Architecture is Fiction is not a page about stories or examples of architecture in literature or special categories of buildings found at theme parks and roadside attractions or even a theory of how buildings might be designed in the future. The title is literal. This page explores the reality of those buildings we call works of architecture and why we think the latter are distinct from the former.
Hale County Beat 13. Used with permission, copyright Ginger Ann Brook. www.deepfriedkudzu.com
Manifesto Against Truth-Telling and Messiah Complexes
01. A spectre is haunting architecture …
02. Everything that has been said is mistaken …
03. Leading us to accept a discipline closer to law or medicine …
04. Where good and true become synonyms …
05. And true and good are corollaries of importance.
06. All the idols of architecture …
07. So much intellectual cover …
08. Obscure experience as a value unto itself.
09. What counts as architectural meaning?
11. “Experience of an experience …”
15. Distinguishing architecture from buildings …
18. (Fiction is neither purposeless nor extraneous, accidental nor solipsistic.)
Fiction and Meaning Ecologically Considered
20. Convert the physical world into environments …
22. Altering the ecological world.
23. Environments are made of real stuff …
26. Juxtapositions constituting surfaces …
27. These are the primary building blocks of experience.
28. Surfaces come with names …
29. Environments communicate …
30. Albeit differently to individuals and groups.
31. Luminous and Illuminated …
32. Radiating and Illuminating …
33. Surfaces can be rendered as radiant or ambient …
34. Structuring the environment …
36. Information not perceived as information …
38. The totality constituting experience …
39. Phenomenological approaches …
41. Experience is informational.
42. Light, sound, touch, smell …
43. With each, position plays a role …
44. Changing as fiction-making animals move …
46. Surfaces that perpetuate …
47. Perceptions of permanence and change.
49. A figural collection of information …
51. Centering fiction-making animals as protagonists …
52. Choreographing their movements …
53. Creates the impression of a plot, a series of events.
54. The world, teeming with events, becomes setting …
55. Where protagonists are enabled to act …
57. Casting objects as meaningful …
60. Perceptions of settings are simultaneously fictional and real …
61. Despite common sensical notions of absolute difference.
62. (Perceptions of events are simultaneously fictional and real, too.)
63. When and where does fictionalizing perception occur? …
64. How do we explain experiences of concealed settings and hidden plots? …
65. In part, revealing explains concealing …
66. Experience is more than perception like seeing is more than visual stimulus …
67. Experience is perception across time and varying points of view …
68. It is oriented …
69. Oriented perception is sharable …
70. Overcoming solipsism …
71. Making theatre possible.
72. Visiting the theatre …
73. Does one experience his or her own fiction, or someone else’s? …
74. The interplay of self and others, protagonist and antagonist and setting …
75. A hunt for meaning …
76. Not an accounting of discrete facts – here self, there others …
77. But the accretion of a story.
78. The mental-physical dichotomy misleads …
79. Protagonists control both …
80. Marshalling information provided by and gleaned from the story …
81. Toward physical ends …
82. Of movement through …
83. Engagement with …
84. Experience of …
85. Settings.
86. An informational approach to experience …
87. Differs from analogies to computational processes …
88. Eschews clear temporal and spatial categorizations of ontology…
89. In favor of environmentally bounded perception …
90. In which fictionalization and understanding are related …
91. And meaning is derived from both.
Architecture as Material Fiction
92. Conceptually, the concerns and themes understood as architectural …
93. Context and its relation to as-if constructs …
94. Ecology and the as-if …
95. Form and fiction …
96. Function and fiction …
97. Globalism and the as-if …
98. History and fiction …
99. Matter and fiction …
100. Phenomena and fiction …
101. Semiology is entirely an as-if enterprise…
102. Structure and the as-if …
103. Technology, its virtues, and fiction …
104. Virtuality and the immaterial as-if …
105. These are elements of storytelling, and constitutive of place.
106. Less academically, perceptions of place …
107. Start from a surface …
108. Surfaces ground the emergence of space …
109. Spaces transform surfaces into barriers …
110. A barrier traversed becomes a threshold …
111. Thresholds recast spaces as places …
112. There, in place, we find architectural meaning.
113. Are there such things as mere buildings? …
114. Are theme parks more or less fictional than other places? …
115. A basement or the Pantheon? …
116. Barns, basilicas, Seaside, Sorrento? …
117. The differences are material fictions …
118. In which abstract relations and character roles …
119. Noble (such as equality, justice, and love) …
120. And ignoble (like greed, jealousy, and lust) …
121. Are personified and performed.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
The world of physical reality does not consist of meaningful things. The world of ecological reality … does. If what we perceived were the entities of physics and mathematics, meanings would have to be imposed on them. But if what we perceive are the entities of environmental science, their meanings can be discovered.
James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
Architecture is Fiction 