Everyone loves a good story.
The power of stories lies in storytelling’s basic premise: a lucid medium, as integral as language itself, that conveys meaning. Stories elevate meaning to an experience that is understandable, relatable and reachable to a wide audience. A story is predicated on a plot that is, in its most basic form, an arc of events that starts with an exposition, escalates into a climax and eventually reaches a denouement.
Architecture, as a discipline and as a realised space, is a treasure trove of stories past and stories yet to come. What buildings mean, how they came about and how they will influence future events is something of great interest to so many people. The characters in architecture are diverse: The architect, the client, the user, the consultant, the planner and the historical characters associated with it are to name but a few. Most projects find resonance in the structure of a story plot: The site or context is presented, challenges are faced along the way in the gruelling design process and a denouement manifests itself in a proposal that may or may not be built. An architect is the narrator of the story as well as having the choice of being a character in it. The architect as narrator is both someone whose imagination contributed to the conjuring up of the story but also someone who taps into a staggering collective legacy of accumulated knowledge of language, culture, style and shared experience. What is interesting is that the architect, perhaps inevitably, ends up as an unreliable narrator since not only are architects potentially influenced by their subconscious stylistic biases stemming from personal experience, but also spaces take a life of their own once a building reaches practical completion, far beyond - or even in antithesis to - the meaning that their creators intended. In his article The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes argues that the author of the text is anyone reading and interpreting it rather than the originator since the personal meaning that the reader imbues the text with keeps recreating it.
So how is this relevant to the architectural profession?
We have been taught a trade that intimately permeates everyone’s lives. We are the guardians of an experience that everyone relates to in varying degrees and yet are we aware of it? What we learn at university first and foremost is the ability to narrate stories and convey meaning. Harnessing the power of stories is key to unlocking the potential of the profession. Selling people the experiences or rather the potential of experiences is the cornerstone of what we do and this is quantifiable and potentially very lucrative; yet, the architectural profession, by and large, turns its back on this to focus on production. Architects have been conditioned by their profession to feel ashamed of their discipline. Many architects felt that it was a rite of passage to relinquish design as a service - and this comprises narrative - in favour of concentrating on the construction aspects of their trade, the same aspects that have been outsourced to contractors specifically to allow architects to focus on what they do best. Instead, most architects hang on to production and strip their profession of particularly what makes it unique: The stories it tells and those it lays the grounds for. The theory we are taught at university is meant to be the strongest weapon in our arsenal, to decode and manipulate language and culture, to master communication at both the conscious and subconscious levels and ultimately to anchor what we do as an indispensable facet of people’s lives. This is either abandoned professionally or relegated to elitist, academic ivory towers rather than being employed as business acumen. Obsessing about waterproofing details or lintel schedules is not what wins us work or elevates our fees. Tapping into and having the power to influence people’s desires, aspirations, social mobility, coveted lifestyles and keeping up with the Joneses does. Such is the consumerist culture that governs our lives.
What is actually worse than abandoning storytelling is reducing it to a caricature, as formulaic as consultant trackers. Although genuine and well-intentioned efforts have been made to flesh out narrative out of architecture in the form of a Design and Access Statement where the proposed intervention needs to have an urban story about it and how it meets practical matters as well; however, most design and access statements feel like they only pay lip service to narrative, as another box to tick and make way for the important aspects like K10 packages. In fact, most design and access statements feel like the text version of the home improvement shows of the 1990s: the existing building is a disaster. We are tearing it down and replacing it with something more contextual. Find any tenuous Georgian reference. Hang on. This is a bit bland. Let’s add a dash of colour to make a statement and a masterpiece is born.
Not quite.
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