AbstractsLanguage, Literature & Linguistics

The Instrument and the Atlas: Metalepsis as a Lens for Reading the City

by Jaron Popko




Institution: University of Cincinnati
Department: Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture
Degree: M. Arch.
Year: 2014
Keywords: Architecture; architecture; borges; translation; metalepsis
Record ID: 2024537
Full text PDF: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1406811071


Abstract

Architecture is an art of framing and mediating the experience and perception of the world through the activation of latent morphologies. Managing the relationship between the visible and the invisible, architecture performs a level of narrative operations, which share a border with literary theory. Both architecture and literature structure experience through means of spatial and temporal expressions, allowing for cross-disciplinary influence. This thesis seeks to uncover the analogical relationships that occur through inter-medial translation by exploring how the creative processes of reading, re-reading, and thus re-writing, which allow for an imaginative and cognitive pluralism, translate into a meaningful and creative architectural experience.The literary realm of the fantastic employs narrative strategies that blur the boundaries of the visible and invisible, of reality and fiction. The writings of Jorge Luis Borges exist within this complex and dissonant landscape punctuated by constantly constructing and collapsing realities. His stories leave the reader with a feeling of the bizarre uncanny, but more importantly a sense of profound discovery. Looking at Borgesian narrative techniques, this thesis proposes an intervention within the city that provides the user with a similar disjunctive reading of reality, acting as an unstable atlas of the city. The project is a place for inquiry and understanding, an instrument for looking, a position for orientation, and a site for unearthing hidden and unstructured worlds.