IMAGINING SPACE: The Interplay of Writing and Architecture

March 7-8, 2014
Portland State University
Portland, Oregon

How do poems and buildings speak to each other? What affinities, correlations, and opportunities are at play between creative writing and architecture, two mediums that create, structure, inhabit, and discover space? In Spring 2014, Portland State University's School of Architecture and MFA Program in Creative Writing present Imagining Space, a symposium that seeks unexpected ways of defining, occupying and expanding the intersections of literature and architecture.

This two-day, trans-disciplinary event will bring together a range of writers, architects, visual artists, and scholars who will investigate the architectural and literary implications of the following phenomena: the interdependence of fiction and architecture, architecture parlante, the fragment, hypertext, psychogeography, mobile device–enhanced texts, sustainability, the archive, interstices, elision, orthography, inhabitation, the book, the Internet, interpellation, and chronotopicity.

We invite submissions that probe these themes in the form of academic papers, artistic performances, audience-participatory projects, workshops, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. By exploring built environments—be they poems, prisons, or planetariums—Imagining Space pursues an intertwined conception of architecture and/with/in writing.

For more information or to submit a one-page proposal, please contact imagining.space@gmail.com or visit www.ImaginingSpaceSymposium.wordpress.com.

Deadline for submissions: November 15, 2013.

Notification of acceptance will be made by December 20, 2013.