Once Upon a Place

This book presents some of these manifold forms. It opens with a short journey into some of the most significant literary spaces and imaginary constructions by writer Alberto Manguel, followed by Arch. Colin Fournier’s digression on architectural and urban fictions, its practices and experiences that shaped our contemporaneity. Next is the core of this book, a collection of articles sough to bring together a diversity of individuals, discourses and practices to examine the role of fiction and imagination in architecture and related disciplines, organized into eight thematic chapters, each introduced by a guest author. Ranging widely from history to literary analysis, cinema, graphic, urban, conceptual and literary experiments, the different contributions are, however, highly porous – as the reader will discover – and together they engender new ground for thought and exploration.

Few publications and books deal specifically with architecture from an interdisciplinary perspective, especially from the ‘fiction angle’. The editorial scope outlined in this book intends to be perceptive and distinctive. It aims at serving scholars, architects, designers, authors, students and a wider, non-professional audience. It is a contribution to the field and pushes forward research in architectural practice and thought in intriguing and exciting directions, precisely in this moment, in which one may question architecture’s inclination to become a pseudo-technical service or mere signature shape-giving; in which one may question urban planning’s propensity to produce social failure, one may as well ask if the imagination of fiction is not the ultimate gizmo with which to face a reality that has gone… stranger than fiction.