Architecture in Fictional Literature: Essays on Selected Works

The works of Franz Kafka have a very rich metaphorical context of space and architecture. By using spatial and architectural metaphors, he represented the modern world and the experiences and feelings of the modern individual, such as insecurity, fear, alienation, and despair. The “dark and sometimes surrealistic” novel, The Castle, published after Kafka’s death in 1926, also focuses on alienation, bureaucracy, and the despair of modern man’s attempts to stand against the system. It is full of architectural and spatial metaphors waiting to be interpreted by the reader. What these metaphors point out often goes beyond their physical existence; thereby, a multi-layered meaning is created. Any interpretation of this multi-layered meaning requires the understanding and deciphering of the implicit and symbolic meanings of the objects, architectural elements, and spaces. The fact that architecture and space are the prerequisites for all kinds of human activities makes it inevitable that they play an important role in literature, as they do in any subject that concerns human life. However, the spaces in The Castle not only form the stage where human life takes place but go beyond that and become an expression of the psychological effects created by the social and cultural conditions of the modern world on individuals. What is told in the castle is not the space itself but its meaning. In this context, the article focuses on the architectural interpretation of the novel by deciphering the possible implicit and symbolic meanings of the architectural elements and spaces, which are narrated throughout the novel.

Penned by Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame is built upon a love story evolving between a Gypsy girl, Esmeralda, and a hunchbacked church bell-ringer, Quasimodo. Nonetheless, the novel moves beyond a love story, and by sharing analyses on the political and social matters of 15th century Paris and medieval Europe, it holds a mirror to that period. In the novel, both Paris city and Notre Dame de Paris church play a more important role than solely forming the background of the plot. Rather, these elements take place in the novel as the building blocks of the story and direct its flow. The plot of the novel was established by positioning the cathedral into its centre. As the novel is analysed on the basis of space-human interaction, the characters are integrated with the church and exist in accordance with an attachment to place.

A major representative of the Romantic movement, Victor Hugo adopted the classical art approach, and in an age where imitating Roman and Greek art forms was popular, Hugo, with his work in Gothic architecture, drew public attention. This work managed to stop the destruction of a great number of Gothic architecture symbols, the Notre Dame de Paris Church in particular, by capturing the attention of society. On that account, this work plays quite an important role in protecting an architectural work via literature.

Hans Castorp, a young naval engineer from Hamburg, goes to the sanatorium to visit his cousin Joachim, who is being treated in a mountain village in Davos. In the sanatorium, Castrop sees that time is very different from the time in the city. The way of life between life and death fascinates him. As he is about to return to his normal life, he is diagnosed with a disease. Deprived of time, detached from the world, he remains in the sanatorium where the disease is at the centre of life. During this time, Castrop is trying to discover the world of doctors and patients. He is in a platonic love in the background of his attachment to this diseased environment. In the sanatorium, Castrop, who understands the philosophy of life beyond experiences such as illness and death, undergoes a radical change. Hans succumbs to the power of love and death. The cultural and moral collapse of European society before the war is also mentioned. Rather than the individuals who lived in this period, a period in which all of European society becomes ill and withdrawn is also mentioned. The collapse in this materialist society that lacks equality and justice is described as the disease itself. Castrop will eventually find the way of enlightenment “above” in the sanatorium dominated by the disease, recovering and regaining her health and returning to her former life “below” in the city where society will find itself in war and disease.

“The Magic Mountain” was written by German author Thomas Mann. The novel is among the contemporary classics of world literature. In this novel, bearing traces of his biography and memories, Thomas Mann also wrote essays on “time” and “personality analysis”. Mann was born in 1875 in Lübeck, Germany, and is the child of a wellestablished and wealthy family. Mann has deep religious views. After Hitler dominated Germany, he defected to Switzerland and later immigrated to the United States. Unable to feel comfortable in the USA, Mann moved back to Switzerland at the age of 78 and died in Zurich in 1955.

