Can architects design with words? Can they move from words to models and then hands on making, bypassing the medium of drawing altogether? “Homing Objects” was a recent four-week workshop that tested this possibility. The workshop–part of the master level design course “The Space of Words” which explored different ways to address the above questions–was taught by three architects combining expertise in architectural theory, building technology and timber construction. “Homing Objects” asked architecture students to fabricate unprecedented domestic objects that were dreamed up and drawn out through language. “Homing” (borrowed from messenger pigeons) intends to turn “home” into a verb and an act, through a journey into memories and words that engender new possibilities of enacting and finding home, disrupting our preconceived notions about home and domesticity. We introduced the students to literary texts that describe everyday familiar objects. This introduction was meant to question and bring forward new possibilities of what a domestic object can be, as the literary texts offered unusual, uncanny, and unpredictable ways of seeing and relating to these objects. Following the close study of these texts, students were prompted to bring objects from their daily life to a shared common table. They “warmed up their inside voice” by writing short descriptions for three of these objects, in such a way that objects were hidden between the lines and were not named directly. This instruction pushed the students to see the familiar otherwise. Then they imagined possible combinations of these objects (or parts of these objects) that would create unprecedented new ones. Based on these imaginary combinations they proceeded with writing narratives that would describe, explain, and envision the new objects in the space of a home. Iterations of these narratives harvested, always in writing, design ideas for experiential qualities of these unique objects. Through writing and re-writing, many students moved further in envisioning objects that did not connect any more with the ones that were brought to the shared table. The students moved then to scaled models that gave the imagined objects a three-dimensional presence. The decision to exclude drawings from the process shifted the focus from what these invented objects might look like, to their sensorial qualities: what does it feel to hold an object in your hand, what sound does the use of an object create. Offering feedback on the models, always relating them with the narratives, led to more nuanced versions of these mock-ups and took us to the construction of the objects as finished and reproducible products. The students concluded the workshop composing a narrative that describes the use of their object from the perspective of a particular character. This narrative communicated functional aspects of the objects: elements that somebody could not easily understand without directly engaging with them. The end of “Homing Objects” meant the reinterpretation of what home might mean and the beginning of the studio’s final assignment: the building of full-scale domestic rooms, merging again through writing and language, that further questioned the notion of domesticity.@en

This editorial is an introduction to the issue of Footprint 34, ‘Narrating Shared Futures’. The issue is dedicated to a transdisciplinary encounter between literature and cultural heritage, namely, here we seek to understand how literature can help us unpack complex meanings of places of heritage, and use that knowledge to imagine, design and produce shared and inclusive futures. We elaborate on three notions that appear in the title of the issue – ‘narrating’, ‘shared’ and ‘futures’ – and then we explain how each of the articles featured in this volume contributes to the proposed framing. We conclude with a brief discussion of ways in which the past, present and future are constantly being made in-the-now through both literary and design techniques.@en

This visual essay features students’ projects from the MSc2 design studio ‘Transdiciplinary Encounters: Narrating Shared Futures’ offered at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture in Spring of 2022, which served as an inspiration for this issue of Footprint. Designed and taught by the issue editors, Aleksandar Staničić and Angeliki Sioli, the course combined cultural heritage and literary narratives to ask students: How can places of memory be rethought using literary techniques, so that they provide the ground for new meanings to emerge and get shared across different cultures? Seven visionary architectural projects featured in this essay, offered their responses to this pertinent question that is fundamental for narrating, imagining and, ultimately, creating shared futures.@en

This conversation with Moira Crone was inspired by her science fiction novel The Not Yet. The interview opens with a question regarding the capacity of architectural heritage to carry past and present values, as well as our stories, and help us make sense of the world. With an emphasis on the historic French quarter in New Orleans, Crone explains why the preservation of the city’s most famous neighborhood was necessary for the plot and how in reality this preservation takes place. She discusses the difficult and cruel history of plantation homes in Louisiana, as well as moments in which the strict racial hierarchies broke down, creating possibilities for different ways of co-existence among its inhabitants. Crone unpacks her ideas about archetypical architectural spaces like the theater, and the subversive role it can play in contemporary or imaginative societies. The interview concludes with a discussion about science fiction’s connections to architectural thinking and the author’s creative process.@en

