Reading buildings: The textual turn of architecture as a parallel to the spatial turn in literary studiesi (original) (raw)
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Ars Aeterna
This article seeks to explore the parallels between the spatial turn embraced by contemporary literary theory and the so-called textual turn in architecture. More specifically, links between the contemporary developments of architectural theory and practice and literary criticism are established. In order to highlight the nature and origin of the connection between these two contemporary tendencies, this paper draws on a number of authoritative texts of both literary criticism as well as architectural theory, predominantly within the Anglo-American context. Architecture is presented from the viewpoint of the 20th and 21st centuries, which accentuates its liberation from a purely formal understanding by emphasizing the human involvement in its interpretation. The conception and structuring of physical spaces are therefore regarded as conditioned by processes similar to those involved in the construction of meaning in language and literature. Thus, while literary studies benefits from...
Ars Aeterna, 2022
This article seeks to explore the parallels between the spatial turn embraced by contemporary literary theory and the so-called textual turn in architecture. More specifically, links between the contemporary developments of architectural theory and practice and literary criticism are established. In order to highlight the nature and origin of the connection between these two contemporary tendencies, this paper draws on a number of authoritative texts of both literary criticism as well as architectural theory, predominantly within the Anglo-American context. Architecture is presented from the viewpoint of the 20th and 21st centuries, which accentuates its liberation from a purely formal understanding by emphasizing the human involvement in its interpretation. The conception and structuring of physical spaces are therefore regarded as conditioned by processes similar to those involved in the construction of meaning in language and literature. Thus, while literary studies benefits from the extension of its field of study through the inclusion (and contemporary primacy) of the spatial point of view, architectural criticism invites active participation in the construction of its meaning, in other words, its reading. The processes of the mutual influencing and enrichment of both the textual turn in architecture and the spatial turn in literary studies is exemplified by means of contemporary architectural works that embody the synergic relationship of the two traditionally separate fields – (literary) text and architecture.
Architecture and Modern Literature
2012
Architecture and Modern Literatureexplores the representation and interpretation of architectural space in modern literature from the early nineteenth century to the present, with the aim of showing how literary production and architectural construction are related as cultural forms in the historical context of modernity. In addressing this subject, it also examines the larger questions of the relation between literature and architecture and the extent to which these two arts define one another in the social and philosophical contexts of modernity. Architecture and Modern Literature will serve as a foundational introduction to the emerging interdisciplinary study of architecture and literature. David Spurr addresses a broad range of material, including literary, critical, and philosophical works in English, French, and German, and proposes a new historical and theoretical overview of this area, in which modern forms of "meaning" in architecture and literature are related t...
A Phenomenological Approach on the Perception of Architecture in Literature
ATINER ' s Conference Paper Series, 2016
This study aims at searching for alternatives of architectural experiences in literature. Architecture is something abstract that can be scrutinized. Besides, architectural spaces are concrete spaces that can be experienced. Phenomenological readings will provide a base for abstract and concrete duality of spatial experience in conception of architecture. Specifically, architecture supplies spaces for people, and works of literature can give narrations of these spaces. Factual experience is possible by being in or around, moving through and observing spaces. It is not always possible to directly experience an architectural space represented in a photograph, film, or a book. Photographs and films put forth a visual source, whereas books give a textual source. These two sources do not provide real experience, but different kinds of perception (experience). However, what differentiates a textual source from a visual one is that it allows imagination of a space derived from words. In the case of a visual source, most of the time, an image of a particular space is presented as already constructed by having already passed through one’s mind and imagination; as a result, that image reflects the perception of a space from a certain viewpoint. An imaginary experience, on the other hand, is assumed to be achieved by reading words and translating them into an image of abstract spatiality. Therefore, a work of literature becomes a kind of domain where its reader is able to construct an image of the speculated spaces by his own interpretation. In the scope of this study, a novel written in Turkish, titled “Apartment Void (Apartman Boşluğu)” is chosen to look at architecture from a phenomenological perspective, because it offers spatial narrations that can be analyzed in the framework of phenomenological comparisons between the notions of space-place, temporary-permanent, inside-outside, and in-between situations. The author, Hakan Bıçakçı, is not a well-known writer; the preference of this particular work is solely due to its spatial narrative value.
Literary Architecture, Dwelling and the Return-Home in the Works of Rachel Seiffert
2018
As Ellen Eve Frank observes in her seminal work Literary Architecture (1979), the arts of architecture and literature have long been connected, not only through the structural elements by looking up from a book and noticing the chapters and external values, similar to that of a building, but also on the level of consciousness, that which is internal, perceived or "felt" (Frank 6). As a spatial construct, both have the internal and external, the movement of inside and outside. Thus, literature, she observes, gives place, form or idea meaning. She writes that man "imagines his consciousness or experience to be bounded or located in particular space, [...] while what is outside his personal realm he imagines to be boundless as he thinks the universe is boundless, timeless as it is timeless" (ibid). Introduction 8 Reminiscent of Bachelard, who I shall return to below, Frank draws attention to the analogy between literature and architectural space, through the subject of literature, that is life itself and the structures of consciousness. She notes how writers choose architecture, as a 'structure of human space' to organize their perceptions of "felt and remembered experience of life" (ibid 9). She suggests that through architectural images, writers express time or linearity in terms of space or location. Furthermore, the writers she investigates,
Echoes of architectural modernism in J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise
Ars aeterna, 2020
where she teaches courses on English, British and American Literature, Literary Studies and Postcolonial Literature. She received her doctoral degree from the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague. Her research focuses on spatial poetics, primarily the house as a literary motif, setting and subject matter, and the conception of dwelling in modern British literature. She has participated in international conferences and published articles on Simon Mawer, E.M. Forster and Iris Murdoch in academic journals and essay collections abroad and in the Czech Republic.