Architecture has always been an integral part of literature. Literature is not just about character description or case narration. In literary works, many elements such as space, cultural accumulation, sociological changes, and political orders reflect the characteristics of the related era and convey a whole culture to the future. From this point of view, literature is intertwined with many disciplines and is an effective communication tool in interdisciplinary interaction.

In literary works, disciplines that include space set-ups, such as architecture, interior design, and urban planning take on different meanings and dimensions. In fiction, the spaces and structures that accompany the heroes become concrete in the dream and are made visible in the reader’s world.

From this point of view, by choosing L. N. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and considering the social and political environment of Tsarist Russia depicted in the novel, we examine in this study, within the discipline of architecture, the space set-ups of that period in detail. Accordingly, based on the novel, pressures created on individuals by society and the powers-that-be, helplessness, and despondency that these individuals fell into are explained through spatial and architectural metaphors. The aim here is to reveal the relationship between literature and the architecture discipline through spatial set-ups in literary works.

Stendhal, one of the most prominent authors of 19th century European literature, published The Red and the Black in 1831, based on the true story of a young man named Antoine Berthet. The author created a fictitious town to respect private life and changed the names of the heroes. In the novel’s main theme, he devised a process from love to death. But when it went deep, it is seen that he reflected the class discrimination and ideology of 19th century French society. The noble class displayed its power over the peasants and the intrigues they used to maintain this power. As a matter of fact, it is possible to analyse architecture, social structure, the spirit of space, and people through space, depending on the time, place, and space used in the fiction of the literary novel. In this novel, there are traces of society, culture, space, time, place, and the spirit of space.

When the novel is read together with its name, very different meanings can be given to people, events, and places in fictional frames. It is seen that red symbolising life, love, and passion, and black, symbolising sadness, pessimism, and death, are constantly shifting. From the point of view of events, love, which ends with death, holds an important place. In the process of love, while passion evokes red, the pain and the end with death evokes black. From a social point of view, the dress worn by people serving the nobles is black. From the point of view of space, sometimes it is seen that what is experienced or felt beyond what looks like black is red, and what is experienced or felt beyond what looks like red is black. In summary, the novel “The Red and the Black” takes the reader on a journey in which different meanings can be associated with the person, society, time, place, space, and the spirit of space.

The book titled “The Time Regulation Institute,” published in 1961, one year before Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s death, is a novel that ironically fictionalises Turkey’s modernisation process. Based on clocks, the novel employs a symbolical language and makes a critique of time through changeable and unregulated clocks. In this context, the study aims to evaluate the novel from the point of time and space in the old/traditional and new/modern intersection, which constitutes the main theme of the novel. Initially, the prominent spaces in the novel are evaluated from an architectural angle. Then, we attempted to analyse critically how the aforementioned spaces underwent a change and transformation with modernism.

As a reflection of society and culture, architecture has lost its identity with modernisation. Concepts such as space, function, form, and aesthetics are unquestionably for the structure to have an architectural value, but these concepts change and transform according to time and conditions, too. In this context, the novel offers an important point of view to present and future architects on how to adopt a “responsible” and “sensitive” architectural approach, which is ignored today. The study also aims to reveal the effects of modern life on individuals’ behaviours, their belongings, social behaviour, lifestyles, family structure, and institutional relations, as well as in architecture.

The Tartar Steppe is one of the notable works of existentialism that encompassed Europe initially and then the whole world following the Second World War. The Tartar Steppe, using extraordinary literary competence, puts forward the gravest problem of existence, portraying the human condition in an attempt to lay bare how the spaces we are stuck in corrode our soul.

A masterwork of the twentieth century, Italian writer Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe opens with the assignment of a freshly graduated officer to a post devoid of any meaning, as is in the case of all the little people who lost the chance of taking control of their little lives. Lieutenant Drogo’s first assignment is the pale, soulless, and murky Fort Bastiani located on a godforsaken border where it is believed the Tartars will someday attack.

