Call for Papers /// Graphic Architecture (edited collection)

Call for Papers: Graphic Architecture (edited collection)

Graphic Architecture is an emerging interdisciplinary field that explores the intersections between comics (in all forms) and architectural practices, processes and production, specifically ‘how comics and sequential art depict human interaction with architectural spaces, and how the medium has unique and useful ways of portraying this depiction’ (Fitch, 2023: 1).  A number of recent volumes have explicitly explored the intersection between the two disciplines from particular points of view, including titles by Ahrens and Meteling (2010), Hoorn (2012), Bordes (2017) and Davies (2019), as well as exhibitions on the topic in London (Anise Gallery, 2015) and Canada(Winnipeg Architecture Foundation, 2019).

Graphic novels that have featured architecture within their pages include Asterios Polyp (Mazzucchelli, 2009),Robert Moses (Balez and Christin, 2015), Building Stories (Ware, 2012), Here (Maguire, 2014), and Welcome Home (Pope and Pope, 2022), amongst several others, with many comics incorporating architecture into their design and storytelling. Additionally, several architects have used comic book imagery to promote their work over the last hundred years, from Le Corbusier (1925), via Archigram (1961) and Rem Koolhaas (1995), to C.J. Lim (2019), and artists with architectural training have applied their architectural knowledge and skills to their comics practice, such as Sabba Khan, Owen Pomery, and Alison Sampson.

We invite proposals for chapters for an innovative forthcoming edited collection that will be the first focused and sustained exploration of the intersection between comics and architecture. This collection will examine the ways architecture has historically employed aspects of comics in terms of layout, function and engagement. Depending on response, chapters will also combine close text analysis with architectural frameworks. In doing so, the collection hopes to establish the foundational groundwork for a rich and innovative area of scholarship and practice. We feel the collection should be global in scope, and so especially welcome proposals from beyond the UK and US contexts. 

Excerpt from The Roles We Play, Sabba Khan (Myriad Editions, 2021)

This collection is under consideration by Palgrave Macmillan.

Topics you might like to consider include, but are not limited to:

• Architecture, comics and world-building

• Using comics to understand building use and purpose and / or to disseminate wider social ideas

• The architecture of the comics page

• Architecture, comics and communities

• Comics and sustainable development

• Comics, architecture and social justice

• Using comics to explore real and imagined space

• Building stories and stories of buildings

• The cityscape as narrative design

• Architectural comics as social commentary

• The comic book creator as flâneur

• Comics, cartography and wayfinding

• Comics and stained-glass narratives in churches

• Building models and dolls houses as a storytelling method

• Specific focus on creators such as (but not limited to) Seth, Chris Ware, Karrie Fransman, Katsuhiro Otomo, Jimenez Lai, Richard Maguire or François Schuiten

Please send detailed proposals of 500 words and a 100 word biography to Alex Fitch (a.fitch@brighton.ac.uk) and Barbara Chamberlin (b.j.chamberlin@brighton.ac.uk), with the header ‘Graphic Architecture Collection’ by 31 October 2025. Informal enquiries may also be sent to the editors at these addresses. Contributors will be notified of the outcome by 1 December 2025.

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