Cities of readers: A teaching innovation methodology that assimilates the reader spaces in the contemporary literature for the initiation to the architectural project

Abstract

The experience here presented comes from the application of an interdisciplinary teaching methodology (Spanish-American literature and architecture). It is also transversal (combining different knowledge of several areas with quotidian and social interest elements) and plural, linked to real-life. To this end, a process of searching, observing, choosing, interpreting and making an architecture project was developed from the reading of 22 stories whose main character was a reader. From the literature students’ descriptions about the spatial qualities context of each character, a series of urban profiles found in different cities can be established. The knowledge of the psychological or "metaphorical" space of each reader, on the other hand, allows developing a series of personal profiles and "inner" spatial qualities that can be generated by students of architecture in the places found. Using proposals of intervention, the students will be able to improve the conditions for the practice of reading in the city or to induce the psycho-environmental experience to be lived by each reader in the chosen place. This teaching strategy allows us to overcome some of the students’ inherent prejudices during their first years of the architecture degree. It expands as well the previous concept of space in order to build a richer thinking about the observed reality and a personal reading, projected towards the multiple potentialities of the current urban space.