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The storytelling in architecture. A proposal to read and to write spaces

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 The Storytelling in Architecture:
A Proposal to Read and to Write Spaces
!
Carla Molinari and Stefano Bigiotti

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Abstract
Considering the fundamental influence of media and communication in contemporary society, this chapter
intends to develop the relationship between this field of knowledge and architecture, with a specific focus on
the roles and on the potentialities of narrative structures and devices. Storytelling is a strategic system of
composition, edited in order to transmit a message. In architecture, it represents a specific approach to design
related to the human experience, and to the structuring and the montage of spatial sequences with specific
communicative aims. The nature of architectural communication is complex and hard to define, and the
parallel with language is a useful and very popular approach. Storytelling, in particular, could be interpreted
as a system to arrange and to compose the space, starting from a series of sequences with communicative
purposes. Several architectures, indeed, were also observed to be starting from sequences: the concept of
narration in these processes is implicit, and it defines the presentation of events and also their progressive
interpretation. This perception of space is directly influenced by the concept of time, and considering a
phenomenological, contemporary approach, the narrative dimension is meant as a re-interpretable story,
bound to the corporeal movement and to the variability of the time-space. Therefore, this chapter analyses
storytelling as method of composition, starting from its interdisciplinary feature, and then describes some
architectural examples based on narrative structures. The main goal is to define the concept of storytelling as
a strategic method to create innovative places and relations, a tool to design and to analyse the time-space of
architecture.
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Key Words: Storytelling and architecture, narrative spaces, media and communication, cinema, montage and
sequences of images, time-space dimension, perception and experience.
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*****

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1. The Narrative Structures of Architecture and Communication

Contemporary society is constantly exposed to an infinite series of images and data, and the knowledge field
of media and communication is fundamental for understanding our world and our life, every visual discipline
having to interface with it.

Architecture, also, is strongly related to this topic and is sometimes described and theorised as a real
medium:

(...) the Information Society is completely changing the rules of the game, all games, including those of
architecture. If large industry and machines were the driving engine of the previous society, in this society
these are in the service sector. Today's machine is the computer; its flue, the systems of formalisation,
transmission and development of information.1

Furthermore, there is a crisis of meaninglessness associated with this continuous flow of information, which
seems to have important consequences in architecture, as well. Some architecture of recent years have been
dominated by a visual culture based on powerful, and often empty, images. In opposition to this tendency,
some contemporary architects are proposing an architecture in which the composition depends on the
concept of perception and the fundamental role of communication is expressed by the experience of space.2
‘Language is a medium for storing (...). Material forms and the immaterial spaces determined by the forms,
and their mutual relationships, are the means of architectural communication.’3

Considering the fundamental influence of media and communication in contemporary society, and the
phenomenological approach in particular, it should be even more important for the contemporary architecture
to understand and to analyse storytelling. Storytelling, indeed, is an instrument to edit sequences following a
communicative aim, and in architecture it could be an interesting tool to analyse the montage of sequences
and the time–space dimension.

Narrative is often seen as a form of representation bound with sequence, space and time (...). A narrative
requires a narrator and a reader in the same way in which architecture requires an architect and a viewer. A
narrative, therefore, is not only the content of the story that is narrated, or the way in which it is interpreted
by readers, but also the way in which it is structured and presented to an audience by an authorial entity, a
writer, a film-maker, an architect or the curator of an exhibition. The relationship between narrative structure,
perceptual experience and representation is the aspect of narrative that is most relevant to architecture.4

Therefore, the fundamental purpose of this chapter is to develop these roles and potentialities of narrative
structures in architecture, with a specific focus on the relationship between the concept of storytelling and the
architectural systems of composition.

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2. Beyond Storytelling: An Interdisciplinary Method of Composition

Storytelling consists of a logical system; it is edited to transfer a message following a communicative logic,
and it is actually very important for every kind of media. Indeed, information is actually a collection of
memories and storytelling is a strategic device to remember them: the act of reading or decoding a message
depends on the typology of the narrative structure of the medium and it directly influences the understanding.5

At the beginning, storytelling was studied in particular, as a method to analyse and to compose written texts,
but beginning in the 1960s, it was used also in different disciplines. Albert Laffay, in particular, was one of
the first who theorised the fundamental importance of storytelling in cinema, in order to create a readable
and understandable parallel reality. Some years after, Seymour B. Chatman underlined how, in movies, there
are two different temporal perceptions, one related to the tale and one to the storytelling. In cinema, the
dimension of time is actually assumed as dynamic, and it is necessarily altered to reconstruct and to compose
the story in order to transmit the message in a specific way.6

