Building Stories

While storytelling is about the construction of a story by setting up a timeline of events, design is based on the construction of a physical narration by organising spatial relationships. This paper builds up an analogy between storytelling and spatial design processes. It ponders on the effects of the available means and technologies on these undertakings. We look back to the emergence of media that have significantly influenced the design thinking of their time and we trace three categories of design tools that narrate different types of stories. Representational tools express visually an image first conceived in the architect’s mind, conveying stories of desirable lifestyles. Especially throughout the last decades the process of creating that vision has been influenced by the emergence of digital design tools that are able to algorithmically generate architectural forms. Through their use, the narration element becomes strongly incorporated into the design process perhaps at the expense of the final result, becoming inaccessible to those who do not have the access to the code or the ability to understand it. Finally, the most recent development is found in what we define as “animating” tools. The use of new media to create immersive and multilayered spatial experiences and interactive stories, that stems neither from an architect’s vision, nor from a computer’s algorithmic process, but from the layering of information and experiences by a multitude of inputs.

Introduction

“When a place is lifeless or unreal, there is almost always a mastermind behind it. It is so filled with the will of its maker that there is no room for its own nature.” – Christopher Alexander

In October 2012, in an exhibition at Yale School of Architecture, revisiting Palladio’s work, Peter Eisenman proposed a novel reading of the renowned classical architect’s work, not based on previous formal analysis but on the traces of the design process. He built in models and redrew his villas based on sketches and drawings that never made it to the final stage of the design, which was eventually realized. The architectural design process, a layering of drawings, models and texts is itself a story of how these villas reached their final form and a record of the designer’s doubts, trials and errors – an inner discussion on the building’s architectural expression, which later becomes so much of a meaningful storyteller on its own.

As Anthony Vidler comments in a review of the day “Eisenman’s point, one which has been a consistent leitmotif of his theoretical practice from the beginning, is to open up what he calls ‘the possibility of an architecture’, one that emerges from a ‘redrawing of the very boundaries of the discipline’, a constant comprehension of undecidability, and an awareness of indeterminacy that underlies the architectural project from the outset. Eisenman’s contemporary quest, that is consciously bound to unending irresolution, is aimed toward an architecture of formal ideas that live through the process of design, and continue to live through construction, and posthumous idealisation, in all the potential states represented by three-dimensional models, object, texts and drawings.” (Vidler, 2012)

Architecture has always been considered a carrier of messages. Stories and buildings have been tied up together since the beginning of the conscious formation of space and the first attempts to understand the world around us. Nowadays this relationship becomes not only tighter but also more complex as the use of information technologies adds up to this already intricate correlation. But what Eisenmann brings into focus, perhaps for the first time in such a scale, is the stories hidden in the process of giving shape to the space around us.

Architectural Design as Storytelling

Storytelling is a process that establishes and develops connections between one’s past experiences and those of others. (Frascari, 2012: 224) Since the prehistoric times it has served as one of the most powerful cognitive tools that help us make judgements about things and events, based on the emotions stirred by a story. Consequently storytelling, as buildings, has always been a carrier of ideas and thoughts that were a result of this comprehension, evoking emotions not by composition of plots but by composition of sets, where plots could and would play out. But while a narrative is constructed as a timeline of events, the architecture is constructed as a set of spatial relationships defining human action, which is its basic concern, in the same way it is the basic concern of stories. (Chi, 1991: 84) Naturally architecture can be understood as storytelling, not only because it serves as a set for plots and a container of them, but also because it becomes a subject to a historical analysis. What we can see in Eisenman’s re-reading of Palladio’s work, is an interesting twist on a classical historical reading of architecture as a spatial construct. What is intriguing in it, is that Eisenman looked at the design process as a construction of that story. The design process revealed by him unfolds a tale of what the coordinator of that process, the architect, imagined as the future ideal inhabitation conditions. How he was struggling to identify the beauty and the most meaningful emotions that should be expressed in the ideal surrounding. Identifying a building as a beautiful artefact, corresponds however to more than a purely aesthetic judgement; it suggests an attraction towards the lifestyle promoted by the architecture. It is implied by the spatial organisation of the rooms, the movement, the size and position of the openings and even the furnishing. Imagining oneself conducting everyday life inside a space signifies a material expression of one’s ideals of a good life. It could be said that while architecture is capable of telling stories about past and present, the architectural design is by definition telling a story about the future and its construction. This paper will specifically focus on this part of architectural practice and the manifestation of storytelling through architectural design, with a special focus on its new dimensions that were made possible by the introduction of the digital media.

