go looking for a better job, ordered no competition guidelines, and read no architectural journals. Instead I immersed myself in books by dead authors. I read Poe and Joseph von Eichendorff, Mircea Eliade and Giambattista Vico, and it was as though their writings contained a truth that I could at least sense, though it could never be proved. By way of Aldo Rossi I came across Étienne-Louis Boullée, a pre-Revolutionary French architect who designed melancholy monumental structures not one of which had been built. I became fascinated by his way with light, which in his drawings wasn’t a given, but more like a substance. It looked as though the buildings were pushing back against a stream of light, against the stream of time.
I filled notebooks with confused thoughts and designs for enormous purposeless constructions, archives, cenotaphs, fortresses half sunk into the ground, almost windowless rooms that light barely penetrated.
When, quoting Aldo Rossi, I said in a letter to Sonia that every summer felt like my last, she shot back that to her, this summer had felt like her first. She had never cared for Rossi’s melancholy and fixation on the past. She believed the world could be transformed by architecture, and when I objected that all the great things had already been built, she mocked me and said I was just trying to excuse my lack of ambition.
Our shared apartment was on the second floor of a tenement building on a narrow street. As long as Sonia had lived there, I had always enjoyed visiting, but since she moved out, I felt rather ill at ease in the rooms. The arrangement of space was somehow inharmonious, and it didn’t get enough light. My room was long and narrow and disproportionally high. I had set up my table in front of the window, but even so, whenever I sat down to work, I felt simultaneously exposed and jammed in. The only heating in the apartment was an oil-burning stove in the living room, and when I closed my door for privacy, I noticed the room got cold very quickly. So when I was at home, I spent most of my time lying on my mattress, which was in one corner of the floor, and read or dozed.
My living with Birgit and Tania turned out to be problematic. Sonia had talked them into taking me in, but actually neither of them wanted to share with a man. In the case of Birgit, who was just gearing up for her thesis, I had often had the feeling before that she resented me, but when I raised it with Sonia, she only laughed and shook her head, and said Birgit had grown up with two sisters, she just wasn’t used to encountering a man outside the bathroom door every morning. Tania, my other roommate, worked as a medical assistant at the hospital in Bogenhausen. To begin with, we had gotten along rather well, but lately she’d gotten into discussions about drugs and upbringing and expressed arch-conservative views that I hadn’t expected in her. She was away for weeks on end at congresses or courses, and each time she returned, she had a new pet theme, feminism or antiauthoritarian rearing or homosexuality, which she would proceed to blame for the approaching end of the world. Shortly after Sonia left, Tania started talking obsessively about AIDS, and developed an absurd preoccupation with hygiene. She brought back bottles of disinfectant spray and left them out in the kitchen and bathroom, and each of us got his own individual shelf in the fridge, and there was no more sharing of food. Then Tania started bringing home people who were put up in the living room, and who tried to convert Birgit and me to their opinions. It turned out that they were all members of a dubious anthroposophical society. Birgit would often argue with them, while I retreated to my room or demonstratively switched on the TV and turned the volume so high that it wasn’t possible to conduct a conversation over it. The atmosphere in the apartment deteriorated. Even so, I was only halfhearted about looking for a new place to live.
Most of
I filled notebooks with confused thoughts and designs for enormous purposeless constructions, archives, cenotaphs, fortresses half sunk into the ground, almost windowless rooms that light barely penetrated.
When, quoting Aldo Rossi, I said in a letter to Sonia that every summer felt like my last, she shot back that to her, this summer had felt like her first. She had never cared for Rossi’s melancholy and fixation on the past. She believed the world could be transformed by architecture, and when I objected that all the great things had already been built, she mocked me and said I was just trying to excuse my lack of ambition.
Our shared apartment was on the second floor of a tenement building on a narrow street. As long as Sonia had lived there, I had always enjoyed visiting, but since she moved out, I felt rather ill at ease in the rooms. The arrangement of space was somehow inharmonious, and it didn’t get enough light. My room was long and narrow and disproportionally high. I had set up my table in front of the window, but even so, whenever I sat down to work, I felt simultaneously exposed and jammed in. The only heating in the apartment was an oil-burning stove in the living room, and when I closed my door for privacy, I noticed the room got cold very quickly. So when I was at home, I spent most of my time lying on my mattress, which was in one corner of the floor, and read or dozed.
My living with Birgit and Tania turned out to be problematic. Sonia had talked them into taking me in, but actually neither of them wanted to share with a man. In the case of Birgit, who was just gearing up for her thesis, I had often had the feeling before that she resented me, but when I raised it with Sonia, she only laughed and shook her head, and said Birgit had grown up with two sisters, she just wasn’t used to encountering a man outside the bathroom door every morning. Tania, my other roommate, worked as a medical assistant at the hospital in Bogenhausen. To begin with, we had gotten along rather well, but lately she’d gotten into discussions about drugs and upbringing and expressed arch-conservative views that I hadn’t expected in her. She was away for weeks on end at congresses or courses, and each time she returned, she had a new pet theme, feminism or antiauthoritarian rearing or homosexuality, which she would proceed to blame for the approaching end of the world. Shortly after Sonia left, Tania started talking obsessively about AIDS, and developed an absurd preoccupation with hygiene. She brought back bottles of disinfectant spray and left them out in the kitchen and bathroom, and each of us got his own individual shelf in the fridge, and there was no more sharing of food. Then Tania started bringing home people who were put up in the living room, and who tried to convert Birgit and me to their opinions. It turned out that they were all members of a dubious anthroposophical society. Birgit would often argue with them, while I retreated to my room or demonstratively switched on the TV and turned the volume so high that it wasn’t possible to conduct a conversation over it. The atmosphere in the apartment deteriorated. Even so, I was only halfhearted about looking for a new place to live.
Most of
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