When Literary Works Act as a Proxy for Architecture

Abstract

In this project, Voltaire’s Candide: or, The Optimist, has acted as a proxy for architecture to discover spatial potentials latent in literary works. The work presented here poses two questions. One question is discursive: how could architecture utilize literature as a representation of collective cultural memory and bring distant history into closer proximity? The other question is disciplinary: how could techniques of representation be repurposed to spatialize and materialize narratives, instead of merely visualizing them? This project translates a story into architectural drawings and spatial experiences via the making of an exhibition that mobilizes the spectator throughout two distinct rooms.

Keywords:

• architecture
• fabrication
• 1700–1799
• materials
• installation

Notes

Notes

1 K. Michael Hays, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 1.

2 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, essay in Thinking in the World: a Reader, Jill Bennet and Mary Zournazi, eds. (London, New York, Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 69.

3 Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing (New York: Routledge, 2011), 68.

4 William F. Bottiglia, “Candide’s Garden,” Modern Language Association, vol. 66, no. 5 (September 1951): 727.

5 Voltaire, Candide (Electronic Scholarly publishing projects, 1998), 3.

6 Bottiglia, “Candide’s Garden”: 727.

7 Bottiglia, “Candide’s Garden”: 728.

8 Voltaire, Candide, 47.

9 Voltaire, Candide, 74.

10 Teresa Stoppani, “Translucent and fluid: Piranesi’s impossible plan,” in From Models to Drawings: Imagination and Representation in Architecture, Marco Frascari, Jonathan Hale, Bradley Starkey, eds. (Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2013), 104.

11 This project was done for the design research portion of the Schidlowski Fellowship and the exhibition made possible by support from Kent State University, College of Architecture and Environmental Design. The exhibition and all featured drawings are produced by the author.

12 Various works from artists Isaac Julien and Julie Mehretu, in addition to the golden age of theater in 15th century Spain, have inspired the usage of layering and the residual qualities of tracing and their implications on delaminating a fully flattened drawing.

13 Voltaire, Candide, 1.

14 Voltaire, Candide, 49.

15 Bottiglia, “Candide’s Garden”: 727.

16 Voltaire, Candide, 50.

17 Voltaire, Candide, 97.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zahra Safaverdi

Zahra Safaverdi is an assistant professor of architecture at Texas Tech University and an architecture practitioner whose work explores methods of revisualizing history in relation to the contemporary discourse and its spatial and material potential. Safaverdi received her Master of Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. She has been a Schidlowski Fellow and has served as Harvard University’s Irving Innovation Fellow in Architecture.