Date of Submission
Summer 7-28-2025
Degree Type
Dissertation/Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Architecture
Department
Architecture
Committee Chair/First Advisor
Ermal Shpuza
Abstract
Authors and orators have employed fictional stories for thousands of years as a crucial method for translating narratives, lessons, and intangible culture. These take shape through diverse art forms such as spoken word, visual art, dance, and sculpture. However, in the current age, architecture often neglects its immersive and spatial potential, allowing stories of a site’s heritage to become lost beneath the layers of urban development. This thesis explores design as storytelling, examining how fictional narratives can be translated into architectural space.
The research draws on fictional and speculative narrative architecture, analyzing the use of metaphor, symbol, and allegory as tools to construct spatial narratives. It focuses particularly on allegory as both a literary and architectural device. In literature, allegory is defined as a doubleness of intention that requires interpretation. In Architecture, this often takes the form of narrative space with underlying meanings intended to teach or reveal deeper truths. The purpose of the thesis is to generate a design method that explores translation across mediums. The goal is not to merely copy a story but to reinterpret and transform it into architectural form, spatial relationships, and experiential qualities.
This thesis selects Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World as a literary fiction to explore architectural translation. The novel, which is both a hard-boiled detective story and a surrealist fantasy, alternates between two narratives in the even and odd-numbered chapters. While initially distinct, the interconnectedness of the stories becomes apparent through recurring events, characters, and objects. Thematically, Murakami uses this plot structure to explore allegories of duality and identity.
The analysis begins with a close reading of the novel’s plot structure and key moments. Through textual analysis, design rules are established before developing diagrammatic drawings that explore spatial possibilities. These diagrams serve as a bridge between literary criticism and architectural investigation. The plot structure is reimagined as a sequence of spaces, while individual moments become distinct spatial experiences.
The design method follows a reflective and cyclical process, transitioning from two-dimensional diagrams to hybrid three-dimensional models and back into drawings—continually refining the narrative potential of each spatial construct. Finally, the abstract concepts of plot and moment are applied to a real site, exploring how allegory can be translated into a dual museum of Ecology and Human Development located in South Downtown Atlanta. The thesis becomes a critical method for investigating Allegorical Narrative through architectural constructs, employing space to tell stories.