Book review; "Architecture in Fictional Literature: Essays on Selected Works"

Year 2025, Volume: 7 Issue: 2, 373 - 377, 15.12.2025

Cihan Yanar

https://doi.org/10.46474/jds.1785558

Abstract

“Architecture in Fictional Literature: Essays on Selected Works”, which started as a university project, has been published in the local language in which was initially prepared and has attracted great interest in the architectural community in Turkey. The editors of the book, Professor Dr. Nevnihal Erdoğan, an architect from Kocaeli University Faculty of Architecture, and Hikmet Temel Akarsu, a literary writer and architect, aimed to turn this project into an international publication based on the interest in the book. The Architecture in in Fictional Literature project, which has been expanded, revised, updated and developed with new additions since its first edition, has gone beyond being a book and started a dynamic process of interaction between architecture and literature. The subject of this book review is the content, form and theoretical analysis of the aforementioned compilation book, Architecture in Fictional Literature.

Nevnihal Erdoğan and Hikmet Temel Akarsu, two architects who have not interrupted their intellectual communication and creation since they entered the Faculty of Architecture at Istanbul Technical University in 1977. This book, edited by Hikmet Temel Akarsu, consists of 28 different works that examine the relationship between architecture and literature with an interdisciplinary approach. Each chapter aims to analyze a different literary work, which has an important place in the world literature, from the perspective of architectural art this context, it proposes to consider the space not only with its physical but also with its cultural, historical and symbolic layers.

Keywords

Architecture in Fictional Literature , Interdisciplinary Approach , Memory and Spatial Memory , Space and Identity

References

• Erdoğan, N. & Akarsu, H. (2021). Architecture in Fictional Literature: Essays on Selected Works. Singapore: Bentham Books.