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The use of fiction to interpret architecture and urban space

In this essay I want to revise the interpretation of architectural and urban space by questioning the supremacy of technical pronouncements on the city and its architecture. The essay traces the strands of a theoretical position. The first is that apparently natural or objective characteristics of space can be interpreted in terms of capitalist activity, particularly the pursuit of profit. The second is that the quest for purity, expressed by taboos against pollution, permeates architectural and urban practice. And the third is that fictions, particularly in film and the novel, can be used in a number of ways to reveal unseen workings of architecture. It sets out both to make connections across a range of scales, from the architectural detail and the interior, to city strategy, and, in apparent contradiction, to encourage ways of thinking about space that transgress these, and other categories. This text uses the privileges of fiction. It shifts between one technique for deciphering space and another. At times one or the other, or both, disappear from view. And at other times all three approaches are brought into play. In teaching modern architectural history, the work from which this essay springs, I have had recourse to all of these approaches. Here, I try to indicate what the interconnections and disjunctures between the three views could be.