Introduction: Reading Architecture: Literary Imagination and Architectural Experience

The contributors to this volume, before their essays fell into place as the chapters of this book, first collaborated on the occasion of a small-scale symposium in Greece; an event organized by the History and Theory Program of McGill University’s School of Architecture.1 In June 2015 a group of approximately forty-five people gathered in hot and politically-charged downtown Athens, convinced that fiction might be the most promising path toward (grasping) reality. The objective was to discuss possibilities for the use of literature—novels, short stories and poems—in architectural design, research and practice, and to create a network of people determined to pursue their literary interests in the architectural world. The event undoubtedly echoed a number of related architectural conferences that had taken place in Europe in previous years,2 but it differed from them in focusing exclusively on literary writing—that is, narratives produced by authors or poets—that could evoke/provoke an architect’s literary imagination. [...]