Narrative Architecture - Design: A Fiction
Narrative Architecture is an architecture that is both a product of storytelling and that produces its own stories. It derives its formal vocabulary from the narrative development of a tale, translating narrative methods and literary elements into architectural language. Narrative situations, plot structure and underlying structure of a story, character constellations and the setting of the narration become design parameters that spatially articulate the aesthetic structure of a literary text. The category of the fictitious – an aspect at the heart of every literary work – makes it possible to consciously overstep the limits of spatial realization and to focus on the visionary aspects of design.
During the master studio „Design: A Fiction“ held in 2018 at Graz University of Technology, students developed a spatial constellation based on the narrative strategies that had been applied to short stories by famous writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka or Edgar Allan Poe. It was not the aim of the design studio to merely reproduce the spatial setting of a particular story but rather to extract design parameters from the components of narrative transmission. After the close reading and literary analysis of selected short stories, every student developed an architectural program for a particular story, thus translating the fictional project into a 3D cartboard model. The model building workshop was supervised by Michael Hieslmaier.
Iris Athenstaedt: Jorge Luis Borges "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
Fiction or reality? Fake or original? These are the fundamental questions the reader finds him or herself confronted with while reading „Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.“ It is about the fictional planet Tlön, which has been invented by a secret society („Orbis Tertius“) in the 17th century and whose religious, philosophic, archeologic and linguistic peculiarities have been recorded in the form of an encyclopedia. The fictitious (and real) narrator Borges and his friend Casares come across the geographical entry „Uqbar,”, which speculates about the location of the obscure place. Gradually, by researching remaining fragments of the encyclopedia, the fantastic world of Tlön is reconstructed. Moreover, according to Borges, our present culture will be determined by Tlönian knowledge in the near future. The project draws on the literary technique of intertextuality. Reversing Borges‘vision, it asserts that Tlön made contact with the Earth centuries ago and thus influenced the cultural development of humankind. An excavation in Ukbara (Iraq) leads us to question the hitherto existing history of architecture. The archeological results indicate that Roman antiquity was not inspired by the Greeks but by the Tlönists. Willhelm Koch’s Baustilkunde was therefore completed with an additional entry on “Tlönism.”
Vera Schabbon: Franz Kafka "The Burrow"
Kafka’s short story is told by an undefined animal-like creature, which is constructing its burrow by digging an architecture of tunnels and underground squares. Even though the fear of an external intruder forces the narrator to constantly optimize and secure his structure, the invisible threat becomes increasingly more present. In addition to using the stream-of-consciousness technique as the mode of narration, Kafka creates the effect of doubt in that he articulates the protagonist’s thoughts in contradictory and unstructured terms, mirroring the creature’s paranoia and inner struggle. Sentences are connected only associatively so that the syntax becomes as porous as the walls of the burrow. The design links terms referring to the spatial setting of the story and creates a network that is superimposed with Kafka’s biographical stations in Prague. The outer shell of the structure is covered with a netting, reflecting the inner fragmentation of the narrating I as well as the instability of political structures between the wars. The pavilion structure is located in the front yard of the Kafka Museum in Prague.
Julian Lebitsch: Jorge Luis Borges "The Garden of Forking Paths"
Is it possible to walk through a story? A garden-maze on the Venetian island of San Giorgio Maggiore, dedicated to the writer Borges on the 25th anniversary of his death, makes this possible. The project is located next to the maze of box hedges which, from a bird’s eye view, weaves in two opposite directions the name BORGES. The design of a staircase-tower follows the mathematical model of the Menger Sponge, a cube with smaller cubes extracted from it. The project translates the literary strategies of Borges’s tale „The Garden of Forking Paths“ into architecture. The story revolves around the murder of a scientist who owns a labyrinthine garden, in which the murderer recognizes the vast literary work of his grandfather. Text and maze merge into one semantic unit, in which narrative strands simultaneously run, fork or intersect with each other so that different levels of time, space, and reality are tied together.