Freshly graduated Lieutenant Drogo is actually full of hope, expectations, and excitement during his travel to Fort Bastiani. However, the monotonous and dismal bureaucracy that greets him there leaves him with a hopeless existence. Even on his first night in the Fort, he contemplates escape, but he somehow cannot. He lets his life perish, chasing after vain promises, worrying about his livelihood.

The Tartar Steppe brings a critical approach to the anxieties and reservations we enslave our lives to while discussing the paradox of existence in Fort Bastiani, a military outpost where time and architectural space create an environment of dread and boredom.

The Bridge on the Drina was written by internationally famous Ivo Andric, who was born in 1892 in Travnik, Bosnia, and spent a part of his youth in Visegrad with his mother. The Bridge of the Drina is an important work that has been able to relate past experiences, hopes, and aspirations. In this work, the East-West relationship from the strongest periods of the Ottoman Empire was transmitted to the reader through this bridge. This work, whose author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961, has been printed many times in different languages. The bridge itself was built over the Drina River, the largest tributary of the Sava River. The stories of different people, such as Serbs, Muslims, and Jews, who lived there because of the years of wars between the Ottomans and Austria and other uprisings, were set in the town of Visegrad around this river and on this bridge. With this bridge, Bosnia was connected to Serbia and further afield, to other parts of the Ottoman Empire and even to Istanbul. The stone bridge, built on 11 arches, took five years to build and was completed in 1571. Most of the stories mentioned in this work were realized there as well. This stone bridge was built by a Serbian-born boy who crossed the river from the village of Sokolovic from the opposite side. He was called Sokollu Mehmet Pasha years later, the grand vizier in the Ottoman Empire. With the construction of the bridge, different structures such as the stone house and the police station were built in different periods. The Bridge of the Drina conveys the deep waters of the past, the stories filled with hope, longing, and loss, in a sad and effective way.

This article, which evaluates One Hundred Years of Solıtude, one of the important works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is discussed in three stages. In the first stage, the life, literary personality, and influences of Gabriel Garcia Marquez are investigated in order to understand the events, especially the banana massacre, which had a great impact. The environment in which the events took place, and the details in the descriptions, the period, and conditions in which this novel was written are reviewed.

In the second stage, the definition of the magical realism movement is studied, and its features are examined by giving examples and descriptions throughout the novel. In the third stage, the life process of “Macondo,” where the novel took place, from its establishment as a village to its urbanization and disappearance, are discussed. In these depictions, many changes and transformations that we encounter throughout the novel are examined over the following topics, changing the purpose of creating space, adding new functions to the buildings, enlarging the buildings by making additions, migrations, the effect of community and social change on daily life and space and the perception of this space on people, the sense of belonging of local people and alienation from the city, and the mechanization of space production are examined in the novel.

How many readers that are introduced to languages other than Italian through the novel know how important an academician, medieval historian, philosopher, aesthetics, and semiotics expert Eco is? The author skilfully embroiders the conflicts between religious sects, the daily life in a monastery complex, the passion, ambition, and intrigue of the inhabitants of the monastery onto an extremely strong background with his deep knowledge of history and architectural history. Although it was his first novel, the technical aspect did not go beyond the literary aspect; despite its length, it is not repetitive, and the depictions of space are of a kind that would make an architect become very jealous. Eco has an approach that attaches great importance to details.

Eco, as an expert of the medieval period, reflected on the urbanization and emergence of the bourgeois class in the cities and the dilemmas of Christianity as a system. The events in The Name of the Rose take place in northern Italy, in a monastery at the end of 1327, on the ridges of the Apennine Mountains. The book entitled Memories was written in Latin by its owner Adso, recapping 14th-century events, and was then translated into neo-French by Vallet. Adso’s manuscript spans seven days.

There is great detail, excitement, immersion, history, architecture, art. What else can we possibly ask for? This must be read. If you read it once, read it once more. Stick to the details, enjoy the richness of expression.

