Territory and literary imaginary: hermeneutic exploration of the spatiality of Aracataca from the work of Gabriel García Márquez

Abstract

This paper displays a transdisciplinary look at architectural education, at the intersection between literary, pictorial, and architectural space. This intersection of space representations seeks to understand the spatial and cultural complexity of the Colombian Caribbean through the literature of Gabriel García Márquez. The literary-architectural crossover allows the recreation of imaginaries and the filling of social gaps in the territory left by architecture. The premise of imagining space-time from thinking by doing and doing by thinking is based on Ricoeur's hermeneutic cycle as a pedagogical strategy and on project reading as a central tool of the project process. The results seek to reconstruct the imaginary through the interpretative analysis of the students' exercises, demonstrating that the understanding of space emerges from the creative act of the object and its atmosphere, which integrate in their narrative the fundamental myths and legends of the Caribbean culture. Consequently, the act of projection becomes a dialogical practice that incorporates a more sensitive possible future to human nature, deeply linked to the inhabited environment.