Narrative Architecture and the Catford School of Fiction

Daniel Dream and Ifigeneia Liangi

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Abstract

This article explores the work of Night Kitchen, a design research studio that creates picturebooks to explore the intersection of objects, architecture and narrative. Employing metafictional strategies, they challenge traditional architectural representations while exploring the interplay between fact and fiction and collecting and creating. Central to this is their approach to repurposing screen-used film props, effectively blurring the lines between their roles as originators and consumer-collectors.

Introduction

In an era where the boundaries between creators and audiences are increasingly porous, the concept of the creative audience has gained traction within cultural industries research (Mayer, 2018). This article presents how Night Kitchen, a design research studio based in Catford and Athens, explores architectural design processes by treating collecting, archiving and storytelling as integral components of their spatial and narrative methodology. Their work challenges traditional models of design practice by integrating film props, digital technologies and metafictional picturebooks into a hybrid methodology that merges fiction with material culture.

Night Kitchen operates at the intersection of architecture, collecting and storytelling. Through the creation of metafictional picturebooks, which combine fictional narratives with architectural imagery, they explore how repurposed materials can transform audience participation into a collaborative form of design authorship. Run by Drs Dream and Liangi, the studio’s interdisciplinary approach positions collecting, archiving and display not as passive acts, but as creative processes in their own right.

In their practice, collecting becomes a form of narrative engagement. Film props and ephemera are archived and displayed in their home-studio-archive, The Catford School of Fiction, and then digitally scanned, modelled and reimagined within speculative architectural scenes. This transforms their domestic and working environment into a reconfigurable narrative space, where the boundaries between fact and fiction, and between the material and immaterial, are intentionally blurred. Their evolving archive resists linear models of architectural design, embracing ambiguity, reuse and the emotional resonance of objects.

This approach resonates with historical precedents such as Sir John Soane’s house-museum and Maurice Sendak’s studio. Both spaces were curated interiors that also functioned as narrative engines. These examples, which are returned to below, help frame the idiosyncrasies of Night Kitchen’s practice and invite a consideration of how architectural design might engage with fiction as a method grounded in material culture and narrative imagination.

This article outlines a practice-based research methodology, where making, collecting and recontextualising artefacts are understood as generative processes rather than ancillary creative acts. By treating the archive as a site of speculation and the picturebook as a spatial device, the studio positions design as an iterative dialogue between material culture and narrative imagination. These activities, including collecting props, scanning objects and embedding them within speculative architectural scenes, produce new forms of architectural knowledge by revealing how fiction can operate as a method for design inquiry. In this sense, the work does not simply document or illustrate; it performs research through acts of transformation, inviting epistemic insights that emerge from the interplay of narrative, object and space.

Publishing as Practice: Reimagining Architectural Media

The history of architectural practice is deeply intertwined with the act of publishing. From antiquity to the rebirth of the treatise in Renaissance Italy, publishing has long offered architects a means to claim authority and shape public perception. As such, it has long been central to a version of architectural practice in which designers use printed words and images not only to promote ideas about architecture but also to define the discipline itself (Aling, 2017). Despite this extensive history of books as sites of discursive production, enabling a dialogue between architectural image and text, the spatial and graphic conventions that govern how these elements are arranged, particularly the separation of image from text, have remained largely unquestioned. These conventions can be traced back to early European book culture, where conceptual content was often privileged over material or visual form (Cormack & Mazzio, 2005, p. 2).

