I am interested in how architecture can be narrative.
In a way this relates to the chronological experience of buildings but I think it can also be much more abstract, i.e. associations, and can refer to single moments, e.g. passing from one room into another.
For me, the narrative, (particularly as in the sequencing of associations and visual impressions) is relevant for how we experience many things in life. Narrative tools in literature and film are a key example in how emotional responses are constructed. E.g. a film shows a scene in a dark, damp, room followed by a scene in a sunny garden: we experience relief. The tools are inspired by real life, and the efficacy of the tools is reinforced through real life experiences. Conversely real life emotional responses can be influenced by what we have been trained to experience through film and literature.
This is all relevant for architecture.
I am now looking for good literature on the link between architecture and the narrative. So far I have been recommended Tschumi.
If anyone has any thoughts on this matter, or book suggestions, I would also love to hear them.
Check out the writings on Kevin Nute. He is a professor at the university of Oregon and researches how architecture can visualize the passing of time or a specific event. He delves into how architecture can make us more aware of our surroundings. I think one of his books is called Place, Time and Being in Japanese architecture. It may not be exactly what you are looking for but its a fascinating book. It also has lots of great examples of contemporary architecture that accomplishes this idea.
hi, even i am working on a similar subject. although i am working on linking Architecture + Films, which would/should incorporate Montage & Narrative. I have found literature on Films but still fail to find relevant texts dealing with narrative & montage in architecture.
i have, also, been recommended Tschumi, for his Space-Event Theory.
but apart from that, i cant find any other Architecturally relevant source.
Please do help me and the guy who originally posted the post...
Cheers.
in his 1979 sci arc lecture, peter eisenman talked in terms of architectural narrative regarding to his cannaregio town square project (1978)
he moved the buildings around the town square, he semi humorously tied them to 'large building ate the small building, then was eaten by yet another larger building' and so on. at the time, i very much thought that was a great story telling and talking about his project in a refreshing way, as he territorialized the town square and toyed with asymmetrical constructions and corbusian grid, archaeological construction deconstructed, i don't remember all, at the re-invented site and its historical narratives.
it was quite brilliant at the time when i was a student and influenced me a great deal.
years later, i am more interested in; story as story as opposed to architecture as story. nevertheless, i think any spatial experience can be narrational.
you might be also interested to look into novels of alain robbe-grillet.
Orhan i think any spatial experience can be narrational.
perhaps the internal subtitling we apply to/deduce from our spatial experiences in their wake build up a narrative but the actual flow of experiences we have, i believe, is far too recurrently virginal (like aphrodite rising from the sea) and unmediated to be, in itself, a narrative. to narrate: to recount, to relay...the re-prefix indicates a second passage over the flow of experience, a narrative of experiences is the re-covering of those experiences.
calling this a "spatial experience" endows it with a formal and even fatalistic wrap of unity but in the moment it occurs, this interaction, its a testing ground for an array of immediacies, some unpredictable by nature. a "serene" experience of some space on whic many concur (tadao ando buildings, zumthor, some spot in the forest..etc) , i believe, is more a knot in a cultural code, i believe, than an actual testimony to the 'serenity' of this space. they can be, imaginatively, as much the site of rape, suicide, murder...
well, yes.
we also have to include the dimension of 'time,' which i believe makes the whole understanding and the definitions extremely chaotic and wild-card-ish.
just an idea...
i always wondered what narratives cleopatra's summer villa on sedir island held near antalya in modern day turkey? was it the serenity of the colorful imported sand ceasar sent her as his gift to cover her private beach, or the lustful murders she ordered to her bodyguards where the corpses were fed to sharks who homestead nearby sunken islands, perhaps submerged fragments of atlantis.
can architecture come close to this?
should the architectural narratives tell truth or fiction?
what happened when piranesi fictionalized the passage of time?
i think architectural narratives are more successful on paper conceptualizations.
when they are built into buildings, they are pretty much accidental because architectural vocabulary usually invokes generalizations. written narratives utilize much richer vocabulary that probably tell or provoke much more onto those invoked by architecture.
