The Road That Is Not a Road, and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile.

The twentieth-century Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro wrote, "Flee from the external sublime if you don't want to die flattened by the wind." For better or worse, some of Huidobro's compatriots are tempting the elements.

The Road That Is Not a Road is an account of the theoretical enterprises of the Institute for Architecture at the Catholic University of Valparaiso in Chile. According to author Ann Pendleton-Jullian, the architects, poets, artists, and engineers who make up the institute's faculty take the poetic act as their inspiration in architecture. They want to tap into "the same enigmatic mental layer related to the unconscious mind of which the modern French poets speak." So they play card games to determine sites for a series of sculptures, or free-associate words on the blackboard by the heath, or wander into the middle of Valparaiso and chant makeshift poems. If you're wondering how poetic acts like these become actual buildings, your mind's not right - not yet anyway. The point isn't to "change one's course in life . . . but to change that which is at the very heart of life."

Pendleton-Jullian, professor of architecture at MIT and a practicing architect, focuses on the underpinnings of the institute's masterwork-in-progress, the Open City Amereida in Ritoque, an experimental community along a stretch of coastline not far from Valparaiso designed and inhabited by the students and faculty. The buildings, small, mostly wooden structures scattered not too far apart on the dunes, are light and airy, and sort of spidery in appearance and execution, related, as she remarks, "to the physical process of building at the scale of the artisan." Since a lot of the materials, especially windows, are often scavenged, to my mind the Open City partakes of a kind of wit, delicacy, and earthy lyricism I associate with other improvised stays against the "external sublime," like the really fine moments of pre-World War II French Surrealist poetry, Robert Desnos, Max Jacob, Paul Eluard. Yet it's doubtful that evocation would satisfy the faculty, since despite the echoes of Breton the project really has nothing to do with Surrealism.

The institute began as a reaction against academicism in architecture. It thus "embraces experience as an active endeavor and theoretically rejects knowledge as the unique basis for a way of acting and doing." Fine, but why the recourse to poetry? "Poetry, is the expression, through human language restored to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious meaning of existence: it thus grants authenticity to our time on earth and constitutes the unique spiritual task." It only happens to sound like Heidegger's rectorate address - Pendleton-Jullian is quoting Mallarme here. However, the italics are all mine, so feel free to stick in any words you like. It's fun and easy: gambling and money; police work and vigilance; bouillabaisse and fish. So again, why poetry?

Pendleton-Jullian writes: "The erased footsteps in the sand of the institute's concept of volver a no saber [returning to not knowing] are analogous to the feuillet blanc [white page] of which Le Corbusier speaks. Both implicate reinvention in the design process." White page, implicate - that's off the Mallarme soundtrack, too, but for Mallarme the white page wasn't simply the site of poetic creation or expression; rather it embodied the limits of poetry, limits he thought useful for writing both himself and poetry out of the picture. It's a pretty novel conception of space, and though doubtless theoretically attractive to some architects it's one I can't imagine being of much practical use to them. Of course, Mallarme hasn't been of much use to poets either, which is one definition of greatness.

So maybe the question is, Why Mallarme? Part of the problem here is that Pendleton-Jullian isn't a very helpful guide through the poetry. So when she talks about "the modern French poets" she's lumping together about a hundred years of work, which is too bad because there's a lot there actually engaging both poetry and social space: parts of Benjamin's Baudelaire, Kristin Ross' excellent book on Rimbaud, The Emergence of Social Space, Louis Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris, Apollinaire's Zone, and virtually everything Blaise Cendrars ever wrote.

No matter, it's hard not to think of Mallarme's remark when Cezanne told him he had lots of ideas for poems: poems are made of words not ideas. Interdisciplinary work has its limits, so rather than taking poetry as an ontological ground we might consider its material practice: Why didn't Cezanne write poems? Or Mallarme compose music? Why are Heidegger's poems so bad? Why didn't Foucault write novels? and, Why did Nietzsche write such good books?

Lee Smith writes frequently on poetry and literature.