Night Kitchen situates the architectural aspects of their work within this lineage of architectural self-definition through media, but through a different kind of publication: the picturebook. Their use of the format draws on its unique potential to interweave design, art and object-based storytelling. Influenced by postmodern picturebook theory, their work embraces nonstandard layouts and spatial strategies that allow text, image and reader to interact in liminal and layered ways. This includes what theorists have called the fourth and fifth dimensions of the picturebook, which are the margins and spaces that exist between the image and the audience, and beneath the physical page itself (Sipe & Pantaleo, 2008, p. 31). These dimensions allow Night Kitchen to explore architecture not just as a physical or visual form, but as a narrative and spatial experience that unfolds through the flows of the picturebook and the scenes it contains. Their metafictional picturebooks are ‘published’ within the imagery accompanying their scholarly output. In this work, publishing is not merely a tool for dissemination but a site of practice in itself. Objects from their archive of cinematic remnants are recontextualised and reused to visually explore the boundaries between fact and fiction. Through this process, an architectural voice emerges which is layered through image, object and text, and shaped in part by the unpredictable rhythms of the collectors’ market.

Their engagement with postmodern picturebook theory is not merely aesthetic but methodological. Drawing on scholarship that positions picturebooks as complex, multimodal texts, Night Kitchen treats the format as a spatial device capable of compressing time, layering realities and interweaving the verbal and the visual (Sipe and Pantaleo, 2008, p. 9). The imagery of their books often contains books within books, or spreads that depict the very process of their own making, creating recursive loops between fiction and documentation, allowing for an exploration of architecture not as a fixed discipline but as a mutable and storied practice. The picturebook, in this sense, is not a container for architectural ideas but a generator of them as a medium through which their archive of collected objects can be used and reimagined.

This use of picturebooks as a visual-verbal medium invites a reconsideration of how architecture is communicated. While the profession has traditionally privileged the plan and section as its primary tools of authorship and control, Night Kitchen’s use of digital scanning, modelling and rendering aligns more closely with the lineage of the perspective drawing—historically less specialist and more accessible to broader audiences (Jolliffe and Crosby, 2021 p.73). Just as the nineteenth century saw the rise of the coloured perspective to engage lay clients, Night Kitchen’s use of picturebooks signals a shift in emphasis: from the technical to the affective, from the abstract to the storied. These picturebooks are also deeply informed by their collecting practice. Drawing on ideas of world-acquisition (Melchionne, 1999) and the enchantment of culturally available fictions (Geraghty, 2014), Night Kitchen’s archive of film props and ephemera becomes a narrative engine. These objects, which are digitally scanned and embedded within their imagery, act as portals between real and fictional realms. Their placement within picturebook spreads is not incidental but strategic, allowing for the layering of meaning and the suggestion of other realities, aligning with postmodern picturebook strategies that blur the boundaries between text and image, fiction and documentation, reader and author.

In this way, Night Kitchen’s work questions the conventions of architectural publishing by embracing the picturebook as a site of spatial, narrative and material experimentation. Their practice suggests that architecture can be designed and presented not only through buildings and traditional forms of drawings, but through stories, objects and the imaginative reconfiguration of media.

Afterlight: The Material Residue of Cinema

Night Kitchen considers movies as the preeminent magical art form of the past century. While it is unarguable that remarkable works of art have been completed in other mediums during this time, it is cinema which has the most profound effect on society through the way it has shaped expectations of entertainment, fiction and storytelling. Cinema is ephemeral, a catching and distributing of fleeting light through lens, projector and screen. However, despite the inherent immateriality and make-believe nature of a movie, visceral rushes and sensations are experienced by us in the real world while watching them, with material remnants from the production being left behind. As director William Friedkin once remarked, “Movies are like dreams. They’re not real. They’re like dreams you never forget” (Sorcerers, 2015). For Dream and Liangi, days after watching Sean Baker’s Anora (2024), the ache of its ending lingered as an emotional residue. Over a decade since its release, the cool detachment of Spring Breakers (2012) exists as a kind of afterlight, not as a collection of scenes, but as a mood that can be reinhabited. Returned to multiple times by the studio, the grit and gloss of Thief (1981) has left an accessible imprint of both atmosphere and memory. Films do not simply pass through us, they imprint, refract and return.

