Writing as a Mode of Spatial Investigation

This lecture explores literary writing as a mode of spatial investigation, discovering poetic, narrative and imaginative dimensions of architecture and urban place. Klaske Havik will make a plea for poetic imagination as a crucial capacity of both literary writers and architects. In this context, she will also discuss the outcomes of the EU COST Network Writing Urban Places, an international and interdisciplinary network that seeks for more socially inclusive and locally specific urban places through the investigation of local narratives. 

 The event will be chaired by Professor Yeoryia Manolopoulou with responses from Professor Jane Rendell followed by discussion with the audience. 

Speaker biographies

Klaske Havik is an architect, scholar and writer. She is Professor of Architecture at TU Delft, holding the Chair of Methods of Analysis and Imagination. Advocating a literary approach to architecture to address societal issues, Havik published, among many other edited books and articles, Urban Literacy. Reading and Writing Architecture (2014). She was editor of architecture journals de Architect and OASE, and initiated the Writingplace Journal for Architecture and Literature. Havik’s literary work has appeared in poetry collections and literary magazines.  She is Chair of the EU COST Action Writing Urban Places. New Narratives for the European City. 

Yeoryia Manolopoulou is an architect and design researcher, Professor of Architecture and Experimental Practice and Co-Director of Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. In 2003 she completed one of the first design-led PhDs, defining architecture as an aleatoric practice. Manolopoulou is Co-Founder of AY Architects, winners of the Stephen Lawrence Prize (2013); author of Architectures of Chance (2013); and Founder and Lead Editor of the Bartlett Design Research Folios (2008-22). For the 2016 Biennale, she co-created Losing Myself, a design research project concerning architecture and dementia. Her current work is centered on developing dialogic drawing and scoring tools.

Jane Rendell is Professor of Critical Spatial Practice and Co-Director of Ethics at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Introducing concepts of ‘critical spatial practice’ and ‘site-writing’ through books, such as The Architecture of Psychoanalysis (2017), Silver (2016), Site-Writing (2010), and Art and Architecture (2006), she led Bartlett’s Ethics Commission, 2015-22 (with David Roberts), and ‘The Ethics of Research Practice’, (for the GCRF-funded KNOW – Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality project) 2018-22, (with Yael Padan). Currently she curates www.practisingethics.org, and is responding through site-writing to ethical and ecological issues concerning blue green infrastructures in the Pyrenees.

More information

Image: Narrative Methods for Writing Urban Places, Fifith Issue, Writing Place Journal, TU Delft Open.