SPACE IN ARCHITECTURE, LITERATURE, AND GRAPHIC DESIGN Ayşegül İzer

We know that the concept of space, which is the fundamental subject of architecture, has been the topic of many researches and books due to the diversity of meanings and permeability it exhibits in different disciplines ranging from mathematics to geometry, from physics to philosophy.

Architect Şevki Pekin says, “God is in the detail, architecture is hidden in space.” Although space is approached differently by various perspectives, in a broad framework it can be defined as “the void that separates humans from the environment to a certain extent and is suitable for sustaining their actions” and “a piece of space whose boundaries can be perceived by observers.”

Şevki Pekin

Today, “creating space” is one of the most fundamental areas of occupation in architecture, literature, cinema, comics, advertising, graphic design, and exhibition design…

According to S. H. Steinberg, author of Five Hundred Years of Printing, the invention of the printing press and movable type caused profound changes not only in political, governmental, religious, economic, and social events, but also in printing and education, language, literature, and philosophy.

Marshall McLuhan’s media theory book The Gutenberg Galaxy bears the subtitle “The Making of Typographic Man.” It examines the consequences of the printing revolution that began with Gutenberg and what the electronic revolution will bring, using his unique mosaic approach. According to the communication theorist McLuhan, the invention of printing was highly beneficial for humanity in terms of storing and transmitting information, but it also caused very profound changes in the human mind. According to him, a different, new type of human that can be described as “typographic man” emerged.

This difference is as deep and significant as the difference between those who can read and write and those who cannot.

There are numerous commonalities between Architecture, Literature, and Graphic Design.

It is worth recalling the revolutionary poems of Marinetti and his friends, who ignored writing conventions. In 1913, with the magazine Lacerba published by Giovanni Papini, typography entered the art world. In Marinetti’s article published in the June 1913 issue, the subject of a typographic revolution against traditions was discussed. Designs were created in which harmony was excluded, many different typefaces were used to create disorder in hierarchy in order to add vitality and difference, and some words were placed in different directions on the page in an asymmetrical form. By breaking the rules, metaphorical meanings were loaded onto the texts they designed, and this new style was named “Parole in Libertà” (Words in Freedom).

It is thought that the works produced in this period served as a source of inspiration for postmodern designers. Similarly, Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire and Dadaist poetry eliminated the traditional concept of poetry, including the interaction of “structure, order, and sound” that contains “sound, meaning, and the meaning of language.” Innovative approaches such as typography, photomontage, negative white space, layout, letter spacing, and line spacing played an important role in the development of postmodern

graphic design.

Between 1920 and 1930, Gropius and his friends who moved to the USA played an important role in the construction of modern space as architects and urban planners.

Bauhaus Masters: Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stölzl, and Oskar Schlemmer.

As the boundaries between Graphic Design, visual arts, architecture, and literature blur and disappear, designers’ innovative understanding of typography has come to dominate contemporary design. With interventions outside the conventional to the components of the book object, the reading experience has radically changed, and an entirely “new” understanding of the book has emerged. Productions that triggered the postmodern graphic design process of the 20th century and influenced today’s graphic design understanding have been created.

Prof. Dr. Şerif Aktaş, who states that space in a literary work is “fictional-nominal,” expresses that the quality of the links forming the chain of events and the conditions in which the individuals in the accompanying cast of characters find themselves are factors that affect the shaping of this fictional space. He emphasizes that in creating space, it is important who sees the space, when, and to whom it is narrated, as well as what kind of space is needed for the event narrated in the work.[1] He also states that the concept of space underwent a great change in the 20th century, its function changed, it became a means of reflecting inner reality rather than external reality, and illuminating the human consciousness was taken as the basis.

