Olivia Tun and Stephanie Jones‘ project inspired by Concerning the Bodyguard by Donald Barthelme

In an opinion piece in the New York Times in 2013, Matteo Pericoli, an architect, teacher, illustrator and author of The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York and London Unfurled, wrote about a course he teaches in Turin, Italy and at Columbia University where he asks writers to think like architects, and to “physically build the literary architecture of a text.” He explains:

Great architects build structures that can make us feel enclosed, liberated or suspended. They lead us through space, make us slow down, speed up or stop to contemplate. Great writers, in devising their literary structures, do exactly the same.

Texts that students to create architecture models for Pericoli’s class included A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace, “The Falls” by George Saunders, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver. Photographs of the projects are included in the New York Times piece.

That article inspired George Mayo, a teacher at Montgomery Blair High School, in Silver Spring, Maryland to develop a similar class for his tenth grade English students. Those student projects and reflections about their process are documented on a website Mayo created called Constructing Holden Caulfield. The class Skyped with Pericoli and did close readings of The Catcher in the Rye before attempting their architectural models. Mayo described the process he created for his class:

Literature, like architecture, can evoke strong emotions and feelings. So if my students were going to design and build meaningful architectural spaces they first had to connect with the novel on a very personal level. As the students read The Catcher in the Rye, I asked them to take notes and make annotations on parts of the novel they found significant. Class discussions revolved around talking about the text and the structure and the flow of the text. We also talked about mood, tone, symbolism, theme and first person narration. These literary terms would play an important role in the student’s later design decisions for their architectural models. I also introduced a basic list of architectural terms and concepts. Many of these terms are similar to literary devices.