4 Novels About Architecture That Are Better Than “The Fountainhead”
Sooner or later, every architect is gifted The Fountainhead. Usually, this is done with good intentions: someone reads Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel about an idealistic architect at war with a cynical society and is reminded of the architect in their own lives, their friend or nephew or whomever. They buy the architect a copy, thinking they will appreciate seeing their profession represented in literature.
Sometimes though, Fountainhead pushers have another agenda. Rand’s 753 page doorstop was not just a work of imaginative literature; it was a vehicle for Ayn Rand to push her political ideology, an extreme form of capitalist individualism called Objectivism. Rand hoped readers of The Fountainhead would be convinced of the evils of collectivism, especially any kind of socialism, which in her view suppresses the entrepreneurial spirit of geniuses like her architect hero Howard Roark. She wanted to change the way people voted, not just how they thought about architecture.
As it is a work of political propaganda, The Fountainhead falls short of John Keats’s standard for authentic literature. In an 1817 letter to his brothers George and Thomas, the poet coined the term “negative capability” to describe the ability of great authors to put their own opinions to the side when they set out to write. The role of the author, in Keats’s view, is not to push an agenda but to give life to whatever ideas emerge organically within the imaginative space of the poem or novel.
A lofty standard? Maybe. But the novels listed here come closer to the mark than The Fountainhead. They run where Rand’s book only walks — that is, they give authentic literary expression to architectural ideas.
Daniel Burnham’s “White City,” constructed in 1893 for the Chicago World’s Fair. Unidentified Photographer, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The reader might here exclaim that I am cheating. “The Devil in the White City is not a novel at all,” they’ll say, “it is a work of non-fiction!”
True as that may be, The Devil in the White City is by Keats’s standard a clear example of imaginative literature. In re-telling the events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and its architect, Daniel Burnham, author Erik Larson set out, above all else, to tell a story and to do so as powerfully as he could. As New York Times critic Janet Maslin gushed, Larson “relentlessly fuses history and entertainment to give this nonfiction book the dramatic effect of a novel, complete with abundant cross-cutting and foreshadowing.”
Larson’s approach is well suited to his dramatic subject matter. The story alternates between two narratives: the planning and development of the World’s Fair under architect Daniel Burnham, who used the fair as an opportunity to showcase the grandeur of the Beaux Arts Style, and the exploits of serial killer H.H. Holmes, who used the fair as an opportunity to prey on naive out-of-towners.
In a grim ironic twist, Holmes was something of an architect himself, transforming a Chicago rooming house into a “Murder Castle” complete with trapdoors, greased chutes and soundproof rooms. Indeed, the parallels between Burnham and Holmes are the thematic heart of the book, lending this true story literary gravitas.
Italo Calvino riding a bike in 1970. Unknown Photographer, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Like a great building, Invisible Cities is a book that was designed to be inhabited rather than simply experienced once. The allegorical novel is structured as a series of conversations between Marco Polo, the 13th century Italian explorer, and Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor of China.
Polo and Khan did meet in history, but this book is not drawn from any historical sources. The conversations are merely a framing device, allowing Polo to describe 55 fictitious cities to the emperor, places he claims to have visited. Each city is a parable for a different aspect of human nature, and as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the subject Polo has learned the most about in his travels is himself. Places, it seems, are illuminated by the preconceptions we bring to them.
While the story has a free-floating and dreamlike structure, there is a plot twist that occurs halfway through the novel. Pressed by Kubla Khan to describe his home city of Venice, Polo explains that he has been doing that all along. Fedora, Zoe, Zenobia, and all the other fictional cities he recounts are all just Venice seen from different vantage points.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000)
Leaves are much more intricate than they appear to be at first. Photo by Jon Sullivan, 2003, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
House of Leaves is sort of like the reading equivalent of being trapped within H.H. Holmes labyrinthine Murder Castle. The text is laid out in a fashion that is anything but linear, with copious footnotes leading to their own footnotes which themselves have footnotes, all making copious references to books and films that are sometimes real, sometimes not. At times, the text is arranged unusually on the page and the book must be rotated to be read. At other times, multiple narrators interrupt one another in a disorienting fashion. Even the genre is hard to determine. While most readers consider House of Leaves a horror story, the author himself has described it — bafflingly perhaps — as a love story.
