The City and Its Uncertain Walls

Haruki Murakami’s allegorical novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, confronts the problem of what happens to identity when the city that once shaped it no longer exists in its original form. In the novel, the protagonist moves between the real world and a dream-city that houses his shadow self, exploring the loss of a former place that cannot be recovered. The dream-city is generated by the “consciousness that creates you as a person” (55), where shadows, fragmentation, memories, and dreams re-present aspects of place identity when a physical context has changed. The real and the unreal coexist, representing the allegory of an unstable city with “uncertain walls” that continually reshape themselves in response to imagined or remembered personal experience rather than material permanence. My childhood city of Christchurch presents a similar condition. The 2011 earthquake fractured not only the physical city but also my personal relationship with it. Places that once grounded my sense of home now exist only as fragments, producing a disjunction between the past and present and therefore have affected my sense of place identity. This thesis responds to this problem by proposing that Murakami’s literary allegorical devices provide a generative framework for re-presenting Christchurch’s lost identity as an allegorical architectural project. The three principal research objectives are drawn from Murakami’s three principal literary allegorical devices: Shadows, Fragmentation, and Memories and Dreams. The design-led thesis investigation proposes to re-present these literary allegorical devices as architectural ones to convey a similar allegorical narrative. This investigation uses the novel as a provocateur to explore how place identity might be expressed when a place survives primarily through memory or physical fragments. The proposed thesis outcome is an allegorical house, whose walls re-present the allegorical “uncertain walls” in Murakami’s novel. The house is sited within a condensed microcosm of Christchurch, which represents an allegorical site through which the city’s layered identities can coexist. This mirrors how, in the novel, the imaginary city is described as a microcosm of the real world, at the smaller and more personal scale of a house. To reflect the city in the novel and address the importance of my family history, the speculative house is conceived as a multi-generational house. It brings together the lives of my great-grandparents and grandparents, my family, my future children, and myself. They are housed in fragmented and disjointed dwellings, much like the fragmented condition of Murakami’s city and Christchurch today. This design-led thesis investigation asks: How can the principal allegorical devices used by Haruki Murakami in his novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls be applied to an allegorical architectural project to re-present what happens to place identity when a place no longer exists as it once was?