one has to be pretty knowledgeable to 'get' architectural narratives in built form, unless they are one liners, which they usually and banally are.
i'm figuring you're conflating before-architecture narratives i.e. design conceptualizations, during-architecture narratives i.e. "spatial experiences" and after-architecture narratives i.e. the folklore and history of a place. the spatial experiencer sandwiched between eisenman and cleopatra.
the success, if thats the right word, of design conceptualization would be an orthodox measurement of how much of an internal sense it makes as well as how well equiped it is to realize its sense externally, the architectural prediction as a trap for a particular future and a particular imagined narrative of "spatial experiences". the architect there occupies the central ground between a fiction-producer and a fortune-teller,...she works her fiction to have it realized factually, and out of facts (the nature of materials and the set codes of her society) she spins her fiction.
the other two narratives are beyond the concept of "measurement", i think, since its merely a matter of them happening.
i wasn't particularly, but it does sound good now that you divided like this.
this is why it is important to decide the nature of the narrative. fiction or science? note that i am not using science-fiction, which is not what we are talking here.
fiction as historical truth, in which multi truths narrated in present, or, science as decoded truth of what is perhaps un-truth (?).
in both cases they change in time or under political conditions, sometimes in variable speeds (one can add media too now to further complicate.)
i think that is why, one must decide which way an architectural narrative is storied. there are some balance acts with 'time' that must be resolved. otherwise one is pretty much limited to usual decorum of light,shadow, proportion, texture, etc, as mentioned in Vervanaque's first post and in the filmic examples that were given in relationship to that scenery.
in other words, no moves that weren't done before...
i like your examples of murder, rape, suicide more imaginative against the more predictable architectural compositions, which you precisely described with the term, "measurement."
i do prefer the other two you mention, but i am not sure how they can be applied to architecture better than to literature.
maybe architectural narration is made to spin perpetually.
back to #3,
there are many stories on virgin mary's house near ephesus. i like the one that tells she had to sell it less than what she paid for and left never to return to the area. i don't know what happened to her after that. did she ever die? or went to heaven (assumption) or simply bought another house elsewhere and died as an unknown? if she bought a new house, i wonder if it was smaller and easier to keep clean? i wonder if it was a hillside property like the previous one? i wonder what colors she liked or if she cooked and what she cooked, etc?
history as series of spatial fictions and perimeters?
here is a project i did in architecture school in 1981. i wrote a story and drew the space where and how the story happened. ultimately story came first but interacted with the narrative. link
Calvino's Invisible Cities delves into architecture - or place - as narrative in small vignettes.
This city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the coursers of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightening rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
thats not a description of a narrative as much as a description of an archaeology of narratives..."the city does not tell". also, remembering that book, the description of the city/ies was more that of the structures and orders than an actual linear thematic tracing through time that would constitute a narrative.
"We have seen that the author cannot choose to avoid rhetoric, he can choose only the kind of rhetoric he will employ. He cannot choose whether or not to affect his readers'evaluations by his choice of narrative manner; he can only choose whther to do it well or porrly. As dramatistis have always known, even the purest of dramas is not purely dramatic in the sence of being entirely presented, entirely shown as taking place in the moment. There are always as Dryden called "relations" to be taken care of, and try as the author may to ignore the troublemsome fact, "some parts of the action more fit to be represented, some to be realted," But related by whom? The dramatist must decide, and the novelist's case id different only in that the choices opent to him are more numerous.
If we think through the many narrative devices in the fiction we know, we soon come toa sense of the embarrasing inadequacy of our traditional classification of "point of view" into three or four kinds, variables only of the "person" and the degree of omniscience/ If we name over three or four of the great narrators- say Cervantes' Cid Hatete Benengeli, Tristram Shandy, the "I" of Middlemarch, and Strether, through whose vision most of The Ambassodors comes to us, we reaize that to describe any of them with terms like "first person" or "omniscient" tells us little about how the differ from each other, or why they succeed while others described in the same terms fail. It should be worth our while, then , to attempt a richer tabulation of the forms the author's voice can take, both as a wummary of the preceding chapters and as a basis for parts II and III. --- from Wayne Booth's "The Rhetoric of Fiction."
