Let’s play to discover the invisible cities of each novel

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/

“Porta Palazzo like New York, here there is the same mixture of life.”

La Stampa Torino, March 20, 2023

The artist is among the contributors to the Hypercritic Poethon at Scuola Holden

by Diego Molino

“Turin is unknowingly beautiful. It doesn’t know it is, but that is its strength.” That is how Matteo Pericoli, architect, designer, teacher and author, defines the city. He will be among the guests participating in the Hypercritic Poethon poetry marathon for a week, from tomorrow to March 27 (there will also be Margherita Oggero, Enrica Baricco, Serena Dandini, Igiaba Scego, Martino Gozzi, Ilaria Gaspari, Maurizio Gancitano, gipeto, Guido Catalano, Andrea Tarabbia, Alessandro Burbank, Yoko Yamada, Sara Benedetti, Andrea Tomaselli, Daniele De Cicco, Giorgia Cerruti, Silvia Cannarsa, Luca Gamberini, Emiliano Poddi). A journey that will draw inspiration from the places where the poems by different authors will be read: museums, gardens, case di ringhiera and old streetcars, thanks to the collaboration with Gtt and Associazione Torinese Tram Storici. All events are admission free subject to availability, so reservations are recommended on Eventbrite in the section dedicated to the event. Pericoli is featured on Friday at 6:45 p.m. at Scuola Holden with The Architecture of Poetry.

What do architecture and poetry have in common?

“Poetry is nothing but manufacture, and to know this you only have to look at its etymology, poièo in ancient Greek means to make, to create, to construct. Poetry is the strongest and most constructive act there is, it means putting words in a sequence, one after the other. Architecture in turn is modeling space, it has to do with relationships, spaces, voids and shadows, all things in common with poetry.”

So can we say that they are the same thing?

“There is a zone where all decisions, compositional ideas do not yet take the form of a specific discipline. It is the creative potential to which architecture, poetry, music and writing belong. Only later can each of us give these ideas and insights a well-defined form.”

Let’s talk about the architecture of cities. How is it possible to unearth their poetic soul?

“At first I thought that cities were agglomerates of buildings built very close to each other, and that this was purely for a reason of utility. I first found poetry while living in New York, it was a bit like when you fall in love with a person, it happens but you can’t explain why.”

Did you find the poetry you were looking for in Turin?

“When I arrived in Turin I found an unexpected and incredible energy and spirit. In a way the most similar place to New York is Porta Palazzo: it is in the center of the city, close to important and aulic institutional buildings, and yet there is an extremely real, intense mixture of life, and that reassures me. Porta Palazzo is one of those places that exist without needing to tell its story, because it communicates so much already as it is, just like New York.”

And what is its secret?

“Not to be self-conscious, this is the only way poetry manifests itself, otherwise it would be lost. It is also said in the film The Postman when Mario (Massimo Troisi) and Pablo Neruda (Philippe Noiret) are sitting on the seashore and Mario has just told him that he felt ‘like a boat being knocked over by your words.’ Neruda tells Mario that he has just created a metaphor. ‘No!’ replies Mario blushing, ‘Really?’ Then he adds, ‘Whatever, but it doesn’t count because I didn’t want to do it.’ ‘Wanting is not important,’ Neruda tells him, ‘images are born unintentionally.’ That’s what it means to be unaware.”

Are there other places that inspire the same feeling for you in Turin?

“The walks along the Po hide an unusual idea of the city, it feels like you’re in the country but you’re in the middle of the center. It is a slice of nature that creeps inside the city, this is very poetic, it allows for strange intersections in your mind. In Turin, poetry is often hidden within things you don’t expect to find in a medium-sized city.”

Do urban transformations threaten to cause that poetry to be lost?

“It is wrong to think that a city must always be the same, it is like saying that a child must never grow up. Poetry lies in being able to watch and direct that growth; after all, cities are living organisms.”

© La Stampa
https://www.lastampa.it/torino/2023/03/20/news/matteo_pericoli_porta_palazzo_torino_new_york_mescolanza_vita-12703557/

A book is built like a house

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).

