'The City is a 1,000 Poems': A Conversation with Ted Landrum

Authors

Angeliki Sioli
Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5655-7444

Synopsis

In this conversation, Ted Landrum advocates for poems as means to discuss architecture. Poetry is necessary, even in conferences and scientific events, because architectural qualities—ones that moves us, surprise us, and liberate us—cannot be captured in numbers or prose. He vouches for the importance of connecting with the stories of a city and urges architects and academics to trust in poetry as it enables them to move beyond their disciplinary and social bubbles by connecting with their city’s poets and its poetry communities. Reading and writing poetry are also ways that connect us with places and people, while transcending specific places and moving towards a multiplicity of places and meanings.

Author Biography

Angeliki Sioli, Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Angeliki Sioli is an architect and associate professor at the Department of Architecture, tu Delft. She completed her Doctor of Philosophy in the history and theory of architecture at McGill University. Her work connects architecture with language, literature, spatial atmospheres, and urban places. She has edited the collected volumes Architectures of Resistance: Negotiating Borders through Spatial Practices (Leuven University Press, 2024); The Sound of Architecture: Acoustic Atmospheres in Place (Leuven University Press, 2022); Reading Architecture: Literary Imagination and Architectural Experience (Routledge, 2018). Before joining TU Delft, Sioli taught both undergraduate and graduate courses at McGill University, in Montreal; Tec de Monterrey, in Mexico; and Louisiana State University in the U.S.

Pages

143-149

Published

December 31, 2025

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Sioli, A. (2025). ’The City is a 1,000 Poems’: A Conversation with Ted Landrum. In K. Havik, A. Sioli, V. A. Cellucci, & J. A. Hawkins (Eds.), Poetics of Place (pp. 143-149). TU Delft OPEN Books. https://doi.org/10.59490/mt.215.48