I called the short descriptions of cities in Invisible Cities vignettes, which can be short or outlined narratives, such as:
At Melania, every time you enter the square, you find yourself caught in a dialogue: the braggart soldier and the parasite coming from a door meet the young wastrel and the prostitute; or else the miserly father from his threshold utters his final warnings to the amorous daughter and is interrupted by the foolish servant who is taking a note to the procuress. You return to Melania after years and you find the same dialogue still going on; in the meanwhile the parasite has died, and so have the procuress and the miserly father; but the braggart soldier, the amorous daughter, the foolish servant have taken their places, being replaced in their turn by the hypocrite, the confidante, the astrologer.
In addition to all these short chapters, there is the overlaid narrative of Marco Polo's conversation with Kublai Kahn.
The vignettes are certainly a "tracing through time" of the story or character of the cities Marco has visited, albeit is an abstracted way. And, as you read one after the other, they begin to add up to a kind of narrative of an imaginary kingdom, one that the Kahn has not seen:
Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kublai Kahn able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could excape the termites' gnawing.
Anyway, Verva, if you get past having to fit your inquiry into a strict dictionary definition of "narrative", you will find that the book certainly is "relevant for how we experience many things in life", including and especially architecture.
Yikes. So. Im gonna try really hard to write in non-archibullshit.
I would suggest starting very, very small and very, very easy. Tell some really simple stories before you try to write a pynchon novel. Id look into early english and grotesque gardens, you can also think about late baroque churches in germany and poland, the paris opera house to see the basics of theatrical sequencing. Theres also some good resources on Carlo Scarpa and symbolist poetry, fragments of experience that form a symbolic language, and how to compose them in space and time.
Im also a huge fan of Douglas Darden, he has some wonderfully twisted studies in the relationship between rhetorical devices and cultural symbols to form and composition.
Frankly, I think you could do a pretty compelling thesis just on that. But! At the very least its easier to start there and find some compelling new territory than to wade into it through vague poetics about change in cities.
But to try to locate a few of the more difficult issues you might run into ~
- Linearity; Theres a wonderful tension here, I think, in that a certain linearity is inescapable, in that everything we explore is perceived through a single body moving along a single line in time. But the marvel of the story is that this experience is never only linear. There are others moving through the same framework of space and time; theres the potential for repetition, forking, interface; and theres the wonderful phenomenon of memory, this constant regression into mental spaces and projection of those associations into our perception of the world.
- Theater and simulation; Theres also the question of the inherent artificiality of experience. By simply attempting to impose upon a space any kind of narrative structure youre accepting a kind of falseness. This has been explored through art and literature for centuries and there are like a million directions you could go with this.
- Drama; I tend to think the most important thing about a story is mystery. Telling a good story is less about what you show and when you show it, and more about what you hide and how you hide it. However this bears itself out in your experience and construction of the building, I think its hugely important to know what youre allowing people to see and what youre not allowing them to see, and when and why youre doing it.
- Medium; I think its important that you know "where" your story is. Is it a story of stagecraft? Like the danteum? Where the architecture is simply an artificial landscape, a set for action between human characters? Is it a symbolic story between the building and the viewer like carlo scarpa? Is it a structural story? Like Eisenman's kind of artifacts of a story of composition? Is it in some other realm?
i mean, narrating stories, histories, mythologies.
and what architecture can do, in the absence of the skin potential for figurative or textual illustration, is to become a spatial guessing game between architect and user?
what am i implying here, what do i mean by that detail there, what does this remind you of....
and always what is implicated is architecture's ability or inability to refer to the external world and this is a great source of anxiousness that is made all too obvious by the manner by which students struggle to translate their literary ideas into architecture. more experienced people revert to architecture itself as an external reference, or art movements, or drawing metaphors and similarities out of science....
as such, i don't thing it is narrative that holds architecture together as its anxious will to reflect the external world.
from the side of the user as well, spatial immersion is not similar to textual or filmic immersion. in space, i am a variegated subjectivity, my senses victim to their own whims and prejudices follow myriad traces. as a reader or viewer, however, my sense follows the linear indexical print that converges my subjectivity into a linear run of words or linear animation of pictures. even if those words and pictures are characterized by a post modern fragmentary sensibility.
