http://archinect.com/forum/thread/100885/architecture-and-word-a-new-method

FABULA_architecture wishes to reintroduce words and story as a guide to the design and to the thought of form.

FABULA_architecture is a method that all architects can apply, as a basic theoretical formula, to their projects, to their style. (*)

FABULA_architecture provides, as the first phase of the project, for the selection of 1 story: novel, comic strip, essay, poem, biography.

On this pathway, the text and the story become part of the design of the architectural structure, are contained in it. "Contained in it" means that they remain subsets fit into a broader set. This passage is fundamental to keep - as is often the case - words and story from conditioning the project in an absolute way, either by absence or by presence. In the architecture of the "less is more" and of "ornament and crime" they are external - by absence - residing in the theoretical texts, and constituting the premise that constrains the design in a subtraction of narration that is concretized in the extreme simplification of forms. On the contrary, in the architecture of theme amusement parks, of a certain Postmodern, of Revival and Neo Renaissance, it is the story, its illustration, that comes out from a subset determining - by presence - the design of the entire building. In FABULA_architecture the subset function is thus fundamental.

How can a novel, an essay, a comic strip etc... become a subset? In various possible ways:

- Reduction, as in stencil-graffiti art - sticker art, of part of the text to a synthetic image modularly repeated in subsets within the project (to underline architectural details), a sort of logo of the building.

- Summary of the novel into various passages of images to be fitted as formal elements into subsets that dialogue with the project design.

- Fitting parts of text into the external and internal structure.

- Elements drawn from writing (letters etc...) and their location in the "layout" of the architectural forms.

- Writings-images-brands that refer back to the text.

- Descriptive images of the history fitted into subsets utilized as design motifs inscribed in the architectural form: junctions on the external and internal surfaces. The logical succession of spaces becomes temporal succession, film.

- Images of the story placed according to the logical order of the rhetorical figures.

- Make function and word into a binary system continually in relation in the set/subset dialectic.

- Storyboard and structure proceed in a single sequence.

FABULA_architecture must not be confused with decoration and ornament.

FABULA_architecture is/is-not words.

FABULA_architecture broaches a dialectical thought between set and subsets, function and words.

For FABULA_architecture a building represents 1 machine for all the actions it encloses: entering, leaving, appearing, walking etc.... The surfaces of a construction are brackets (round, square) that delimit events, histories, actions: a matryoshka. The architecture produces narration, contains words. This is the starting point, the base on which FABULa_architecture articulates a structure.

(*) FABULA_architecture is/is-not an architectural style.