The Janus Faces of the architect's Notebook: The notebook as a register of time

The architect’s notebook should I propose be read primarily as a register of time. Memory, sequence,
and material presence are all richly embedded -consciously and unconsciously- in the practices of the
architect’s notebook. It is an associative and parallel refractive mirror to the construction of buildings,
which is taken as the primary currency of the architect’s agency. But notebooks become through time,
autonomous from the physical witnessing of the events of construction, directly or indirectly. This
coexistent dilemma of buildings and notebooks, provides an invaluable window into an interpretation of
architectural meaning and value.
I would argue that the notebook is the most fundamental measure and translator of the objective and
interpretive dimension of the architect’s relationship with the past and present. Mapping constantly
circulating thoughts and observations, tracking the shifting focus of a distracted gaze, and acting as the
inevitable diary of day-to-day events, the notebook is a shadowboxer with the operational tactics and
creativity of the architect’s modus operandi.
Unlike the formal quantifiable drawings of the building process, or the discarded overlays or jottings of
momentary solutions in the studio, notebooks take on (as do buildings) another life and relevance, to
that for which they were originally intended. This opening up of a consequential space of interpretation
is inbuilt, and within the practices of keeping a notebook. It provides an inevitable distancing of
authorship and events, through time. This ability to transcend and translate ideas beyond chronological
time and events, and to look both forwards and backwards, if not sideways, through the phenomena and
schema of history, in a Janus type operation, situates the notebook in a unique position of
interpretation, oscillating between the temporal and historical world. It becomes a conduit for encoded
notations in the translatory and reciprocal space of past and present, which we struggle to articulate as
history.
Taking the connective and associative practices of the observational notebooks of Charles Rennie
Mackintosh (some of which are held in The National Library of Ireland) and in turn considering how they
are viewed and valued today in the context of history and the reconstruction of his masterwork The
Glasgow School of Art, the ‘enabling fiction’ 1 of the notebook, and the Janus like ability to look forwards
and backwards through time, will be discussed and explored.