In the course of time, the different approaches in various fields of knowledge have given to storytelling a
specific autonomy and an independence from the medium. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur, in particular,
theorised narrativity as a method to interpret reality; he sustained that also in Plato’s and Aristotle’s works
there was the issue of defining reality and of conceiving space and time in narrative terms. Ricoeur also
theorised that narrative structure can intersect the temporality of architecture with the spatiality of tale, and
finally define the communicative and cognitive values of spaces. In particular, he wrote:

We can state that in the starting situation of duplex parallelism between tale–architecture and time told–space
constructed, it is possible to found an absolutely primitive reason to not abide by the simple realisation of
difference between storytelling and architectural design, this reason is the fact that neither the time of tale nor
the space of architecture are simple portions of universal time or geometrical space.7

Then, Ricoeur located the intersection between architecture and tales in their interdisciplinary boundaries,
which embrace, in different ways, the dimensions of time and space.

Therefore, storytelling is actually a complex system to organise and to compose words, images, or even
spaces, in sequences starting from the concept of time. Considering, in particular, that visual storytelling,
architecture, and cinema are the fundamental disciplines based on a series of images – or spaces – structured
following a timeline and assembled by emotional experience.

!
3. The Storytelling and Some Architectural Examples

Furthermore, it is interesting to notice how compositive and imaginative processes are not usually bound to
specific application fields, but instead they are ascribed to different artistic movements. As highlighted by
Tshumi,8 the ability to transfer telling from one medium to another — from the literary, cinematographic,
artistic world to architecture — could not occur through mere analogy, but needs a deep analysis about the
appliance method itself. It becomes of primary importance to take into consideration the composing process,
not only seen as a means, but especially as a final aim, impressing on the storytelling creation an autonomous
value of attitude and not only potentiality. In particular, architecture, and expressive forms in general, can
constitute itself not only through formal or functional features, but also thanks to the individuation of
personal handling, structuring or assembling systems, common to other disciplines.

According to this point of view, the planning process can assume originality and expressivity, such features
that are able to engrave the personal stylistic understanding of one author. Estranging, archetype,
overwriting, and temporal distortion are features, which contribute to the creation of a fantastic image, that
should be ‘undergone to a composite check, including the participation and control of the physical,
geometrical and topological rules.’9

How can this process be materially reproduced? And what are the spatial results? Even if the modern
movement masters were confident in the use of metaphors, shifting, imitation, and opposing, especially seen
as a basic language of their poetic, nowadays, returning to traditional storytelling techniques is a movement
not to be ignored in the traditional process of architecture. This is the case of Van Berkel's Moebius House,10
whose architect appeals to the geometrical archetype of the ring, in order to build storytelling flashbacks in
an environment signified by the eternal return. The space projected by the UN Studio is shaped by cultural
and physical forces, in which the act of creation is ephemeral, unsettled, and a prelude to a possible variation
of the final work. It is, in fact, the dissonance between geometrical continuity and temporal discontinuity that
produces an accommodating perception of the environment, which, transformed by spatial findings,
compresses and expands, offering to the user/audience the emotion of the flashback.

The continuous surface of the Moebius ring is able to transform itself into a complex organism, giving place
to new meanings concerning the relationships of inside-outside, above-under, front-back, and close-open.
Engaging that archetype means losing its beginning and its end, confusing into the continuity of a never-
ending series of ante and post. Architectural images that call to mind Quentin Tarantino's storytelling
techniques,11 mingled and superimposed, and that are also characterised by repetition, disjunction, and
temporal dissolution.

According to this, it becomes possible to assume a specific role played by the assembling techniques in the
individuation of handling space processes, which aim to find new contemporary expressive poetics. Such
techniques are distinguished by the ideology of the photographic and cinematographic picture, in which
space and time become a unique, fragmented ‘before’ and composed ‘after.’ Nevertheless, according to Van
Berkel, ‘the best effects that could be produced by architecture are proliferation and movement, effects that
anticipates and surprise, climax-like, cinematic and not linear;’12 so storytelling, in fact, creates architecture
this way by means of analysing the spaces in order to co-locate them in successive unities, giving birth to
estranging. Storytelling features such as estranging and disarticulation occur in different architectonic
contemporary experiences, in fact ‘estranging is a essential fact, which makes possible the less banal
compositions and permits the most surprising metaphors.’13

