Description
Book SynopsisArchitects 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 pra
Trade Review
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 *
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements List of Contributors List of Illustrations Prelude 1. Prelude – the ways in which we write, Jane Rendell (UCL, UK) Writing Architectures 2. Waking Ideas From Their Sleep: An introduction to ficto-critical writing in and of architecture, Hélène Frichot (KTH, Sweden) and Naomi Stead (Monash University, Australia) 3. From Site to Situation: Cutting up as fictocritical composition, Anna Gibbs (Western Sydney University, Australia) 4. Construction (and connection), Katrina Schlunke (University of Tasmania and Sydney, Australia) 5. Incompossible Constructions of an Island Paradise, Hélène Frichot (KTH, Sweden) 6. Archaeologies of Exile on Trikeri Island: Listening to stones and speculating on prison matters, Elke Krasny and Phoebe Giannisi 7. In which Robert Smithson visits Christchurch: Ficto-criticism and the field trip, Jacky Bowring (Lincoln University, New Zealand) 8. Hiroshima: Notes of the expanded field, Kim Roberts (Independent Scholar, Australia) 9. Writing Walking: Ficto-critical routes through eighteenth-century London, Emma Cheatle (University of Sheffield, UK) 10. The Indelible Traces of Your Footsteps, Mireille Roddier (University of Michigan, USA) 11. Sydney Letters: A to E, Naomi Stead (Monash University, Australia) and Katrina Schlunke (University of Tasmania and Sydney, Australia) 12. Outrage on Calle Alcalá, Scott Colman (Rice University, USA) and Lars Lerup (Rice Univeristy and University of California at Berkeley, USA) 13. Architecture as Entourage: The politics of objects, Michael Young (The Cooper Union, USA) 14. The Architect Who Couldn’t Write, Keith Mitnick (University of Michigan, USA) 15. Return to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory after The Marriage Plot, Sandra Kaji-O'Grady (University of Queensland, Australia) 16. The Bannister, Katrina Simon (RMIT University, Australia) 17. Nice House, Woodland Lakes, Andrew Steen (University of Tasmania, Australia) 18. The Door Left Ajar: On Dissident Waiting and Collective Fiction, Sepideh Karami (University of Edinburgh, UK) Postlude 19. Postlude – Ficto-criticism after critique, Stephen Muecke (Flinders University, Australia) Index
