Title Pending 23062

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.The article is based upon a reading of Paul Valéry’s Cahiers. Although Valéry’s published writings on architecture are well-known, the Cahiers, the 260 notebooks compiled over his lifetime, have not previously been studied for their architectural content. From the short entries in the notebooks, it has been possible to construct a more nuanced and richer account of how Valéry’s thinking embraced architecture. The Cahiers contain ideas from many different fields, in no systematic order. Valéry avoided schematising his thought processes, so as well as explicit references to architecture, there are many notes throughout that have resonance with architecture. The first part of the article considers why architecture was important to Valéry, and the place architecture holds within the Cahiers and within Valery’s wider thought, setting out a reciprocal relationship between architecture and the mind. The second part identifies specific themes in the Cahiers — work, making, ornament, modulation and space — to draw out features of Valery’s thinking that have potential applicability to architecture. These themes are not among the 31 categories that Valéry proposed and that were followed in the edited versions of the Cahiers, but come from reading the Cahiers for notes and recurring ideas that might relate to architecture. While not respecting Valéry’s classification, these themes were chosen to explore what architecture meant to Valéry, and the possibilities of his thinking for architecture. We have drawn attention to occasions where Valéry’s thought intersected with that of architects and thinkers of his time, but in general Valéry avoided reference to other writers, and rejected all pre-existing, established models of thought. In treating the Cahiers as an open quarry, we follow the example of others who have mined them for comparable themes, such as music.