Following this compositional reasoning, the irreverent Koolhaas, in his Maison a Bordeaux,14 experiments
the shift of sense created by a no longer stable ground, instead, by a moving one. His elevator-room deprives
the ground of its traditional image, fixed and settled, in order to shake and abstract it, reducing it as an
artistic event. In this Koolhaas's project, there is a lack of Van Berkel's ring consecutio temporum, but it
shows a relativistic perception in which the house itself undergoes the dynamism of changing, around a
pivotal point and (in this case) in a frozen time. Passing through the Maison vertically, is like waking from
one dream into another, and then falling asleep again, confused by a scenographic (dis)assembling, that could
be compared only to the estranging generated by Inception by Christopher Nolan. It means falling into the
den of an ancestral White Rabbit, to then find a Wonderland. In fact, to appreciate an environment's
transformation, while remaining tied to our own desk, is exactly to ‘see the beginning of a use in the space
followed immediately by the beginning of another space.’15 Contemporary living becomes cinematic this
way.

Figure 1: The Moebius House: temporal discontinuity on geometrical continuity. © 2014 Carla Molinari,
Stefano Bigiotti. Used with permission.

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4. The Time-Space of Architecture

The perception of space is directly influenced by the idea of time itself, and several architectures, as we saw,
were realised starting from this concept. There are spaces designed on a sequential succession, based on the
experience of the observer, which became the system to organise the entire architecture. Luigi Moretti stated
that there are many ways to create a sequence of spaces, and in particular, he found out that several classical
examples of architecture were characterised by a peculiar succession of internal spaces. He clearly described
how in Villa Adriana in Tivoli or in La Rotonda by Palladio there is a specific ordered composition, ruled by
different elements as the light or the geometrical figures, and which was created starting from the real
experience of spaces.16

This vision is firstly related to the concept of space: the time modifies architecture only as eternal and
external parameter. Storytelling is used to compose a series of images, but narrative structure is linear, time is
absolute, and the human being is a passive observer. Space is the fundamental dimension of architecture; the
primary element shaped and modelled by the construction. As Zevi stated: ‘I accept only constructions that
deliberately deploy internal space as an artistically expressive medium to be included in the category of
architecture. The history of architecture is primarily the history of spatial conceptions.’17 Considering the
human experience, the concept of space is actually crucially important for all different forms of expression,
and not only for architecture. Spatial situations or relations are fundamental bases, even for language.

Figure 2: The Maison a Bordeaux: the narrative deconstruction of space. © 2014 Carla Molinari, Stefano
Bigiotti. Used with permission.

!
We perceive, understand and describe our experiential world regarding ourselves as the point of reference
and centre. In architecture, space is not merely a medium of guiding behaviour; it is also an intentional
means of mental and artistic communication, and an object of aesthetic articulation. Architectural space
mediates between the world at large and the human domain, the physical and the mental, the material and the
spiritual. Architecture creates horizons and frames of reference for perception and understanding of the
world.18

However, the notion of space and time changes historically and culturally. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, time-space finally became a unique dynamic relationship, related to movements, events, and an
interactive kind of experience.19 The classical concept of time was totally twisted, as memory possesses its
own structure not necessarily linked to the real rhythm, and time became a melting clock, as in the famous
paint of Dalì Persistence. Therefore, it is always more clear that an active experience of space has to be
related also to the composition of time, and so structured by sequences. As Le Corbusier stated, ‘Architecture
can be classified as dead or living by the degree to which the rule of sequential movement has been ignored
or, instead, brilliantly observed.’20

In the Maison à Bordeau, as well as in the Moebius House, the user is guided by the overwriting of their
environment. He is conveyed through the spatial continuity/discontinuity; the freedom of choice is only
apparent, the user is instead conducted (or tied) along tracks layered by a wise scenographer, well-trained in
transforming his stage and amazing his audience. But, nevertheless, space exists the way it is perceived, and
it is activated by the same presence of the user. Steven Holl underlines that, ‘the experience is not only
understood through objects or things, and so, similarly, space is perceived uniquely when a subject describes
it. A subject occupies a specific time, space is then linked to a perceptive duration.’21

A temporal conception of making architecture that is warped by the literal rewriting of signs which transform
spaces, vary sequences, and define the environments, changes its uses and functions following a storytelling
composition. As a matter of fact, in the space/void, space/hinge Residences of Fukuoka, Holl makes an
attempt at trying to replicate an already existing experiment, that of the facade of the gallery Store Front for
Art and Architecture, situated in Manhattan.