Well I dont think architecture needs literally to refer to existing stories to be narrative in nature. Id even argue that every building is at some level a narrative experience, whether thats the central design intent or not, in that the user experiences a linear process of having the space revealed to them. I dont think one needs refer really at all to historical imagery to employ narrative and linguistic methods and structures. The element of surprise, the narrative arc, juxtaposition, these are all hugely useful tools in architecture that are all about using space to 'tell a story'.
And certainly theres a difference between reading a book or watching a film and being in a space, but how relevant is that difference when it comes to architecture? Is the gap between text and film really larger than the gap between film and architecture? They are all (at some level) planned sequences of images and sensations, all hugely subject to interpretation, all mailable and intertwined with the viewers familiarities. The mental, cognitive content, in other words, the process of molding an experiential map, is extraordinarily similar, only fundamentally different in the mechanics through which we receive it.
I dont think we need to give the high-hat to this right? I mean is Eisenman really more sophisticated than the paris opera house? Frankly I often find the exercise in final fact kind of academic and static.
oe: Is the gap between text and film really larger than the gap between film and architecture?
what i said was that the gap between film and text is smaller than that between architecture and film/text. I'm not sure, therefore, whether this coment was apropos my post or not.
anyway, what text and film share as features are a frame and a structuring device that are far more overt than that incurring the experience of architecture, whose overall frame is less overt and more intangible. what sets architecture apart is that it is possible to background its artificiality and to blur the boundary, the frame, marking its province as an injection of opinion and design. as animals, we can sleep and shit in it, fuck and be sick in it....architecture, as well as being a consolidated end result of culture and subjectivity from the viewpoint of the cultured 'reader' and the designer, is also an incidental banal and meaningless found-environment (which is as banal as the found-object minus aesthetic stupifaction) for our instincts.
also i believe there is still this propensity to lump up after-architecture, during-architecture and before-architecture into one messy pile of claims.
as for 'spatial-experience', i doubt that either the phenomenological i.e. during-architecture (which precedes the logic of narrative construction) or the semiotic (which is synchronized with and after (in varying layers of meanings) narrative constrution) allow for the logic of narrative to set in during the experience of architecture, which is the first moment that kaleidescopically bridges the animal experience to the human imagination thereafter to be framed and subtilitled as a cultured experience which we then, denying our savage immoral animality, confuse for the initial state of our experience and our being. for a sensibility of what is primary and initial in the state of being human, phenomenology is just soooo polite.
and double-foldingly, "art criticism", seems burdened with somber gravitas that, in the sensibility for the secondary to devour the initial obliviously (as in art/the artificial devouring life and becoming pronouncements on life, art criticism devours art and becomes pronouncements on art AND pronouncements on life). a sensibility that always praises the integrated, the ascending order of subtitling (or sur-titling actually) over the childlike, the kaleidescopic, the essentially meaningless but impressionably charged.
and therefore perhaps what we should mean to say is that the first moment of experiencing architecture is the second moment after we realize "this is architecture"...which probably takes a few moments before.
architectural narrative may have nothing to do with words. habits, practices, innate material tendencies (viscosity, friability...) are a kind of narrative that doesn't occur during the design except as speculation.
Apr 16, 09 7:15 am ·
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Architecture and the narrative
I am interested in how architecture can be narrative.
In a way this relates to the chronological experience of buildings but I think it can also be much more abstract, i.e. associations, and can refer to single moments, e.g. passing from one room into another.
For me, the narrative, (particularly as in the sequencing of associations and visual impressions) is relevant for how we experience many things in life. Narrative tools in literature and film are a key example in how emotional responses are constructed. E.g. a film shows a scene in a dark, damp, room followed by a scene in a sunny garden: we experience relief. The tools are inspired by real life, and the efficacy of the tools is reinforced through real life experiences. Conversely real life emotional responses can be influenced by what we have been trained to experience through film and literature.
