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• Emma Vidal Escalante

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COMPENDIUM written by Enrique Walker

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According to one of his earliest letters, Gustave Flaubert began collecting received ideas at the age of nine, when he decided to write down the senseless remarks delivered by an old woman who used to visit his parents' house in Rouen from Paris. Arguably his lifetime project, Le dictionnaire des idees reptes-translated into English variously as The

Dictionary ofA ccepted Ideas, The Dictionary of Received Ideas, and A Dictionary of Platitudes-was formulated around the time when Flaubert started writing M adame Eo vary, and compiled over the next three decades, but was still incomplete at the time of his death.

The dictionary-a book for which Flaubert decided not to compose a single line with the exception of a prefacewould thoroughly record the accepted and unquestioned ideas repeated ad nauseam in his time, and was intended as an inventory of potential exclusions. Flaubert expected-as he wrote in a letter to Louise Colet-that after reading the book one would be afraid to talk, for fear of using one of the phrases in it. Accordingly, he recorded the dictionary entries not as definitions, but as instructions, as a series of lines one ought to repeat with a given term .

The notes Flaubert gathered during his lifetime were meant to become either a book in itself, or the second part of his last novel, Bouvard et Pecuchet, which also remained unfinished at the time of his death. After having devoted decades to the study in succession of a considerable, if not exhaustive, series of disciplines, and after having systematically failed in their application, if not in gathering the received ideas of those disciplines, Bouvard and Pecuchet would return to their original trade, that of copyists, and, as the last endeavor and closure of their cycle, write down the dictionary entries.

In retrospect, the unfinished series of entries posthumously published as Le dictionnaire des idees reptes-indeed, sometimes as a book in itself, and sometimes as an appendix to Bouvard et Pecuchet-reads less as an inventory of potential exclusions, as Flaubert had intended, than as a potential compendium of found objects. More than a century after they were recorded, the received ideas contained in the dictionary-the provincialism that Flaubert meant to castigate, rural and urban alike, and for which he also doomed many of the characters in his novels-have in part remained so, and in part become opaque.

By definition, received ideas pass from former relevance to current irrelevance after being repeated and depleted of their original intensity. By the same token, received ideas also pass from current irrelevance to eventual relevance after being displaced. As a consequence of time-if not in the first place as a consequence of having been recorded as an entry-each of the received ideas that Flaubert collected for the dictionary during his lifetime has in the long run become a latent source for alternative formulations. The dictionary remains an open work-potentially open to be read and misread, used and misused.

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Momoyo Kaijima and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto recorded the first entry of da-me architecture in 1991. This finding-a spaghetti shop and batting center-predated their founding of Atelier Bow-Wow, and evolved into a project on Tokyo over the following ten years, which was-provisionally-completed with two guidebooks in 2001. The first volume collected seventy findings of da-me architecture, that is, authodess and worthless buildings. The second, which expanded on one of the previous findings-case sixty-three: a small house and vending machine-and was published soon after, collected eighty-one findings of pet architecture, that is, small authorless and worthless buildings.

As was acknowledged in the introduction to the first volume, the guidebooks intersected a genealogy of books on cities that have addressed emergent urban phenomena by examining the ordinary, that is, the architecture that the discipline of architecture proclaims outside its boundaries. This practice has entailed the selection of an existing and seemingly irreducible urban condition, and a journey-namely, the standpoint of an outsider-together with a project of documentation. In turn, rather than an insight into the city, the journey actually results in the disclosure of new architectures-concepts formulated precisely to advance the discipline, and applicable elsewhere.

In an interview with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown published in 2001, Rem Koolhaas described Learning ji-om Las Vegas as the last manifesto and the first in a series of books on cities that email a manifesto, within which he included New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, and Lagos. Koolhaas both traced this practice, and obliquely inscribed his two retroactive manifestos, Delirious New York and The Contemporary City-his unfinished research project on the Parisian banlieue, Atlanta and Tokyo-as well as the Harvard Project on the City. With the guidebooks of Atelier BowWow, this genealogy reached a third apotheosis.

The first volume gathered evidence to argue for Tokyo-da-me architecture-as a repository of potential findings. The second volume gathered evidence to argue for a specific finding in Tokyo-pet architecture-as the cornerstone of a potential urbanism. Together, the guidebooks advanced the ultimate installment of the genealogy. Precisely before the books on cities became recurrent, and in turn copious in evidence and meager in arguments, Atelier Bow-Wow both enacted the format-for they collected findings, and disclosed a latent city within the actual city-and displaced the format-for they examined their own city, and actually collected commonplaces.

Unlike other concepts in the genealogy-such as the decorated shed and the culture of congestion, formulated through Las Vegas and New York, respectively, though ultimately relevant elsewhere-pet architecture was both formulated through and for Tokyo. By virtue of their format, the guidebooks transformed familiar architectures in the city into findings, and in turn into alternative architectures for the city. The last nine cases included in the second volume-anomalous samples of pet architecture: not disclosed, but instead designed as if they had been disclosedyielded both a postscript to the project, and the starting point for a practice.

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