Tag Archive for: literary architecture

The Great Living Museum of the Imagination written by Matteo Pericoli guides us in the exploration of literary architecture

by Mario Gerosa

Every building architecture preserves a story within itself, it tells something that escapes the obvious idea of functionality. Of course, every house, building, palace or castle first and foremost serves the housing needs of those who must inhabit it, and in most cases it also responds to precise typological canons. Finally, it refers back to the proportions associated with the dimensions of man, normed by the drawing of the “uomo leonardesco” as well as by Le Corbusier’s Modulor.

But there are also intangible buildings that constitute a multifaceted separate universe, and there is also an inner voice of architecture, be it literary or built from mortar and bricks, that refers to a narrative, often developed on the basis of the sedimentations and stratifications of emotions felt by the visitors who have been there.

All these concepts have been brought out by Matteo Pericoli, an architect and illustrator, who in 2010 founded the Laboratory of Literary Architecture (www.lablitarch.com), “a multidisciplinary exploration of narrative and space,” an important and authoritative point of reference for studies in this field presented at numerous conferences and workshops around the world.

Pericoli systematized a whole series of thoughts and reasoning related to a transversal view of the art of building in The Great Living Museum of Imagination (Il Saggiatore).

The book is structured as a guided tour inside a macro-architecture composed of many buildings, which define an ideal gigantic complex. As if we were in a physical space, the exposition progresses through a series of spaces in which the reader can feel at ease, recognizing a familiar sequence: the museum of literary architecture conceived on paper by Pericoli comprises three floors, with an entrance hall, five rooms, a great hall, and a courtyard. On the first two floors, the reflection on spaces examines many existing pieces of architecture, from the Pantheon to the Guggenheim Museum, from the Parthenon to Villa Savoye, interweaving and intersecting considerations related to examples of literary architecture. From an increasingly tight and compelling comparison, assonances and affinities emerge between the written and built architecture.

A step toward the beyond

In another chapter, that of the Second Floor, we move into the territory of literary architecture, with individual examples dedicated to the architectural inventions of twelve major authors, from Calvino to Dürrenmatt via Vonnegut. The deeper one delves into the reading, the more the boundaries between the two kinds of architectures blur, the built one, which for convenience, with a misnomer, one may call “real architecture,” and the other, the literary one.

True architecture” is a curious expression, Pericoli notes. “As if there is one that is ‘not true,’ and therefore ‘false’? ‘fake’? ‘not real’? ‘intangible’? After all, architecture is to construction like writing is to typing, or the act of writing. The architect is not ‘needed’ for building (many can and just do that), just as the writer or writer is not ‘needed’ for composing sentences, words, texts. So there is perhaps the idea —, much shared and perhaps even legitimate — that on the one hand there is ‘literary architecture,’ immaterial, intangible, perhaps simply the result of some mental or intellectual endeavor, and on the other hand there is ‘real architecture,’ that is, the built, tangible, firm, fixed, objective architecture. And that the two are divided, separated. Here, I strongly believe instead that once we surrender to the idea that a story is like a house, a house to explore, to inhabit, from whose windows we see a changed world, which changes, as we change with each new visit and which is therefore something ‘real,’ as real as our experiencing of architecture, of space, of movement, of proportions, the changes of level, the ascents, descents, openings, darkness, clarity, and so on, then we are ready to read how narrative impregnates everything, it is everywhere, and it is a founding component of the architectural space that we read and perceive on a daily basis, just as we store in our minds the functioning of a story or literary text in general. Here we have to beware of the main misunderstanding: not how we perceive and read, and thus imagine, what a story describes to us (its settings, places, landscapes, its characters, how they are dressed, etc.), but how we learn to move within that construction, which is the product of how the story was constructed (according to us and our inclinations) — thus its materials, its syntax, its voice, its grammar, its cultural context, the references on which it rests, and so on. Literary architecture can give us that sense of confidence in discovering with ease, and perhaps pleasure, the narrative of architectural spaces, how they concatenate, how they reveal themselves to us — to us in relation to our inclination and our reading — and not (or not only) the story of how these buildings came to exist.”

All of these concepts emerge in the book, designed as a compelling architectural promenade between different types of buildings. But what are the literary architectures that have most struck Matteo Pericoli’s imagination?

