Writing Architectures - by Hélène Frichot & Naomi Stead (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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).

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

Hélène Frichot is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy and Director of the Bachelor of Design at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Naomi Stead is Professor of Architecture and Head of the Department of Architecture at Monash University, Australia and Adjunct Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Queensland, Australia.