Central to the construction of cinematic worlds and the emotional weight they carry are the objects that populate them. With the expectations of a given prop beginning in the words of the script, one of the earliest hires in the production of a movie is the Property Master (Taylor, 1967), who translates these words into objects, reflecting the wider requirements of the narrative through an analysis of the script, storyboards and concept art. Despite their importance for the conveyance of narrative, props are often overlooked in critical discourse. This neglect stems from a long-standing bias in dramatic theory, dating back to Aristotle, which privileges narrative and character over the material elements of performance (Sofer, 2003). However, as Sofer argues, props are not mere accessories but active participants in storytelling. They move through space and time, accumulating meaning and shaping audience perception. A prop, once handled by an actor, becomes a dynamic signifier, with its significance unfolding in performance rather than being fixed on the page. As such, it can be argued that in filmmaking the selection of props holds a significance comparable to the casting of actors. Consider your most cherished film and envision a scenario where all of its objects are arbitrarily exchanged; the effect would be akin to a recasting (Corvino, 2025). In capturing performances through light, cinema becomes an archive of fleeting gestures and material arrangements, preserving not only stories, but the ephemeral presence and relationships of people and things. Each frame becomes a luminous imprint, fixing in time a temporary arrangement of bodies, objects and atmospheres.

From a material culture perspective, props are not just tools of illusion, but objects embedded with cultural, emotional and symbolic value. As Woodward (2007) notes, objects mediate identity, memory and social relations. In cinema, a prop can encapsulate a character’s inner world or evoke a collective memory. Yet, because props are so seamlessly integrated into the mise-en-scène, their impact is often subliminal. They are transparent until they malfunction or are made strange.

Prop collecting is a relatively new phenomenon, being tied to the arrival of the internet and companies such as Propstore. While some property masters will commission bespoke objects and costumes for a film, others will use off-the-shelf items. The value that these kinds of objects play in the communicating of narrative, even if critically overlooked, see everyday items transformed into highly valued rarities, through their use and depiction on the light of the screen. Everyday objects and ephemera can become coveted items of wonder, with people bidding inordinate amounts to own them. The worth of such items can be difficult to ascertain, even by specialists, with auctions being the go-to method for big ticket items, where the price is ultimately set by the buyer (Buckwald, 2025). The cultural relevance of these objects can fluctuate alongside their market value. Their worth is also subject to generational shifts: as the audiences who cherished particular films or genres age and pass on, the desirability of related memorabilia can decline. For example, in past decades, memorabilia associated with Hollywood Westerns was highly sought after, but the passing of the generation that collected such items has led to a noticeable drop in their market value.

By curating an archive of diegetic objects, Night Kitchen foregrounds these often-overlooked artefacts, treating them as cultural residues of fiction. In doing so, the studio aligns with a broader materialist turn that recognises the power of objects to shape meaning and experience. Props are not merely disposable tools for performers but narrative agents in their own right. As objects of narrative transmission, they operate along a spectrum, ranging from practical enhancers of realism to symbols and motifs that shape the thematic and emotional architecture of a film. A letter, a weapon, or a pair of sunglasses can each serve as a plot device, a character-defining object, or a visual metaphor, along with countless other kinds of objects. Their selection is rarely incidental and is often imbued with meaning that evolves over time, transforming background details into emotionally charged symbols. The prop, then, is not just a tool of performance but a vessel of memory, desire and transformation. It is capable of anchoring a scene, defining a character or carrying the weight of an entire story.
Night Kitchen’s enthusiasm for the material and conceptual aspects of these objects results in a collecting practice guided more by emotional and narrative resonance than by taxonomy. Recent acquisitions have included Thelma’s sunglasses from Thelma & Louise (1991), a presidential bust from Superman II (1980), table dressings from American Fiction (2023) and a conference placard from Rocky Balboa (2006), with each offering a tangible link to a fictional world. Rather than following a predefined wish list, the studio monitors key auction houses and production studios, allowing curiosity, excitement, studio liquidity and the rhythms of the collectors’ market to shape their collection. Once in the studio, these objects begin to suggest themes for future work. Their reuse sometimes echoes the symbolic and character-defining roles that props play in film as they are visually recontextualised within speculative architectural drawings. Objects that once supported fictional narratives are integrated into new ones, sometimes finding their meaning through the development of the work itself, sometimes being placed into a scene for the sake of the issues they might raise. While access to such objects is shaped by economic means and market dynamics, our teaching practice demonstrates that ownership is not essential for engaging with material culture. Students have reimagined objects encountered in galleries and museums, using scanning and reinterpretation to embed them within speculative narratives. This approach highlights how creative reuse can democratize participation in these processes, even when direct acquisition is not possible.