“I have visited a huge number of literary architectures, buildings constructed either after I read the texts myself, and thus ‘designed’ them in my mind, or after readings and designs made by others. The ones that struck me most were perhaps those that concealed insights and ideas whose form could only be expressed in that way, that is, through architecture, and not through the use of words. The beauty of this approach, or method, or vision however one wishes to call it (that of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture), is that once one is on the “other side,” the side beyond words, in the place where the text is a series of architectural forms and spaces, thus wordless, to be manipulated and explored with freedom and ease, one has access to that state of mind, which usually lasts but an instant, in which our ideas have a shape before they have content.

A project by a group of high school students comes to mind. They were working on Ernest Hemingway‘s short story Hills Like White Elephants, and for them the crucial element, the fulcrum around which the story, the text, the protagonists and their reading revolved, was the weight of the decision as to whether or not she will do an intervention, a ‘small operation,’ which the two protagonists fervently discuss without describing in detail. The architecture of this group of kids is a plaza at a lower level of the city, where we are driven to descend (we are attracted by emptiness) and on which hangs, suspended, a huge black cube, the weight of the decision, at such a height and position that it causes a sense of both discomfort and curiosity. The idea of the two protagonists is not present in the project, and already this seemed to me beautiful and strong. But the thing that struck me most, for clarity, strength, elegance, and sophistication of thought, was that the tie-rods that hold that cube in suspension, tie-rods of different lengths from each other because of the off-center and asymmetrical position of the volume in relation to the whole, work (literally work) differently, some are tighter and under greater tension, others less so. Those different tensions represent the various moments of tension in the dialogue between the two protagonists that definitely does not work.

It is evident in the book that there is always a distinct sense of narrative in literary architecture. One wonders if this narrative dimension is also found in built architecture.

Just as every story that, from the moment it leaves the pen or the table of the writer and is let go, must necessarily have its own architectural structure, so every piece of architecture is necessarily imbued with narrative. Whether this happens consciously or unconsciously is irrelevant. There are those who write with a strong inclination toward the architectural design of the text they are constructing, and there are those who write instead letting their instincts guide them or move them by who knows what other ‘forces.’ But, in the end, the product is a structure that will have to ‘stand’, either well or badly, in order to be read. Turning the tables, much of the decisions that architects make, whether consciously or unconsciously, can be likened to those that the writer must make: how to meaningfully concatenate spaces? How to reveal the main space? How to use the clarity given by light? How to create surprises or expectations? How to make evident or hide the structure that supports the whole? How to use, if desired, linguistic references related to the past? (And to what past?). What form, and thus voice, to give to the whole?

It still remains to be understood in which buildings the narrative component is most relevant.

In all of them,” Pericoli states. “In architecture, the ‘narrative component’ is inextricable from any compositional decision. In the museum-book, on the First Floor, in Room 3, I say, ‘the choices one makes when composing architectural structures are qualitatively very similar to those made by someone who is narrating a story.'”

And then begins this long list of (self-)questions and answers:

“For example: isn’t positing an entrance on the side instead of in the middle a narrative choice? Yes, because by entering the ‘narrative space’ from the side we perceive it differently, the perspective changes. But then is raising or enlarging a window also a narrative choice? Yes, because somehow we change the relationship that exists between inside and outside, as well as the amount of information that can be ‘read.’ And is moving the visitor from a square room to a rectangular one a narrative choice? Sure, because they will perceive either an expansion or contraction of space (depending on the orientation of the rectangle). And is deciding whether or not to set back the front of a building from the street it faces a narrative choice? Well, yes, because it is like making explicit the relationship with which that building (then it depends on what kind of building it is: a house, a church, a bank, a museum, a skyscraper) stands in relation to the context, how and how much you want to highlight this relationship. What about the decision whether or not to incorporate a large tree into the structure of a building? It is a very strong narrative choice; it clearly tells what you believe the relationship between artifact and nature should be. And is the height of a wall dividing two communicating rooms a narrative choice? Yes, because the height will have a direct effect on what you will be able to read or glimpse or imagine about the other space; plus, it is a clear way of telling us whether you intend for the two environments to be perceived as linked or divided. What about setting back an entrance to make room for a porch? You see it on the ground floor in Room 1 with the Pantheon; it’s like retreating or postponing a beginning, a kind of introduction. And are providing soft lighting and deciding whether to do it with direct or indirect light narrative choices? Light, another material among the many narrative devices at an architect’s disposal, projects clarity or can deceive by excess or defect; it is directly related to clarity of exposition. And is the repetition of nearly the same structural elements (such as my repeating ‘it’s a narrative choice’) amidst the progression of a series of varying volumes a narrative choice? Of course, if used carefully it is a kind of architectural anaphora.”

https://www.wired.it/article/architettura-letteraria-matteo-pericoli-libro-il-grande-museo-vivente-dell-immaginazione/

With his drawings of Manhattan, Matteo Pericoli won New Yorkers over (and then the rest of the world), then went back to Italy, to Turin, to work on architecture, stories, and their relationship.

by Manuel Orazi

Many in literature have used the metaphor of architecture, especially to shape the structure of a novel; however, very few have done the opposite: imagining architecture as a narrative structure. This is the original interpretation of Matteo Pericoli, a man who, after leaving his profession in architecture, backed into it again.