The book you hold in your hands did not try to describe what borders are. As discussed in the introduction, our focus from the beginning was on the ways we can resist borders through spatial practices. We approached borders firstly from their political and social perspective—and the types of spatial relations they produced—and only then, if necessary, from their physical dimensionality. For us this is an epistemic position that emerged from our own interest in the topic but also from the personal involvement of many of this book’s contributors with the borders they describe. The majority of scholars in this book have lived the borders they study. They have experienced them at an intimate scale and they have felt their impact in their everyday lives, even before acquiring the skills to study them. For many, this engagement with borders is both situated and personal. We believe that such an approach, when it manages to overcome biases and political propagandas, can create new ways to negotiate borders: as places of meaningful adjacencies, where fruitful osmosis can over-turn their dividing role. […]@en

“Wall” is one of the multiple names that have been used to describe a border. “The fence, the wall, […] the frontier, the limit, the march, the boundary” are all “distinct phenomena in social history” that delineate a border in space, as Thomas Nail reminds us in the Theory of the Border. While these words allude mostly to a dividing line, a static linear structure between two separate territories, today’s border studies argue for something different. Antony Cooper and Søren Tinning, referencing the work of numerous contemporary researchers, talk about “the conceptual shift from borders as territorial lines to bordering as socio-cultural processes, practices, and discourses.” Border studies look at bordering not only in terms of territory but also “in the messy here-and-now micro-politics of everyday life practices and experiences.”3 Based on this definition, this essay examines walls that create territorial separations while also playing a prominent role in everyday life practices and experiences. [...]@en

On March 1, 2020, Greece closed its borders, denying refugees the right to seek political asylum, a reaction to Turkey’s decision to strategically refuse its role as gatekeeper to the European Union. A few weeks later, Italy, France, Belgium, and Spain closed their borders as the global COVID-19 pandemic spread. China had already closed its borders a few weeks earlier and other countries quickly followed suit. As planes were grounded, the stark reality of immobility was revealed to a global class accustomed to frictionless travel across the planet. On a more intimate scale, innumerable citizens, from New Zealand to Brazil, were confined to their homes, with some needing an official permit to simply go out for a walk or to buy food. Invisible boundaries proliferated in public space with the call to maintain a 1.5 meter distance between people to guard against the spread of the respiratory virus. As nationwide lockdowns became the norm, they revealed discrepancies between white-collar workers able to carry on working and earning from the comfort of their homes and frontline workers and laborers who were required to be present physically in their places of work. Such untenable aspects of lockdowns were perhaps more apparent in the global South, where most people rely on daily wages, as well as in those countries that chose to implement restrictions in specific neighborhoods and regions, producing internal divisions that rein-forced labor, class, and wealth disparities. [...]@en

Around 1661, Johannes Vermeer painted what has become one of the most famous city views: the View of Delft. The city of Delft is depicted from across the water of the River Schie. We see the city as a collection of brick buildings with lower and higher towers, peaking into the sky, and being reflected in the water of the river. The light looks alive: despite the clouds it is bright, setting the buildings of Delft and the riverbank in the foreground in a palpable warmth. Delft, an intermediate European city in the province of South Holland, between The Hague and Rotterdam, has featured quite prominently in Dutch city narratives, partially thanks to Vermeer’s paintings, which showed fragments of both spatial and social characteristics of the city in the sev-enteenth century. In the same period, biologist Anthoni van Leeuwenhoek experimented with lenses and built a microscope, which led to the discovery of the micro-world of cells and bacteria. The city’s small streets, the canals, the church towers and the market squares still remind us of the times of Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek. But Delft today, as a centre of trade, knowl-edge and art, is a very vibrant city, with the University of Technology as one of its most celebrated contemporary inhabitants. The TU Delft is recog-nized around the world for educating progressive thinkers and innovators in varied engineering fields, while its Faculty of Architecture has raised, and keeps raising, inspired generations of architects and designers. As Delft is the city where this Writing Urban Place network originated, and where many members of the network have lived, studied or lectured, or are still doing all the above, we have asked our Delft-related colleagues for their views on Delft, painting for our readers, in words, their accounts of the sociospatial characteristics of this city, their relationship with the water, their favourite urban places, their personal Views of Delft.@en