Jana Rieth: Jorge Luis Borges "The Garden of Forking Paths"
The short story revolves around a German spy who, in the turmoil of the Second World War, wants to pass on the information about the geographical position of a British artillery park to his supervisor in Berlin. The protagonist is a descendant of Ts’ui Pên, a governor who had withdrawn himself for 13 years to write a novel and to build a labyrinth. After his assassination nobody was able to decipher the meaning of the novel, nor to find the labyrinth. What is revealed later in the story is that labyrinth and text refer to one and the same form. Both forms are an attempt to describe a world in which all possible outcomes of a situation happen simultaneously and in which each outcome leads to another split-up of (historical) events. The complex network structures created by Borges are figurative representations of the different realities and masses of data which exist simultaneously on today’s internet and which are continuously crossing each other, creating various bifurcations. As a “labyrinth of symbols,” Ts‘ui Pên’s novel can be seen as the substructure or base of the physical labyrinth. In similar terms, the data – stored on the Network Operation Center – presents the substructure of the larger labyrinth of the “internet”.
Eva Portenkirchner: Ernest Hemingway "A Clean, Well-Lightened Place"
Hemingway‘s short story is set in a café in Madrid, late at night. An old, lonely man is the last customer, watched and discussed by the two waiters. While the younger waiter, who thinks that getting old is a “nasty thing,” is eager to get home, the older waiter is sympathetic to the old man’s need for company. Before the older waiter closes up the café he recites the “Lord’s Prayer”, substituting all nouns with religious meaning with the Spanish word „nada“. The design is inspired by Hemingway’s minimalist and economic writing style, in which pronouns and characters remain undefined and in which only the most essential information is given. The so-called “iceberg technique“ attempts to motivate the reader to think about the deeper meaning of the story that remains hidden underneath the surface. The floor plan of Topping House (Idaho, USA), the house in which Hemingway spent the last years of his life, is mirrored and the narrative diagram of the story has been translated into elements of modern architecture.
Christina Rohrmoser: Jorge Luis Borges "The Aleph"
The project is based on a detailed analysis of the short story "The Aleph" by Borges. In the story, Borges defines the Aleph, as a "small iridescent spherre with unbearable brilliance" - a point in space where all points in the universe can be seen simultaneously. The narrative logic of the story is based on different triad structures. The location of the pavilion derived from the story is the Cementiere des Rois cemetery in Geneva, where Borges' grave is located. With the mirror situation of the artist Sylvie Fleury already existing at the cemetery, a visual relationship is formed with Borges' gravestone, the mirror and the pavilion, in which the pavilion becomes visible from the grave, through the mirror and in the other direction. Using Lacan's psychoanalytical theory of the level of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, the triadic structures can be derived from the story, as well as the spatial triad of the design.
Andreas Maierhofer: Jorge Luis Borges "The Aleph"
This project translates Borges strategies of hypertext and metafiction into architectural form. The project is a design for a Facebook headquarter, in which the virtual and the real world of office life coexists simultaneously, and in which the creation of content takes form as a complex rhizomatic structure.
Tamara Golser: Charlotte Perkins Gilman "The Yellow Wallpaper"
The Women's Liberation Museum takes its formal structure from Gilman's short story that critiques the strictly domestic role of upper middle class women during the 19th century. Women were expected to be subordinate to their husbands which very often also meant not leaving the home. The story–written in epistolary form–tells the story of a young women forced into a rest cure, followed by her gradual descent into psychosis. The museum is located in Pasadena, California, where Gilman composed the story and houses an exhibition of the Women's Liberation Movement in the U.S., taking the visitor from a spatial state of confinement into rooms where walls gradually disolve into organic matter, symbolising the organic ornament of the wallpaper coming to life in the story.
Andrea Pelzl: Edgar Allan Poe "The Fall of the House of Usher"
This project translates Poe's poetic strategies of doubling and mirroring into architectural form. The project is situated in historic Poe Park in New York, opposite of Poe Cottage, which the poet rented from 1846 to 1849. The architectural addition to the park is located next to the Visitor Center and is given the function of a reading room around an open fireplace that is located in the center of the room. It's formal design casts the same shadow as the cottage thus functioning as a gloomy structural mirroring of the cottage. Repetitive gothic ornamentation and stylistic elements underline the gothic ambience, also inherent in the story.