But House of Leaves offers the reader much more than mere confusion. By traversing this experimental book, the reader is able to share in the protagonists’ disorientation, offering a unique, sometimes claustrophobic experience of imaginative identification. The book follows a family whose house contains an endless series of hidden rooms — an allegory, perhaps, for the psyche, family dynamics, academic criticism, history and more. (Perhaps the list is also endless). For architects, the mysteries of this novel are a potent reminder that clarity, rationality, and openness are not always preferable. Sometimes people are drawn to the darkness.
Am Gestade, one of many Viennese streets Austerlitz traverses as he searches for his hidden past. Photo by Jorge Franganillo, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Can a work of art speak to both the heart and head at the same time? Or do the intellect and the emotions respond to different kinds of artistic experience, one craving critical distance and the other empathic closeness? These are not just questions that Austerlitz poses to the reader, they are the questions faced by the novel’s eponymous protagonist.
Jacques Austerlitz is an architectural historian who lives a solitary, itinerant life. He is fascinated with the way buildings and street layouts can reveal the buried histories of places, leaving behind an objective record of how people lived — ordinary people, that is, not just the type of people whose names end up in history books. One day, Austerlitz stumbles across a startling fact about himself. He learns that the couple who raised him in England were not his biological parents. His actual parents were a Jewish couple from Vienna who perished in the Holocaust. They had sent their young son, then aged three, to safety in England using an underground program known as the kindertransport.
Austerlitz applies his skills as an architectural historian to research the buried history of his own parents, who seem to have left few traces behind. He is then faced with the possibility that he had unknowingly been looking for them all along. Could his interest in architectural history have been, unconsciously, a way of trying to uncover his own roots? This question, which would intrigue Calvino’s Marco Polo, is just one of the many tantalizing mysteries of this masterful novel about memory and loss.
Cover Image: Freepik, Attribution via Wikimedia Commons
First, it’s important to understand that while all mushrooms are fungi, not all fungi are mushrooms. Mushrooms are the fruiting body of fungi. A mushroom is like an apple growing on an apple tree––it’s the fruit, not the tree. In the fungi world the “tree” is called mycelium. Mycelium is the living body of fungi. It’s a rootlike structure that is constantly eating, expanding, and connecting in large filamentous networks underground or in rotting trees. Mycelium is the star of the MycoHab project and the key to a future of fungi-based materials.
“Inspired by the iconic book Invisible Cities. by Italo Calvino, this drawing tells the story of Octavia, a city suspended above the Earth by a spider’s web of cables and wires. Interpretations are limitless, but in my interpretation, the inhabitants of Octavia depict the central truth about humanity – connections are profound – but tenuous; just as is our grasp on life itself. Isolation is not sustainable and connectivity – for all its impermanence – remains a more beautiful response.”
“Cafe Palace selected a series of plans of landmark buildings with different cultural backgrounds according to the composition of immigrants in the block, which served as the inspiration and design starting point of the overall underground space layout. Through the redefinition and blend of different architectural styles, an architectural atmosphere similar to the situationist concept was created.
“The conversation around future space travel intensifies, illustrating an intrinsic tension between a childlike excitement towards space travel and a corrupt governmental elitist control. As the world we know deteriorates under our feet, we desire to preserve, to resist, to survive. Fable or Failure takes an architectural approach of dividing a traditional spacecraft into three sections.
“In March 2021, an Evergreen container ship blocked the Suez Canal waterway for 6 days. In a scenario in which the ship had never managed to leave the canal, people in need of homes would have brought their lives aboard. While the Egyptian government has been dragging people out of their homes in Warraq and Sinai as development plans move forward, people are forced into poorly planned habitats that pay no real attention to people’s needs or their economic activities.
“Stair mazes will always be dynamic structures for the human spatial experience. Humans have the instinct to create infinite space through limited materials so that a certain relationship can be formed between limited life and the infinite universe. Stairs are important elements of a maze—connecting different heights and circulating up and down. The winding pink staircases, the main subject of this drawing, give the building a very large number of possible paths, forming a complex labyrinth.
“Peter Eisenman commented on John Hejduk’s Berlin figures that they are not architecture “because you can’t get in them.” To which Hejduk replied, “YOU can’t get in them.” The work questions the degrees of accessibility in which users/participants can have agency/authorship to a piece of architecture. The notion of authorship can be understood as a form of intellectual property, where participants can only be allowed to travel with the designer through the meaning/essence of the work using their imaginations, only if the work was explained to them.
“Dear Diary,
“Chungking Mansion is located in Hong Kong. It has brought together traders and asylum-seekers from South Asia and Africa, temporary workers from India and cash-strapped tourists from all over the world. It is a building that represents “low-end globalisation”.
