Between Books & Buildings

This workshop closely considers methods in which books and buildings become constructs of social and architectural discourse. By taking stock of specific books on architecture and allied fields; and studying the different ways in which they organize ideas, we will closely investigate relationships between the visual and the verbal, narrative and sequencing, argumentation and voice, technology and form, and so on. Some of the underpinning inquiries for this course begin to contemplate upon how do books and building interact with each other? How do they conceptually shape each other? What kind of spaces do books and buildings reveal to us? The course will explore the dialectic relationship between these two artefacts structured through common principles of materiality and visuality and excavate ways in which contemporary cultural, political, economic and technological forces get embodied into these forms. Further through such understanding, it intends to investigate if experiments in writing and representation can open up new concepts of imagining and recording space. How can narrative structures be challenged? Participants will develop ideas to occupy the space of representation through sessions that thematically explore and unpack the nature of books and buildings as objects of knowledge, as well as look closely into practices of archiving, exhibitions, writing and research that have emerged through critical engagements with these artefacts.