The works of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar have rich content in terms of human-space-time relations. The author, who gives much space to place and architecture in his works, almost paints pictures with words; his use of the cities he lived in as spaces adds great richness to his works. Dreams caused by space frequently appear in novels and stories. Istanbul has a special value in Tanpınar’s world of thought and feeling; Istanbul is the only field where the three elements that create the dream state in the author come together![2] Music, imagination, and dream…

Writers, like painters, architects, filmmakers, and graphic designers, select a piece of space in which they themselves are located and process the space in various meanings, thus giving it meaning. The descriptions in Orhan Pamuk’s New Life and The Museum of Innocence are the best examples of this. Moreover, the museum that Orhan Pamuk created based on his work The Museum of Innocence is the first museum created by starting from the fictional universe in order to “establish communication between space, object,

and human.”

Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence

Comics, called the 9th art, is a product and a form of expression born from the collaboration of drawing and writing. In comics, the depiction of space facilitates the understanding of events. It helps to describe the situation depicted in the panel and to convey the narrative; various explanations are written in narrative boxes, and expressions such as “soon after” or “meanwhile” are used to indicate changes in time and space, in order to increase the comprehensibility of the story.

Graphic designer Robert Massin, in 1964 for Gallimard Publications, acted like a “stage director” for Eugene Ionesco’s play The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice Chauve), which is performed in a space that keeps the cabaret tradition alive today and deals with the difficulty of lack of communication between individuals. He translated “the atmosphere, movement, conversations, and songs in the play” into his own language; using the interaction between image and text, he tried to convey the idea of time and space on stage. In doing so, he drew on typography, comic book storytelling, and techniques used in cinema to express time and sequence.

Robert Massin, The Bald Soprano

Discussions on form and functionality in graphic design have gone through many different phases throughout history. After the 1980s, with the development of technology and the entry of computers into the designer’s life, “desktop publishing” changed the conceptual framework of the book, and formal experiments made in artists’ books began to be applied to the world of books as design objects.

Just as in literature, life is reconstructed through connections of “language, word, culture, philosophy, history, science,” in the 1980s graphic designers also transformed “writing” into the main carrier of design by producing new typographic solutions and constructing new layers of meaning.

The book is considered as a space and is thought of, built, and constructed together with elements such as text-image, line-paper, layout, printing-binding. In these books, seeing is reading, reading is seeing, text is image, image is text. In other words, in such books we see and read the difference between writing a book and making a book.

Bülent Erkmen, in Making Books, treats the book as a space and says […] “The book is the becoming visible-readable of writing, of the thought hidden in what is written, in the book space consisting of a certain number of paper leaves—called pages—connected to each other along one edge of their four corners and protected from the front, spine, and back with a more durable material. Like staging a play, performing a composition, shooting a script into a film.

However, if the book is something beyond the visible-readable state of texts, if the book is not a mechanical reproduction of writing and image, if it is desired that the book be designed as much as it is printed; then it is necessary to insert one more expert between the publisher/editor and the printer (if the publisher/editor does not have such expertise!). This person is called a graphic designer.[3]

What does a graphic designer do?

First, they try to understand what they are going to turn into a book. They need to grasp its identity, its soul very well. Everything they do afterward will bear the traces of this soul. The designer makes this soul visible, brings out the body of this soul. Book size, binding form, cover and page paper types, selected typeface or typefaces, line lengths, openness of line or letter spacings, the blank space between the text texture and page margins, page number, if any, image/page relationship or image/text relationship with the page, the way sections forming the book are separated, section titles, how to enter and exit the book, title page, table of contents, index, explanatory appendices, if any, caption texts, footnotes, foreword pages, the book’s packaging considered as front, spine, back cover designs—all these are problems that the designer will solve both individually and by seeking and establishing necessary connections between them.”

The book titled Kitap (Book), containing illustrations from Firdevsî’s Shahname in the Topkapı Palace Museum Library and including text by Ferit Edgü, is a surprising result of the collaboration between Bülent Erkmen and Ferit Edgü; here Erkmen completely upends the traditional book production process by designing the book before it is written.

