimulation from books is akin to the visual stimulation of going for a walk. For me, this process of notation always has design outcomes. More recently I have been reading Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity (Profile Books, 2018). Whilst reading I was constantly making notes and sketching in the back of the book, thinking about material relationships between the ideas I am reading and possible design outcomes. This is normally generated from historical or theoretical books, rather than fiction. This process is constantly erupting, which means when I start a new project, there is a bank of ideas. Writing is a further way of solidifying this process; arresting my process at a single point in time to help clarify my position. Somehow it has worked out that I have undertaken major bits of writing at various important moments throughout my life and career, helping to crystalise my thinking. The writing of Queer Spaces is possibly one of those moments, as was Revisiting Postmodernism (RIBA Publishing, 2017) with Terry Farrell, as well as numerous articles. I also write for myself, but this tends to be more poetic. I find this to be a useful tool to unite intellect and emotion. A way of creating an image, which is both potent and powerful. Poetry becomes a kernel that can remain important and productive for many years, often in a way that designing does not.

Earlier you were speaking about how you do not like to define the narrative for your work. In my mind, this relates to your discussion around poetry here, allowing yourself a degree of ambiguity and thus, freedom. This idea of poetry influencing your own design process is incredibly interesting and will differ depending on your environment, your age, how you are feeling, and so on...

Exactly. That is how I would like my design work to be perceived as well. It is interesting because when I look back at my work, the specific context I find myself in means it is always different.

Is there any poetry that has been particularly close to you?

Interestingly, I am not a massive reader of poetry. I read more novels and tend to graze poetry. One writer who I would say I have come back to a lot is Anna Akhmatova, especially with the ongoing atrocities in Ukraine, as well as many personal losses that have been quite difficult to comprehend, let alone deal with. Akhmatova’s work has a profound sense of loss, but in a dry Russian voice.

I understand from other interviews that you are dyslexic. You briefly discussed earlier the way in which you work with books, but I thought it would be interesting to understand if there are any other methods you find particularly useful?

I think it is worth noting that I do still struggle sometimes. It was another reason why I wanted to publish the Queer Spaces book, to produce a publication that was more readily accessible as it focused on visual content. Reading and writing are incredibly important to me. I couldn’t read or write until a relatively late age, and even when I could it was a real struggle. Later, reading became this incredible connection with human knowledge and history. I never stopped reading. It was the input and writing, the output. This took a lot longer and was something I was still struggling with at university. Poetry was a way around that, focusing more on the image. Those sketches in words became very important to me whilst designing, and they remain important to me now. As well as shapes and ideas that pop into my head, there will be an amorphous blob, a feeling tied to a smell, or a particular place, or a memory. A small vignette perfectly capturing a space and a feeling. Poetic language became the lens with which to explore and express that feeling. It has remained a very personal process to me.

A vision in your head... If you could re-discover one book, what would it be? Perhaps a book that you read when you were younger that you didn’t quite understand and has come to play a significant role in your life, or vice versa? Or, something that has been quite seminal for you recently that you wished you had read at university?

As an undergraduate, I would have liked to have read Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain by John Potvin (Manchester University Press, 2015). I would have very much liked my younger, architectural student self to have read it. Perhaps alongside the book I have just published.

And what is it about this book that you wished you had known then..?

It systematically unearths and explains the sophistication and importance of interiors and objects, proliferating the orchestration of space and domesticity as a pivotal expression of queer identity. Similarly to The Eloquence of Colour, it addresses a number of topics which are totally ridiculed, gendered, othered, laughed at, and called camp. Instead, Potvin presents these interiors as sophisticated, rich, and complex. Camp is a very convenient word, which because of Susan Sontag, has been used to sweep many diverse topics into one group, thus making them easy to scorn and dismiss. When you are born into a situation in which you have to argue to exist, Bachelors of a Different Sort becomes extremely important. It situates this history in an aesthetic realm, which is where so much queer, feminine, and female culture has existed. Not because mainstream culture is not aesthetic, but because of its claim to be universal it is therefore, not. Its aim is to erase all other aesthetics. This book goes someway in reclaiming that ground, expressing the importance of objects, knickknacks, kitsch, all the movements labelled camp, as brilliant, sophisticated and meaningful, and as such, being completely worthy of their place in canonical history.

Finally, what book would you recommend young aspiring architects, or designers, to read?

That is a difficult question because I think everyone is completely different. For me, that question relates to the context of architectural education; this presumption that everyone should know certain pieces of knowledge. If I had to choose, I would say Sound Advice’s book, Now You Know (Sound Advice, 2021). I think everyone should read it. It is not necessarily universal, but I think it teaches you critical ideas and knowledge. I would add Queer Spaces in here as well. These two books are not the same, but they are both trying to open the architectural industry to a wider audience and showcase these different perspectives. There is a rich history from these diverse backgrounds and it is critical they are included in the discourse. There is a lot of critical knowledge still to be brought to the field of architecture.

All photography by Tim Lucas unless otherwise stated.

Instagram

Twitter

Shop Instagram

1. Adam Nathaniel Furman

Artist, Educator, Author, Publisher
London - UK

Index Next︎

Shop Instagram

1. Adam Nathaniel Furman

Artist, Educator, Author, PublisherLondon - UK

Index Next︎

Artist, Educator, Author, Publisher
London - UK