Stories to inhabit

Literary Intersections

Matteo Pericoli
IL GRANDE MUSEO VIVENTE DELL’IMMAGINAZIONE
Guida all’esplorazione dell’architettura letteraria
pp. 166, € 25, il Saggiatore, Milan 2022

by Luigi Marfè

“If the architecture of a novel were a building,” asks Matteo Pericoli in The Great Living Museum of the Imagination, “what shape would it take?” After Finestre su New York (il Saggiatore, 2019) and Finestre sull’altrove (il Saggiatore, 2021), in this new book the author questions, through the exploration of a series of spatial metaphors, the visible forms of narrative creativity: that “clear impression,” as we read, “of feeling immersed in a kind of construction that has its own functioning and structure.” After all, literary theories have often used architectural imagery to describe compositional processes, from the method of loci of classical rhetoric to the constructive functions of formalism. “The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors,” James Wood wrote more recently in How Fiction Works (2008). An architect, writer and illustrator, Pericoli is convinced that metaphors like this are not just abstract formulations, but on the contrary capture deep elements of the cognitive processes by which the mind imagines narrative universes. Each story, in his view, can be understood as a kind of space to be explored: “there are no stories that cannot be inhabited and inspected from within.”

Il grande museo vivente dell'immaginazioneThe Great Living Museum of the Imagination is designed as a walk-through, a visit to an ideal museum about the creativity of architects and writers. “This is not just another book. It is a building,” the author writes: instead of different parts there are floors, instead of chapters as many rooms. Enriched with images, maps and photographs, the book is an iconotext, aiming to re-accustom the reader’s gaze to the observation of physical and mental spaces. Pericoli reflects on the relationship between narrative composition and architectural design, gives a visual reading of some narrative classics, and offers exercises in narrative creativity. Like the imagination of writers, the imagination of architects, he seems to suggest, does not follow objective rules, but is the result of subjective perceptions and intuitions. If there are “stories-that-are-spaces,” there are also “spaces-that-are-stories,” and orienting oneself in the world means trying to turn its pages: walking through a city, “we intuitively read paths, we are attracted by sudden, wide empty spaces, or by the light streaming in from the ceiling, or by a huge window.” The legibility of space is what allows the architect to give it form, composing the narrative surface on which to exercise his design: “The envelope of space is nothing more than the set of all those words, paragraphs and chapters, expressed in the language of architecture and used to articulate ideas, concepts, stories and aspirations.”

Every architect “tells a story.” Unlike those of writers, however, it is not configured as a “concatenation of events,” but of “spaces”: it is therefore an “architectural plot,” a “spatial narrative.” If architects have always fed on the imagery of writers, on the contrary the latter have sought in architecture a way to give visibility to their own narratives. Reading The Great Living Museum of the Imagination brings to mind Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space, whereby words could be considered as “little houses” that the writer finds himself inhabiting, exploring, furnishing: “To climb the stairs of the house of the word means, from step to step, to abstract,” Bachelard wrote, “To descend into the cellar, means to dream, to lose oneself in the remote corridors of an uncertain etymology, means to search in words for unobtainable treasures.”

The “literary architectures” outlined by Pericoli concern works by Calvino, Ernaux, Vonnegut, Dürrenmatt, Conrad, Carrère, Saer, Ferrante, Tanizaki, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, and Fenoglio. His book is presented as an exercise in “arch-criticism,” if one can call it that, seeking in each text the visible form that best describes it. Pericoli is convinced that narrative imagination does not feed only on words: “There are in fact other thoughts – let’s call them intuitions – often made up of imagination or visualizations that are neither verbal nor causally produced by the reasoning we do.” Visual metaphors can be a gateway to this different dimension of creativity: “very often these thoughts or associations are triggered by metaphors which, if they work as such, are real engines of imagination and creativity that, literally, transport us elsewhere.”

Luigi Marfè teaches literary criticism and comparative literature at the University of Padua

What structure over there awaits the end?

L’Indice dei libri del mese

review by Francesco Gallo

Matteo Pericoli
Il grande museo vivente dell’immaginazione
Guida all’esplorazione dell’architettura letteraria
168 pp, 25 €
Il Saggiatore, Milan 2022

January 30, 2023

Who knows where Italo Calvino would have placed a book like this: among the Books That Are Missing To Put Next To Others On The Shelf, or the Novelties Whose Author Or Topic Attract Us? We like to think that the author of If One Winter’s Night a Traveler would have placed The Great Living Museum of the Imagination among the Books That Inspire Sudden, Frantic And Not Clearly Justifiable Curiosity.

More than a book, in fact, it is a guidebook; a Guide to the Exploration of Literary Architecture. There are Maps (Ground Floor, First and Second Floor), a Legend of Spaces (Entrance, Rooms 1 and 2, and Inner Courtyard). And there is a guide, of course: the author himself – speaking in a voice that is not his, but ours (but we will understand this as we read on…). A guide who, instead of escorting us along a series of obligatory steps, as a first thing wants us to feel free; free to go where we please, observe what we please, and, most importantly, imagine what we please. He is quick to reiterate, in fact, that “museum” comes from “mūseóon,” meaning the place sacred to the daughters of Zeus where one could contemplate and imagine in full autonomy.