A Prop, A Prompt, A President,

Taken from In Reverie, a picturebook currently being developed by the studio, fig.2 depicts a variety of objects arranged on a desk in relation to the story’s protagonist. Open-ended in its composition and resistant to didactic interpretation, In Reverie offers an ambiguous commentary on gentrification in South London with an architectural reimagining of a garden playing a central role. Among the objects forming this still life is a bust of George Washington, the first American President. Its presence may seem out of place, given the complex political and historical associations it carries, particularly when considered alongside the local themes explored in the book. However, this bust is not strictly fictional; it exists in the home-studio-archive of Night Kitchen. Its inclusion in the drawing can be understood as a representation of an item archived at The Catford School of Fiction, suggesting further layers of meaning through its past life as a cinematic prop.

On display since its acquisition through an auction, the bust of Washington once appeared in the background of a scene in Superman II (1980), during General Zod’s invasion of the White House. Zod, the film’s central antagonist, embodies authoritarian power in stark contrast to Superman’s moral restraint. While the bust may initially seem like standard set dressing, as a nod to historical authenticity, its afterlife, removed from the cinematic frame and placed on a desk in London, transforms it into something else entirely: a relic of fiction embedded within new layers of narrative. In the film, the bust witnesses the forced surrender of the President. It stands as an emblem of American ideals, juxtaposed with the spectacle of their collapse. Washington, as the founder of his country, represents democratic leadership and the foundational mythos of the United States. Zod, by contrast, is a tyrant who demands absolute obedience. The bust’s presence in that scene is more than decorative; it becomes a symbol of threatened ideals and the fragility of power when confronted by overwhelming force. It is a prop, yes, but one that carries the weight of cultural memory. Now, in the context of Night Kitchen’s studio, the bust is no longer tethered to its original narrative. It has been recontextualized, both as a curio and as material to be displayed and used within further fictions.

In the image, the bust appears as an object that is unexplained and unremarked upon. It is not foregrounded, nor is it given narrative justification. Its presence performs a subtle kind of work. It invites the visually observant and reflective to wonder: Why is it there? What does it mean? Is it a relic of power, a ghost of empire, a souvenir of fiction? Or is it simply a thing—out of place, out of time, waiting to be re-read? Here, it is not a symbol of national identity, but of displacement, of the strange juxtapositions that occur when objects migrate across stories and spaces. It sits among other objects on a stand designed specifically for it, while suggesting themes, moods and characters not fully defined. Its journey from set dressing to collectible object underscores how film objects can outlive their narratives, accruing new meanings as they migrate across contexts and audiences. Recontextualised within the image from an unfinished picturebook on themes much different to Superman, the bust is reframed through a stylised exploration of everyday life. In this act of artistic salvage, the prop’s afterlife is not merely archival but generative, inviting new narratives to gather around understandings of it. Its appearance may even suggest that this scene is part of a story that takes place in a shared fictional realm, in the shadow of its past life.

Used in this way, such artifacts outline the studio’s broader ethos: that props are not just tools of performance but vessels of narrative potential. They are fragments of other worlds, capable of turning up and conditioning the perception of new ones. This is the essence of Night Kitchen’s approach to archiving: not only to preserve, but to reimagine. The bust is not a static artefact but a performative object, capable of shifting meaning depending on its context. It is a piece of cinematic detritus that, through its reuse, becomes part of a new architectural fiction that resists linearity and embraces ambiguity.