This is all relevant for architecture.
I am now looking for good literature on the link between architecture and the narrative. So far I have been recommended Tschumi.
If anyone has any thoughts on this matter, or book suggestions, I would also love to hear them.
thanks
Check out the writings on Kevin Nute. He is a professor at the university of Oregon and researches how architecture can visualize the passing of time or a specific event. He delves into how architecture can make us more aware of our surroundings. I think one of his books is called Place, Time and Being in Japanese architecture. It may not be exactly what you are looking for but its a fascinating book. It also has lots of great examples of contemporary architecture that accomplishes this idea.
You might try Phillippe Hamons "Expositions: Literature and Architecture in 19th Century France".
the theme of the next issue of AXIS: Journal of the Caribbean School of Architecture is on architecture + narrative
hi, even i am working on a similar subject. although i am working on linking Architecture + Films, which would/should incorporate Montage & Narrative. I have found literature on Films but still fail to find relevant texts dealing with narrative & montage in architecture.
i have, also, been recommended Tschumi, for his Space-Event Theory.
but apart from that, i cant find any other Architecturally relevant source.
Please do help me and the guy who originally posted the post...
Cheers.
Look up Yi-Fu Tuan's Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Tschumi is interesting.
here is another example;
in his 1979 sci arc lecture, peter eisenman talked in terms of architectural narrative regarding to his cannaregio town square project (1978)
he moved the buildings around the town square, he semi humorously tied them to 'large building ate the small building, then was eaten by yet another larger building' and so on. at the time, i very much thought that was a great story telling and talking about his project in a refreshing way, as he territorialized the town square and toyed with asymmetrical constructions and corbusian grid, archaeological construction deconstructed, i don't remember all, at the re-invented site and its historical narratives.
it was quite brilliant at the time when i was a student and influenced me a great deal.
years later, i am more interested in; story as story as opposed to architecture as story. nevertheless, i think any spatial experience can be narrational.
you might be also interested to look into novels of alain robbe-grillet.
Orhan i think any spatial experience can be narrational.
perhaps the internal subtitling we apply to/deduce from our spatial experiences in their wake build up a narrative but the actual flow of experiences we have, i believe, is far too recurrently virginal (like aphrodite rising from the sea) and unmediated to be, in itself, a narrative. to narrate: to recount, to relay...the re-prefix indicates a second passage over the flow of experience, a narrative of experiences is the re-covering of those experiences.
calling this a "spatial experience" endows it with a formal and even fatalistic wrap of unity but in the moment it occurs, this interaction, its a testing ground for an array of immediacies, some unpredictable by nature. a "serene" experience of some space on whic many concur (tadao ando buildings, zumthor, some spot in the forest..etc) , i believe, is more a knot in a cultural code, i believe, than an actual testimony to the 'serenity' of this space. they can be, imaginatively, as much the site of rape, suicide, murder...
well, yes.
we also have to include the dimension of 'time,' which i believe makes the whole understanding and the definitions extremely chaotic and wild-card-ish.
just an idea...
time and motion...
i've got the moves baby, you got the motion If we got together we'd be causing a commotion
i always wondered what narratives cleopatra's summer villa on sedir island held near antalya in modern day turkey? was it the serenity of the colorful imported sand ceasar sent her as his gift to cover her private beach, or the lustful murders she ordered to her bodyguards where the corpses were fed to sharks who homestead nearby sunken islands, perhaps submerged fragments of atlantis.
can architecture come close to this?
should the architectural narratives tell truth or fiction?
what happened when piranesi fictionalized the passage of time?
i think architectural narratives are more successful on paper conceptualizations.
when they are built into buildings, they are pretty much accidental because architectural vocabulary usually invokes generalizations. written narratives utilize much richer vocabulary that probably tell or provoke much more onto those invoked by architecture.
one has to be pretty knowledgeable to 'get' architectural narratives in built form, unless they are one liners, which they usually and banally are.
nigel coates + NATO?