Some writers have written so vividly about the cities they lived in that even their names are associated with those very cities. James Joyce with Dublin is one of them. In his acclaimed, post-modernist work, Ulysses, Joyce recounts a single day of two of the most famous characters in literature, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, in Dublin, June 16, 1904, interspersed with numerous encyclopedic knowledge, literary, historical, and cultural references, puns, puzzles, lists, recipes, etc. Ulysses is also an extremely deep naturalistic work. Actual and current events, historical references, newspaper reports, space, environment, and object depictions in the narration are meticulously researched by Joyce, so much that he said, “If Dublin one day suddenly disappeared from the Earth, it could be reconstructed out of my book.” Via his stream-of-consciousness method, Joyce enables the reader to experience the entire fabric of the city in almost all five senses, hand-in-hand with the Irish protagonists, Bloom and Dedalus. The underlying reason is the importance he attributes to the concept of “experience/intuition” and the feeling of “here and now.” Thus even the simplest details become indispensable in Joyce’s Dublin. The influences and connections awakened in the characters’ consciousness through the symbols they encounter in the city turn Joyce’s Dublin into a landscape of meanings. This is perhaps one of the most accurate psychological interpretations of the city-human relationship. No writer has described how a city dweller experiences his surroundings better than Joyce has in Ulysses. Perhaps the only way for an architect to experience Dublin and the buildings of that city is to read James Joyce’s Ulysses.

In all the journeys we embark on, memories of residences, cities, and lives left behind cling on to us, reaching the places we visit and blending in with the moment. Fragmented memories reform in a different time and space to create new collages. This is the perspective of Italo Calvino as he contemplates the world of the living and non-living objects through his interest in semiotics and constructivism.

Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities, 1972) consists of 11 chapters and five short texts for each chapter. Each of these short texts corresponds to a different city. Described in a fantastic style, these magical cities are duplications of different aspects of Venice dismantled and reproduced. The novel unfolds in symbols and allegories according to a mathematical system and forces the reader to solve this puzzle.

In the novel, we experience places where we cannot definitely tell where we are and where we are going, although we feel a strange familiarity that we have been there before. As we get further away from this place, we arrive again in very similar surroundings that evoke the feeling of visiting a facsimile. We witness the people who are running in circles instead of looking for new possibilities and understand that each generation builds its lives on the vicious circle of the previous generation. It is all real, and it is all a dream. We live in it, but we cannot perceive it as a whole anymore. Each city dweller is bound by his/her own perspective.

Venice, the starting point for these imaginary cities, can offer us inspiration for a civilized, humane, and tolerant way of life as an alternative to the uninhabitable and joyless cities we have formed and trapped ourselves in.

When writer Lawrence Durrell first published Justine of The Alexandria Quartet in 1957, it made a big impact. It was because of the novel’s untraditional style of writing. As an example, the first three books do not follow a timeline. Only with the last book does the timeline become more solid. But also, the third book, Mountolive, has a different telling than the other three.

In the novels, a modern love story is told, but that love story is an unusual one. The city of Alexandria serves as the backdrop for this modern love story. The city reflects the characters’ mental status most of the time. Alexandria and her characters are linked together; one cannot exist without the other. Cities around the world are anything but stable; they have to change somehow. So, the idealized Alexandria in the novels changed over time. In that way, there were lots of clues about architecture. It was always considered together with the users and their acts, and also with the region and urban planning. In this study, the books were reviewed from a different perspective. The architectural side of the books was shown with examples. The Eastern Mediterranean style and the Levantine cities were explained with the help of the city of Alexandria. Also, Alexandria’s past, present, and future were displayed.

A Strangeness in My Mind is an “Olympic-size narrative” formed by the author by selecting bits and pieces from his repertory of extensive and meticulous research and attaching them to persons and characters. Besides carrying certain attributes of the impressionistic age, meaning the central qualities of the 19th-century roman-fleuve, it possesses unique and innovative aspects. The author conducts this narrative throughout the novel with different characters’ perspectives and internal monologues. While a unique hero (named Mevlut) seemingly exists in the classical, dramaturgical structure of introduction – development - conclusion, the main character, as in every Pamuk novel (except Snow), is Istanbul. In this work, the 50-year “urban transformation” of this old, devious and dynamic city is being told.