Other objects in The Catford School of Fiction are yet to find their place in Night Kitchen’s creative output, although when they do, different themes will be raised. Among them, the sunglasses worn by Geena Davis as Thelma in Thelma & Louise occupy a particularly charged position. As Taylor (2003) argues, cultural memory is not only stored in the archive but also enacted through embodied practices, gestures and performances that resist textual capture. Thelma’s sunglasses, in this sense, are part of a repertoire of feminist resistance and cinematic mythmaking. They are not just a collectible but a performative object, one that carries the memory of Thelma’s refusal to return to a life of containment. To engage with them is to hold a fragment of that gesture, to inherit a trace of that refusal. As Cook (2007) notes, Thelma & Louise lives on not only through its narrative but through its cultural afterlife and the ways it has been cited and re-performed. The sunglasses are a literal and metaphorical lens through which questions of gender, agency and cinematic memory might be refracted. When objects such as these and the bust of Washington are digitally scanned and placed in the Night Kitchen’s imagery, they do not merely reference the film; they reactivate aspects of it. In this way, such objects become strange collaborators in the studio’s speculative architectures, operating as witnesses to the entanglement of fiction and material culture. Their presence blurs the line between collecting and creating, between consuming cultural artefacts and generating new meaning from them. This fluid exchange between reception and production is central to Night Kitchen’s hybrid practice.

Soane, Sendak and the Narrative Archive

These dynamic interplays of creating and collecting, wherein the immateriality of narrative converges with the materiality of objects towards a distinctive mode of production, finds historical precedent in the work and collecting practices of the nineteenth-century architect Sir John Soane and the twentieth-century picturebook author and artist Maurice Sendak. The significance of their respective approaches to collecting has become increasingly relevant to Dream and Liangi as they have gradually developed a methodology grounded with some shared concerns. Night Kitchen’s investigation into the relationship between the collecting and creative practices of these two otherwise unrelated figures, with Soane aligning with the studio’s architectural orientation and Sendak with its narrative sensibilities, has provided a nascent framework for understanding the convergence of activities within their practice, with the primacy of doing having preceded any conscious recognitions of the parallels with these precedents.

Sir John Soane (1753-1837) was an English architect who is still celebrated for his imaginative and personal interpretations of history. While designing a number of Britain’s most celebrated neoclassical buildings, he was also a passionate collector of antiquities, architectural fragments and artworks, which he curated into a distinctive and educational environment within his home (Boucher, 2024). This house, which survives today in London as the Sir John Soane’s Museum, can be understood as existing somewhere between residence and repository, as a choreographed environment in which collected objects were embedded within the architecture itself. A visit to the building as it is preserved reveals a layered, immersive environment where objects are not merely displayed but staged, and where meaning and relationships are defined through juxtaposition, light and movement. If Night Kitchen’s collecting practice is shaped by intuition, narrative potential and the collectors’ market, then Sir John Soane’s house-museum offers a historical precedent for this kind of materially grounded, narratively open-ended research. His varied collection was not arranged according to scholarly taxonomy, but according to affect, association and spatial rhythm. Importantly, Soane’s home functioned as both a prototype for later museums and an extreme example of the cabinet of curiosity, where collecting was inseparable from spatial and narrative design (Lucas, 2014).

Soane’s integration of collecting, domesticity and design was not simply about display, but about transformation, with his objects activating and conditioning a spatial experience. In his speculative manuscript Crude Hints Towards an History of My House (2015), Soane imagined the house as a future ruin, and as a site of mystery and misinterpretation. This fictional framing of the home-archive obliquely resonates with aspects of Night Kitchen’s approach, where an arrangement of things is not only preserved but recontextualized and reimagined. Like Soane, Night Kitchen treats the archive as a site of visual and narrative possibility, where objects are not ends in themselves and can be seen as fragments of stories yet to be told in relation to one another. Soane’s privileging of poetic association over chronology was central to his curatorial logic and continues to invite visitors to become co-authors of meaning and relationships, and to engage with his artefacts through various imaginative faculties. His paintings, sculptures and architectural fragments are experienced through hinged picture panels, mirrored vistas and spatial sequencing, gently inviting visitors to construct meaning across time, space and theme. The sarcophagus of Seti I, created around 1370BC and dramatically displayed in a crypt-like chamber beneath Soane’s own bust, is both an object and a narrative device, as a preexisting artifact that has been brought into a larger reflection on legacy, mortality and the architect as mythmaker.