i'm figuring you're conflating before-architecture narratives i.e. design conceptualizations, during-architecture narratives i.e. "spatial experiences" and after-architecture narratives i.e. the folklore and history of a place. the spatial experiencer sandwiched between eisenman and cleopatra.
the success, if thats the right word, of design conceptualization would be an orthodox measurement of how much of an internal sense it makes as well as how well equiped it is to realize its sense externally, the architectural prediction as a trap for a particular future and a particular imagined narrative of "spatial experiences". the architect there occupies the central ground between a fiction-producer and a fortune-teller,...she works her fiction to have it realized factually, and out of facts (the nature of materials and the set codes of her society) she spins her fiction.
the other two narratives are beyond the concept of "measurement", i think, since its merely a matter of them happening.
i wasn't particularly, but it does sound good now that you divided like this.
this is why it is important to decide the nature of the narrative. fiction or science? note that i am not using science-fiction, which is not what we are talking here.
fiction as historical truth, in which multi truths narrated in present, or, science as decoded truth of what is perhaps un-truth (?).
in both cases they change in time or under political conditions, sometimes in variable speeds (one can add media too now to further complicate.)
i think that is why, one must decide which way an architectural narrative is storied. there are some balance acts with 'time' that must be resolved. otherwise one is pretty much limited to usual decorum of light,shadow, proportion, texture, etc, as mentioned in Vervanaque's first post and in the filmic examples that were given in relationship to that scenery.
in other words, no moves that weren't done before...
i like your examples of murder, rape, suicide more imaginative against the more predictable architectural compositions, which you precisely described with the term, "measurement."
i do prefer the other two you mention, but i am not sure how they can be applied to architecture better than to literature.
maybe architectural narration is made to spin perpetually.
back to #3,
there are many stories on virgin mary's house near ephesus. i like the one that tells she had to sell it less than what she paid for and left never to return to the area. i don't know what happened to her after that. did she ever die? or went to heaven (assumption) or simply bought another house elsewhere and died as an unknown? if she bought a new house, i wonder if it was smaller and easier to keep clean? i wonder if it was a hillside property like the previous one? i wonder what colors she liked or if she cooked and what she cooked, etc?
history as series of spatial fictions and perimeters?
here is a project i did in architecture school in 1981. i wrote a story and drew the space where and how the story happened. ultimately story came first but interacted with the narrative.
link
Calvino's Invisible Cities delves into architecture - or place - as narrative in small vignettes.
This city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the coursers of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightening rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
thats not a description of a narrative as much as a description of an archaeology of narratives..."the city does not tell". also, remembering that book, the description of the city/ies was more that of the structures and orders than an actual linear thematic tracing through time that would constitute a narrative.
anyone kind enough to say something on Montage in Architecture???
"We have seen that the author cannot choose to avoid rhetoric, he can choose only the kind of rhetoric he will employ. He cannot choose whether or not to affect his readers'evaluations by his choice of narrative manner; he can only choose whther to do it well or porrly. As dramatistis have always known, even the purest of dramas is not purely dramatic in the sence of being entirely presented, entirely shown as taking place in the moment. There are always as Dryden called "relations" to be taken care of, and try as the author may to ignore the troublemsome fact, "some parts of the action more fit to be represented, some to be realted," But related by whom? The dramatist must decide, and the novelist's case id different only in that the choices opent to him are more numerous.
If we think through the many narrative devices in the fiction we know, we soon come toa sense of the embarrasing inadequacy of our traditional classification of "point of view" into three or four kinds, variables only of the "person" and the degree of omniscience/ If we name over three or four of the great narrators- say Cervantes' Cid Hatete Benengeli, Tristram Shandy, the "I" of Middlemarch, and Strether, through whose vision most of The Ambassodors comes to us, we reaize that to describe any of them with terms like "first person" or "omniscient" tells us little about how the differ from each other, or why they succeed while others described in the same terms fail. It should be worth our while, then , to attempt a richer tabulation of the forms the author's voice can take, both as a wummary of the preceding chapters and as a basis for parts II and III. --- from Wayne Booth's "The Rhetoric of Fiction."
