Narrative Architecture E-Book

Nigel Coates

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Architectural Design Primer
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 229

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The first book to look architectural narrative in the eye

Since the early eighties, many architects have used the term "narrative" to describe their work. To architects the enduring attraction of narrative is that it offers a way of engaging with the way a city feels and works. Rather than reducing architecture to mere style or an overt emphasis on technology, it foregrounds the experiential dimension of architecture. Narrative Architecture explores the potential for narrative as a way of interpreting buildings from ancient history through to the present, deals with architectural background, analysis and practice as well as its future development.

• Authored by Nigel Coates, a foremost figure in the field of narrative architecture, the book is one of the first to address this subject directly
• Features architects as diverse as William Kent, Antoni Gaudí, Eero Saarinen, Ettore Sottsass, Superstudio, Rem Koolhaas, and FAT to provide an overview of the work of NATO and Coates, as well as chapters on other contemporary designers
• Includes over 120 colour photographs

Signposting narrative's significance as a design approach that can aid architecture to remain relevant in this complex, multi-disciplinary and multi-everything age, Narrative Architecture is a must-read for anyone with an interest in architectural history and theory.

Leseprobe

This edition first published 2012

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Executive Commissioning Editor: Helen Castle Project Editor: Miriam Swift Assistant Editor: Calver Lezama

ISBN 978-0-470-05745-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-470-05744-5 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-119-96320-2 (ebk) ISBN 978-1-119-96306-6 (ebk) ISBN 978-1-119-96307-3 (ebk) ISBN 978-1-119-94348-8 (ebk)

Acknowledgements

Though limited in scale, this book has been a long time in the making. I first agreed to write it in 2006, the year in which Branson Coates Architecture evolved into Nigel Coates Studio. Far from weakening my argument, the passage of time has strengthened the thesis. It has allowed me to include many subsequent examples of narrative in practice and some of the most inventive projects done by students at the Royal College of Art while I was Professor of Architecture there. I am grateful to all the contributors of projects included, and to Howard Watson for his picture research in the early stages. I would like to extend my thanks to: Mark Garcia for his help in making an initial mapping of the subject; Helen Castle for her patience and detailed notes; and Will Hunter for his editorial overview and guidance in formulating the present structure. Thanks are due also to Amber Jeavons for delving into my studio archives, to Caroline Ellerby for her rigorous image management, and to Abigail Grater for overseeing the copy-editing stage. Lastly I would like to thank John Maybury, my partner in all creative ventures, and without whose tireless encouragement and literary lightness of touch, this modest work would not have come into being.

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1 The Long Perspective

Chapter 2 Radical Terrain

Chapter 3 NATO

Chapter 4 Story Buildings

Chapter 5 Practice in Person

Chapter 6 Pure ‘Narrativity’

Epilogue

Bibliography

Key Search Terms

Preface

The Author beginneth his Hypnerotomachia, to set downe the hower and time when in his sleepe it seemed to him that hee was in a quiet solitarie desart, and uninhabited plaine, and from thence afterward how he entered unadvisedly before he was aware, with great feare, into a darke obscure and unfrequented wood.

Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 14991

Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Venice, Italy, 1499.

One of the first great achievements of print, this extraordinary Renaissance book combines text and woodcut to create a captivating vision. Struggling through the dark wood of medieval thought, its protagonist Poliphilo searches for his love but stumbles on mysterious temples and Dionysian rites.

Architecture is too big to hide. Even the ugliest buildings reveal something of the culture that made them, the faults there for all to see. Yet architecture is also a powerful instrument, a potent medium for democratic, religious or political power. From the humble house to the tallest tower, designers want their buildings to stand on tiptoes, to reach that bit higher than a response to utility. Desire is part of architecture’s language; few would deny that every civilisation makes the most of its buildings. From the Incas of pre-Columbian America to the indigenous Ainu of Japan, from New York to New Delhi, from Dublin to Dubai, every culture looks to architecture for enduring messages, and to a certain articulation of life itself. Narrative provides a way of coming face to face with architecture in the ‘dark and unfrequented wood’ of the anything-goes culture of our times.

When civilisations clash, it is not just the people that suffer, but the infrastructure, the landscape and, of course, the buildings. Ancient Babylon was finally obliterated by the last Iraq war. In the wake of destruction, wars also make way for renewal. In the wake of the destruction of the Wall, Berlin was reshaped in a form that expresses German aspirations for a new society. Historically architecture may be divided into styles, but there are other less synchronised rhythms that mean that architecture is subject to a version of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Going beyond manifestations of style, 19th-century Paris, with its broad avenues and galleries lined with boutiques, expresses the bourgeois need for observation and display. To understand the dynamics of architecture you need to fully surround yourself by its complex and often bewildering phenomena.

