Architectural historians typically rely on histories for facts, and treatises for theories. A much wider range of texts records the reception of real buildings, the capacity to imagine fantastic ones, and the reciprocity between architecture and literature: poetry, dramaturgy, the picaresque novel, inauguration or consecration speeches, travelogues, epigraphy, and so on.
‘Architecture’ includes cities, civic buildings, palaces, villas, housing, individual rooms, gardens, grottoes, the constructions of nature itself, fountains, monuments, engineering, and decorations from vault painting to topiary. Our focus is largely Europe, but encompasses the Ottoman Empire, all territories ringing the Mediterranean basin, and descriptions of architecture transmitted by the global missions of the Church or travellers.
The source languages are multiple, and we are interested in Neo-Latin, Neo-Greek, and Classical Arabic as legacy languages of cultural transmission across history and language borders.
A particular theoretical concern is the intermedial relationship between immaterial words and solid buildings – however that may be defined.
A collection of essays from the conference will be published, subject to peer review, in an edited volume of the new book series, Architecture & the Literary Imagination (Harvey Miller Publishers, series editors, Fabio Barry & Paul Gwynne).
Papers will be 30 minutes in length. Please send an abstract of 200 words by 1 October to Fabio Barry (rabirius@cantab.net) & Paul Gwynne (p.gwynne@aur.edu)
Architecture & the Literary Imagination. 1350-1750
The American University of Rome
Via Pietro Roselli, 4, 00153 Roma RM
6-8 November 2025