Since the author knows quite well the history and the centuries-long lore of the city he inhabits, he shows utmost skill, in an extremely belletristic and touching context, at recounting the devastation of such riches and treasures by these newly formed social classes. The author deserves the honour of passing on this literary heritage to future generations by tackling the city’s unrelenting problems: the creation of their own caste system by the lumpenproletariat, its amalgamation to the political system, mafia originating from illegal electricity distribution, land mafia, involvement of leftist organizations and cults in these schemes and the finale of the novel depicting the transformation of the “desparate” ex-slum-dwellers to skyscraper residents.

In this article, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald was examined in an architectural context through socio-spatial themes. The structure of the city, recreated and constructed in the novel, is shaped by the connection established with the social. The spatial separation form created by social inequalities and social classes constitutes the identity of a city. This concept enabled architecture to be addressed through sociospatial themes. The Great Gatsby defines this spatial separation over four main settlements. In this context, the shaping of spaces and architectural elements over the socio-economic attributes of the characters makes social analysis possible.

How healthy is it to construct the city’s identity only on the basis of social classes, social inequalities, and the spatial segregation created by these? To answer this question with a quote from Ilhan Tekeli, it would not be right to try to look for the personality and identity of a city only in the architectural value of its buildings and in the characteristics of the natural environment. These positive qualities can only be defined by the experience of life in which they gain meaning and value. The two directions complement each other. For the people living in this city, if the environment in which we live is the areas where some activities are performed, and the necessary earnings are provided for, we can only talk about the identity of the area if there is no meaning other than such instrumental qualities for those living there.

First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises, perhaps the most autobiographical novel of Ernest Hemingway, presents one of the first literary works of post-war modernism. Hemingway is known to have created the first works of the “Lost Generation” movement, which prioritizes the mind state of the period and the characters over the literary criteria.

Having embraced the soul of various cities he has lived in through his life, Hemingway chooses to narrate the incidents and moods, and states of the characters through their relations with the spirit of the space and existing architectural elements. While characters are portrayed as reckless drifters without any purpose or hope in the beginning, through the novel, we see them change in parallel with the environment surrounding them. After leaving the gloomy atmosphere of Paris, where the beginning of the novel is set, we read that the characters start to feel emotions such as passion, love, and envy as they arrive at the joyful, sincere Pamplona.

It is accepted that places also have souls that lead to occurrences of various emotions in the visitor. This soul, the Spirit of the Place, is constituted by both physical features, such as scale and texture, and elements that are abstract and not visible to the eye in the first place, as is history. Following the recognition at the international scale, the concept of the Spirit of Place is now accepted as a reflection of the fact that the soul of the place is constituted by not only the spatial features but also with the events this very place has witnessed throughout history.

As stated in the presentation of the work, At the Gates of Constantinople is actually a historical novel about the Turkish Middle Ages. The author is Hikmet Temel Akarsu, a writer with an architectural education. Let us convey it with the presentation of the book: “A work which focuses on the adventure of the free Turkoman tribes who reach the gates of Constantinople, the capital of the then world empire Byzantium, after conquering all of Asia Minor starting with the Battle of Manzikert in a short time like five years.”

The most important aspect of the novel that reflects the classical characteristics of the “knight romances”, is that it reconciles events with their background in an architectural and urban context and offers us detailed façades from the “medieval” Constantinople. In the novel At the Gates of Constantinople, it is possible to find some characteristics of the city and architecture of the period in a stylized way about the Byzantine cities of Nicaea, Izmit (Nikomedia), and Istanbul (Constantinople). The important settlements that predominantly constitute the plateau and the themes of the book are the capital cities of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople (Istanbul), and Nicaea, and thereby their architecture and landscape.

Through this novel, the history and the places/buildings of the city can be read with a completely different perspective.