Maurice Sendak’s (1928–2012) influence on Night Kitchen’s practice extends beyond his celebrated picturebooks and into the domestic fabric of his creative life. While he is best known for illustrating and writing canonical works such as Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and Outside Over There (1981), it is his approach to collecting that offers the most resonant precedent for Night Kitchen, with their studio name, in fact, being drawn from his In the Night Kitchen (1970). Sendak’s home and studio were not merely spaces of production but curated environments, densely populated with toys, books and ephemera. These accumulations, lived with and drawn from, were active participants in his creative process.

Sendak’s collecting was as much about use as it was about connoisseurship or display. As Lynn Caponera, Executive Director of the Maurice Sendak Foundation, has noted, he was a “passionate, smart, deliberate collector” who “assembled a wealth of inspiration for his work” (Dalland, 2025). His collections, ranging from William Blake’s illuminated books to Mickey Mouse figurines, were not passive acquisitions but dynamic engines of imagination. He made no distinction between high and low culture, valuing instead the “intrinsic quality and liveliness” of the work (Skirball Cultural Center, 2024). This philosophy allowed him to synthesize diverse visual languages, creating a studio environment where Blake could sit beside Disney, and where a pastoral etching might inform the cross-hatching of a children’s book (Dalland, 2025). This approach to collecting was a generative act. His objects were not static artefacts but tools of transformation which he referred to as “things I can use in some way” (Skirball Cultural Center, 2024). This approach resonates with Night Kitchen’s own methodology, where collected props and ephemera are utilised within speculative architectural drawings and picturebooks. Like Sendak, they treat the archive not as a place of preservation, but as a site of narrative potential, where meaning is shaped through juxtaposition, emotional resonance and imaginative reuse.

Both Sendak and Soane’s home-studios were fiction machines, spaces where objects were engaged with in creative ways. These collections were not ends in themselves but beginnings, with both of their practices engaging with an archive as a dynamic and conditioning influence for their work. Soane’s house-museum was a living laboratory, a pedagogical tool, much like Sendak’s a century later. The creative voices that are tied to these processes of collecting are marked by their curiosity, enchantment and tendency towards speculative reassembly. They are shaped by the emotional and narrative charge of acquired objects, and how the meanings around them can change. Underpinned by interplays of fact of fiction, they concentrate the imaginative labour of both the maker and their audience.

Like Sendak or Soane, Night Kitchen do not collect for completeness, prestige or financial investment. Collecting takes place for narrative charge and for the emotional and imaginative potential of objects to suggest stories, moments and atmospheres. Their home-archive is not a place of closure but of possibility. As such, their archive is a speculative device to be creatively engaged with as a narrative engine. This sees collections of objects contributing to layered environments of meaning and relationships, where things can interact to suggest and produce new meanings, which happens in both Night Kitchen’s home-studio and picturebooks.

Archival Fictions and Material Narratives

Night Kitchen’s picturebooks are more than illustrated stories. They act as imaginative archives, spaces where storytelling, design and collected objects come together. The studio uses their imagery to showcase objects they have gathered, overlapping design and narrative in ways that challenge conventional ideas of display. This approach turns their visual storytelling into a form of creative archiving, where the act of showing objects becomes a reflection on narrative theory and on how time and space are compressed within the buildings and environments they design. Their picturebooks blur the lines between fiction and reality, past and present. They embrace unconventional layouts, intertextual references and metafictional techniques, inviting readers into a layered and fluid engagement with architectural ideas.