Whether in the service of power or vernacular commodity, architecture cannot avoid materialising the literature of cities. For every society, it always speaks a kind of lingua franca. Buildings have their own narratives: from the first impulse to build, to their realisation and prime, and to their decline. Like nature, architecture constantly dies and renews itself within the cultural ecosystem that makes up cities. So much can be read through buildings. As Edward Hollis says: ‘Buildings long outlive the purposes for which they were built, the technologies by which they were constructed, and the aesthetics that determined their form; and soon enough their form and their function have little to do with one another.’2

Perhaps, in the early decades of the 20th century, people and populations were thrown into such turmoil that Modernist clean lines represented a way out of the embroiled hell they were living through. With the pluralism and the postmodern reflection that emerged in the closing decades of the last century, with the pull of embracing history, inevitably the many voices of a mixed society would be reflected in the way we build.

This book is partly an attempt to explore the potential for narrative as a way of interpreting buildings, but also signposts the way to architecture that is relevant to a multi-disciplinary and multi-everything age. Within this messy, complicated, multi-layered but ultimately exhilarating everyday world, it outlines what ‘narrative architecture’ is and its wider significance for designing and appreciating buildings.

In exploring narrative, I have no preordained theory from which a new architecture can spring. My approach summarises the intuitive response that some of us had when we formed the architecture group Narrative Architecture Today (NATO) almost 30 years ago. Rather than diminishing, this first insight has turned into a steadily growing body of research that underscores the cultural rather than the scientific trajectory of architectural ideas. The term has since been absorbed into everyday culture, and is as common in news reports on subjects ranging from politics to sport. But in architecture I think it has a particular meaning beyond an overarching theme. It denotes a sensibility and a way of working that sets out to incorporate human nature into its method. In pursuit of meaning rather than performance, it frames an architecture that takes account of human experiences and the need to shape them into stories. It starts and ends with how people interact first and foremost with their environment, and in the process of responding to it and yielding to it, map their experiences in a mental space that architects need to understand, and possibly make use of.

Happy to hide behind archetypal forms like the pitched-roof shed/house/temple and the vertically thrusting tower/chimney/block, most architecture today deliberately avoids emotional engagement with its user. Alternatively narrative in architecture can fulfil not only a psychological need but a functional need as well. It is becoming a minimum requirement rather than an artistic and unnecessary add-on. Throughout a lifelong attachment to the discipline of architecture, I have been looking to break out of its closed-circuit audience to make it more relevant to the city dweller, understanding and developing strategies for bringing this into the process of design.

I begin this enquiry by looking at the evolution of narrative from what we now see as architectural history, and at the physical and psychological role of narrative in the cities we currently inhabit – as phenomenology. Narrative is a theme that is writ large in the social dynamics of our times; semiotic understanding of language, communication and identity has brought us virtually to the point where the language of architecture and those of advertising and the media cross over into one another’s territories. Concepts of narrative are built into the post-millennial language of architectural debate, but relatively few of these concepts are organised in print. This book is not meant to be the last word on the subject, but more a primer that will encourage others to add to or contradict the interpretation of narrative that I have arrived at through my experience as a designer, academic and curious onlooker.

Each of the following chapters examines narrative in architecture from a particular vantage point. From beginning to end, the book loosely follows a chronological structure citing key events, designs and buildings. But within this, a taxonomy emerges. It is intended to help the reader make use of narrative as a methodology, one that is particularly suited to design in an age of communication.

References

1 Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Venice, 1499, first English edition published in London, 1592.

2 Edward Hollis, The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories, Portobello Books (London), 2009, p 9.

Chapter 1

The Long Perspective

The terms ‘narrative’ and ‘architecture’ may not at first seem to be natural bedfellows. In today’s sense they suffer from slightly oppositional problems: the former proliferated and diluted, the latter restricted and reduced. In the media, reference to ‘narrative’ is now so commonplace as to evade meaning. In its tightest form it indicates a literary sensibility, but often dissolves simply into an ‘idea’. In the communication age, narration invades the everyday: ‘What’s happening?’ is a question answered by every tweet on Twitter.