He imposes the rotation/rewriting of some walls along their own axis, in order to create an impure space,
which ‘can be exact and then it can suddenly change into a dynamic space.’22 Walls move, as they seem to
answer to their own conscience, such as the fairy-like stairs in Hogwarts,23 they are overwritten signs, one
above the other, that, as well as the stratified backgrounds of the pictures of Klee, permit a deep and straight
perception of the slow process that leads to the final result.24 However, in the literary field, as well as in
architecture, ‘to overwrite means to lay signs or existing signs. It means to add new concepts to others which
keep their original meanings: new signs do not erase the old ones, but rather give them a new significance.’25

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5. The Narrative Experience of Architecture

The fil rouge that links the different works taken into consideration is to be found in the experience suggested
by the storytelling composition: architecture is not autonomous, it is not mere shape and it is not a style or
language question. Architecture is made up by experiences and events. The composing process, organised, in
this way, according to storytelling techniques and methods, aims to guarantee the legacy of the results,
during the unrolling of an activity aimed toward the realisation of the work.

Considering storytelling as a strategic system of composition, edited in order to transmit a message, in

architecture it could simultaneously represent a specific approach to design, related to the structuring and the
montage of sequences.

As we have seen, a sequence is strongly connected to the concept of the time-space and then to the
experience of architecture.

Figure 3: The Residences of Fukuoka: movement as rewriting of space. © 2014 Carla Molinari, Stefano
Bigiotti. Used with permission.

!
Thus, storytelling is a complex method of design based on the concept of an interactive and psycho-physical
participation in which spaces could be constantly reinvented, as in the cinema tradition.26 It could be
interpreted in architecture as a system to arrange and to compose the space, starting from a series of
sequences with communicative purposes and totally influenced by the variability of the concept of time; the
idea of narration in those processes is implicit and it defines the presentation of events and also the
progressive interpretation of them.27 The director, Eisenstein, who also sustained the parallelism between the
editing of sequences in cinema and in architecture, considered the montage as a method strongly related, not
only to narrativity, but also to cognitive skills; it is not only a method to organise, but also a particular way to
discover, to learn, and to understand.28 Therefore, the narrative dimension could be meant as a re-
interpretable story, bound to the corporeal movement and to the variability of the time-space.
In a physical environment, narrative construes what philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco calls a
'connotative' rather than a 'denotative' meaning that is close to function. (...) 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.29

Therefore, storytelling in architecture could be a fundamental composition system based on the notion of
experience and, considering in particular the contemporary scenario, it could be an interesting device to
analyse and to understand architecture. The notion of a dynamic time-space dimension, characterised by an
open field of possibilities of interpretation, creates a structure of narrative patterns, which stimulate
perception, thoughts, and associations. In this way, the experience of architecture is not simply visual, but is
based on a real interactive communicative model, which is transformative and fused with the temporal
dimension.

!
Notes

1 Antonino Saggio, Introduzione alla Rivoluzione Informatica (Roma: Carocci Editore, 2010), 27.
2 This particular research in architecture is called 'Phenomenological' and primarily derives from the theories
on perception of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It is an architecture based on spatial dynamism,
movement, and which investigates the strongly relationship between space and time. As reference: Benoît
Jacquet e Vincent Giraud, From the Things Themselves: Architecture and Phenomenology (Kyoto:
University Press, 2012), and the book by Steven Holl, Parallax (Milano: Postmedia Books, 2004).
3 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin. Architecture and the Senses (Chichester: Wiley&Sons Ltd, 2005),
43.
4 Sophia Psarra, Architecture and Narrative. The Formation of Space and Cultural Meaning (New York:
Routledge, 2009), 14.

5 Maia Engeli, Storie digitali (Roma: Testo&Immagine, 1999).

6 Daniele Dottorini, 'Narratologia,' Enciclopedia del Cinema (Roma: Treccani, 2004).
7 Paul Ricoeur, Tempo e racconto (Milano: Jaca Book, 1988), 9.

