Reading Science Fiction Novels as an Architectural Research |

Zeynep Tuna Ultav

1. Introduction
The aim of this paper is to emphasize the position that architectural discourse should systematize the social and spatial clues within texts. This theme is conceptualized -in the way to explore how it is — as reading the spatial elements within the texts of science fiction novels and particularly, reading that of J. G. Ballard’s High Rise (Carroll & Graf Publishers NY, 1975) with the belief in necessity to convey the future predictions of science fiction to the realm of architectural discourse in a systematic way. At this point, it can be argued that people within the realm of architectural discipline refer to the mentioned spatial elements from time to time, but we can claim that this information should not be dispersed, but systematized for a scientific relationship between architectural discourse and this knowledge, because people tend to read in different ways in relation to their socio-cultural differences.

This study, taking language as a departure point, will take into consideration the notion of interdisciplinarity which expresses the relationship of modern research methods with several other disciplines without limitation to one. Pavel (1985) elucidates this necessity in terms of linguistics as follows:

Modern research on literary narratives developed in relation to several factors: the gradual abandonment of impressionism in literary studies in favour of more objective methods, the rise of modern linguistics, and the prevalent ambivalence of interdisciplinarity in the social sciences, which encourages methodological and conceptual cross-fertilization… The development of modern social science enhanced this direction, on the one hand by the growing willingness to share methodology, on the other hand by the realization that many problems encountered in one discipline cannot be solved without recourse to research in some other discipline. Thus, anthropology became tributary to linguistics, linguistics to cognitive psychology, text-theory to formal logic, etc… (Pavel, 1985)