Editors: Professor Eleni Bastéa and Dr Patrick West

Writing and architecture connect the self to others, and as much as we are shaped by the structures, cities and landscapes we inhabit, the stories that flow through our built and natural environments transform us. Furthermore, complicating and enriching the historical narrative of writing’s dialogues with architecture (and its imbrications with issues of human well-being), the emergence of the new materialism and related trains of practice and thought has served to expand the possibilities of re-inventing the human form through interaction with the diverse and challenging energies of the non-human. Through divergent, shared and holistic approaches, writers, scholars and designers are describing new and old types of practice that connect and re-connect the animate and the inanimate, the living and the constructed.

TEXT is a fully refereed journal focused on the processes of writing and the teaching of writing, and this special issue aims to continue, interrogate and elaborate the conversation between architecture and writing that has preoccupied so many authors and architecture practitioners over time. Contributions may adopt a variety of scholarly and literary modes to support, expand, or challenge established positions. Submissions on individual writer-architects or architect-writers, or on individual texts, are most welcome, along with papers that use the writing-architecture nexus as a springboard for open-ended investigations into a range of thematics and disciplinary areas, including, but not limited to: material human-non-human relations, identity, imagination, urban studies, memory, space, place, thing theory, practice-led research, unbuilt architecture, built writing, design studies, cross-artform practice, paper architecture, and embodiment.

Up to eight images may be included in each complete paper at the discretion of the author. Enquiries about submissions in hypertext or other experimental forms are welcome.