Building Architecture Into Your Writing

I never quite realised how fascinated I was with buildings until I started looking back at pictures I took when I spent a year travelling the world as cabin crew and saw the sheer number of buildings I had captured on my wistful wanderings around new cities. I didn’t discriminate either; there were photos of churches, temples, skyscrapers, old, wooden colonial houses, quirky towers and closed shops. Each picture marked a moment in that city between me and its architecture, a moment where I laughed at a building that took me by surprise or felt breathless in the presence of a particularly striking or beautiful building. There were buildings that were so synonymous with the history and identity of a place that it moved me to tears – the Witch House in Salem, the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Yet despite their cultural significance and inspiring structures, buildings often play a secondary or even tertiary role in writing to characters and plot. Buildings can all too often be depicted as simply space to house characters, and when they are explored in detail, descriptions can sometimes come across as a little clichéd such as in Gothic novels where haunted houses creak and groan with loose floorboards, and dusty bookcase hide entrances to stone tunnels filled with cobwebs and the odd flaming torch. Metaphorically, they play a hugely important role in understanding themes such as family, religion and fear. Take the line coined by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet for example, ‘a plague on both your houses.’ Here, Shakespeare explores the invasion of the sanctity of the house and the family traditions at risk from social conflict. Buildings, whether real or symbolic, matter.

So how can we make buildings the primary focus of our writing and what does this look like when done effectively?

1. Use the history of well-known buildings to drive your plot.

Taking a well-known building and putting it at the centre of your narrative or poem can be a really interesting way to drive your plot forward. A writer who I think does this exceptionally well is Dan Brown in the Da Vinci Code, when he takes the architecture of the Louvre and weaves it into the mystery of codes and rituals that the building itself unlocks the secrets to:

“The new entrance to the Paris Louvre had become almost as famous as the museum itself. The controversial, neo-modern glass pyramid designed by Chinese-born American architect I. M. Pei still evoked scorn from traditionalists who felt it destroyed the dignity of the Renaissance courtyard. Goethe had described architecture as frozen music, and Pei’s critics described this pyramid as fingernails on a chalkboard. Progressive admirers, though, hailed Pei’s seventy-one-foot tall, transparent pyramid as a dazzling synergy of ancient structure and modern method-a symbolic link between the old and new—helping usher the Louvre into the next millennium.”

Researching the history of buildings can also be fun. Personally, I am fascinated with the conspiracy theories surrounding Denver Airport as well as its interesting and quite bizarre design features, and would love to explore how the building itself could propel my characters and plot into something really intriguing.

2. Don’t neglect ordinary buildings

During a recent writing workshop I led, we explored buildings using the poems ‘A Supermarket in California’ by Alan Ginsberg and 'Filling Station’ by Elizabeth Bishop. I loved how these poems explored a very ordinary building in an extraordinary way, either by placing a celebrity in it, as Ginsberg does, or focus on the out of place items within that setting, such as the doilies in the oil-stricken filling station in Bishop’s poem. We had some fantastic pieces of writing emerge, from Audrey Hepburn in a gym to spanners in a kitchen. I love how these ideas expose our dependency on the ordinary and slant the experience to unsettle the reader.

3. Entrances are important

How many times have you read a narrative where you are inside the building without ever having entered it? Entrances can allow you to transport your reader into a building in the most interesting and unexpected ways. You could dedicate an entire plot or poem to thresholds and façades of buildings without ever actually taking a step inside. I was inspired by the story of the London Underground tunnel that was covered with the façade of a building to hide its ugliness and make it look like it was part of the row of houses it interrupted. I played with the idea of going through an entrance that you think leads to one building but actually takes you somewhere very different and used the concept to write about going to the front door of my childhood home, only to find a hospital corridor on the other side. Structurally it was shocking and displacing but metaphorically, it allowed me to express the fears I had about my own mother’s poor health and the fear that one day, the front door I knew so well wouldn’t be accessible anymore.

"There is nothing remarkable about the white UVPC door of number 14. The double glazing matches next door's although the letterbox is still intact. It has the council house non-identity that divides us from the grandious Victorian wooden doors two streets over. But it is still, unmistakedly, ours."

4. Use silence to build tension

Finally, why not have a go at using a building to suspend one of the senses in your writing. I am imagining a building that requires silence or near silence: a church, a library, a temple etc. Use the other senses to build tension between your characters, while maintaining your focus on the building itself. A glance between bookshelves can be the spark of a love interest, the fear of echos in an old church could foreground the protagonist’s inability to cry despite feeling immense grief. I love this poem by Philip Larkin and the way he describes the decaying of the church as it becomes more neglected over time. His use of silence is subtle but the line ‘the echoes snigger briefly’ is a beautiful personification of the unique amplification that churches possess. Allow your characters to move around the building freely, but in silence.

Grab a drink, get comfy and explore any of the above ideas for 10-15 minutes. Feel free to share your ideas by heading over to my Instagram page @words_and_wine_ashford