But what is literary architecture? It is an ongoing discovery. Not only that: an attempt to increase our awareness when we relate to spaces (and the void). More: a series of educational workshops that, over the past twelve years, architect, designer and author Matteo Pericoli has held around the world; from Turin (where it all began) to New York, via Dubai.

Inspired by the discovery of a lexicon common to both architecture and literature – how many times have we heard, about a story endowed with uncertain logical connections, that it “lacks structure,” “wobbles,” or “doesn’t stand up”? -, Pericoli has traversed the history of architecture as an attempt to narrate; at first simple, then increasingly complex.

What is the impulse that unites the first hut – when the basic idea was that of a “roof-over-the-head-so-I-don’t-get-wet” – to the first “house-with-a-window” – an “architectural element that connects what is tangible (the frame itself) with the intangible (the view, the outside) and thus the real with the imaginary, the everyday with the absolute” – if not a narrative impulse, the incipit of a story destined irrevocably to complicate itself?

Alice Munro writes: “A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. 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.”

By stripping architecture of its least relevant elements – the style, the name of the person who designed a certain project, its historical value – Pericoli shows us the spot where the essential lurks; that which “can neither be touched (the space) nor read (the architecture of a story).” Removing the walls, ceilings, windows, etc., removing the envelope, in short, what is left but a void, the void? And setting aside the words, sentences, punctuation and paragraphs of writing a story, what is left but an essence that “can only be intuited and deduced,” as when we confront the ghostly voice of Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or try to intuit the subject matter of the dialogue between the girl and the American in Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants.

Having delved into these reflections from a theoretical point of view – Room 3 contains an enlightening lecture on creative writing; Room 4 reiterates the importance of reading as a wonder-generating activity -, Pericoli, with his characteristic lucidity and politeness, invites us on a tour of the Great Hall where it is possible to view no less than twelve interpretations of literary architecture. Then, a moment before the bookshop (unfailing: as in any museum), he gives us instructions for making our own literary architecture so as to display it in our own, very personal living museum of the imagination. (And reminds us, too, that in architecture it makes little sense to distinguish between “expert” and “non-expert” people, since we all experience our relationship with space.) The only rule in this game – because there are no games without rules – is to always maintain a literary approach, never a literal one. What are we to do with a model of a lighthouse if what we are actually excited about is the dense web of relationships that governs the behavioral dynamics of the Ramsay family during a famous trip to the Isle of Skye? Why not give it a try, then? In between reflections, we may be able to free ourselves “from the inevitable burden given by preconceptions and preclusions due to the judgments and interpretations of others,” and discover something new about the mysterious relationship between architecture and literature. And, why not, about ourselves.

https://www.lindiceonline.com/letture/matteo-pericoli-il-grande-museo-vivente-dellimmaginazione/

A walk through twelve masterpieces
“These stories are fantastic palaces.”

Matteo Pericoli’s book stems from his “Laboratory of Literary Architecture”
From Dostoevsky to Ferrante, drawing becomes a form of alternative reading

by Mario Baudino

Conceiving and drawing houses and buildings starting from great literature is not just a game, although maybe we have even done it, sometimes, fantasizing about a novel or a short story: perhaps, however, we have never gone further on this interpretive road, we have not made it concrete. Matteo Pericoli, on the other hand, has been working on this intuition for years now. He had started out with an idea borrowed from Alice Munro, the Canadian writer much admired for her short stories, who had once described ́”stories” not as roads, that is, not as vector narratives, one-dimensional paths with a beginning and an end, but as ́”houses,” entirely three-dimensional – and to be inhabited, and has now come to construct a book of fantastic texts and buildings, The Great Living Museum of the Imagination (Il Saggiatore) a very elegant book that ideally summarizes a long process of workshops around the world (and started at the Scuola Holden in Turin) and presents a wide range of results: stories turned into buildings, reading as a way of living.

