History and Theory of Architecture IX: Coming Home - Stories in Architectural Theory

Abstract

The lecture course discusses architecture and literature in its diverse relations: Stories as moments when architecture comes to life, the writing of architectural history and theory and literary writing. The focus aims at the notion of home and its discontents.

Objective

The objective of the course is to provide knowledge of literary aspects for an architectural practice committed to create spaces for living.

Content

Coming home has dubious connotations in wartime. Rilke’s poetizing of the residents’ traces visible due to the missing façade of a condemned house has a different impact when associated with a shelled building. Perhaps home is a place where stories intertwine in ways that affect one’s quest for identity in a nuclear and explosive manner. What is an architectural home? What is home in the history and theory of architecture? Is public space the opposite of private housing? Cosmopolitism the opposite of regionalism? Stories intersect these poles. They are both architecture’s immaterial and real side. The lecture course discusses these issues through glimpses into texts by natural-born writers like Kafka, Joyce, Munro, Didion or Danielewski, by engineers like Musil, by musicians like Cage, by architects like Frisch and Burger. Tschumi’s detective stories encounter Koolhaas’s citationist joy in the wake of poststructuralist or deconstructionist recourses to the Freudian uncanny.

Resources