Details

ISBN-10: 1350236772
ISBN-13: 9781350236776
Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Publish Date: 04/21/2022
Dimensions: 9.21" L, 6.14" W, 0.55" H

Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches

Editor: Naomi Stead

Paperback

Price: $35.95

Overview

Architects and fiction writers share the same ambition: to imagine new worlds into being. Every architectural proposition is a kind of fiction before it becomes a built fact; likewise, every written fiction relies on the construction of a context in which a story can take place.

This collection of essays explores what happens when fiction, experimental writing and criticism are combined and applied to architectural projects and problems. It begins with ficto-criticism – an experimental and often feminist mode of writing which fuses the forms and genres of essay, critique, and story – and extends it into the domain of architecture, challenging assumptions about our contemporary social and political realities, and placing architecture in contact with such disciplines as cultural studies, literary theory and ethnography. These sixteen newly-written pieces have been selected for this volume to show how ficto-critical writing can be a powerful vehicle for creative architectural practice, providing new opportunities to explore modes of writing about architecture both within and beyond the discipline.

The collection represents a broad range of geographical and cultural positions including indigenous and non-Western contexts, and includes a foreword and afterword by important thinkers in the domains of architectural criticism (Jane Rendell) and cultural studies/ethnography (Stephen Muecke).

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Reviews

"A storybook about architectural storytelling, this important collection conveys well the powers of fiction to get us to things that can often seem more significantly real than the 'facts' as they are officially constituted and received. The authors, while retaining a keen sense of the contingency of their own writing, attend closely to questions of witness, the situatedness of experience and the ways in which the imagination can take flight from them, addressing what stories it matters to tell and the immanent critical charge that they carry." –Mark Dorrian, Forbes Chair in Architecture, University of Edinburgh, UK

"An extraordinary collection of writings where existential ideas about world orders migrate though different architectural and spatial typologies. Ficto-criticism allows multiplicity, simultaneity and disruption; it allows the reader to travel between different times, places and objects of investigation, enabling multiple connections and complex affinities based on the extrusion of evidence to an event lingering between reality and fiction." –Lydia Kallipoliti, The Cooper Union, USA

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Details

ISBN-10: 1350236772
ISBN-13: 9781350236776
Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Publish Date: 04/21/2022
Dimensions: 9.21" L, 6.14" W, 0.55" H
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