After graduating from Politecnico di Milano university under Wolfgang Frankl – one of Mario Ridolfi’s historical collaborators – right before his passing, Pericoli moved to New York to work for Peter Eisenman for a brief period and then for Richard Meier. Between 1995 and 2008, the Big Apple was the setting for his metamorphosis from architect to illustrator; he conquered the city that never sleeps, which he drew from the outside first and the inside after (in Manhattan unfurled and Manhattan within).

What if the architecture of a novel were a real building – that is, it had a physical, tangible structure made of more than just words – what shape would it take?

Annie Ernaux, Les années

Paul Goldberger, then critic for The New Yorker, wrote that Pericoli managed to win New Yorkers over because he was the first to gather the entire urban profile of the island in a single roll, to draw Manhattan as if it were a town from his birth region. After many years and many other literary adventures that brought him to work with some of the most renowned international newspapers, Pericoli went back to Italy, but not to Marche, the region where his family is originally from, but to Turin.

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (L’amica geniale)

There, he found the Scuola Holden, where he proposed a completely new way of perceiving literature: “stories need to be experienced mentally before they can be written.” So, are stories landscapes, are they doors? “Not really, a story is not like a road to follow… it’s more like a house. Like the Nobel price Alice Munroe explained, you go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished.” 

So you can even go back again and again, of course, “the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.” The result is a collection of curious drawings, now gathered in a book, The Great Living Museum of the Imagination, which is probably the most ambitious of his books, the crowning achievement of this second Italian life of his. It certainly is the most theoretical of his publications.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (Mattatoio 5)

Pericoli’s intellectual candor echoes that of Gianno Rodari and his The Grammar of Fantasy: An Introduction to the Art of Inventing Stories, published over fifty years ago, the only theoretical text by Rodati, which makes it particularly significant. In the back cover of the 1973 edition, Rodari wrote: “I insist on saying that, although Romanticism surrounded it with mystery and created a sort of cult around it, the creative process is inherent to human nature and therefore it is within everyone’s reach, with everything this entails in terms of happiness to express and play with one’s imagination.”

Similarly, Pericoli encourages everyone to this exercise, trying to unravel some of the big, abstract questions without ever wanting to present himself as a philosopher or a critic, but suggesting practical solutions that are accessible to everyone. And he does so, for instance, by posing the question: what if the architecture of a novel were a real building – that is, it had a physical, tangible structure made of more than just words – what shape would it take?

It’s a question that Pericoli has been trying to answer for more than a decade together with his students at the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, which started at the Scuola Holden and then extended to other universities as well: “Reception creates interpretations that translate into shapes that are completely different depending on the student that conceives them, no two are the same.” The drawn, often bizarre, structures stress a fundamental fact: the process of reading of a text is just as creative as the process of its writing (maybe even more so), “the choices that are made when building architectural structures are very similar in quality to those made by a storyteller…It has the same feeling as a collaboration between two active sources rather than being a monodirectional transmission > reception process.”

https://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2023/05/23/literary-architecture-the-great-museum-of-imagination-by-matteo-pericoli.html

An essay by Matteo Pericoli

Architect, illustrator and author, in his new book the author offers a true guide to exploring literary architecture

by Lara Crinò

That the act of narrating can be likened, metaphorically, to that of designing a building, a neighborhood, even a city, is something we all know. We know it from having experienced it, as amateur or professional writers from a very young age: were we not perhaps encouraged, when we are about to put our thoughts on paper, with an expression that comes from architecture itself: “fai la scaletta,” (make a ladder) as if writing were placing rungs to climb higher? We know this, too, from studying it. What are literary theory and semiotics talking about, if not how we “construct,” again a metaphor of sorts, the text?

In his new book The Great Living Museum of the Imagination (il Saggiatore), however, Matteo Pericoli, an architect, designer and author, takes it a step further by offering, as the subtitle suggests, a true Guide to Exploring Literary Architecture.

