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This paper aims at introducing the concept that is central to my PhD thesis: the architectural book. My attempt is not to provide a category for books that have architecture as their content matter, but rather to think the book architecturally. The questions that such an approach raises in relation to architectural discourse need urgently to be addressed. Although architects have always published books, the book has rarely been seen or analysed as a site of architectural practice. Simply put, architects and historians alike have seldom seen their books as architectural artefacts, in the same way as buildings. Here, I will try to investigate the problem from a theoretical perspective that sees our relationship to books as objects as problematic. Instead, I argue, it will be necessary to complement an analysis of the book with, what the philosopher Leonhard Schmeiser calls, an 'intermedial text analysis' that rescues the book as a medium. Such a procedure will investigate the mechanisms that build up a set of spatial relationships, which one might call architectural, that prefigure a reading or interpretation of the text. This field of relationships that allows for the work to let the 'Text', in Roland Barthes' terms, function precisely as Text, is, what I would like to call, the bookscape. The term 'scape' has recently been theorised by Mark Cousins within the architectural discipline. The paper will try to open up this discussion to the field of book research and also describe some examples. In fact, the thesis devotes a substantial part to the study of some historical, early seventeenth century cases (alchemical emblem books) in which the residue of architectural content is minimal or purely symbolic but the desire of the book to be seen as architecture is all the more present and asks to be fulfilled.

Stream: Books, Writing and Reading

Paper: Bookscapes

Willem de Bruijn, born 1975, was trained as an architect in the Netherlands and graduated from Delft University of Technology in 2001. He currently pursues a PhD by text in Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. His interest in old alchemical books has led him to question the status of the book within the architectural discipline on a theoretical level but the research is also driven by a passion for making books. One of these is 'Poliphilo in London' that transposes and re-writes the famous Renaissance story of a 'struggle for love in a dream' by Francesco Colonna to the context of contemporary London.