Speaking Architecture
SPEAKING ARCHITECTURE
Speaking Architecture is an investigation around the landscape potential of urban writing to materialize in the form of small transformable architectures capable of contributing to the quality of the public spaces in which it is located.
In 1773 Johann David Steingruber wrote his Alphabet Architektur treatise on the architectural potential of the alphabet. Two years later he was designing a castle for Prince Carl Alexander of Anspach based on a plan made from his initials.
A hundred years before Thomas Gobert made a design for Louis XIV in which a palace was made up of eleven letters with which the phrase LOUIS LE GRAND was written; the relationship between constructed form and writing has continued to this day.

Image: Ulrich Conrads, Hans G. Sperlich “Fantastic Architecture”, 1960, MOMA exhibition, New York.