I called the short descriptions of cities in Invisible Cities vignettes, which can be short or outlined narratives, such as:
At Melania, every time you enter the square, you find yourself caught in a dialogue: the braggart soldier and the parasite coming from a door meet the young wastrel and the prostitute; or else the miserly father from his threshold utters his final warnings to the amorous daughter and is interrupted by the foolish servant who is taking a note to the procuress. You return to Melania after years and you find the same dialogue still going on; in the meanwhile the parasite has died, and so have the procuress and the miserly father; but the braggart soldier, the amorous daughter, the foolish servant have taken their places, being replaced in their turn by the hypocrite, the confidante, the astrologer.
In addition to all these short chapters, there is the overlaid narrative of Marco Polo's conversation with Kublai Kahn.
The vignettes are certainly a "tracing through time" of the story or character of the cities Marco has visited, albeit is an abstracted way. And, as you read one after the other, they begin to add up to a kind of narrative of an imaginary kingdom, one that the Kahn has not seen:
Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kublai Kahn able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could excape the termites' gnawing.
Anyway, Verva, if you get past having to fit your inquiry into a strict dictionary definition of "narrative", you will find that the book certainly is "relevant for how we experience many things in life", including and especially architecture.
these are not narratives, but descriptions of the structures and orders of the city/ies. u're so trying to squeeze lemon out of lime.
yea, ok nocti, you're always right...I didn't address the last sentence to you anyway, and I stand by what I said.
squeeeeeeeeeeze my lemon, till the juice runs down my leg
Surprised no one has mentioned Tarragni's Danteum... the quintessential modern narrative building, albeit unuilt.
^ good.
Yikes. So. Im gonna try really hard to write in non-archibullshit.
I would suggest starting very, very small and very, very easy. Tell some really simple stories before you try to write a pynchon novel. Id look into early english and grotesque gardens, you can also think about late baroque churches in germany and poland, the paris opera house to see the basics of theatrical sequencing. Theres also some good resources on Carlo Scarpa and symbolist poetry, fragments of experience that form a symbolic language, and how to compose them in space and time.
Im also a huge fan of Douglas Darden, he has some wonderfully twisted studies in the relationship between rhetorical devices and cultural symbols to form and composition.
Frankly, I think you could do a pretty compelling thesis just on that. But! At the very least its easier to start there and find some compelling new territory than to wade into it through vague poetics about change in cities.
But to try to locate a few of the more difficult issues you might run into ~
- Linearity; Theres a wonderful tension here, I think, in that a certain linearity is inescapable, in that everything we explore is perceived through a single body moving along a single line in time. But the marvel of the story is that this experience is never only linear. There are others moving through the same framework of space and time; theres the potential for repetition, forking, interface; and theres the wonderful phenomenon of memory, this constant regression into mental spaces and projection of those associations into our perception of the world.
- Theater and simulation; Theres also the question of the inherent artificiality of experience. By simply attempting to impose upon a space any kind of narrative structure youre accepting a kind of falseness. This has been explored through art and literature for centuries and there are like a million directions you could go with this.
- Drama; I tend to think the most important thing about a story is mystery. Telling a good story is less about what you show and when you show it, and more about what you hide and how you hide it. However this bears itself out in your experience and construction of the building, I think its hugely important to know what youre allowing people to see and what youre not allowing them to see, and when and why youre doing it.
- Medium; I think its important that you know "where" your story is. Is it a story of stagecraft? Like the danteum? Where the architecture is simply an artificial landscape, a set for action between human characters? Is it a symbolic story between the building and the viewer like carlo scarpa? Is it a structural story? Like Eisenman's kind of artifacts of a story of composition? Is it in some other realm?
And Modz, what you got so far?
didn't architecture itself stop directly narrating once ornament was declared a crime?
