"Constructing Holden Caulfield": Learning to build character through literary architecture

2014-06-12T18:22:00-04:00

The writer and the architect aren't so different from each other when you consider each one as builders of an environment, and what better way to introduce that concept than to a class of high school students. After reading about Matteo Pericoli's "The Laboratory of Literary Architecture" course in The New York Times, English teacher George Mayo was inspired to teach it to his 10th grade class at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, MD.

Matteo Pericoli created and taught the workshop in the Scuola Holden creative writing school in Turin, Italy and then in the M.F.A. writing program at Columbia University's School of the Arts. Students picked a literary work they closely understood and then broke it down to its core elements, from which they based their architectural designs.

The goal was for students to avoid literal representations and instead design literary representations that symbolize "the essential ideas of the narrative structure in a spatial form," as described in P...

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"Constructing Holden Caulfield": Learning to build character through literary architecture