The studio’s research engages with architecture and publishing as a collection of material components and a repository of resonances, reflecting the ethos of The Catford School of Fiction, in which this work is made. Within the picturebook format’s specific feedback loop of word and image, the studio uses architectural representation to explore the overlaps between visual and verbal narratives, while also examining the roles of props and other objects in storytelling. Working with the things they own and the buildings and furniture they have designed, this narrative potential depends on digital scanning processes. Once acquired, archived objects are scanned into high-definition 3D meshes, with the role of such processes in other archives having significantly developed in recent decades with the advent of scanning technologies like LIDAR. This remote sensing method, which uses laser light to capture form and texture, generates digital copies of physical objects. Once scanned, these objects become hybrids: part artifact, part model, part fiction. This process aligns with Benzon’s notion of archival fictions, where digital and material forms intersect to create new narrative possibilities (Benzon, 2021). Just as Soane embedded classical fragments into the architecture of his home, Night Kitchen embeds objects into speculative architectural narratives using these digital processes, without necessarily clarifying their relationships. This reuse acknowledges the objects’ histories while providing them with something of an afterlife.

At a tangible level, Night Kitchen collects inanimate matter. The props they acquire range in materiality, encompassing plastics, metals, glues, inks, paper and more. However, they transcend this corporeal grounding through their past use registering of different realities and histories. As much as a given object may be a material assemblage, it can also be understood as a nexus between events. When considering their use in the production of films, often towards the transmission of a character’s identity or environment, they suggest insights into contexts, practices and stories. While props, costumes and set dressings can be linked to the portrayals of specific performers, they also signify various creative processes as witnesses to the shared concerns of actors, writers and directors in the finalising of a production, and the crossovers and budget concerns that take place between the character and art departments of a production. As such, as collectors and creators, Night Kitchen collects the tangible fragments of imaginary worlds; their acquisitions being the concrete remnants of fictional realms.

Traditional collections, with their tactile objects like documents, photographs and other artifacts, offer a sensory experience rooted in texture, weight and physical presence. As Catherine Richardson notes, archives are “repositories of productive environments of the past” highlighting how the physical context of these items enriches our understanding of their historical and cultural value (Prescott and Wiggins, 2023, p. 276). In contrast, digital archives present a different kind of engagement through their ability to transcend geographical boundaries by way of the quick sharing and replicating of information, as a form of onscreen display. While digital formats can enhance accessibility, allowing broader audiences to engage with materials that were previously confined to physical spaces, digitization can lead to a disconnection from the original materiality. As Jane Birkin discusses, digital representations can lose the contextual significance that physical objects possess, raising questions about the authenticity and integrity of the archival experience (Prescott and Wiggins, 2023, p. 294) with the selection and presentation of material artifacts connecting to further explorations of identity and memory (Prescott and Wiggins, 2023, p. 18), while highlighting the significance of materiality in the digital age.

Resulting from the LIDAR scanning that underpins their working process, Night Kitchen’s archive exists in both material and digital realms. Their scans of studio-stored objects enable new possibilities for their use and placement within the imagery of other narratives, blurring the lines between the physical nature of their archive and digital nature of their imagery. Recognizing the limitations of digital scans in conveying “tactile, olfactory, and historical nuances” (Benzon, 2021, p. 245), this digital-analogue interplay differs from conventional approaches to collecting and displaying by inviting a re-examination of how collecting can be understood in relation to authorship and representation. This can engage in broader conversations about creative forms of consuming, and how specific types of audiences can engage with the materiality of past fictions. Night Kitchen’s practice explores the material and immaterial overlaps of collecting and creating, having the potential to augment understandings of how an object’s role and meaning can shift through its relationships with factors such as text and the spaces in which it is depicted (Prescott Wiggins, 2023, p. 264).