This essay argues that J.R.R. Tolkien changed the understanding of fairy tales and fantasy literature through his academic and literary works. The accepted view at the time of fairy tales was that they were the product of intellectually limited childish minds trying to portray the world we live in in a symbolic fashion and have a very limited function for the adult reader of today except as an anthropological curiosity. In contrast, Tolkien focused on humanity’s desire to create new worlds and discuss the fundamental truths of our existence independent of the primary world we live in. Tolkien insisted that creating a secondary world, a fairy world that could attract the attention of the reader, required a higher form of literary expression. The writer should be able to create an “inner sense of consistency” so that the reader will be able to enter and roam in this secondary world without feeling alienated. To create this extensive secondary world, Tolkien used architecture and literature, which are the two most fundamental forms of art that have the ability to express both our external and internal experiences. He meticulously created an architectural style for each race living in this secondary world, expressing their ecological awareness and aspirations. A professor of Anglo-Saxon, he also created an output of literary works focused on poetry and songs for different races indicative of their characteristic traits and history.

English writer and famous critic Jonathan Swift from the eighteenth century introduces us to one of his most famous works, Gulliver’s Travels. This book discusses the English doctor Gulliver who works on long-distance traveling ships. In his life, the main role was taken by a passion for traveling, so he experienced many adventurous journeys. It is about the trips to the states of Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa (including the islands), and finally the country of horses, Houyhnhnm. In all four works and adventures, Gulliver finds himself in environments very different from his homeland. From an architectural point of view, the main features of this book are the different dimensions and scales, mathematical proportions and geometric shapes, as well as the close connection between man and place. All these adventures are discussed from these architectural aspects. The main feature of the adventure in Lilliput is the world of elves and their scale. In this setting, everything is created according to their proportional system. So Gulliver is the giant. Unlike Lilliput, in the state of Brobdingnag, everything is gigantic. It is a world where everything is enormous. In this place, Gulliver is an elf. The third adventure is about the geometric world of Laputa. The inhabitants of this place are obsessed with mathematical rules, and everything is part of mathematics and music. In the other islands of this adventure, the architectural features are imaginative. In the fourth adventure, Gulliver, unlike all the previous ones, finds himself in an animal world where the main inhabitants are horses. Therefore, the unit of measurement or modulus is horses.

Seemingly, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is an extremely famous children’s novel that has been in publication for almost two centuries; however, the book is also notable for tackling major adult subjects such as “maturity,” “meaning of life” and “search for identity.”

The novel allegorically conveys the confusions and dilemmas of a child growing up in an adult world, on a journey towards the meaning of life and identity. While the novel constitutes an allegory for life in general, it is also beneficial for any creative individual, including architects, to draw inspiration from. Any artist or ordinary individual engaged in the act of creation, like Alice, is on the way to realizing individual potential. In this path, their main endeavour is the search for identity since human existence acknowledges itself via its consciousness, and consciousness reveals itself through identity. When an artist’s identity does not penetrate the work, the resulting creation will be no different from any “product.” Architecture requires its creator’s perspective on the world; identity as the proof of consciousness is essential. Alice in Wonderland is an illuminating tale for an artist, or any individual, who is not afraid to jump down a rabbit hole in search of his/her identity.

This study aims to review George Orwell’s 1984, a dystopian novel about a fictional future, by considering his reflections on locations and their functions. The story focuses on the man, Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984, living in Airstrip One, the imaginary name of Great Britain, which was re-established after the Third World War and ruled by stringent authoritarian governance. 1984 has three different life patterns described under three names: “members of the inner party” who keeps authoritarian governance alive, “members of the outer party” who are functionaries of this governance, and the people who are excluded from everything are called “prolers”.

The lifestyle described in the novel and the writer’s paradigm about such a world are realized through the depictions of the novel’s main buildings. These are comprised of four gigantic ministries arranged with opposite functions and the “Victory Mansions” that meet the people’s residential needs. The ministries have different functions: The “Ministry of Truth” heads entertainment, education, and fine arts. The “Ministry of Peace” controls wars. The “Ministry of Love” maintains law and order, and the “Ministry of Plenty” manages economic affairs. The fact that even the ministries’ names have an opposite meaning to their functions is reflected as a metaphor of how the authoritarian governance crying out for victory keeps people captive.

