This paper describes an attempt to use literary descriptions of space in architectural design education. In a workshop called “TEXT SPACE,” thirty-two students worked with eight books by Virginia Woolf to redesign the spaces described within them. The main aim of this project was to investigate the intersection of architecture and literature, in general, and Woolf's architectural spaces, specifically. Architects design physical environments; people live in these spaces; and writers describe them in their writings. What happens if the designers try to discover these described architectural spaces?

LITERATURE AND ARCHITECTURE AS SYMBIOTIC ARTS

Visual expressions of space may be different from verbal ones in many ways, not least in that verbal expressions use words whereas visual expressions use images. Woolf's narrative approach embraces words to portray cities, neighborhoods, streets, buildings, and rooms.

Architecture may be briefly defined as an artful skill for creating space. During this process of creation, certain physical and technical principles and the cultural needs of people should be considered. Architecture is also commonly called “the three dimensional useful art.”

Space as a term originated from Latin spatium (extent or room), and the Greek topos or choros (place or location). Immanuel Kant defines space as “a necessary apriori representation, which underlies all outer intuitions” (qtd. in Flew 424). According to Bernard Tschumi, author of Architecture and Disjunction :

The perception of space is a dynamic process which occurs over a period of time. Spaces, surfaces, volumes, objects, events and their meanings cannot be understood simultaneously, but it is possible to find out sequentially what messages they convey. Articulation of a space allows people to move from one place to another; articulation produces a park, a hall, a staircase, a corridor, a room. For this reason, people connect the most important physical characteristic of a space with an event or events that they know happened there, or are supposed to have happened there, as a way of making the event(s) concrete and the place meaningful.