Name: Dr Teresa Stoppani

Affiliation: Senior Lecturer in Architecture, University of Greenwich

Bio: Teresa Stoppani studied architecture at the Institute of Architecture of the
University of Venice (IUAV) and received a PhD in Architectural and Urban Design
from the University of Florence. She has collaborated as design consultant with
architectural practices in New York, Venice, London and Munich. Has taught
architectural design and theory at the IUAV (1995-1999) and at the Architectural
Association in London (2000-02). Senior lecturer at the School of Architecture and
Construction of the University of Greenwich since 2001, where she directs the
MA/MSc Architecture programmes and co-ordinates the Architecture Theory courses.
Her main interests are the relationship between architecture theory and the design
process in the urban environment, and the influence on the specifically architectural
of other spatial practices. Her work has been published in Italy, the United Kingdom,
Germany, Argentina. Currently working on the book 'Manhattan and Venice:
Paradigm Islands of Anti-Modern Space' and on the design research project 'The
Palace, the Line and the Horizon' (with L. De Boeck). 'Architecture_Dust' is her new
project.

Abstract:

A Dusty Project

The reference to dust in Walter Benjamin's work is often associated with ideas of
grayness, obsolescence, and boredom. In the Arcades Project dust seems to blanket
Paris like a heavy gray coat. Underneath it, dust nests in the plush and dust covers of
the bourgeois interiors. In the public space of the city it 'encrusts' those who venture
outside, sticking to footwear and clothes, inescapable. Visible or invisible, slow or
fast, in both interiors and exteriors dust measures the uncontrollable, penetrating that
which is apparently ordered, organized, systematized.
In the passages, the in-between spaces of public interiors, dust is charged with
meanings of obsolescence. It covers the redundant, that which is old or no longer
viable or useful but remains purposeless available. It materializes oblivion,
blanketing over that which lies forgotten. It produces an opacity that in concealing
protects, but obliterates as well, eliminating the differences of things. Dust becomes
one and all with the forgotten objects that in the passages gather: discarded by the
interests of the commodity market, former novelties become dust, in a slow whirlwind
that inexorably swallows not only the objects, but also the architectural space that
displays them. In interiors, dust records and gathers traces, measures time and
indisputable linear history, it is a garment that 'one cannot turn' <F,8>. Linked to
boredom and to the monotony of the gray, dust seems to condemn space to stillness
and inexorable decay. In the city, this process is challenged by movement: dust is
swept and 'stirred up' by 'the trains of dresses' [D1a, 3], and its order of slow linear
time, of immotile recording, is upset.
This paper reads the multiple and ambiguous connotations of 'dust' in Benjamin's
Arcades as part of a project in which 'he who waits' is the agent of change. Benjamin
is the 'bored' one, who 'takes in the time and renders it up in altered form' [D3,4] in
his Project. His is an unstable construction that uncovers and unearths dusts- objects
and spaces, reactivating them in new relations of tensions between fragments.
Benjamin's Project is read as a 'dusty' strategy.