ABE 021

Through six half-day sessions, this course helps PhD researchers in architecture to develop a solid understanding of different modes of writing used in architectural and urban research. The course familiarizes participants with a set of base-methodologies for written architectural research and their underlying historiographic and epistemological stances. It allows them to articulate situated accounts of particular topics and areas of (inter- cross or transdisciplinary) research.

During the course, participants will be discussing, studying and experimenting with a set of writing approaches from discourse analysis to cartographies, from narrative approaches to site-writing, from micro-histories to oral history. The main goal of these exercises is to learn to distinguish the potential of certain modes of writing, so that researchers can more consciously position themselves vis-à-vis their research subject and their sources.

Learning objectives

Participants will (1) understand that there is a writing position and disposition, and that the disposition as a writer affects what one is able to say; (2) apply this awareness to situate themselves and their research within certain discourses (historical, geopolitical, cultural, etc.) and contexts, in order to reflect, analyze and critically assess from which position and on behalf of whom they speak; (3) consciously adopt and develop fitting modes of writing in their architectural research.

Teaching method

The course is structured as a bi-weekly seminar that consists of an introduction, followed by 6 halfday- sessions, with alternating double lectures of complementary angles and feedback sessions to collectively discuss the participant’s work.

Course dates and times

22 February 2023, room Q                         Introduction 
1 March 2023, room Q                               Session 1: On Cartography and
                                                                    Microhistory 
22 March 2023, room K                              Feedback session 
29 March 2023, room Q                              Session 2: Positionality and Persona 
19 April 2023, BG.West.350                       Feedback session  
26 April 2023, room T                                 Session 3: On Narrative and
                                                                    Poetic Writing 
24 May 2023, room K                                 Feedback session  

All sessions will take place in the afternoon, from 13.45 to 17.45 

Detailed course outline

Wed, Feb 22, 2023 Introduction
The session begins with a brief presentation by the lecturers about the course, and the sessions. We will unpack the differing modes of writing in architecture, related to position abilities and dispositions. Participants will present themselves, their work, and their interest in the course (max. 5 mins). 

Wed, Mar 1, 2023
Session 1: On Cartography and Microhistory
Robert Gorny and Anne Kockelkorn
This session will focus on the use of sources for writing in architectural research. The first part of the session will address cartography as a way to organize sources. We will will discuss post-Foucauldian modes of mapping historical processes and discourses, stress the methodological differences between ‘archaeological’ and ‘genealogical’ modes of historical inquiry, and introduce a set of newer cartographic approaches.
The second part of the session combines micro-historical research with the performative qualities of source material: by doing so, it explores theatrical narratives within which mutually exclusive viewpoints can coexist. The goal of this session is to understand how seemingly minor sources––ranging from oral sources to bills––on a seemingly minor research object can develop into a grand narrative that might question and expand existing discursive power relations.
Readings: to be provided 

Wed, Mar 22, 2023
Feedback session

Wed, Mar 29, 2023
Session 2: Positionality and Persona
Janina Gosseye, with a guest lecture by Isabelle Doucet
This second block of the course will invite PhD candidates to reflect on how they situate themselves in their research and writing. It will delve deeper into the concept of the situated researcher on the one hand, and invite PhD candidates to think how one might write from a certain persona on the other hand.

Reading: Isabelle Doucet, ‘Architecture Storytelling: A Space Between Critical Practice and Fragile Environments’ in Hélène Frichot, Adrià Carbonell, Hannes Frykholm and Sepideh Karami, eds. Infrastructural Love (Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2022), 37-51.

“Flat Out Criticism: Conversation Between Penelope Dean and Anna Font” (Video Conversation), Sept 9, 2021. Avail. online at www.youtube.com/watch (109mins). 

Wed, April 19, 2023
Feedback session 

Wed, April 26, 2023
Session 3: On Narrative and Poetic Writing
Angeliki Sioli and Klaske Havik
This session will explore modes of writing that express experiential, sensuous and situated aspects of space. The session will discuss the potential of narrative and poetic language for architectural research, explaining how it may offer information about site-specific social and spatial practices. It is often through stories that knowledge about places, the ways they are used and experiences, can be shared. Narratives are able to situate architecture and everyday practces in their temporal, spatial and social contexts, depicting habits and rituals specific to a certain place or community. At the same time poetic language often manages to reveal the complexities and ambiguities of embodied spatial experience. Given that understaanding experience of place and the multifarious contexts of architecture are paramount for our field, narratives and poetic language emerge thus as paramount to study.

Readings: Angeliki Sioli, "Discovering 'Paris and its Folds, Paris and its Faces'," in Reading Architecture: Literary Imagination and Architectural Experience, edited by Angeliki Sioli and Yoonchun Jung (London/New York: Routledge 2018), 20-26.

