Abstract | At first sight, the relationship that architecture has with comics seems to be obvious and inarguable.
According to Frank Lloyd Wright ‘architecture is life; or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived’ (Baker 2008, 117).
As comics is a medium that usually portrays human life through its characters, the representation of architecture will help the reader/viewer to understand the characteristics of the characters, since architecture is an interface created by Man to make the world fit to his needs and routines. However, the relationship that architecture has with comics is not limited to obvious representations of it in comics; it is also present in depictions of its creative process and even in the similarity between the experiences of the comics reader and the user of architecture.
According to Buchet (2013), the architect can be compared to a strip cartoonist: when he draws a museum or even an airport terminal, there is an implicit narrative that the visitor reads when attending these places.
In this article I enumerate four instances where architecture is present in comics and explain the different scopes and effects of its presence.