8 Bernard Tschumi, Architettura e Disgiunzione (Bologna: Edizioni Pendragon, 2005).

9 Massimo Del Vecchio, 'L'immaginazione architettonica come procedimento' Valter Bordini, Paola Coppola
Pignatelli, Ruggero Lenci, Trenta lezioni di architettura più una. Lezioni di teoria e pratica di progettazione
architettonica (Roma: Cangemi ed., 1990). In the text Del Vecchio investigates the traces of narrative
processes of alienation and amplification in the modern architectural composition, with the aim of defining a
‘grammar of architectural imagination’; an obvious reference to the text
10 The parallels between design and narrative composition at the base of the Moebius house of Van Berkel
has already been carried out by the same designer in Chaterine Boss and Ben Van Berkel,
11 About the proximity between the spaces of minimalist and deconstructionist architecture and Tarantino's
film editing, please refer to Giannandrea Jacobucci, Conseguenze previste. Attraversamenti ipertestuali per
una teoria della ricerca architettonica (Bari: Edizioni Giuseppe Laterza, 2005).
12 The quote by Van Berkel is already shown in Laura Negrini, Ben Van Berkel 13
14 Functional requirements that are hidden in the design of the floating room of the maison bordeaux and the
impact on the architectural landscape of the same house, please refer to Niklas Maak, 'Maison a Bordeaux',
Domus 966, (2013), 96-105.

15 With these words, Tshumi try to describe the parallelism between the architectural composition of spaces
and unfinished consequential, with the construction of cinematic sequences collage (collisions) or sequence
assembly (progressions). translation of the author. Tschumi, Architettura e Disgiunzione, 131.
16 Luigi Moretti, 'Strutture e sequenze di spazi', Spazio 7 (1952), 9-20.

17 Bruno Zevi, Saper vedere l'architettura (Torino: Einaudi, 1948), 31.

 18 Juhani Pallasmaa and Robert McCarter, Understanding Architecture: A Primer on Architecture as
Experience (London: Phaidon, 2012), 18.

19 Some fundamental considerations about the new concept of time and architecture are in the text Sigfried
Giedion, Spazio tempo e architettura (Milano: Hoepli, 1984).

20 Martino Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror. The City in Theory, Photography, and Film (Los
Angels: Getty Publications, 2013), 171.

21 Steven Holl, Parallax (Milano: Postmedia, 1994), 9.

22 Holl, Parallax, 97.

23 In particular, reference is made to the mythology of the Harry Potter's fantasy world, created by J. K.
Rowling, where, in the magic school Hogwarts, the stairs, as rooms, have a human consciousness and move
at will, transforming the space of the enchanted castle. The seven books of the saga, were transposed to eight
films with different directors, produced by Warner Bros from the 2001 to 2011.

24 The reflection about the possible parallels between overwriting and the works of Klee was already
introduced in the text Ruffo Wolf, Sequenze. Architetture - Works and Projects (Cascine del Riccio, Firenze:
Alinea editrice, 2002).

25 Please refer to Wolf, Sequenze. Architetture - Works and Projects, 14.

26 Giordana Bruno, Atlante delle emozioni. In viaggio tra arte, architettura e cinema (Milano: Mondadori,
2006).

27 Tschumi, Architettura e Disgiunzione, 131.

28 Sergei Ejzenstein, Montaggio (Venezia: Marsilio, 1992).

29 Nigel Coates, Narrative Architecture (Chichester: Wiley&Sons Ltd, 2012), 15- 16.

!
Bibliography

Bruno, Giordana. Atlante delle emozioni. In viaggio tra arte, architettura e cinema. Milano: Mondadori,
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De Kerckhove, Derrick, Peter Eisenman and Antonino Saggio. La carta di Zurigo. Roma: Testo&Immagine,
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Del Vecchio, Massimo. 'L'immaginazione architettonica come procedimento’. Trenta lezioni di architettura
più una. Lezioni di teoria e pratica di progettazione architettonica, Valter Bordini, Paola Coppola Pignatelli,
Ruggero Lenci. Roma: Cangemi edizioni, 1990.
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Pallasmaa, Juhani and McCarter, Robert. Understanding Architecture: A Primer on Architecture as
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Psarra, Sophia. Architecture and Narrative. The Formation of Space and Cultural Meaning. New York:
Routledge, 2009.
Ricoeur, Paul. Tempo e racconto. Milano: Jaca Book, 1988.
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Tshumi, Bernard. Architettura e Disgiunzione. Bologna: Edizioni Pendragon, 2005.
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Carla Molinari is a PhD student in Architecture: theory and design at the University Sapienza of Rome. Her
research is focused on narrative, montage, and sequences of spaces.
!
Stefano Bigiotti is a PhD student in Architecture: theory and design at the University Sapienza of Rome. His
research is focused on human measure and compositive qualities of sustainability.

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