Writingplace # 5 Narrative Methods for Writing Urban Places, editorial p.3–7; and “How to Speak,” Interview with Alberto Pérez-Gómez, 113–31

Klaske Havik “Writing Atmospheres. Literary methods to investigate the thresholds of architectural experience”, in, The Routledge Companion on Architecture, Literature and the City, ed. Jonathan Charley (London/New York: Routledge 2019), 270–82 

Wed, May 24, 2023
Feedback session, Final discussion & reflection 

About the Lecturer(s)/Coach(es)

Robert A. Gorny is a transdisciplinary scholar, theorist, and lecturer at the academic group of Architecture Philosophy and Theory at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft, where he has been teaching and coordinating courses focusing on theory and research methodology since 2015. Advanced in his doctoral studies “A Flat Theory: Towards a Genealogy of Apartments, 1540-1752” (2021), his transdisciplinary research approach combines historically-grounded scholarship with an assemblage-theoretical extension of genealogical and cartographic accounts of built environments, their organization, and genesis under the working title "Worlding Theory: A General Organology of Built Environments". Related publications include “From Epiphylogenesis to General Organology” (2022 with A. Radman), “A Diagrammatic Cartography of Architectures of Life and Death” (2021), and “Reclaiming what Architecture Does” (2018). Since 2016, he is a member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed Dutch architecture theory journal Footprint. As editor for Footprint, he has co-edited an issue with a thematic focus on “Trans-Bodies / Queering Spaces” (Winter 2017), and is currently editing an issue focussing on "The Epiphylogenetic Turn" in the work of philosopher Bernard Stiegler (Spring 2022).

Anne Kockelkorn is an architectural historian and assistant professor of dwelling at TU Delft since 2021. Previously, she worked as a co-director of the MAS program in History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich (2019/2020) and as Guest Professor at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus in 2018. Her work focuses on the intersections between design, territorial politics and processes of subjectivation. Her forthcoming monograph The Social Condenser II investigates the representation and production of large-scale housing complexes in France before and after the neoliberal reforms of 1977, awarded with the ETH Silver Medal for outstanding doctoral theses in 2018. Her co-edited volume Productive Universals–Specific Situations. Critical Engagements in Art, Architecture, and Urbanism (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019, with Nina Zschocke) explores the promises, delusions and colonial legacies of modernity. 

Janina Gosseye is Associate Professor of Architecture at the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment. Her research is situated at the nexus of 20th century architectural and urban history on the one hand, and social and political history on the other. Janina has published extensively on the history and theory of architecture and urban design in peer-reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Architecture, the Journal of Urban History and Planning Perspectives. Her most recent books are: Urban Design in the 20th Century: A History (2021, with Tom Avermaete), Activism at Home: Architects Dwelling Between Politics, Aesthetics and Resistance (2021, with Isabelle Doucet), and Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research (2019, with Naomi Stead and Deborah van der Plaat). Janina is series editor of the ‘Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture’ book series (with Tom Avermaete), a member of the European Science Foundation College of Expert Reviewers, Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Queensland (Australia), and Honorary Member of the Australian Institute of Architects (AIA).

Angeliki Sioli is an assistant professor of architecture at the Chair of Methods of Analysis and Imagination, TU Delft. She hails from Greece, where she obtained her professional diploma in architecture from the University of Thessaly and was granted a post-professional master’s in architectural theory and history by the National Technical University of Athens. She completed her Doctor of Philosophy in the history and theory of architecture at McGill University. She is a registered architect and has worked on projects ranging from residential and office buildings to the design of small-scale objects and books. Her research seeks connections between architecture and literature in the public realm of the city, focusing on aspects of embodied perception of place in the urban environment. Her work on architecture, literature, and pedagogy has been published in a number of books and presented at numerous conferences. She recently edited the collected volume Reading Architecture: Literary Imagination and Architectural Experience (Routledge, 2018). Before joining TU Delft, Sioli taught both undergraduate and graduate courses at McGill University, in Montreal; Tec de Monterrey, in Mexico; and Louisiana State University in the U.S. 

Klaske Havik is Professor of Methods of Analysis and Imagination at Delft University of Technology. Her work relates architectural and urban questions, such as the use, experience and imagination of place, to literary language. Her publications include Urban Literacy. Reading and Writing Architecture (2014), and the edited volume Writingplace, Investigations in Architecture and Literature (2016). Klaske Havik initiated the platform Writingplace and organised the 2nd international conference on architecture and fiction: Writingplace. Literary Methods in Architectural Research and Design (2013, publication 2016). For architecture journal OASE, she edited, among other issues, OASE#91 Building Atmosphere (2013), OASE#85, Productive Uncertainty, (2011) and OASE 70 Architecture and Literature (2007). Havik’s literary work appeared in Dutch poetry collections and literary magazines. In English, her collection of poems Way and Further appeared in 2021 at Rightangle publishing. Havik is editor of the Writingplace Journal, and chair of the EU Cost Action Writing Urban Places.

How to enroll

Please send an email with your name, mail address, start date, research group and title of your research to ABE@tudelft.nl. 

Course info

Course code
ABE 021 

Course type
Seminar  

Number of Participants 
Max. 15 
Open to all doctoral candidates, but best suited for 2nd year PhDs 

Name of Lecturer(s)/Coach(es) 
Klaske Havik, Robert Gorny, Janina Gosseye, Angeliki Sioli, Anne Kockelkorn 

Course Load
16 hours public lectures + 9 hours seminar meetings (contact hours) + 35 hours self-study (preparation: reading/discussion papers) 

Graduate School credits 
4 GS Credits