While the process of imagining and visualizing architecture has not changed structurally for centuries, it has been strongly influenced by the different media that were available at any given time in history. The tools architects have been using to communicate their work are primarily visual. They sketch out ideas, draw plans and sections and produce 3d renderings of their buildings. They also build physical models and create film animations of the experience of walking through their buildings many of which are discarded along the way. The various tools that architects have been using to tell their stories about the future spaces they had in mind, digital or not, have had influence on the eventual narrative. The paper will therefore first introduce a brief genealogy of prominent architectural tools, which will serve as a background for examining what they have allowed and emphasized, what kind of buildings did they lead to, what chances did they give and what did they dismiss. Further, an extrapolation of these observations will be made to study the digital tools currently available and speculate on the different ways of incorporating them in the storytelling of the design process.

Representational tools

“Powerful narrative techniques help architects to introduce new designs, strategies for conceiving buildings and changes in plans.” (Frascari, 2012: 225)

Examined below are four cornerstone events that marked breakthroughs in by the discovery of new representational tools that influenced the development of architectural design as a storytelling process, that is: the invention of perspective drawing, implementation of section, axonometric drawing and eventually digital 3d modelling and visualization.

Even if there are several objections (Hoffmann, 2010: 5) as to whether the perspective was actually re-invented by Brunelleschi’s painting experiment[1] in 1420 in Florence, it remains undoubtful that linear perspective, as popularised by Alberti, who replaced Brunelleschi’s mirror with a gridded window, radically influenced Renaissance art and architecture. Furthermore it possibly played a key role to the development of the scientific revolution of the 16th century. Perspective allowed renaissance architecture to become pictorial, seeking to produce perfect images focused on one particular gaze and painting became synonymous with the act of seeing. (Belting, 2010: 522) By exploiting the laws of vision, people could finally depict the world perfectly and attain a God’s eye perspective, gradually bringing this divine privilege into a secular context. (Hayton, 2011: 383)

The section, one of the most commonly used representational views in modern design drawings, only started to be widely used in the late renaissance. Its proliferation coincided with the break of the taboo of dissecting the human body. Dissecting a building created a dialogue between the cutting surface and the depth shown behind and thus allowed for the interior to be disconnected from the exterior. In english the word section means both the “cut” and the “fragment”. Till then the buildings were designed mainly in plan and perspective views; the parallel projection of the section allowed the interiors to be worked out as independent surfaces. (Manolidis, 2006: 188) The architectural section can also be seen as an example of the development of a tool that also stood in line with the rules of composition used during the Renaissance. The beauty of the the whole was defined by the perfect proportions of its parts as if they were autonomous objects. Consequently, the buildings were not only designed as perfect in plan and elevation, but in section as well. Even though the buildings would hardly ever be seen in such an abstract situation, it allowed for a better understanding of volume and depth that together with the perspective drawing has had a large influence on the theatrical experiments of light and shadow developed later in Baroque.

In the early 20th century, the axonometric drawing became the symbol of the modern movement. Contrary to the single point perspective view that has been the main representational tool of the 19th century, the parallel perspective used in the axonometric allowed for the measurable elements to remain in scale while maintaining the same level of detail through out the drawing. It was a method of representation that, according to Gropius, (Amerikanou, 2006: 217) was able to join the atmosphere of a space and the line drawing. It allowed to avoid the disadvantages of the latter (concerning perception) without compromising the possibility to directly measure dimensions. The axonometric declared the independence of the wall and established the surface as a new architectural element. Its technical nature favorited a strict and minimal expression, which came to be the defining language in modernist narrative.