Much 20th-century architecture pursued an abstract aesthetic that married well with functional ideals. Modernism celebrated the fact that it had broken free from the ‘tyranny’ of decoration. And yet despite this, the built environment inevitably ‘communicates’ – it cannot avoid doing so. Like nature the city can speak primordially, its fabric tacitly conveying its rich and potent history. A financial centre – the City of London, or New York – expresses its economic power through its glossy tallness as much as derelict buildings disclose their story of decline.

And we have stories of our own; the curious citizen can easily discover architectural narrative everywhere. Narratives arise spontaneously in the course of navigating the world – from inside to outside, private to public, personal experience to collective myth. This reading of architecture doesn’t require an architect to have ‘written’ it. Even unplanned settlements such as shantytowns or medieval villages contain complex narrative content; for an inhabitant they will configure a three-dimensional map of social relations, possible dangers and past events. Mental maps situate fragments in a time–space continuum: a house where you once lived, or the scene of an accident. The city constitutes a rich theatre of memory that melds all the senses in ways that suit every single one of us, in our capacity to combine instinct and knowledge, rational understanding and the imagination.

Personal narratives build on the cognitive mechanisms that arise from existing places and spaces. Narrative has its roots in the world we inhabit, and occurs at the interface between our own experience and complex signs, like the little red pointers that smother other data on Google maps. It does not necessarily manifest as appearance; the fields in Flanders where so many First World War battles took place have an emotional significance as a site of loss but today look much like any other. We are walking encyclopaedias of architecture not because we’ve shaped it, but because we experience it.

This chapter asks how narrative applies to architecture. We shall see how narrative in space as opposed to literature or cinema has a firm basis in the way each of us learns to navigate and map the world around us. Within the framework of these personal spatial geometries, we will explore how narrative constructs can engage with the medium of space. This will provide a framework for how architecture can be invested with narrative as a means to give it meaning based on experience.

Narrative: from storytelling to spatial practice

Storytelling is as old as the hills. Even before the help of writing, universal myths were shaped by the oral tradition. From the Songlines of the Australian Aboriginals to the proto-myths of the Greeks, mankind has searched for answers to the mysteries of the universe, painting them on walls and encapsulating them in stories. Narratives enabled phenomena powered by the unseen forces of nature to be ‘explained’, and corralled into a system of beliefs. Their overarching themes lie at the heart of the major religions. Narratives that personify ethical or existential questions have profoundly shaped our understanding of space; these mythical tales and parables have the power to mediate between the spatial configuration of the universe, of heaven and hell, and the everyday world and its reality of survival, sustenance and territory. Within the framework of these spatial geometries, narratives can engage with the medium of space, and form the basis on which architecture can be given meaning.

With roots in the Latin verb ‘narrare’, a narrative organises events of a real or fictional nature into a sequence recounted by the ‘narrator’. Along with exposition, argumentation and description, narration is one of four categories of rhetoric. The constructed format of a narrative can extend beyond speech to poetry, singing, writing, drama, cinema and games. Narration shapes and simplifies events into a sequence that can stimulate the imagination, and with its understanding comes the possibility of the story being retold – verbally, pictorially or spatially. Though they may involve shifts of time, location and circumstance as the dynamics of a plot unfold, for the viewer or the reader, stories progress along a sequential trajectory.

In architecture the linearity of the narrative function dissolves as the spatial dimension interferes with time. In architectural space coherent plot lines or prescribed experiential sequences are unusual. The narrative approach depends on a parallel code that adds depth to the basic architectural language. In a conventional narrative structure, events unfold in relation to a temporal metre, but in architecture the time element is always shifting in response to the immutability of the physical structure. While permanence should be celebrated as a particularly architectural quality, inevitably we should be curious about its opposite. The difference between a mere image and a work of art lies partly in its endurance – of existence but also of meaning. In architecture, that endurance is both positive and negative, depending on whether the public buys into it or not.

The various physical parts of a space signify as a result of the actions – and experiences – of the participant, who assembles them into a personal construct. The narrative coefficient resides in a system of triggers that signify poetically, above and in addition to functionality. Narrative means that the object contains some ‘other’ existence in parallel with its function. This object has been invested with a fictional plane of signification that renders it fugitive, mercurial and subject to interpretation. If a conventional narrative in a work of fiction binds characters, events and places within an overarching plot framework, in an environment narrative carries all of the above, but the fictional or self-constructed might be tested against physical reality. Narrative ‘fictionalises’ our surroundings in an accentuation of explicit ‘reality’.

