Performing Objects and Interpretive Techniques: Textual Rewriting and Other Methods to Raise a Set of Landscape Designs for a Rural Community

Abstract

Based on the concept of ‘interpretive community’, it is possible to trace how humans can become interpreters (or decoders) of their own reality through, say, written excerpts and architectural works. This chapter is intended, therefore, to report on an interpretive-community workshop where students of three different disciplines (namely, Architecture, Sociology and English Studies) were assigned specific chapters of literary works with the goal of making a collective interpretation through a process of rewriting and restoring architecture. These projects allow students (or any participant, in fact) in their recognition of salient concepts that are not necessarily ascribed to a specific domain; for instance, the understanding of architecture not solely as a construction process, but as a mechanism intended to protect traces of life that are naturally perceived through narration and the use of metaphors.