Transfigurations that narrate their relationship with the world as living characters

Many avid readers know that they have often had the experience of ́”falling” into a book, and of changing dimensions. Writers, just as often, invite them to precisely this space-time dislocation, when urban architecture narrates their relationship to the world as if they were characters. The examples are countless, some as memorable as the incipit of Ferragus, the first story of History of the Thirteen, where Balzac gives the floor to the Parisian streets, those disgraced or noble, murderous or “older than certain very old ladies,” respectable, clean or always dirty, working-class, trading; because ́”the streets of Paris have human qualities, and by their physiognomy they imprint in us certain ideas from which it is difficult for us to escape.” He is not the only one, of course. Something like this happens in Dickens (read perhaps Bleak House, where a dilapidated and infamous London street behaves like a human being).

Matteo Pericoli has gone further, that is, he has decided instead to make the works of literature speak as if they were as a whole pieces of architecture, aiming not, as he says in the preface of his book, “at that natural instinct we have to imagine or visualize the settings described in the novel, but at that distinct impression of feeling immersed in a kind of construction that has its own functioning and structure.” Drawings, models, fantastic buildings, like Calvino’s cities, are in turn embedded in a super-architecture, that of the “book-museum” (“This is not a book like any other,” he writes, “It is a building”) that houses them: without temptations of “realism” or flat verisimilitude. If we take Heart of Darkness, the magnificent Conradian tale, it is certainly not transformed or described as a hut in the forest: instead, the building into which it is transformed is an inverted pyramid down to many feet below the ground. So for the twelve authors on whom Pericoli worked: they are not arranged as nativities, but as symbolic transfigurations.

“Cuore di tenebra» di Joseph Conrad diventa una piramide rovesciata conficcata nel suolo (dal libro di Pericoli)”
“Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad becomes an inverted pyramid down to many feet below the ground (from Pericoli’s book)

Elena Ferrante (My Brilliant Friend) splits into two buildings that perhaps support each other (and this representation, all things considered, is perhaps the most obvious), Dostoevsky’s White Nights becomes a skyscraper tilted above a kind of labyrinthine checkerboard, Beppe Fenoglio’s Ruin is a house entirely made of roots, a building that grows “underground,” Italo Calvino’s The Rampant Baron is something that contains a sense of unbridgeable distance, a house with a gap visible only from above (because as Cosimo Piovasco’s father says, “rebellion is not measured in meters”). There are also, regenerated and displaced with the work of spatial construction, Annie Ernaux, William Faulkner, Junichirο Tanizaki, Kurt Vonnegut, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Emmanuel Carrère, Juan José Saer, testifying that the process can work on any narrative, on any “story” – with one eye toward the other story, that of architecture, and another toward the possible paradigm of “architecting.”

“We have a natural instinct to imagine and visualize”

“These structures you will encounter,” Pericoli writes, “will take the form you want them to … that is, the form based on your reactions, intuitions and ideas. Each one different for each of you, a multiverse of forms.” The result is a very stimulating reading path-because then Pericoli’s Museum of the Imagination is indeed a “museum” but meanwhile it is a book, not a catalog but a history of stories, especially if one thinks of the sometimes casual and ideological use that one tends to make in public discourse of the classics of today and yesterday: a very bad habit because the risk then becomes that of making of them not free and fantastic constructions, but sad and very boring prisons. —

RSI Radio 2

“In the book The Great Living Museum of the Imagination, architect and illustrator Matteo Pericoli explores the links between literature and architecture, between imagination and construction.” Matteo Pericoli interviewed by Enrico Bianda
Aired on November 30, 2022
https://www.rsi.ch/rete-due/programmi/cultura/alphaville/Alphaville-15827212.html

Paper Castles | A guide to literary architecture in order to explore books (and oneself) in an innovative way

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/

The Great Living Museum of the Imagination

It doesn’t seem real.

After four years of work, what at first looked like a confusing sequence of rooms has become a real book-building.

The Great Living Museum of the Imagination: A Guide to the Exploration of Literary Architecture, published by Il Saggiatore, comes out Friday, November 25.

A Window Open Onto the Mind

Saul Steinberg: the legacy of a genius

by Matteo Pericoli

 
Published in the March 2022 issue of L’Indice dei libri del mese
Saul Steinberg 1978. Photo by Evelyn Hofer

One of the greatest challenges we encounter when trying to interpret Saul Steinberg’s work is trying to find the right angle of approach. The typical mistake we often make is trying to classify him: Is he an illustrator? No, or maybe yes; Is he a cartoonist? Sure! No, of course not; A brilliant draftsman? Yes, a draftsman for sure, or maybe not? Is he perhaps more simply, or more generically, an “artist”? Well, that’s a given. However, as we carefully approach the complex figure of Saul Steinberg it feels as if not even the all-encompassing word “artist” is accurate enough. He was not just an artist; he was something more. But what?