Like the system of trip wires and pressure-sensitive buttons hidden in the folds of a Baroque fountain, narrative in architecture is rarely a prescribed sequence of meanings, but is instead an anti-sequential ‘framework’ of associative meanings held in wait to ‘drench’ the unsuspecting visitor. In whatever form, it communicates subtly and unpredictably, and often works better when hidden rather than overt. In a physical environment, narrative construes what philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco (b 1932) calls a ‘connotative’ rather than a ‘denotive’ meaning that is close to function. The temple represents the god it houses rather than the denotive meaning of the act of worship.1 In a world of postmodern, post-Structuralist understanding, the term ‘narrative’ has come to signify a level of meaning that substantiates the object, and yet contains an animated inner quality that interprets human events in relation to place.

The beginnings of architecture have been variously interpreted as the primitive hut,2 or – according to Eco – the recognition that a cave can provide protection and shelter.3 By the time the cave or the hut had fully formed as concepts, they must have featured as anecdotal homes. Myths and religions alike narrate the origin of the world in terms of everyday phenomena: in light and dark, in landscape and animals, and in men with supernatural powers. Since architecture can be manipulated and interpreted through narrative, it follows that the architect can invest architecture with a proportion of narrative alongside a response to the context and the programme of activities. Ancient temples of course tell stories, or highlights from them, as any visitor to the Louvre or the British Museum will appreciate.

Indeed, it is buildings that need the most potent symbolic content which make the most use of narrative strategies. Churches accumulate narrative as a result of the desire to reflect the story of God in every way possible, including the configuring of the body of Christ in their plan, their decoration, painting and sculpture. Northern Europe’s great medieval cathedrals also tell complex stories of configuration, veneration and extremes of heaven and hell. With the help of the pointed arch, the multiple column and the flying buttress, every Gothic cathedral exhibits a rational organisation of the world through its geometry and, with its enormous soaring windows, the ‘light of heaven’. Every aspect of these buildings has symbolic purpose, from the cruciform plan to details of capitals and windows.

Despite architecture usually being thought of as the art of articulating spaces, connotative meanings abound in its multi-various territories, and have done so from the outset. In architecture, narrative is a term that has risen in usage since the mid-1980s, but to grasp its implications, it would be valuable to visit some examples drawn from disconnected historical and physical contexts. What follows is distinctly not a history but a series of vignettes drawn from diverse times and places that together help define a context for narrative in architecture as an approach to practice. They are separated into the three gestalts; each one reveals narrative as the translation of a narrative spirit into a tangible, physical form.

Narrative awakenings

In the Palazzo Pubblico, the town hall of Siena in Italy, there is a frescoed state room that celebrates the relationship between the populus and its government, as had been expressed in the writings of contemporary chronicler Dino Compagni (c 1255–1324). The cycle of frescoes, The Allegory and Effects of Good and Bad Government, was painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (c 1290–1348) in the mid-14th century at a time when there was a need to stabilise civic ambitions. These two paintings representing good and bad face each other on opposite walls.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Allegory of Good Government, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, Italy, 1338–40.

One of three major frescoes that together make up the Sala dei Nove, this televisual composition uses the framework of Siena’s collective architecture to weave daily events typical of a harmonious society.

In the Allegory of Good Government everyday life is portrayed as a set of events occurring simultaneously. Unlike the extraordinary, usually religious occurrences represented in most painting of the period, this is an everyday scene with no apparent mishaps or strife. A narrative dimension builds on the commonplace. As opposed to blueprints of the architectural kind, in the painting the buildings constitute a backdrop, and in many ways their purpose was exactly that – a naturalistic mise en scène for the families that lived, and hopefully flourished, in and between them. On the opposite wall, the Effects of Bad Government includes decaying buildings, burning and a lot of cloak-and-dagger stuff. The painter’s use of the whole room as a conceptual matrix reinforces this dialogue between good and bad. Although flattened by its blocked representational technique, the sense of space in these frescoes is palpable, with people in the foreground and buildings and towers in a very three-dimensional middle distance. Despite the absence of precise architectural representation, Lorenzetti employed a plausible vocabulary of building types. You can sense the narrow alleyways between the buildings, reinforcing what you might experience when walking back through the city. This room establishes a thoroughly accurate ‘narrative’ that has relevance today.

In mid-15th-century Florence, Giovanni Rucellai, head of a prominent wool merchant family, commissioned Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72), the leading exponent of the classical revival that came to be known as the Renaissance, to build a palace where, according to Rucellai’s testimonial, ‘out of eight houses, I made one’.4 Alberti and his contemporaries were experimenting with building in the style of earlier, more poignant classical models. His design for the Palazzo Rucellai (1446–51) took its cue for the treatment of the orders of its pilasters from the Coliseum in Rome, with Tuscan capitals on the ground floor, Ionic on the first floor and Corinthian on the second. Rediscovered classicism was at the cutting edge of contemporary thinking to the extent of obsession and bitter rivalry.