Stemming from the experience of a workshop with a group of creative writing students from the Scuola Holden in Turin, this essay is a real experiment, starting with the format. Indeed, in the first few pages, the reader is asked to approach the reading as if exploring a museum, complete with a map, moving from a “ground floor,” which serves to introduce the book’s purposes, to a “first floor” and then to a “second floor” in which these purposes are spread out and then applied to a series of literary works. The basic thesis suggested by Matteo Pericoli is this: since when we read we are always, more or less consciously, visitors of an imaginary space, then it is possible to attribute to our impression of a certain text a certain form. If we can explore its various parts with our minds, then we are not only able to describe them verbally but also to create spaces, voids and solids, that are the architectural equivalent of the story we are reading.

It is no longer a matter of merely visualizing settings: indeed, as Pericoli immediately clarifies, he is not interested in the “so-called locations” of a novel, because “focusing on them means, in general, missing an opportunity.” What the author proposes is something different: working out an architecture that reflects the structure of the text. How is it done? To find out, one must first get up to the first floor of this museum book, where, with a historical overview, Matteo Pericoli explains how every architecture, from the primitive hut to the Parthenon, from Brunelleschi’s dome to Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, is in itself a story that needs to be interpreted.

Then, by continuing to the second floor, we can explore twelve interpretations of literary architectures: twelve works that are transformed into buildings. The catalog is varied and interesting, so much so that any good reader will want to read or reread the texts being discussed: from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, from Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Judge and His Hangman to Annie Ernaux’s Les Années, each work is drawn as if it were an installation or a building. There is also Italo Calvino, with his The Baron in the Trees.

These are evocative projects, mind games, ideal palaces and cities that overlap with the real ones in which we live and move. If you like the game, is the message, you can go ahead on your own, accumulating new literary architectures. And you will find that the books you love are cathedrals, humble courtyards, or invisible cities. Perhaps, the places where you will feel most at home.

https://www.repubblica.it/cultura/2023/04/15/news/matteo_pericoli_saggio_museo_vivente_immaginazione-396194958/

Il venerdì di Repubblica
February 17, 2023
by Arianna Passeri

Very often, while reading one encounters expressions such as “the space of narrative,” “the foundation of a story.” Or perhaps of a book whose “plot does not stand.” What seem to be simple metaphorical expressions are actually to be understood as revealing spies of a double-stranded link between the worlds of architecture and literature.
Architect and author Matteo Pericoli starts from this assumption to devise an interesting creative exercise: “If the architecture of a novel were really a building – that is, it had a physical structure, not just made of words – what form would it take?”
So here Heart of Darkness becomes an inverted truncated pyramid, whose apex is meters deep in the ground, and My Brilliant Friend splits into two buildings that support and repel each other.
And several more are examples. Almost magically, even the reader can thus “visit” The Great Living Museum of Imagination (Il Saggiatore, 166 pages, 25 euros), and discover the secrets behind the construction of a text (and a building).

by Andrea Fioravanti

For eleven years Matteo Pericoli has been teaching students around the world how to analyze the narrative structure of a story and creatively and imaginatively transform it into a building. Out of this experience came “The Great Living Museum of the Imagination” (il Saggiatore), itself written as if it were a museum to explore, complete with a map and bookshop

Dickow, Niddam, Porat, Topaz based on a short story by Yonathan Raz Portugali – Hebrew University of Jerusalem

For Ennio Flaiano, the great books are not the ones we browse carelessly, consume out of envy or emulation, finish in haste, in anger, to keep up with the literary fashion of the moment; they are the ones we read so many times that we inhabit them, feeling them on us like certain corners of our house. We keep them on the bedside table, in our purse or on a precise shelf in the bookstore to take refuge when we need them most. To seek answers to questions that life distractedly poses to us. Some books are shaped like a tent, some like a penthouse, some like a house on a hill.

However, it took the multifaceted nature of an architect, illustrator, teacher and writer to discover how to analyze the architecture of a story and transform it with creativity and imagination into a building. For eleven years Matteo Pericoli has been guiding students all over the world (the United States, Italy, Israel, Switzerland, Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates) in a game that has now become a surprising experiment where there are no mistakes, because there is no dogma to follow: the Laboratory of Literary Architecture. This multi-year work has become a book: “The Great Living Museum of the Imagination” (il Saggiatore), written in turn as if it were a museum to explore, complete with a map and bookshop.

n this generous guide that is attentive to the reader’s pace, Pericoli reveals the secrets to opening up to the mysterious but continuous link between fantasy and construction. And so Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness becomes a soaring inverted pyramid whose apex lies dozens of feet underground; Elena Ferrante’s L’amica geniale is transformed into two buildings that support and repel each other. And so on it goes, building. This cultural construction site does not end with the book, but expands into a constantly updated bilingual site.

