“Immersed in reading a book it feels like [being] inside an architecture, a metaphysical space surrounded by the words,” says Federico Babina, discussing his latest series of illustrations, ARCHIWRITER. In the new series of 27 drawings, the illustrator has created “portraits” of authors by personifying their writing styles, periods, and locations as built environments made from architectural elements and words. Heightening this sense of individuality, Babina states that the resultant portraits can be “fluctuating, vernacular, itinerant, ephemeral, concentric, labyrinthine, surrealist, oneiric, and futuristic.”

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration. – Ernest Hemingway
Fiódor Dostoyevski, the philosophical polyphone

Italo Calvino, the exactitude of imagination

Franz Kafka, the labyrinth of metaphors

George Orwell, the effective minimalism

Jack Kerouac, the improvisation journey

Charles Bukowski, the urban poetry

Haruki Murakami, the noisy loneliness

Hermann Hesse, the hagiography mysticism

Albert Camus, the sense of isolation

Milan Kundera, the lightness of absence

Federico García Lorca, the power of metaphor

León Tolstói, the ascetic morality

Paul Auster, the layers of identity

Ernest Hemingway, the absence of lyrical

Oscar Wilde, the tears of hedonism

William Shakespeare, the medieval metaphor

Raymond Carver, the ordinary details

William Burroughs, the paranoid order

Dante Alighieri, the lyric travel

John Fante, the beauty of bitterness

Truman Capote, the fashionable nightmare

Richard Wright, the cage of race

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the timeless isolation

Henry Miller, the sensuality of reality

Isaac Asimov, the hidden universe

Marcel Proust, the structure of memory

James Joyce, the stream of consciousness
