Space as Storyteller: Spatial Jumps in Architecture, Critical Theory, and Literature - Softcover

Chiesa, Laura

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810133458 ISBN 13: 9780810133457

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2016

Synopsis

Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project suggests that space can become a storyteller: if so, plenty of fleeting stories can be read in the space of modernity, where repetition and the unexpected cross-pollinate. In Space as Storyteller, Laura Chiesa explores several stories across a wide range of time that narrate spatial jumps, from Benjamin's tangential take on the cityscape, the experimentalism of Futurist theatricality, the multiple and potential atlases narrated by Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, and the posturban thought and practice of Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas/OMA. Space as Storyteller diverts attention from isolated disciplines and historical or geographical contexts toward transdisciplinary encounters that mobilize the potential to invent new spaces of comparison, a potential the author describes as "architecturability."

About this title

About the Author

LAURA CHIESA is an assistant professor of Italian at SUNY Buffalo.

Review

“Chiesa makes an original contribution to this new area of research connecting architecture and critical theory. She creatively brings together theoretical, literary, and architectural texts, while familiarizing readers with previously unknown material.” —Susan Bernstein, author of Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger
“In this impressive new work, Chiesa explores major theories and texts across the modernist realm while distinguishing between different times, languages, cultures, and art forms. This is a valuable addition to the field of spatial studies.” —Patrick Bray, author of The Novel Map: Space and Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction

"...Chiesa deserves credit for bringing into focus, among other movements, the inventive relations between literature and architecture in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s... Chiesa has an undisguised fascination for the infinite connectivity of Koolhaas’s postmodernism, where the interests of capital are obscured in the delirium of movement, play, and performance. But this is also the source of Chiesa’s own dynamic, which is consistently provocative in its ability to make unexpected connections across disciplines." —Modernism/modernity

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0810133458
• ISBN 13: 9780810133457
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 264