“Eleven years ago a flame was lit in me, igniting a fuse whose effects I had not foreseen. I had just returned from the United States, and when I was offered a workshop at the Scuola Holden, at the time a small space on Via Dante in Turin, I decided to delve into a concept that had been rattling around in my head. Why is it that a story is said to have structure, to have a foundation, or to “not stand”? Yet I realized that in talking with students about narrative structures, words were not enough. There was an amount of information that was missing. So I asked them, ‘Why don’t you show me using cardboard, scissors and glue?’ This trivial question led me to a surprising discovery.”

Which discovery?
We all have a giant underground reservoir of unexplored knowledge. A cauldron of creative energy given by reading that we often fail to access because if we go to search for it with words we only dig up the same concepts that we had worked out in the past by copying other people’s thoughts. Instead of continuing to use words to explain something that was made of words, we try to give tangible form to our thoughts about the book. By doing so, I have noticed that knowledge increases tenfold. And it applies to everyone. From the high school students who take my classes to those who have not read as many books or are not familiar with architecture. This phenomenon is repeated at every workshop.

Let’s pause for a moment at the entrance of this museum-book in which you invite the reader to leave in the wardrobe the cumbersome baggage that prevents a better understanding of the links between stories and architecture. What are the most difficult obstacles to leave behind?
For example, thinking that the relationship between architecture and literature is an insurmountable intellectual endeavor; not feeling up to it and necessarily proving that you are intelligent and prepared before reading a book. But above all, skepticism; the same skepticism I encounter at the beginning when I propose this game. At the first workshop meeting I see some dismayed, terrified faces. Then on the second and third day I am overwhelmed by the crazy enthusiasm of those who understand how good it feels to be on the other side.

On the other side with respect to what?
With respect to preconceptions. Beyond our prior knowledge about style, narrative, the labels we give to books. Stories are not punctual roads to be traveled based on directions given by others, but buildings to be explored freely, immersing ourselves in a literary space. Obviously this space is constructed by someone else, the writer, but in the end the constructions are almost entirely done by us, in our own minds. The hope is that once the museum-book begins the reader will say, you know what? I’m going to leave these bulky bags there and come out lighter than when I went in.

So let’s go in light and give an example of an architectural construction inspired by a narrative structure.
During a workshop, I was struck by the different ways in which Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” can be viewed. For the architects, the love story between the two characters was square, like a parallelepiped, while for the high school kids it was cylindrical, perhaps more idealized. These responses fill your mind and body with a positive feeling, because with a text they would not have been able to deepen the relationship between the two main characters like that. The same happened with Amy Hempel’s extraordinary short story entitled “The Harvest.” In eleven years of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, no two buildings ever looked alike. The point is that our thoughts have a pre-verbalized shape and feeling, different for everyone, which we often ignore, jumping immediately to the next step to feed our inner monologue. The workshop enhances what the written words deflate. There are continuous results because this process is something extremely natural that only comes out if we relax.

Could this innovative approach be used in schools to bring young people, as well as older people, closer to reading?
Certainly. Realizing that reading is similar to exploring a place whose ultimate shape is embedded in our synapses might be a drive to approach stories in a different way. That is, not trying to replicate what others have previously said or thought about that book. Because a work has been presented to us as beautiful, ugly, simple or complex, we should not look for a feeling in the text that others have already found. We know much more than we think we know. By going back to the source of ideas that have weight and form, we can all find our own spaces, building, deconstructing, tearing down and starting over. And mistakes no longer exist; there are no teachers and no students.

In the book you delve into two important concepts that literature and architecture share: emptiness and context.
Architecture is the constant companion of our entire existence. We spend our lives crossing, passing through buildings and spaces one after another. To understand them we talk about styles and forms, but we often neglect the most powerful effect of architecture: what is not there. Our rooms are surrounded by walls, but we live and work within the one space that has not been built. And so also in stories we give so much importance to pages, paragraphs, sentences and words, neglecting how important the space within a story is. An ineffable element that we have to reconstruct in our minds. And how we do that necessarily depends on the context. Not only the one within which the book or building escapes, but also my context: everything I have learned, heard, believed so far; my expectations and ideas that make me always approach the story or space differently according to my existential condition at that moment. Focusing on different details and spaces each time.

