Fidelity and Freedom in the Theory of Adaptive Reuse. Thinking with T.S. Eliot and Walter Benjamin

Abstract

The Writingplace journal for Architecture and Literature marks a next step in the exploration of the relationship between architecture and literature by the Writingplace collective: an explorative journey that started in 2011. After the launch of the online platform Writingplace laboratory for architecture and literature, the collective initiated by students and teachers at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) evolved into an international network that organized the international Writingplace conference on literary methods in architectural research and design in 2013 and published the book Writingplace: Investigations in Architecture and Literature in 2016. The Writingplace journal for Architecture and Literature is an open-access e-journal, published by nai010 publishers and TUDelft Open. Launched in 2018, it is the first peer-reviewed international journal of architecture and literature. It acts as a vehicle for the Writingplace platform to continue its exchange of knowledge on the relationship between architecture and literature and to address and promote alternative ways of looking at and designing architecture, urban places and landscapes through literary methods. By acknowledging the possibilities of literature as a field of academic research, able to explore architectural imaginations, Writingplace hopes to establish a common ground to investigate the productive connections further between architecture and literature, or a place to engage in writing. The journal presents thematic issues, which, while always centred around the productive relationship between architecture and literature, ranging from pedagogy, spatial analysis and critical theory to artistic practices, individual buildings, landscape and urban design. Next to academic articles the journal is open to accounts of experiments in education and works of design or spatial analysis in which literary tools have been explored. /