In Orwell’s 1984 novel, it is very well explained how the building user’s situation reflects on the space and how it affects life. Furthermore, the oppression and the state of being under surveillance, which authoritarian governance is trying to create, have been successfully described through the book’s architectural spaces.

This study evaluates the anarcho-feminist science fiction and fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin’s dystopian novel The Dispossessed. The sociological, political, and artistic concepts that Le Guin was influenced by in the creation of the fictional structure of The Dispossessed are reviewed. The Dispossessed is based on the existence of two worlds, sociologically and politically opposite. In this dual planetary system, not only do their ideologies create a contrast but also the environments are totally opposite; one planet has an abundance, while the other one is in scarcity. This kind of design creates the possibility of making comparisons between these two planets, along with the ideologies and concepts each planet represents. For instance, anarchism, which Le Guin sees as the most idealist theory among all political theories, forms the basic philosophy and societal structure of Anarres, one of the planets. It seems that the name Anarres was deliberately chosen by Le Guin because it clearly evokes the word “anarchy.” Urras, the other planet, is the complete opposite in terms of its government and social structure. In addition to the concept of anarchism, The Dispossessed is a multi-dimensional and complex work that involves the concepts of utopia, anti-utopia, and dystopia, science fiction, anarcho-feminism, heterotopia, property, and Taoism. Le Guin’s influences are quite evident in the living environments she created in The Dispossessed, not only from a social and political perspective but also from architecture and urban planning standpoint.

This paper studies the architectural and decorative items in Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey that are about the Trojan War. The ancient city of Troy, which draws attention through its glory, prestige, richness, strategic location, architecture, and tall fortifications, is in northwest Anatolia. These two sagas are important in terms of being the oldest written sources related to Anatolia, the Aegean, its islands, and Greece. More importantly, they inform us about many issues such as religion, beliefs, sense of politics, community life, family order, urbanization, hospitality, agreements, oaths, rites, humanistic approaches, traditions, clothes, nourishment, health, artisanship, mining, decoration, trade, transportation, communication, the value of goods, time expressions and units of measurements along with discussing war.

There probably was a bard-priest tradition that transformed annals into songs and was accepted as the memory of society in the beginning. The Iliad and The Odyssey, as results of this tradition, are the sagas that were fictionalized by bards and verbally handed down from generation to generation.

The Divine Comedy, a masterpiece of western world poetry, relates Dante’s imaginary trip to Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. The Divine Comedy is one of the longest-running poems in the history of poetry, with a total number of strings reaching 14,233. Dante’s trip, which started on Thursday night, April 7, 1300, lasted one week, with the poet Virgil guiding him. On top of Purgatory, Virgil gives way to Beatrice, who guides Dante in Paradise. When Dante sees Beatrice for the first time, he is nine years old and Beatrice is eight. She was an inspiration for his thoughts during his life. The Divine Comedy, which takes the epic of Virgil’s Aeneis as an example and can be regarded as a lament burned in an extraordinary love supported by mythology, history and scriptures, is an encyclopaedia that sheds light on many sciences. The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia), written by Dante in Tuscan Italian with a high style, shines like a sun in Italian literature. Dante, who invented his own style and made Italian a literary language, became an example of the Italian language with this work.

Dante makes three journeys in The Divine Comedy. His first journey is the journey to Hell, full of great obstacles. The second journey, the Purgatory travel, is easier and more hopeful. The third journey, Paradise, is a journey accompanied by music, dance, and light. During these travels, Dante is guided by Virgil (Wisdom), Beatrice (Beauty) and Saint Bernard (Power). At the end of his travels, Dante attains the Light. Dante expresses his thoughts as follows: “The power that brings me into being is the highest wisdom, beauty and first love” ... This great poetic work is a depiction of the whole era that beautifully describes the life of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The Decameron is a prose masterpiece written in Italian by Boccaccio between 1348-1351 when the black plague was rampant all over Europe, dissenting from the literary norms of the time it was penned in. It consists of stories within stories.

