During our conference, there will be a special workshop: The Laboratory of Literary Architecture. The Joy of Cardboard, Glue and Storytelling: a Cross-Disciplinary Exploration of Literature as Architecture
Guided by the Italian architect and artist Matteo Pericoli, we will use cardboard, glue, and all our creativity to discover literature in a new way!
In any architectural project there are ideas that need to be designed and conveyed, a supporting structure, sequences of spaces, expectations and suspensions, hierarchies of space and function, and so on. In literary writing, many of the challenges are often similar. Why not then create a piece of architecture that explicitly embodies the structure of a literary text?
The laboratory examines how certain principles of architectural design can be used to describe literary structures. What is a space and how is it made? From a narrative point of view, what do certain sequences of spaces convey or mean? Can pacing and tension be expressed in architectural terms? Is there (and should there be) a hierarchical system when distributing volumes? When creating spaces, can they also represent characters? And can the connections between these spaces represent the characters’ relationships?
Matteo Pericoli has taught his “Laboratory of Literary Architecture”, among other places, at Columbia University, as a Mellon Visiting Artist; at the Department of Architecture of the University of Ferrara, at the Montgomery Blair High School, Maryland; at the creative writing school Scuola Holden, Turin; and at the Theater Department of Southwestern University, Texas.
