Hellenic by Design: H.D., Architecture, and Future Modernism

Abstract

Modernist poet H.D. saw ancient Greek words as portals and gates to new ways of writing. Her Imagist poems often push against the medium of the printed page, taking on qualities of Classical artifacts and modernist paintings. What happens when H.D.’s Hellenism generates literal portals for architectural design? And how might these crossings of materials and academic disciplines foretell future modernisms? This essay reconsiders H.D.’s Imagist practice to propose that her iconic poems are not painterly at heart, but architectural. Collaborating as a literary critic and an architect, we bring these early poems into conversation with recent work from an undergraduate design studio in the University of Florida’s School of Architecture. Our analysis also offers an ex-centric narrative of modernist making—one that considers the outlier spaces housing H.D.’s vanguard poems, the ways “Oread” occupies the space of the page and its spatial transformations, and the poem’s provocations for emergent spaces in students’ design projects. Crossing materials and disciplinary thresholds, the future of modernist poetry will create and occupy new spaces in the university curriculum.

Keywords

• architecture
• classics
• design
• h.d.
• imagism
• louis kahn
• modernism
• pedagogy
• poetry