Professor Mari Lending, Head of Institute
of Form, Theory and History
Of the four Institutes at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, the
Institute of Form, Theory, and History indisputably carries the most challenging
name. Institute of Design, Institute of Urbanism and Landscape, and Institute
of Architecture are unambiguous and transparent signifiers, they read as well-
ordered categories pointing to vast but defined fields of competences, profes-
sions, curriculums, courses and research. Design is Design, Urbanism and Land-
scape is Urbanism and Landscape and Architecture is Architecture. It makes
perfect sense, summed up in the formula A=A.
When the American poet Gertrude Stein in the 1920s stated, in a poem, that
“a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” the logic of A equals A was indeed part of the
claim. At some level a rose
is
certainly a rose, in the same way that architecture
is architecture, even though the richness and complexity of the architectural
discipline transcends the botanic taxonomies of the rose family (historically and
contemporarily). In a fairly uncomplicated way the word rose points to a well-
known, concrete object as well as to real or mental images of this specific flower,
in all its lovely variations. But the monotonous recurrence starts to complicate
things. In Stein’s persistent repetition, a critical approach to an old topos is
unfolding; the metaphor of the rose as distributed in European poetry. In medi-
eval times and in the Renaissance roses pop up all over the place, usually to
signify something precious, beautiful, attractive, ephemeral but also dangerous
(the alluring object protecting itself with its poisonous thorns). However, the
figurative power of the rose was severely corrupted with Romanticism. Over-
use (especially of the increasing banality of the figure beautiful rose=beautiful
woman) left the rose metaphor as a worn-out cliché, stripped of new meaning,
reduced in its ability to evoke surprising and strong images by means of language.
Already the A=A is profoundly distorted: The rose is no longer simply a rose,
neither does it succeed in establishing parallel, imagined realities in the way
successful metaphors sometimes do by providing access to worlds otherwise
unapproachable or unimaginable.
Stein’s A=A=A=A can be read as an attempt to re-appropriate the literary
tradition of the rose, to reactivate and breath new life into a withering meta-
phorical habitat, through a modernist twist on the old topos. Included in this
alluded literary herbarium we find one of the most famous roses in European
What’s in a name?
Mari Lending
