Narrative Architecture: A Designer’s Story

Narrative Architecture explores the postmodern concept of narrative architecture from four perspectives: thinking, imagining, educating, and designing, to give you an original view on our postmodern era and architectural culture. Authors Sylvain De Bleeckere and Sebastiaan Gerards outline the ideas of thinkers, such as Edmund Husserl, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, and Peter Sloterdijk, and explore important work of famous architects, such as Daniel Libeskind and Frank Gehry, as well as rather underestimated architects like G nter Behnisch and Sep Ruf. With more than 100 black and white images this book will help you to adopt the design method in your own work.

Sylvain De Bleeckere, prof. em. dr. phil., worked as assistant professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Arts at Hasselt University in Flanders (Belgium). He was responsible for the graduate seminar Culture and was a leading member of the research group ArcK. Cross-fertilization between the design studio and research activities is central to his work. Since 1977, Sylvain De Bleeckere has continuously published about the postmodern philosophy of culture in relation to democracy, architecture, and cinematography.

Sebastiaan Gerards holds a Master’s degree in Architecture (Hasselt University, 2010) and Arts and Heritage (Maastricht University, 2012). Since the end of 2012 he has been working as a PhD student at the Faculty of Architecture and Arts at Hasselt University, Belgium. The main focus of his research is the social and architectural design of multigenerational dwelling as a renewed housing concept for Flanders. A key element in his work is the design assignment ’multigenerational dwelling’, which he organizes with Sylvain De Bleeckere at Hasselt University. Together they have developed a new collaborative educational strategy to respond to growing social and cultural complexity (in residential Flanders).