ARCHITECTURE, MATERIALITY, AND THE TACTILE CITY

Abstract

This chapter explores the built environment of the city at a personal scale. In a cover titled “The Comix Factory” designed for the comics magazine Raw, Dutch artist Joost Swarte employs the formal depth of comics to suggest their connection to tactile qualities of urban life in three dimensions. American Chris Ware’s ambitious boxed anthology Building Stories invites a tactile reading experience and pushes the architectural form of the comics multiframe to its limits. Also hailing from America, Mark Beyer’s transposition of his popular Amy and Jordan comic to the format of “City of Terror Trading Cards” uses tactility to implicate comics in city circulation patterns. Canadian artist Seth has been building tactile models of buildings in Dominion—the fictional setting for many of his comics. The Ghost of Gaudí by El Torres and Jesús Alonso Iglesias highlights Barcelona’s architecture.