Disciplining fiction: Projecting Robin Evans through history and geography

Abstract

In 1978, Robin Evans published "Figures, Doors and Passages,” charting an explicit strategy for the coupling of architecture and fiction. In it, he argued that pairing architectural plans and their contemporary literature would elucidate the connection between spatial configurations and social life. By doing so, he conferred provisional legitimacy to literature, suggesting that there might be disciplinary avenues to conscript fiction in architectural research. For Evans, affording credibility to fictional representations required a specific bracketing, a bracketing leveraged against forms of representation particular to the discipline of architecture. Although some may discount the use of fiction as source material as simply an eccentricity of a design profession, it is seen as a potentially significant resource in disciplines whose credibility is tied directly to their sources' veracity: historians and geographers have argued for the inclusion of fiction within their canon, though not without significant discussions of its boundaries and potentials. These discussions, recorded in their trade publications, argue for the capacity of fictions and set boundaries relative to the rigors of their respective scholarship. These arguments in History and Geography, rather than finding their limits at fiction, have led to new inroads within their own scholarship through a continued, refined discourse that identifies fiction's provisional legitimacy and latent capacity. Architecture's appropriation of fiction has been more idiosyncratic, and no systematic survey of method exists. This paper compares the agendas, boundaries, and potentials of historians', geographers', and architects' employment of fiction. The contemporary resurgence of literature, fiction, and writing as appropriate domains of architectural research evidences a need to frame their inclusion within architectural scholarship. Using Robin Evans' explicit methodology as a point of entry, this paper compares his architectural representations and social fictions to those of History and Geography, in an attempt to identify a line of inquiry appropriate to contemporary architectural research.