Cathedrals on the light of a butterfly’s wing: the momentary architecture of Virginia Woolf

Abstract

When discussing ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, Virginia Woolf describes the work of an author as ‘an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building‘, using architecture as an analogy for the structure of a literary work. The ‘formed and controlled‘ structures of Woolf‘s books are here explored through her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, which she was writing around the same time as her essay on ‘How Should One Read a Book?‘ and for which she drew a diagram of its tripartite structure. While Woolf repeatedly uses imagery that juxtaposes transitory life with fixed buildings, her writing also suggests another more complex, fleeting architecture. This is revealed through an examination of the temporal structures of her novels and the momentary architecture that forms around its inhabitants. The decay and renewal of the house in the middle section of To the Lighthouse extends this further, revealing a precariousness that undermines the qualities of control, constancy, and permanence she had assumed for a building and, by analogy, her ‘formed and controlled‘ structures. Architecture, instead, becomes momentary and precarious. An assembly of architectural short stories reflect on this reversal as they are ‘read‘ by To the Lighthouse – developing the dialogue between the writing of architecture and building of literature, between architectural possibility and the world-making of words within a book. New College Library by Níall McLaughlin, Ursula Meier‘s film Home, the Marshall House by Dow Jones and the Snellman House by Erik Gunnar Asplund are discussed. The study combines a close reading of the text with a drawn analysis that maps To the Lighthouse and Woolf‘s novels while also reconstructing places she inhabited.