June 12, 2017 Literary Architecture Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights By Matteo Pericoli Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as architectural projects. This is the final installment of a series dedicated to his designs and what they reveal about the stories they’re modeled on. We’re used to seeing skyscrapers towering over cities. We’re used to imagining the fabric of a city as the footprint of solids over voids. The protagonist of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights is, as he himself tells us, a dreamer. A lonely man, with no friends or acquaintances, who only knows the look and soul of the physical places around his city, Saint Petersburg. Hiding from the sunlight, he wanders the city at nighttime, animating each street corner with character—filling its voids. Read More
May 15, 2017 Literary Architecture Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, The Key By Matteo Pericoli Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as architectural projects. In this series, he shares some of his designs and what they reveal about the stories they’re modeled on. In Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s The Key, a man writes in his diary about the sexual fantasies he has been having about his wife. Hoping she’ll read it, he locks it in a drawer and leaves the key on the floor. As soon as his wife sees the key, she understands her husband’s intentions and begins, in turn, to keep her own diary. Knowing that he, too, will read it, she writes to deliberately mislead him, claiming that she hasn’t read—will never read—his diary. A perfect dovetail. The two spouses’ souls, sharing both a space and a life, never meet nor try to know each other. They intersect without ever touching. The diaries are only apparently filled with secrets and truths, as each word is carefully chosen, keeping in mind the spying partner. The reader has access only to the diaries—everything is presented to us clearly and chronologically, starting with the entry in which, on New Year’s Day, the husband writes: “This year I intend to begin writing freely about a topic which, in the past, I have hesitated even to mention here.” Read More
April 17, 2017 Literary Architecture Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend By Matteo Pericoli Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as architectural projects. In this series, he shares some of his designs and what they reveal about the stories they’re modeled on. From a structural point of view, tension and compression often meld into each another. In this building, two volumes are interwoven by strong connecting rods, extended columns and daring beams, with one of the two seemingly suspended from the other. With its mass and swirled dynamism, the suspended volume (that we will call Lila) seems to be slipping away from the one that is holding it up (that we will call Elena) making it extend and stretch as if it was Lila that was shaping Elena and providing her with her dynamic energy, so vital to any piece of architecture. The name of this architectural complex is My Brilliant Friend, after Elena Ferrante’s novel in which the relationship between its two protagonists (Elena, the narrating voice, and her childhood friend Lila) is a constant, alternating flux of blurred identities and imperfect dreams. Now that we know that this is My Brilliant Friend, let’s try to analyze and allow ourselves to be transported by the stresses that occur within its architectural elements. As with structural calculations, the reading and interpreting of a building of this kind are not at all linear and predictable, but rather fluid and certainly not univocal. It is evident that if one of the two elements were to be missing, the other would have no reason to exist. Without Lila there would be no Elena, and vice versa. There are points in the structure where it is not clear in which direction stress is expressed. The weight is transferred from the supporting structure onto the supported one—a problem for both the calculations and the idea we were getting of the relationship between Lila and Elena. It is a building in which neither volume has, so to speak, clear control over the other—i.e., upon which element the functioning of the whole depends. At times it seems like Elena, while making the extraordinary effort to support her, wants to detach herself from Lila. We, too, are suspended—suspended between tension and compression. Motionless. If we were the very fibers of the structure, if we were—as we actually are, as both visitors of the building and readers of the novel—experiencing these forces, we would also understand and feel the additional torsion, shear, and momentum. In reading a structure such as this, it is better not to stop at its surface. “ … We delayed, challenging each other, without ever saying a word, testing our courage.” Suspension, patience and attention. The physics of narrative has its own way of arriving at structural audacities made of hidden tensions and compressions. We must always be ready. In collaboration with Giuseppe Franco.
January 23, 2017 Literary Architecture Juan José Saer, The Witness By Matteo Pericoli Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as architectural projects. In this series, he shares some of his designs and what they reveal about the stories they’re modeled on. The unnamed narrator in Juan José Saer’s novel The Witness is an old man who, in the second half of the sixteenth century, decides to write the story of his life. His voice—intense, measured, meticulous in its details, analytical and strongly contemporary—takes the reader back some sixty years earlier, when, as a thirteen-year-old orphan, the narrator set sail as a cabin boy on one of the first-ever expeditions in search of a passage to India through the New World. Upon its arrival in the Americas and caressing its coastline, the expedition insinuates itself inland by slowly sailing up one of its muddy rivers. During a survey on the seemingly uninhabited mainland, the crew is suddenly attacked by a group of natives who, in a matter of seconds, kill everyone except the protagonist. Read More
December 16, 2016 Literary Architecture Emmanuel Carrère, The Adversary By Matteo Pericoli Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as architectural projects. In this series, he shares some of his designs and what they reveal about the stories they’re modeled on. “My problem is … finding my proper place with respect to your story. … I thought I could … remain objective. But objectivity, in such an undertaking, is a delusion.” In The Adversary, Emmanuel Carrère tells us the unbelievable yet true story of Jean-Claude Romand, a man who, in 1993, tried to commit suicide after brutally killing his wife, his two children, and his parents. The investigation reveals that Romand, an impeccable family man with a degree in medicine and a researcher at the World Health Organization, well-off and well-liked by everyone, in reality was an impostor. Every aspect of his life is a lie—a giant and unsustainable scaffolding created to support his fabrication. Read More
November 10, 2016 Literary Architecture Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness By Matteo Pericoli Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as architectural projects. In this series, he shares some of his designs and what they reveal about the stories they’re modeled on. The skyscraper looming above us is composed of a clean, well-defined volume and a formless, organic, irregular mass that seems to be enveloping the volume while supporting it and, at the same time, oozing from it like a leak from a crack. The shape of the central, glass and steel building is that of an upside-down truncated square pyramid—tall and slender, bright and reflective like a spear stuck into the ground. The accretion is geometrically fluid, opaque, made of wood and with few openings. Read More