Stories for Architectural Imagination

This essay focuses on imagination as a crucial source of innovation and makes a plea for an approach to architectural education that enables imaginative thinking about new spatial and temporal realities. It starts by foregrounding the strong connections between imagination, stories, and language. It then proposes the reading, telling, writing...

How to Speak?: A conversation with Alberto Pérez-Gómez about the necessity of Language to Understand and Practice Architecture

Elaborating on a host of historical and theoretical references, in this conversation Alberto Pérez-Gómez suggests a course of action for the development of the architectural discipline; opposing the banality of scientism and rationalism, and recognizing instead the need for a degree of obscurity and ambiguity as essential to the full exercise of...

Narrative Methods for Writing Urban Places

This fifth issue of the Writingplace Journal examines different narrative methods, understood as procedures, techniques or ways of relating or recounting events, and how they can be used to appraise and imagine the city. The editorial process of the issue has been developed within the context of the EU-funded COST Action ‘Writing Urban Places’,...

Ehituskunst Special issue: Jan Verwijnen: Creative Thought and Urban Change

This special issue of Ehituskunst brings to the surface some of the rich and diverse research material that architect and pro- fessor Jan Verwijnen left to EKA Tallinn's architecture faculty when he passed away in 2005. The project does not intend to be a collection of personal memories but rather hopes to engage some key figures of Verwij- nen...

Reading Caroline Rabourdin’s Sense in Translation: Essays on the Bilingual Body

Sense in Translation: Essays on the Bilingual Body presents a series of thematically related essays on the subject of language, translation and the body. It weaves together ideas derived from phenomenology, science and linguistics with the author’s own experience as a bilingual writer and architect. Rabourdin’s engagement with the writings of...

TerriStories. Literary Tools for Capturing Atmosphere in Architectural Pedagogy

By recognizing the potential of literary language in the description of architectural atmospheres, this contribution aims to confront the shortcomings of conventional pedagogical approaches in architecture that often fail to provide an in-depth understanding of the experiential aspects of place. To contribute to the development of appropriate...

Reading(s) and Writing(s): Unfolding Processes of Transversal Writing

This issue of Writingplace Journal, Reading(s) and Writing(s), focuses on the complex process of writing itself, and in particular on the question of reading and responding to texts. By presenting not only resulting texts, but discreet readings of works in process integrated with the discussions that unfold, the issue reveals complex modes of...

Skopje: The Multiple Faces of the City

Literary Methods in Architectural Education

The topic of the journal’s first issue, Literary Methods in Architectural Education, derived from our observation that many of the contributors to the 2013 Writingplace conference shared a particular practice: that of architectural education. Realizing that many scholars interested in the crossovers between architecture and literature find room...

Acts of Symbiosis: A Literary Analysis of the Work of Rogelio Salmona and Alvar Aalto

Presenting a double reading of architectural spaces, this article aims to bring together works of the archi- tects Alvar Aalto and Rogelio Salmona and identify some shared themes in their architectural approaches. While using literary description as a mode of architectural investigation, it shows how the use of writing in architectural analysis...