Because of its status as the fourth largest city in Croatia, Osijek is considered an intermediate European city. It is the administrative, economic and cultural centre of eastern Croatia, located on the River Drava, and has a rich, multicultural history that is reflected in its tangible and intangible urban identity. It is famous for its historical Fort Tvrđa and its European Avenue, the most representative street of Austro- Hungarian Secession architecture, but also for its specific sociolects that have been a part of its everyday life. Within the COST Action Writing Urban Places: New Narratives of the European City, Osijek was host to the doctoral training school ‘Urban Chronicles in Empirical Context’ (April 2022) and a short-term scientific mission to investigate the ‘other’ perspectives of the city (August 2022). As events that fostered the training, research, and the networking of international and national young researchers, doctoral candidates and members of academia, they helped to raise awareness of the notion of urban identity of a city as a complex of its physical (geography, architecture, infrastructure) and ephemeral manifestations (literature, culture, history) through time. As such, the events functioned as an outreach, linking the involved participants to their own responsibilities to the city as potential and future policymakers. The following chapter focuses on elements of the city of Osijek as presented through the literary point of view of local authors from the mid-twentieth to the early twenty-first century.@en

Engaging the masterclass “Eau de Cologne/sour theater” that took place in a recent master-level studio-course of architecture, this paper examines the role of poetry in exploring the stories of a place and in building students’ capacity for storytelling. The masterclass, which lasted for ten days, is titled after a line from Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist poem “Proclamation without Pretention,”[i] chosen to draw attention to the sense of smell in space. Indeed, the students employed poetry to address an element rarely addressed in architectural education: smells and olfactory atmospheres. [...]@en

Where do we begin? Architecture is a profession riddled with many orientations, directions, and perspectives. How one favours what to signify in representation is equally open in processes, methodologies and approaches to form-making, spatial ordering, material choices, and so forth. The educational process is similar; it is riddled with conundrum after conundrum. The education of the architect was not unique; it developed through the artists’ guilds into academies wishing to elevate the discipline, and the mechanical arts, which was a subset of armatura. Carl Goldstein’s Teaching Art traces not only the growth of academies but the shifting issues with craft and thought, noting that both the disciplinary art and their education were always responsive, and often confrontational.1 The Florentine academy, which privileged disegno over Venetian colore, had a responsive curriculum. As soon as the papacy allowed dissections, life drawing and the study of cadavers were not only included, but mandated at the Accademia del disegno. The elevation of the arts with European royal support led to what Goldstein refers to as ‘triumph of the academy’, a consolidation of processes and methods as de rigueur, inadvertently creating strict doctrine and prescribing inflexible methods and values.2 The response to this was, of course, reactionary, and the dialectical confrontation repeats itself many times, over many decades, as a confrontation between mainstream and avant-garde. Other themes that occur and recur in the academies over the centuries are issues of mimesis and exemplars, the antique, art and science, style, originality, craftsmanship, and in the last two centuries, questions of modernisation, modernism, and modernity. The latter aligns with the territories of contestation: modernisation with process, modernism with establishment, and modernity as condition. In our current climate crisis, political shifts, and recent global pandemic; architectural process, establishment, and conditions are again re-examined.@en

This article will discuss the conditions that define the intermediate European city at the beginning of the twenty-first century: the mid-size, other or secondary city as it many times appears in the relevant bibliography, although these terms fail to capture its full potential. We argue that the intermediate European city cannot simply be defined by parameters like population number, territorial extension, or other forms of scale. Instead, we propose an interpretation through categories of conditions from various scientific disciplines covering different perspectives, as provided by our network members. These conditions suggest a systematization of phenomena commonly manifested in the urban contexts under examination. The article aims to get closer to defining what an intermediate city is or is not, concluding with the concrete illustration of seven selected conditions: scale as a commodity, gravity, perceptual coherence, open-ended image, walkable distances, parochial realm and against fragmentability. @en