Ancient Forum, Rome, Italy.

In its suspended ruined state, the Foro Romano – with its earliest parts dating back to around the 8th century BC – still captures the need for a civilisation to visualise its mythical narratives, which are all the more seductive since they have to be rediscovered through the mists of archaeology and conjecture.

The facade of the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella (completed 1470), where Alberti also intervened on behalf of the Rucellai, famously charts this transformation of ideas, with Gothic arches near the ground level of an original 13th-century elevation, and higher up, his classical pilasters and a magnificent simplified pediment. Here the classical narrative of a harmonious rediscovered world had a new invigorating power. While it drew on past glories, it enabled a degree of order and refinement absent from most medieval buildings. More importantly it provided a readymade narrative vocabulary with which Florence could give substance to its cultural, political and ethical ideals. As though reversing the process of ruination, Alberti completed the retrospective Gothic foundation of this facade with visionary forward-looking classicism.

According to the evidence, in ancient Rome they were good at lacing buildings with narrative. As if postmodern – or should I say post-classical – in their own time, ancient Romans looked backwards and eastwards towards their cultural forebears, to Egypt and Greece. Many of their finest sculptures are based on now-lost Greek originals; in every Roman territory, buildings complied with Greek prototypes. Architects and sculptors relished enlarging and improving Greek models, and investing them with a mythological aura. On a visit to the Forum in Rome, it is not difficult to picture the intensity of this place as it was: with every conceivable deity housed in its temples, political life in its courts and palaces, fruits of the empire in the markets, and triumphant routes marked by massive arches and columns. Conversely, in every imperial outpost, an engineer’s precision imposed infrastructure, militaristic control and enslavement. Architecture was understood as both organiser and communicator, and was used to the full. Even today the ruins of the Forum stack narrative high. Within this now museumised, cordoned off enclave, terraces are still laden with craggy remains and truncated columns. Outside the modern fence containing it, traffic thunders along the Viale dei Fori Imperiali, past snack vans and modern gladiators in leggings and trainers. The modern tourist city has built this heritage into its mythology.

The Roman emperor Hadrian (AD 76–138) provided perhaps the first example of a consciously narrative disposition of buildings, spaces and landscapes that freely represent faraway places. In a bid to protect himself from the tumult of Rome itself, he remodelled landscapes experienced on campaigns in the Middle East, and rebuilt them in miniature at his villa a few kilometres outside the capital at Tivoli. His objective was not only to build an isolated compound at a comfortable distance from the city, but also to reconnect it to places that otherwise would have been consigned to memory.

William Kent, Rousham House landscaping, Oxfordshire, England, 1738–41: garden and stream.

Not only do classical moments occur in strategic slopes and clearings, but the visitor is guided by a flowing stream only a few inches wide; an artery for the life force that flows through the entire garden.

It was many centuries later that Tivoli proved an inspiration for a group of British designers. In the early half of the 18th century, William Kent (c 1685–1748) and his followers discovered the Arcadian narrative of evocative decline at Tivoli, and how it corresponded to the cultural and social aspirations of the owners of some of England’s country houses. At Chiswick House in West London (built and landscaped to Kent’s designs in 1726–9) and Rousham in Oxfordshire (a Jacobean mansion with 1738–41 extensions and landscaping by Kent), the gardens needed to at least match the invention of the house, if not surpass it. The makers of such environments were not so impressed by the Cartesian framework of Versailles or Hampton Court, the perfection of which was no match for the romantic sense of abandonment to be found in the ruins of ancient Rome or the villas in nearby Frascati. Their decadent state heightened the sense of rediscovery. Kent must have felt a privileged connection to a past golden age of culture, artistry and thinking that matched his modern aspirations. The pleasure of ruins far outshone the French taste for geometry. His apparently found (though usually new) objets trouvés took the form of tombs, temples and statuary. These could be re-discovered by the visitor or the owner every time he took a stroll in the garden, as if stumbling across a piece from antiquity only partly visible above the ground.

William Kent, Rousham House landscaping, Oxfordshire, England, 1738–41: garden bower.

In a subtle half-stated choreography, our own spirit comes face to face with the gods themselves. Apollo blends perfectly with the picturesque qualities that Kent was after.