You talked about how much architecture is in literature, but how much literature is in architecture?
Architecture is impregnated with narrative. Each compositional choice made by whoever designed the spaces we live in (from the sequence of volumes to their connections, from what is revealed to what is concealed, from the impact of light to the mystery of darkness, and so on) is actually a narrative choice, sometimes made consciously and sometimes not. Architecture then determines the narrative of our day. Think of the moment when you cross the threshold and leave your house in the morning: in your head you think something new is beginning but that something actually does not exist because outside the door nothing has begun and nothing has ended, everything has always existed. Architecture is our device for framing our daily narrative: opening the window to change the air in the morning, leaving the house, returning home, going up the stairs, going down the stairs. This interaction with architecture is unconscious but deeply narrative and determines how we frame the narrative of our lives. Every movement we make is a reading of space, and without knowing it we are already able to understand the concatenation of narratives of the architecture around us. Why do we exit a building and go right instead of left?

And by instinctively knowing architectural spaces are we able to analyze narrative structures?
Yes, everyone in their own way gives meaning to different elements by privileging one over the other. The door has a clear narrative potential, but for someone the height of a ceiling may be important. A window put in the right place may be a revelation for someone. But if you convey that to another narrative need, it doesn’t work at all. Imagine the first time someone with a hammer or sledgehammer knocked down a piece of wall in a building of any kind, primordial or otherwise, and saw the world outside without being able to walk through it. Who knows, maybe every architectural element has its literary counterpart, after all, that’s how stories are born.

Castelli di carta | Guida all’architettura letteraria per esplorare in modo innovativo i libri (e sé stessi)

by Andrea Fioravanti, published on Linkiesta on November 26, 2022:
https://www.linkiesta.it/2022/11/museo-vivente-immaginazione-pericoli-saggiatore/

It’s finally here and it is so exciting to see the Laboratory of Literary Architecture in a major academic publication! The Routledge Companion on Architecture, Literature and The City, edited by Jonathan Charley, features a chapter on the LabLitArch, which includes a narrative on the genesis of the laboratory, images, project samples, the Literary Architecture series, as well as a dialogue between professors Carola Hilfrich and Jonathan Charley about the pedagogical implications of the LabLitArch.

Excerpts from the dialogue between professors Carola Hilfrich and Jonathan Charley:

“One of the valuable features of the LabLitArch project is that it seems to suggest a ludic alternative to a super-rationalized modern education system.”

“It sets up a process of playful experimentation … that has all the edginess, marginality, contingency, and frustration as well as the serious stakes in liberating our thought from habitual constraints.”

“Seeing the process at work felt like being in loophole of knowledge production; a place where participants, thrown out of the respective boxes of their home disciplines, move into a hybrid, interactive, and reconfigurable field.”

“I think of Matteo’s Laboratory as a unique environment for exploring the potential of … moments where literature and architecture, words and buildings and spaces, readability and inhabitability intertwine with humans.”

“Asking us to put our hands on works of literature by architecturally removing their verbal skins, the LabLitArch makes us grasp their actual texture rather than their form or meaning, so as to shape it, collaboratively, as a habitable space.”

“LabLitArch is perhaps most transformative for our thinking and doing at moments of counter-intuition, competing intuitions, mixed intuition, or intuitions that fail us; and that its emphasis on intuition, or gut feeling, includes loops through the whole body and its more intentional responses, as well as through the imagination and the environment.”

“Matteo’s Laboratory is itself a theory of intuition and failure. Intriguingly, its teaching method in collaboratively haptic creativity advances from the outset a non-subjectivist approach; and it does produce end-results, in the form of architectural projects.”

Details here:
https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-on-Architecture-Literature-and-The-City/Charley/p/book/9781472482730
And here:
http://lablitarch.com/2018/12/lablitarch-in-routledge-academic-anthology/

A newly edited LabLitArch video.
Special thanks to Twin Pixel Video and Al-Johara Beydoun (words).

Visit http://lablitarch.com/ for more information.

The LITERARY ARCHITECTURE SERIES, the series based on The Laboratory of Literary Architecture, has ended. In it, I have shared some of my designs and what they reveal about the stories they are modeled on. The series has been featured in The Paris Review Daily since May 2016 and, until December 2016, also in the Italian national newspaper La Stampa. As of February 2017, the Italian series has been featured in the Italian weekly Pagina 99.

To view the entire series in The Paris Review:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/literary-architecture/