Alex Fitch

PhD Research title: "What does sequential art tell us about architectural interactions that other media do not?”

My research is inter-disciplinary, within the overlap between architecture theory and comics studies - recently entitled ‘Graphic Architecture’. As a nascent area of research, there are opportunities to shape the field, adding to existing research on social interaction with architecture and understanding of how the language of comics works.

Architectural environments have been paramount to many comics, and strips used as an architectural feature in Barbara Nessim’s installation at Centria, New York, and Joost Swarte’s interiors in Haarlem. This tradition can be traced back to sequential art on Trajan's Column and Stations of the Cross across Europe.

I am researching how depiction of human interaction with architecture in comics has similarities with architectural drawings and capturing of architecture on film but offers possibilities that other media do not, and whether the medium has a more ‘revealing’ narrative quality regarding architectural interaction otherwise limited in other flat forms of depiction. To collect first-hand information about the creation of comics through interviews of practitioners, I present the UK’s only broadcast radio show on comic books – Panel Borders – on the Arts Council Radio Station (Resonance FM) in London.