Steinberg was born into a Jewish family in Romania in 1914. He lived in Bucharest until 1933 when he moved to Milan, Italy, where he studied architecture at the Regio Politecnico. Within a few years he began to publish drawings in various Italian magazines and enjoy a certain success. Yet, his situation got complicated by the racial laws, so much so that as soon as Italy entered the war he decided to immigrate to the United States. However, he was arrested before he could leave and spent a period of several months of internment in Abruzzo. In the summer of 1942 he finally managed to arrive in New York.

Steinberg’s work at that point was already well-known in the United States. In fact, thanks to several acquaintances, in the period right before entering the country he had already published many drawings in various American magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and Life. Upon his arrival in New York, Steinberg started practically immediately to collaborate with The New Yorker magazine, contributing covers, illustrations, drawings, cartoons and so on — something he would continue to do, with exceptional and perhaps unparalleled success and freedom, for the rest of his life.

Many clues to the difficulties in describing him are found in quotes from Steinberg himself, such as: “I was born in a complicated country, one had to pave one’s own’s way through several contradictory truths, a magnificent school for a novelist. The only characters I respected, the only ones I could converse with, were characters from novels. I believed that books were of divine origin, and when I realized that they were written by ordinary people (who were therefore unknown before they became famous), I was so impressed that I said to myself, ‘Then I can do it too!’” (Riga, p. 111)

However, his conflictual relationship with Romania, the “infernal homeland” (Lettere a Aldo Buzzi, p. 278), his betrayal by Italy and its racial laws, and his being an immigrant, albeit a naturalized one, in the United States meant that Steinberg lacked a language with which he could express himself with total ease and with the same familiarity of the novels he adored.

In an incessant search for himself, his identity, and a language of his own through his work, Steinberg sought on the one hand to define himself, find himself, know himself, and make himself known, while on the other hand simultaneously create and erase any traces and images of himself.

It was Steinberg himself who recounted how in the midst of this dogged research he ended up inventing “a language that did not exist before as a language.” He chose a “raw material,” i.e., drawing, and used it “to express his poetic or philosophical ideas” (Riga, p. 106). It was not the kind of drawing that comes from the tradition of life drawing, because, as Steinberg said, “life drawing reveals too much about me […] I become a kind of servant, a second-rate character” in which “I see […] my own defects.” In drawings “made from imagination,” however, Steinberg could both hide himself and introduce multiple levels of reading and interpreting his work: “I show myself and my world in the way I choose.” (Riflessi e ombre, p. 59)

And so we, the viewers, through his work, do not have access (as is usually the case) to what Steinberg “sees” as he draws; rather, we are faced with an open window into his mind and thoughts, as in a literary text or essay or treatise.

In all of this I think architecture played a very significant, albeit indirect, role. Steinberg said that the study of architecture was for him “wonderful for everything but architecture. The frightening thought that what you draw can turn into a building makes you lean toward perfectly reasoned lines.” (Riga, p. 38) His lines then, so reasoned, precise, and with crystal clear intent, are the visible imprints of his intuitions, thoughts, and reasoning.

But not only that. Just like the greatest architects, Steinberg even seemed to know what we, in turn, think or know. In fact, his drawings remind me of the Parthenon in Athens. In wanting to convey a sense of harmony, proportion and clarity, the builders of the Parthenon knew that our minds correct, modify and see in a distorted way. For example, they knew that the columns at the edges should be slightly enlarged and pushed a little closer to the others, otherwise they would risk appearing farther apart and smaller than the others; or that the base of the tympanum should be slightly curved downwards, otherwise its ends would give the impression of turning up instead of appearing horizontal. Therefore, the relationship that is established between those who build and those who absorb (in this case, an architectural space) is a sort of interconnection or collaborative effort between two creative sources: that of the designer and that of the viewer.

It is not by chance that the philosophers Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi wrote that “commenting on a drawing by Steinberg is […] like commenting on the work of a colleague” (Riga p. 398). Non only did Steinberg want and know how to speak to everybody, he wanted to be heard by everybody too.

To better approach his work, we therefore have no choice but to linger in front of his drawings, resist the desire to classify him, let his lines seep into our minds and land in his fantastic world.

— March 2022

Books quoted (citations translated by me):
Riga 24, Saul Steinberg, Marcos y Marcos (Italy, 2005)
Saul Steinberg, Lettere a Aldo Buzzi 1945-1999, Adelphi (Italy, 2002)
Saul Steinberg con Aldo Buzzi, Riflessi e ombre, Adelphi (Italy, 2001)