Conference „Space, language & cognition: Perspectives on architecture and urban design“ 9.11.2021 (online) ZHAW ///

Far from being only a medium for the representation of architectural spaces texts should be seen as architectural interventions themselves. Instead of describing them, texts cannot help but to constantly rebuild, expand, transform, and warp space as we know it. They do so by performing an intersection of different and conflicting spatial modes: the imaginary architecture as we picture it in our minds when reading a text is related to the text’s metonymical architecture of syntax and grammar, and finally to the physical three-dimensionality of the medium itself: the sentences, the printed page and finally the book itself as a physical, three-dimensional object on and through which we travel.
By looking at different examples which most explicitly perform such an exchange between different spaces like Edgar Allan Poe, Karl May, Friederike Mayröcker, or the film maker Heinz Emigholz, I want to outline a theory of how to use textual practices as a new approach in architectural design.