Quite obviously not?
i mean, narrating stories, histories, mythologies.
and what architecture can do, in the absence of the skin potential for figurative or textual illustration, is to become a spatial guessing game between architect and user?
what am i implying here, what do i mean by that detail there, what does this remind you of....
and always what is implicated is architecture's ability or inability to refer to the external world and this is a great source of anxiousness that is made all too obvious by the manner by which students struggle to translate their literary ideas into architecture. more experienced people revert to architecture itself as an external reference, or art movements, or drawing metaphors and similarities out of science....
as such, i don't thing it is narrative that holds architecture together as its anxious will to reflect the external world.
from the side of the user as well, spatial immersion is not similar to textual or filmic immersion. in space, i am a variegated subjectivity, my senses victim to their own whims and prejudices follow myriad traces. as a reader or viewer, however, my sense follows the linear indexical print that converges my subjectivity into a linear run of words or linear animation of pictures. even if those words and pictures are characterized by a post modern fragmentary sensibility.
OE, i started a thread with my inquiry...
http://www.archinect.com/forum/threads.php?id=87781_0_42_0_C
Well I dont think architecture needs literally to refer to existing stories to be narrative in nature. Id even argue that every building is at some level a narrative experience, whether thats the central design intent or not, in that the user experiences a linear process of having the space revealed to them. I dont think one needs refer really at all to historical imagery to employ narrative and linguistic methods and structures. The element of surprise, the narrative arc, juxtaposition, these are all hugely useful tools in architecture that are all about using space to 'tell a story'.
And certainly theres a difference between reading a book or watching a film and being in a space, but how relevant is that difference when it comes to architecture? Is the gap between text and film really larger than the gap between film and architecture? They are all (at some level) planned sequences of images and sensations, all hugely subject to interpretation, all mailable and intertwined with the viewers familiarities. The mental, cognitive content, in other words, the process of molding an experiential map, is extraordinarily similar, only fundamentally different in the mechanics through which we receive it.
I dont think we need to give the high-hat to this right? I mean is Eisenman really more sophisticated than the paris opera house? Frankly I often find the exercise in final fact kind of academic and static.
oe: Is the gap between text and film really larger than the gap between film and architecture?
what i said was that the gap between film and text is smaller than that between architecture and film/text. I'm not sure, therefore, whether this coment was apropos my post or not.
anyway, what text and film share as features are a frame and a structuring device that are far more overt than that incurring the experience of architecture, whose overall frame is less overt and more intangible. what sets architecture apart is that it is possible to background its artificiality and to blur the boundary, the frame, marking its province as an injection of opinion and design. as animals, we can sleep and shit in it, fuck and be sick in it....architecture, as well as being a consolidated end result of culture and subjectivity from the viewpoint of the cultured 'reader' and the designer, is also an incidental banal and meaningless found-environment (which is as banal as the found-object minus aesthetic stupifaction) for our instincts.
also i believe there is still this propensity to lump up after-architecture, during-architecture and before-architecture into one messy pile of claims.
as for 'spatial-experience', i doubt that either the phenomenological i.e. during-architecture (which precedes the logic of narrative construction) or the semiotic (which is synchronized with and after (in varying layers of meanings) narrative constrution) allow for the logic of narrative to set in during the experience of architecture, which is the first moment that kaleidescopically bridges the animal experience to the human imagination thereafter to be framed and subtilitled as a cultured experience which we then, denying our savage immoral animality, confuse for the initial state of our experience and our being. for a sensibility of what is primary and initial in the state of being human, phenomenology is just soooo polite.
and double-foldingly, "art criticism", seems burdened with somber gravitas that, in the sensibility for the secondary to devour the initial obliviously (as in art/the artificial devouring life and becoming pronouncements on life, art criticism devours art and becomes pronouncements on art AND pronouncements on life). a sensibility that always praises the integrated, the ascending order of subtitling (or sur-titling actually) over the childlike, the kaleidescopic, the essentially meaningless but impressionably charged.
and therefore perhaps what we should mean to say is that the first moment of experiencing architecture is the second moment after we realize "this is architecture"...which probably takes a few moments before.
ok, i'm off to work on my abs now.
architectural narrative may have nothing to do with words. habits, practices, innate material tendencies (viscosity, friability...) are a kind of narrative that doesn't occur during the design except as speculation.
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