Jill Stoner's intriguing new book proposes 'a more politicized practice of architecture.' Her readings of twentieth century fiction from Franz Kafka to John Cheever and Raymond Carver forge new interpretations of built space while transcending conventional categories such as regionalism or style. Toward a Minor Architecture will appeal to every architect with its literary reexamination of the profession's purpose and direction.
Dolores Hayden, Professor of Architecture and Urbanism, Yale University, author of The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History.
This is an exciting and intellectually bold book. Interweaving architecture and literature, using literature to address space not through the primacy of vision but through the complexities of language, Toward a Minor Architecture offers us a new way of seeing architecture, insides and outsides, space and power, in terms of openings as much as closures.
Elizabeth Grosz, Rutgers University
In the tradition of the Poetics of Space and The Architectural Uncanny, Jill Stoner's fascinating tour (de force) of modern architectural spaces draws on literature and philosophy to offer us a radical, lyrical, and refreshingly hopeful re-visioning of the modern cityscape of late capitalism.
Kathy Mezei, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Humanities, Simon Fraser University
For all architects who are wondering what avenues of creation are still possible in a post-recession landscape, Jill Stoner's Toward a Minor Architecture offers a thoughtful plan through which old, abandoned failures are the canvas on which new, adventurous architecture can be painted.
Eric Cesal, author of Down Detour Road
Countless references to spatial considerations in literature make Jill Stoner's case for an architecture—or rather for architectural acts—of inhabitation, usurpation, appropriation and change. Such active engagement with space has never been part of the official canon of masterpieces and major works, but comes from resistance to established systems of thought and patterns of use. Kafka, Benjamin, T.S. Eliot, Cheever, Borges and many others are Jill Stoner's companions and witnesses on her meandering journey.
Dietrich Neumann, Royce Family Professor for the History of Modern Architecture and Urban Studies, Brown University
Stoner's book reads as a novel, an architectural fiction. It is gentle, brilliantly precise and economical in its use of language. Sentences themselves open up new horizons for architectural reflection, in the manner of poetry.
Lindsay Bremner and Jeremy Till
Architectural Review
Brilliantly and poetically conceived and written, this book is necessary reading for prospective architects and for anyone troubled by the disjunction between the slickness of major architecture and the abject qualities of the postindustrial landscape.
Choice
