Clearly the above isn’t adequate, much less complete.
Incompatible experimental results do not cause physicists to wonder if light exists. In the case of the blind men, there is recourse to an entity – the elephant itself – and a zoological classification that mediates a wide diversity of reports across regions and times going back to the fossil record. Majority rule is the name of the game in both physics and zoology. New experiments or observations by individuals might enlarge or challenge a boundary but the categories are always defined by consensus based on a history of replicated experiments and observations. Consensus similarly suffices for categorizing canonical works of architecture. Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” also suffices. Few, for instance, question my assertion that I had an architectural experience inside the Pantheon despite the lack of any standing agreement on what makes it a work of architecture. Where the classification sought is meaning-oriented, however, recourse to consensus or agreement among experts – a majority of architects, historians, and theorists, for example – is not only insufficient, it threatens to censor the experiences of the minority, and particularly the lone individual, as non-conforming and therefore as non-meaningful, as literally meaningless.[i] Could I have had an architectural experience in my grandparents’ basement? Or, to ask the question from a different perspective, can someone legitimately experience a beloved work of architecture as racist when the consensus is that it is uplifting?
To put a finer point on this, the axiom architectural meaning is an extraordinary (third) experience constructed from a human projection of place within or against an architectural setting is profoundly limited if it applies only to the special case of experiences of canonical works and worse yet if applicable only to a codified set of possible responses. Meaningful architectural experiences are hardly so limited. And even if we accept that canonical works are better at eliciting profound experiences (and limiting negative reactions) than lesser buildings, many of the lessons to be learned from exemplary works of architecture regarding how these support extraordinary experiences are not applicable to typical run-of-the-mill projects on drawing boards around the world, with narrow programs and very limited budgets. The axiom, to be useful, has to apply to the full range of architectural experiences, from the wonders of looking up into the dome of the Pantheon to exploring the dark recesses of a grandparents’ basement. This task is daunting.
It is useful to parse the problem differently. A definition of architecture isn’t necessary to understand architectural meaning if the axiom above is taken at face value. What is required is more limited: the definition of an architectural setting. Once developed, this definition can shed light even on architectural experiences that take place in buildings that clearly are not canonical works and provide a basis for understanding architectural meaning independent of architecture per se. To do this requires a paradigm shift.
There are many paradigms in use today to describe and measure architecture – contextual, ecological, formal, functional, historiographical, phenomenological, recyclable, semiological, and structural are but a few. Each useful but, like the reports of individuals groping an elephant, woefully incomplete. Each, intuitively, has a potential role in framing an architectural setting. Within an architectural setting, however, each existing paradigm is transformed. Context is no longer literal but performative. Ecological concerns are no longer measured but evoked. Formalism is no longer conceived but felt. Functionalism no longer serves program but tells a story of human activity. Every paradigm of architecture, in short, is narrativized in an architectural setting. Read carefully, this sentence suggests a new paradigm or axiom: an architectural setting is the fictionalization of architectural concerns in the mind of an inhabitant. Stated the other way around and more broadly, architecture is fictional in its experience.
The remainder of this meditation explains architectural meaning and the reframing of architecture resulting from this paradigm shift. In brief, architecture understood as fiction not only fleshes out the partial character of the discipline resulting from the truth-seeking paradigms commonly used, it also resolves many longstanding debates. Oppositions such as formal vs. phenomenological, conceptual vs. sensual, presence vs. absence, political vs. personal, ideological vs. aesthetic, historicist vs. expressionist, appearance vs. reality, social vs. individual, etc. are all undermined insofar as fiction always juxtaposes contents and techniques to create experiences of things, places, and even ideas that aren’t literally there. Fiction can evoke opposing notions without entering their fray. Fiction is even the root of those seemingly pure moments of reverie, of memory and nostalgia, of the sort Peter Zumthor extols as resulting from architecture that quietly backgrounds experience. Within this paradigm, architecture is to literature what building is to writing – that is, different means of sharing information and conveying experience. And even a facile analogy appears correct from this perspective: Architecture is to building what literature is to writing, heightened forms of information that aspire to meaning.
[i] See again, Percy’s Message in the Bottle, 55.
Architecture is Fiction 