In Night Kitchen’s picturebook imagery, scanned objects from their collection often assume prominence as the dominant occupants of a scene. What might initially appear as everyday items within this has the potential to be reframed as a portal to alternate fictions, inviting enchantment and narrative possibility. Norman Bryson’s research on still life painting offers a useful parallel, presenting objects as vehicles for deeper reflection on how material things compel artists to engage more meaningfully with the world (Bryson, 1990, p. 89). Still life, he argues, challenges viewers to confront aspects of existence that are frequently overlooked, elevating the mundane to a level of poetic significance. As Bryson writes, still life “takes on the exploration of what ‘importance’ tramples underfoot” (Bryson, 1990, p. 63). Night Kitchen’s work explores similar terrain, encouraging contemplation of objects found in both a real physical studio and further digital imaginary contexts. These items are not treated as mere illustrations but as archival inclusions: fragments of other narratives folded into new ones. They have been held, worn, broken, repaired; lit, framed and filmed. They carry the trace of performance, the weight of character, the aura of fiction. Originally part of a mise-en-scène, they are reused within speculative architectural stagings. Their meanings shift through proximity and placement, and what once signified power in a presidential bust from Superman II might now suggest irony or displacement when juxtaposed with other objects. These arrangements remain provisional, contingent and open to reinterpretation.

Collecting can be time consuming and expensive. Even when seeking objects from films with a smaller cultural legacy than others, the associated fees and costs can make it prohibitively expensive. However, the object-centered method used by the studio can be reworked toward more inclusive aims. As design tutors, Night Kitchen’s pedagogical approach, as explored in Metafictive Publishing and Pedagogy (Dream and Liangi, 2025), positions the picturebook as a spatial and narrative device capable of accommodating diverse voices and experiences. By encouraging students to draw from their personal histories and the everyday objects they already own, along with scannable artifacts in museums, the picturebook becomes a medium through which architectural education can be reimagined as a participatory and bi-directional process. This sees students become active creators by not only interpreting architectural narratives and cultural histories, but by reimagining them through a critical reuse and adaptation of places, objects and buildings. In this context, the picturebook-as-archive questions the hierarchies of traditional architectural representation.

Conclusion

Night Kitchen’s practice reveals how collecting, archiving and storytelling can be reimagined as a form of architectural authorship. By treating props not as static memorabilia but as narrative agents, the studio blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality, past and present, and the material and digital. Their use of picturebooks as both a medium and a methodology allows for a layered exploration of design, narrative and memory, where objects are not only displayed but reactivated. These books become speculative archives through their depiction of spaces where collected fragments are recontextualised to generate new meanings and atmospheres.

The studio’s engagement with cinematic props, digital scanning and metafictional publishing challenges traditional models of architectural representation. Rather than beginning with fixed intentions, their work is shaped by the rhythms of the collectors’ market, the emotional charge of objects and the potential embedded within them. This approach aligns with historical precedents such as Soane and Sendak, whose curated environments served as engines of imagination and meaning-making. Like them, Night Kitchen’s archive is not a closed system but a generative one, where objects are prompts for new stories and speculative designs.

Their work invites us to see fiction not as an escape from reality, but as a method for engaging with it more imaginatively and critically. The Catford School of Fiction, then, is not simply a place of making and living. It is a site of rehearsal, display and reflection. It is a space in which the collected is both stored and staged. Like Soane’s museum or Sendak’s studio, it is a kind of fiction machine—a place where objects are not only remembered but reimagined. The archive is not the end of the story. It is where the story begins, it is a place of once upon a time.

About the authors

Dr Daniel Dream and Dr Ifigeneia Liangi are architectural designers and researchers. They teach at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL and The University of Greenwich. Their design research studio, Night Kitchen, explores interplays of collecting and narrative as part of a design agency that exists in fact and fiction. Central to this are considerations on the role of design in architectural picturebooks, as a method for exploring the intricate relationships between buildings, objects and storytelling.

References

Aling, M. (2017) ‘Publishing as architectural practice’, Design Ecologies, 6(1), pp. 96–126.

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