“The world was once filled with secluded and mysterious villages. The populations of these villages each lived and died in their own immaculate beliefs, traditions, and laws, their respective cultures untouched by the outside world for eons. With what land, sea and sky would offer, they would farm, herd, weave, build and worship, all in harmony with the cycles of nature.
“During its rapid growth in the late 1800s, New York City formed most of its current modern city fabric. As a city of immigrants with its own cultural insecurity, New York borrowed the architectural style of its diverse ancestral European roots in an attempt to create a historic urban context. This European influence, combined with the advancing construction technology and socioeconomic factors of the time, forged a unique architectural environment. Architectural elements of different origin, whether ornamental or functional, were melded into New York’s building facades; architectural manifestation of “insecurity”.
“Art Expose is a Public Fabric Art Forum aiming to raise awareness and mend inequities within Melbourne’s art scene alongside a fibre arts community. Putting the public in the central spine, the discursive architecture seeks to mediate between prosperous art dealers and struggling artists. The scheme arms the public with tools for measured amounts of active and passive surveillance of art production, storage and sales.
“The Atlas – a loose assemblage of maps. It constitutes a multitude of scales within itself. It links between the content and its representations, creates relationships, and references – a hyperlink into the digital space. The atlas holds the weight of the digital mesh.”
“The drawing is a capriccio depicting a post-apocalyptic Semporna as a ‘debrisity’ serving as a reminder that anthropogenic coastal and ocean debris is never another speculation but a reality. The notion of this drawing is to question the precarity whilst disseminating the importance of waste management and striving for the betterment of the settlement and marine life of Semporna. Cities across the globe are sharing the same fate in that unless we become more conscious about the impact of marine debris, they are destined to bear the brunt of human activities. Water is quintessential to support all forms of life yet paradoxically, human narcissism has laid and continues to lay waste to cities that are granted access to the paramount gift of nature, water, turning the ocean into a gigantic dumpster.
“Content with the limitations of their small apartments and quaint terraces, warmly greeting their neighbors, and strolling among the stepped streets, the citizens of Synopolis greet the sunset each evening with decanters of bubbly concoctions, slowness in their constitutionals, diving into delectable sweets, and chatting away the day’s trials and travails over stacks of plates of tapas.”
“This drawing imagines an alternate reality and economic reverie where the Great Depression never happened, a need for stripped to the basics skyscrapers averted, and the stylistic impressions of the era continued to roar for decades onward. This depicts a parallel Chicago, devoid of modernist glassy structures. A staggered stone skyline is a hazy backdrop to airships hovering at startlingly low altitudes.
““This day has come, my young apprentice!” – said Remio Kulhassio, founding partner of the renowned architecture studio in Fornio, Italy.
“‘Ronin’s Lair’… an environment that lies between two parallel universes. These series of spaces are a continually morphing and warping training grounds for the ‘wayward samurai’. They are part Japanese Edo Period and part digital future, they are neither today nor tomorrow… they are in a continually shifting threshold space; a warped interim and an evolutionary and non-chronological series of physicality’s and landscapes. My explorations also lie within 2 worlds of the analogue and the digital, my submission is one of the analogue (ink on parchment paper) and it is one of a series of many such explorations in digital, analogue, and hybrid mediums.”
“If we strip away the technological advances of virtual reality and artificial intelligence, how do we ensure our ability to feel still exists in this digital age? Inspired by the Teatro Del Mondo “Floating Theater” (Aldo Rossi, 1979), this temporary structure floats in Tokyo Bay and is set to open every summer as a metaphor for the Japanese idiom: Ichi-go Ichi-e (one encounter, one chance), a celebration of the unrepeatable nature of every single moment.
“Threshold: The focal point of the picture is a human standing on the water’s surface, facing the light (referring to the Truth) diffusing from a cracked wall in an uncanny cave. The philosophy of art and visual arts questioning the “reality” and “illusion” frequently refers to Platon’s “the allegory of Cave”. The picture uses a cave metaphor as well as a “the allegory of uterus” referring to the human’s first home which is conceptualized by the curvilinear forms.
“Many see in architecture the plan, section, elevation, axonometric, and BIM model; mathematical conventions communicating the means of construction. However, drawing by measurement to prescribe beyond the floor, walls, and roof is a perverse overstep; measurements cannot make singular the continuous performance of everyday living.
“The drawing depicts the possible future of architecture, where buildings are grown organically using programmable bionanobots and natural materials that automatically assemble and fuse chemically via biological mechanisms. buildings will be grown.”
