Rather as everybody supposedly thinks they have a book in them, I wonder if every novelist thinks their mind holds unbuilt architecture. I know I do. Not the technical stuff, obviously. The trigonometry and structural engineering. I mean the exciting freehand sketching bit at the start. The dreaming into existence of a building that didn’t exist before.
Of course, conjuring fictional structures on the page is about a lot more than simply satisfying unrealised ambitions: buildings have done an awful lot of work in many a fiction, shaping and expressing characters’ lives, concretising themes, rooting narratives in time and place.
