Architecture is often described as storytelling – and the inverse is true too, with fiction-writing likened to design and construction. But what of those buildings that appear within stories? From the historic to the futuristic and fantastical, fictional buildings have provided more than mere backdrops, sometimes acting as catalysts for action, metaphors for characters’ psyches, embodiments of philosophical ideas – even characters in their own right. Many are central to their stories, as unforgettable and iconic as the best protagonists. Here, author Tess Little takes us on a tour of literary buildings to tell the story of how authors write fictional architecture.

Classic Country Houses

The classic country house is a literary trope which begs for subversion. Seemingly timeless, insulated, tranquil, the turmoil beyond the estate walls always eventually pushes through, whether in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929) or Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989).

Where it does not, conflict, instead, lies within: sinister truths concealed by the picture-perfect exterior. Manderley, the romantic English manor at the heart of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), stands in ‘perfect symmetry’ with manicured gardens. Yet this order torments the novel’s narrator: she has just married Manderley’s owner and feels she cannot live up to the example of his first, late wife Rebecca. The house, ‘secretive and silent’, embodies memory: at first concealing the true story of Rebecca’s death, then later becoming a site of the narrator’s remembrance. ‘Last night,’ du Maurier famously begins, ‘I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’

The Modern Manor

Nowhere is the country house trope more evident than in Golden Age detective fiction, where it provides a neat, contained stage upon which the crime is committed, from The Franchise in Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair (1948) to Sunny Point in Agatha Christie’s Ordeal by Innocence (1958).

In my own modern murder mystery, The Octopus (2020), I enjoyed reimagining the classic country house. Rather than taking place amid English tradition, the story unfolds at Sedgwick, a modernist mansion in the LA hills, where a brutal, concrete exterior gives way to light and space – and sweeping views of the city.

John Lautner’s Sheats-Goldstein Residence was my main inspiration: theatrical, grand, a home for the isolated elite, much like Christie’s estates and du Maurier’s Manderley. But order, here, is to be found in minimalist, clean lines rather than historic stone; in the windows, reflecting, framing.

Haunted Houses

Within their stories, haunted houses are antagonists, and Hill House is no exception. While a tale of gothic horror, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) doesn’t feature ghosts. Instead, she once noted, ‘The house is the haunting.’

Hill House stands ‘by itself, holding darkness within’. Yet this is no cartoonish nightmare: ‘bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut’. It’s precisely the ordinariness of Hill House that gives rise to the uncanny. Terror creeps upon the group of supernatural investigators who rent it for a summer, as they realise the angles of the house are all ‘slightly wrong’ and discover that the temperature drops below freezing in a certain spot. They hear mysterious noises, find strange writing on the walls.

Jackson never explains these hauntings, but her opening passage hints that the true terror lies within her characters’ minds, nurtured by their isolation. ‘No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality,’ she warns. And as for Hill House, ‘whatever walked there, walked alone.’

This is not the case for 124 Bluestone Road in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), a ‘spiteful’, ‘grey and white house’ in Cincinnati, Ohio. 124 is haunted by a specific soul, that of formerly enslaved Sethe’s baby girl Beloved, who died a terrible death. This is a haunting which spends ‘every minute’ with family, interrupting conversation, love, and baking biscuits. Beloved shakes 124, thumps up and down the stairs; indeed, the house is so animated, Beloved’s sister Denver regards it ‘as a person rather than a structure’.

Here, there is no creeping evil from within the house, but ‘rage’, grief, and the trauma of memory, all caused by evils beyond the house: white people and their system of slavery. As Sethe reckons with her past, so does 124 – by the end of the novel, it ‘is just another weathered house needing repair’, having evolved as all great literary characters do.

Near-future Living

Like Jackson, J.G. Ballard has also explored the ways in which built environments alter human behaviour. The titular building of High-Rise (1975) is a dystopian realisation of the modernist desire to create buildings as ‘machine[s] designed to serve’. Long thought to have been inspired by Ernö Goldfinger’s work, the 40-floor, concrete tower block provides its middle-class, professional residents with all the amenities they require – leisure facilities, restaurants, even a school and supermarket. But with the residents turning from the outside world, life in the high-rise disintegrates to brute chaos; the building unleashes ‘all one’s repressed instincts.’

Another futuristic building-as-machine is the Californian smart home in Ray Bradbury’s short story ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ (1950). Here, the focus is on automated domesticity: a stove that makes breakfast, a self-filling bath, tiny cleaning robot mice.

But the more the narrative focuses on the smart home, the more the reader wonders where its residents are. Then this is revealed too: the ‘charred west side’ of its walls, the blackened lawn, the silhouettes of a family playing in the garden. No characters appear in Bradbury’s tale, only the house tells the story: of a quiet, mundane domesticity, and how it can be extinguished by nuclear war.

Speculative Structures

Fictional architecture, of course, need not conform to our laws of physics – and where freed from the constraints of reality, there are no limits to the ideas authors can explore through their imagined buildings.

Consider Octavia E. Butler’s short story ‘The Book of Martha’ (2005), in which God visits Martha, a woman who ‘was born on the bottom level of society’ – ‘poor, black, and female’ – to ask her to ‘help humankind’ find ‘less destructive, more peaceful, sustainable ways to live’. While she ponders this question, Martha sits in what seems to be ‘her little house in Seattle’. Its bookshelves contain her books, the cupboards contain her food, but beyond the house is an unfamiliar landscape and a rapidly darkening sky. Martha’s surroundings suddenly and quietly change, as does God’s form, while they debate utopia and eat tuna sandwiches.

Consider too the tower in Ted Chiang’s ‘Tower of Babylon’ (1990) which explores both human and divine architecture. A miner is brought to a colossal baked-brick tower, built over centuries; he is tasked with digging through the Vault of Heaven, which the tower has finally reached. The miner climbs for months until, at the summit, he finds the vault: a smooth, white granite surface above, which extends in all directions. When the miner digs through, he finally understands the shape of the world. But it is not the same shape as ours: in Chiang’s story, the principles of ancient cosmology are literally true.

Or consider Jorge Luis Borges’s vast library in ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941). The library, also known as ‘the universe’, consists of a ‘perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries with vast air shafts between’, from which one can see the floors above and below, receding endlessly. Each hexagon has five shelves, each shelf, ‘thirty-five books of uniform format’, together containing every combination of the twenty-two letters. As such, the library holds all possible literary works. Among its shelves, one could find each story mentioned here, descriptions of every building, both real and imagined.