a church, the bible

There's The Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can't Read Good

eisenman's Danteum....based on The Divine Comedy

holl's Fukuoka Housing....based on Zen writings

tschumi has done many studies based on Finnegan's Wake

there's probably alot out there that we just don't realize...

cinderella's castle

cynic,
wasn't the danteum designed by terragni?

john whiteman's 'divisible by 2' is based on lacan...very cool project.

hejduk is another 'literary' architect...

weave,

actually you are correct......terragni did the building design....i was thinking of eisenman's discourse on the terragni's work....my bad

What about any inspired specifically american literature? I've searched all over but can't seem to find any.

Thanks for any help.

g, c, a:
that's a tough one...i'll have to think about that...

speaking of literature, on a side note: anyone knows any architect inspired or accepted/follwed Nietzsche's writings (ie. Birth of Tragedy, Will ti Power etc.)

Tschumi mentions Nietzsche in event cities

It may be difficult to find specific individual works that are directly derived from literary sources. Far more interesting to me is the way that literary sources are less obvious influences.

Thoreau, for example, seems to have been important for Wright. But even if Wright never directly read Thoreau, or for that matter Rousseau, it would still be possible to argue that he was influenced indirectly.

Eidlitz, Furness and Sullivan were directly influenced by Emmerson/Thoreau and even wrote about porting of transcendentalism to arch...

Sullivan is the big one as far as this literary borrowing, in his writings he calls himself a poet and his buildings poems.

There are also important connections between architects operating on a theory of the picturesque, and the eighteenth and nineteenth century novel, particularly in England.

Another one would be Goethe's influence on nineteenth-century German architecture.

agfa- alain de botton is soon to release a book on architecture and beauty- which if the lecture i saw of his was anything to go by- will deal exactly with the idea of the picturesque in architecture.

did eisenman do a Danteum also? I thought it was Terragni

thanks mao... except that i hate alain de botton's little sunday-school lessons. i tend to file him under P for Pop-psychology.

I just visited the website of ricardo Bofill for another thred, and one of his early project seems to be based on "the castle" by kafka (the beginning of his career was a lot more inspiring than what he did after the mid 70's). Sounds like a scary idea to base a housing project on such a depressing novel, but it looks like an interesting project. Probably worth checking.

Steven Holl's house in Martha' s Vineyard is based on Moby Dick.

I think its a good example of why architecture shouldn't be based on literature....

Where did you find that Holl's Fukuoka Housing was inspired by Zen writings? I did a ton of research on that project and never came across that. I would really like to know, thanks

hey, i love that holl house.
and i love moby dick.