Angeliki Sioli, assistant professor of architecture, co-edited Reading Architecture; Literary Imagination and Architectural Experience, a collection of essays on architecture and literature published by Routledge in 2018.

The book builds on the existing interdisciplinary bibliography on architecture and literature, but prioritizes literature's capacity to talk about the lived experience of place and the premise that literary language can often express the inexpressible. It sheds light on the importance of a literary instead of a pictorial imagination for architects and it looks into four contemporary architectural subjects through a wide variety of literary works. Drawing on novels that engage cities from around the world, the book reveals aspects of urban space to which other means of architectural representation are blind.

Whether through novels that employ historical buildings or sites interpreted through specific literary methods, the text suggests a range of methodologies for contemporary architectural academic research. By exploring the power of narrative language in conveying the experience of lived space, it discusses its potential for architectural design and pedagogy.

Questioning the massive architectural production of today's globalized capital-driven world, Reading Architecture turns to literature for ways to understand, resist or suggest alternative paths for architectural practice. Despite literature's fictional character, the essays of this volume reveal true dimensions of and for places beyond their historical, social and political reality; dimensions of utmost importance for architects, urban planners, historians and theoreticians nowadays.

Editor's Note: This article was republished with express written permission by the LSU College of Art & Design and can be read in full HERE.