Lines to Place : Topo-Analytical Writing

Offers an investigation into the use of literary language for its potential to dwell on the ambiguities and complexities of architectural experience.

At the edge of academic research, where impressions can be verbalized in language, where the experience of architecture meets the capacity to reflect on it in conceptual terms, literary writing appears as a practice able to transfer experience into communicable knowledge. This book uses literary language to investigate the affective relationships that people establish with places. Further developing Gaston Bachelard’s notion of “topoanalysis” as “the study of the sites of our intimate lives,” Klaske Havik develops a conceptual exploration about place, discussing its situated, social, experiential, and temporal dimensions. These theoretical discussions are complemented by essays that operate on the boundaries of academic and literary language to express specificities of places.