The special issue Writing Urban Places: New Narratives on the European City, marks the culmination of an international research network that delved into the intricate interplay between communities, urban spaces and narratives. At its core, this endeavour introduced an inventive approach aimed at deepening our comprehension of urban communities, their dynamics and their rootedness, all through the lens of narrative methodologies. This collection gives an account of the dynamics of this network of academics, which consists of over 175 individuals from 35 different European countries and a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. As such, the issue offers a conclusion to the Writing Urban Places COST Action while also, hopefully, providing a springboard for further reflections and discussions on urban narratives, and the role these could play in spatial developments in the European city.@en

Engaging the educational context, topic, working process, and theoretical framework of the first month of The Space of Words design studio, this article addresses the threshold of graduate education. The article presents the potential for stories and modelmaking to foster strong collaborations among peers — particularly within a multicultural group of incoming master students — making the first month of graduate studies a pivotal moment in architectural education.@en

Engaging Joseph Brodsky’s compelling novella Watermark (1992) — a wintertime account of Venice — this paper unpacks embodied experiences in a place of paramount cultural and historical heritage. The literary language captures the city’s emotional character — portraying how it affects our consciousness and subsequent behaviours — by describing affective atmospheres that emerge on the threshold of architecture and its embodied perception. The seasonal narration, moreover, allows for a unique glimpse into the city’s architectural heritage, which is most commonly appreciated by visitors and tourists during spring or summer. With architectural discourse nowadays embracing the importance of atmospheres and narratives for the understanding of place and culture, Watermark tangibly advocates for the city’s affective emotional power as a unique heritage to preserve. By doing so, it guides architects towards a design sensitivity open to the ephemerality of spatial moods. Distinct moments of encounter between the city’s urban design and water, Venice’s architecture and its humidity, as well as the place’s imposing materiality in the cold, provide an understanding of how a place of memory like Venice is produced and experienced.

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Setting off from interdisciplinary research between the fields of architecture and literature this paper examines pedagogical experimentations that foreground literary imagination for drawing and design. The educational approach presented, emerges from a theoretical framework studying how imagination - an often overlooked aspect of architectural education - works. Through recent findings in neuroscience (H. Mallgrave), that corroborate philosophical underpinning from hermeneutical phenomenology (P. Ricoeur and R. Kearney), this methodology explores possibilities in cultivating students’ literary imagination. Literary imagination - emerging from the polysemic and metaphorical language of literature (A. Pérez-Gómez) - negates the common understanding of imagination as a form of vision, a special or modified way of seeing the world. The related discourse postulates that imagination works less in terms of “vision” and more in terms of “language.” It advocates that only through language can imagination lead to original spatial understandings and become a catalyst for dreaming up architectural possibilities (M. Frascari).

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This issue is an invitation to look beyond the definitions of meaningfulness, appropriation and integration, and explore the relations between them. We have liberally arranged the articles under the three main themes but, as it can easily become clear, there are overlaps among the themes. In that way, this issue offers not only a geographical journey along different urban narratives, but also an expedition into the network of interrelated terms and spatial practices.@en

This essay focuses on imagination as a crucial source of innovation and makes a plea for an approach to architectural education that enables imaginative thinking about new spatial and temporal realities. It starts by foregrounding the strong connections between imagination, stories, and language. It then proposes the reading, telling, writing, and making of stories as four approaches in introducing exercises of literary imagination within architectural education that touch upon such themes as meaning, empathy, temporality, and the poetics of making. The contribution unpacks these approaches in a twofold way, pairing an academic grounding of each theme with a short narrative piece describing a pedagogical example. By means of this sequence of thematic explorations and examples, we aim to tangibly illustrate the power embedded in stories for future architects’ education.

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