Concept Ferit Edgü, Design Bülent Erkmen, Shahname:

Starting from the idea of making a book with a single image, Erkmen scans the miniature image, designs the book with blind text, makes a mock-up, and sends it to Ferit Edgü. Edgü writes them word for word, that is, translates the blind text into Turkish. In this book, Erkmen creates a relationship, a rhythmic fiction built with unwritten text and existing images, with pieces of the image. He associates the prominence of page numbers with not wanting to leave pages blank. In his own words: “The numbers on blank pages are proof of the page’s existence, a sign saying the book has begun and attention should be focused; I want to say the curtain is rising, it’s starting now. That is, the page becomes the subject, becomes itself here, says I am here even though it says nothing. On full pages, there is no page number. I never used film subjectively in my life but used it as a tool. The image at the back of the book was produced from a small slide; the actual size of the slide is something small like 6x8 cm, I divided this small image into frames and used these small pieces enlarged, in a sense adapting cinema language to my book design.”[4]

Sevim Burak pins what she writes by hand or on a typewriter to the curtains in her room (she orders medicine and pins from abroad). In this way, she writes by seeing her text, adds, removes, changes places. Like a film director. In a sense, she uses the curtains of her room as a “film editing table.” Erkmen finds this very exciting and designs the book thinking just like Sevim Burak.

Sevim Burak, Yanık Saraylar, Design Bülent Erkmen

Yeşim Demir Pröhl, who says the essential thing is to enable the exhibition to design itself and to act as an interpreter for the embodiment of the content within the space; in the exhibition POETRY IS EVERYWHERE – ILHAN BERK AT 100 that she started working on with curator Necmi Sönmez, she also experiences processes such as overcoming or turning into an advantage the determining aspects of the space. Since Berk is an artist who layers words, papers, forms, symbols, she tries to solve the exhibition by making visible the richness of angles; the layers of sections, expressions, drawings, and words. She sees the artist’s production as a palimpsest of the mind and, by opening the layers of this palimpsest to walls and volumes, enables visitors to witness Ilhan Berk’s universe.

Curator Necmi Sönmez, Design Yeşim Demir, Poetry Is Everywhere: Ilhan Berk at 100, Yapı Kredi Culture and Arts

Despite design theorists often claiming that the era lacks a distinctive style, today when interdisciplinary boundaries have become permeable, the “concept of space” in literature, art, and design is being readdressed as a new language of production; that is, the author’s original text and the designer’s interpretation of that text are presented autonomously, creatively, and differently from each other in the design context.

In Open Work, Umberto Eco says: “There is a common feature in instrumental music works composed in the recent past: A certain amount of autonomy has been granted to the artist as an individual in interpreting the piece. That is, the performer will not only be free to follow or not follow the composer’s instructions according to their own decision-making authority as in traditional music, but will also add their own evaluation to the piece. The performer can decide how long a note will be held, how sounds will be grouped. All these together constitute an acquisition of improvisational creativity.”

Isn’t this approach that Eco brings to musical works an invaluable opportunity for us designers who want to see what visuality adds to text and to develop new reading experiences by using visuality in text?

The concept of space, which is the fundamental subject of architecture, is also the main subject of many researches and books on the variety of meaning and permeability that it shows in many disciplines ranging from mathematics to geometry, from physics to philosophy, from graphic design to exhibition design, from typography to comic books. Architect Şevki Pekin says “God is hidden in details and architecture is in places.” It argues that space is a central concept of modern architecture and should be observed as an object of interest for graphic design, typography, and literature too.

[1] Şerif Aktaş, Roman Sanatı ve Roman İncelemesine Giriş, Birlik Yayınları, 1984, pp. 125-126.

[2] "An Examination on the Space-Dream Relationship in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Stories and Novels: Dream Within Space, Space Within Dream", Yeni Türk Edebiyatı Araştırmaları 3, Vol. 3, No. 3, Feb. 2010, pp. 77-107.

[3] Bülent Erkmen, ‘Kitap Yapmak?’, 2007, Marmara University Faculty of Fine Arts Exhibition Hall.

[4] http://jeff-wonders.com/work/view/1205, Bülent Erkmen Book Design, 1989