The Graveyard of Unwritten Books
Nedim Gürsel, one of Turkey’s most influential and award-winning authors, has had his writings censored and banned by the Turkish authorities, and he has been arrested and prosecuted for his writings on multiple occasions. For this reason, censorship and redaction is a theme that often occurs in his prose. In Gürsel’s short story “The Graveyard of Unwritten Books” (1988), the reader encounters a 'library' that in fact allegorically represents censorship and redaction.
Here, all books banned by authorities throughout the world are shut away. Some of these books were published and then forbidden; others were stillborn; many never reached the written page.
—Alberto Manguel & Gianni Guadalupi, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places “The Graveyard of Unwritten Books” delves into censorship, redaction, and the transformation of meaning through literary allegory, weaving themes of fragmentation, palimpsests, and dualities. Set in the "Hotel of Meanings", an allegorical 'library' that erases words instead of preserving them—embodies a tension between safeguarding and silencing (duality). Censored and banned stories symbolise fragmented histories, with their silenced voices forming palimpsests—traces that persist beneath layers of erasure. The allegorical meta-narrative represented by Gürsel’s text raises an important question about the role of redaction in the realm of architecture, and how architecture might enhance public awareness of similar lost layers of history.
This design-led research thesis reinterprets Gürsel’s allegorical themes presented as a 'graveyard of unwritten books', into an allegorical architectural project, using theories of fragmentation, palimpsests, and dualities to explore interconnected spaces, evolution over time, and the interplay of presence and absence in the built environment.
The investigation asks: How can the principal allegorical devices used by Turkish author Nedim Gürsel in his short story "The Graveyard of Unwritten Books" be applied to an allegorical architectural project to re-present a 'library for books that never reach the written page'?
