A literary approach: designing Katherine Mansfield’s prose

Abstract

This thesis aims to provide insights into the possibility of applying techniques and concepts found in literature to the field of architectural design, addressing the stimulating potentials a literary approach to architecture can provide in both research and practice. The key social and cultural motivation of this thesis was the current agenda of Wellington’s leadership that aspires towards enhancing Wellington’s reputation as the literary capital of New Zealand. The realised architecture is devoted to acclaimed New Zealand writer, Katherine Mansfield, taking her revolutionary short story At the Bay as the precise point of departure for the design process. The proposal employs a literary approach through the design of a memorial architecture that offers conflicting perceptual moods, reflecting the paradoxical nature of Mansfield’s story, from enclosed dark spaces, to light open pavilions with expansive views of the tangled bush and ‘leaping, glittering seas.’3 Days Bay in Wellington, the location of Mansfield’s childhood holiday home, offered her a great source of literary inspiration, forming the backdrop of At the Bay, and is the context in which the architecture of this thesis is proposed. In a bid to test the potential for a literary inspired architecture, common theories and concepts relating to both Mansfield’s literature, and written and architectural works by relevant theorists and architects, were compared and interrogated. A deeper understanding of the importance of the associations between literature and design in connection to structure, technique and concept, and phenomenology’s corporeal awareness in relation to atmosphere, in both literature and architecture was realised. In this thesis, fiction is central to generating a different approach for architecture— a literary approach—capitalising on using the evocative descriptions, details and literary sensibility of places, spaces and atmospheres in written language, in interpreting the spatial design of the parallel. This manner of multidisciplinary research offers valuable insights into the potential for literature to generate more poetic, idiosyncratic, atmospheric and culturally significant built environments.