When discussing ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, Virginia Woolf describes the work of an author as ‘an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building‘, using architecture as an analogy for the structure of a literary work.

The study combines a close reading Woolf’s words text with a drawn analysis that maps To the Lighthouse and Woolf‘s other novels while also reconstructing places she inhabited. It speculates on a reversal of the analogy, using Woolf to read the work of Níall McLaughlin, the film Home by Ursula Meier, Dow Jones Architects and Erik Gunnar Asplund.

This was published as peer-reviewed research in arq, a related shorter version of the study, Brackets, was runner up in the Architecture Writing Prize 2022 run by the Architecture Foundation. An excerpt and drawing was also published in Drawing Matter.