Both during the time it was written and later on, The Decameron was best known for its daring references to sexuality; however, in many of the stories, the author deals with the moral degeneration of the church he witnessed during the era he lived in, in an uncensored manner. Those who criticized Boccaccio’s work as immoral had actually been part of the lifestyle they were criticizing.

It is a pioneering work recounting relationships and events no one else dared to write about. Equally daring and dissident, Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini adapted the work to the cinema. Although Pasolini’s Il Decameron is one of the most important films of cinematic history, this does not come as a surprise to the readers of the work itself. All the events, settings, shapes, colours and even smells are depicted in detail. Thanks to the details, it is an enjoyable read. Since architects have a profession that requires particular attention to detail, it is a work they definitely should read.

Hopefully, this will contribute to the way architects realize their emotional and intellectual ideals and their ability to share their designs without any conflict of interest regarding societies, cities, and nature.

One Thousand and One Nights has been a source of inspiration for studies in art, literature, cinema, and architecture since the day it was published. Quite unorthodox and reflecting the mysterious world of the East, this text penetrates its readers’ imagination and sets them on a mysterious journey.

Having emerged during the Umayyad era and possessing a great past, the science and art idea of the East started to attract the attention of the West in various areas of art after the 17th century, and the translation of various texts of One Thousand and One Nights into a number of languages during the 19th century. Art branches such as painting, music, opera, ballet, theatre, and cinema have been affected by these texts.

Islamic countries have made significant contributions to the development of Islamic architecture with social and cultural elements.

The period when tales of one thousand and one nights were told is the period in which this architectural understanding was applied. This study investigates the mysterious cities and surrealist gorgeous palaces in the stories of One Thousand and One Nights from the point of view of the architectural features of the era.

Journey to the Orient is about the travels of Gerard de Nerval, which continued for nearly one year, starting in January 1843. He reached Cairo via Marseille, Malta, and Alexandria and then to Constantinople. In the introduction part of the book, Towards the East, it is mentioned about the European travels of the author that he went on starting from October 1839 till March 1840.

Nerval, who wants to discover his own origins and the source of his imagination power like other travelers under the influence of the Enlightenment, searches for this in the Eastern cities. During his search, he presents to us the traditions and customs of Eastern life, its religious differences, fairy tales and legends, Eastern people, and their daily life with an objective approach. In this book, going beyond a panoramic view of cities that Nerval visits, we find information about their historical, communal, and political orders and details about their cultural structure. At the same time, we also have the opportunity to make an unbiased comparison of Eastern-Western cities and discuss the impact of the Tanzimat Reform Era on Eastern cities. This writing is about the interpretation of architectural elements and depictions mentioned in the book, on the axis of information relating to cities and details about daily lives as presented by Nerval.

The genre of travel has been an essential source of knowledge for the general public and governments throughout many centuries. At times, it accompanied exploration, colonization, functioned as a political statement, ethnographical account, scientific report, religious indoctrination, as well as journalistic report and entertainment. Travel literature, as a result of travels to the Orient, brought together all of these functions and contributed to the construction and perpetuation of the discourse of Orientalism, denoting a particular way of writing about and representing the Orient; people, lands, architecture, flora, and fauna. Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708) was a professor of botany at the Jardin des Plantes, a botanical garden in Paris. At the beginning of the 18th century, accompanied by a physician and an artist, Tournefort set out on a journey from Marseilles to Crete and travelled around the Levant for two years. The journey was financed by the French crown, and one of his charges was to write letters of the report to the Royal Chancellor Louis Phélypeaux Comte de Pontchartrain. These letters were collected and published as A Voyage into the Levant in two volumes. In addition to collecting and describing the plant specimens he encountered, which were formerly unseen in Europe, he provided the Chancellor and later the general public with a very detailed ethnographic and geographic account. In this study, Tournefort’s travel narrative is analyzed to reveal the consistencies with and digressions from the discourse of Orientalism with a special focus on Tournefort’s interest in architecture.