The notion that architecture is fiction in its experience is relatively unproblematic. Theorists have used expressions suggesting people “read architecture” or that architecture can embody narratives for centuries and researchers have established that our subjective experiences of the world have a far looser connection to reality than most of us are comfortable admitting. As nature writer and poet Diane Ackerman says, “reality is an agreed-upon fiction.”[i] But the paradigm shift noted above is more than an acknowledgment of differences between subjective and objective facts or a call to privilege experiences over objects. Such a reading, in fact, misses the point. Taking the fictional nature of architectural experience seriously not only constitutes a paradigm shift toward experience but entails a rethinking of the status of artifacts themselves. Architecture is not an objective fact that we then perceive in various subjective ways. Fictionalizing is arguably the distinction between buildings and architecture. In other words, architecture is a building with a fiction about being more or other than a mere building.
Take a deep breath and reread that last sentence. It is a new axiom. It is as close to an article of faith as I come. My moment of soothsaying. And it is important to the practice of architecture insofar as an actionable theory of architectural meaning is impossible outside this paradigm. If works of architecture aren’t inherently works of material fiction, then there is no way that meaning or even terms of interpretation can be transmitted through them. If not works of fiction – elsewhere I have called these “pledges”[ii] – then all experiences of architectural meaning are random individuated illusions. The commonality of reported experiences suggests that this is not the case.
So, tentatively, these thoughts allow for the axiom regarding meaning to gain specificity by replacing the term architectural setting with its definition. Revised, architectural meaning is an extraordinary (third) experience constructed from a projection of place within or against a building fictionalized, via architectural concerns or themes, as more or other than a mere building. This revision is, of course, hampered by three particularly long loose threads – first, what exactly are the concerns and themes that trigger thoughts of architecture in the minds of inhabitants? Second, what is place? And third, are there such things as mere buildings?
[i] Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, (New York: Random House, 1990), 308.
[ii] Callender, Architecture History and Theory in Reverse, 134-145.
Architecture is Fiction 