The importance of the three questions above to meaning-oriented practice is difficult to overstate. It is tempting, therefore, to proceed directly to their solution. Despite my desire to be as straightforward as possible, the demands of logical discourse assert themselves here. Ground must be prepared. Working definitions of fiction and meaning in general arenecessary before diving off into the depths of architectural concerns used to fictionalize buildings, the viscous substance of place as something projected onto fictionalized buildings, applications of these thoughts to some common building types, and finally stating the axioms of fiction that elevate some buildings to the status of architecture. These temptations must remain unrequited until the third section of this blog – “Architecture as Material Fiction.”
“Fiction and Meaning Ecologically Considered” interposes itself between these questions and their resolution. This intervening section attempts to frame the primary terms as they are encountered in natural and built environments as opposed to those resulting from literature, dream states, or other non-physical triggers. This is a necessary digression, for reasons I will state below; and from those reasons, I hope it will be clear why this is the longest section of the book – or to use the metaphor from “Reading Between the Lines” on the main page, why the voyage from old shore to new is so expansive.
Fiction takes different forms in the various arts and activities of life. Fiction in film and fiction in theater differ slightly due to medium and available techniques of storytelling. In addition, there are unique forms deployed within each genre. Tragic fiction differs from comedy, for example. In the plastic arts, there are representational and non-representational fictions. Figurative and abstract. There are fictionalizations of politics in art; there are political fictions embedded in governmental briefings and speeches. It is even permissible to play on Hegel’s aesthetics and differentiate symbolic, classical, and romantic forms of fiction.[i] In short, the definition of fiction changes shape given the topic or art genre or philosophical system through which it is analyzed.
Creating a theory of architectural fiction for meaning-oriented practice is the central aim of these meditations. “Fiction and Meaning Ecologically Considered” therefore draws some boundaries around the terms “fiction” and “meaning” to narrow the field of exploration. To return again to Justice Potter Stewart’s famous opinion on Louis Malle’s The Lovers (1958), the inability to articulate precise boundaries for a category of activity does not preclude identifying what clearly falls outside those boundaries. In the case of fiction in general and architectural fiction in particular, it is equally clear and arguably more important to state what it isn’t – particularly what it most definitively isn’t.
One of the most potentially destructive interpretations of fiction, for example, is to consider it an art, at least in a Hegelian sense of the term. In his Aesthetics, Hegel defined art as non-instrumental, as pure means without ends. It is unnecessary to debate the pros and cons of Hegel’s views on art – or even argue whether or not such arts exist – in order to declare that fiction is not such an art.
Fiction is not purposeless. From earliest times, fiction is the tool by which immaterial ideas have attached themselves to inert matter. A book or a stone becoming a symbol is an example of this process even if, at present, the method of attachment appears magical. More importantly, this fictional attachment is neither learned nor culturally determined. There is evidence that it is innate. The classic psychological study in which children’s toys are taken from them and dropped into a ‘duplicating’ machine provides one example. In the study, the children were asked if they preferred to keep their original toy or an identical one just ‘produced’ by the machine. Overwhelmingly, the children chose their ‘original’ toy without material justification, apparently deciding on the basis of narratives of animism (“my toy is endowed with special properties” the kids seem to say) and resulting familial bonds.[ii]
Fiction, in this larger non-Hegelian sense, is both common and necessary to the conduct of every aspect of life. It is a basic and essential function in the understanding and interpretation of the world. Even this last idea, that of a world, is nothing more than evidence of the supreme fictionalizing ambitions of mind across and through matter.
The process of fictionalization, the tendency to see meanings in the world, is likely hardwired in the human brain. Fictions, however, are not limited to a prefigured set of types or number of archetypes. The specific contents of fictions in general, and architectural fictions in particular, are communicative. That is, they are deployments of ideational triggers by an author or speaker or designer with the express intent of being read or heard or inhabited and understood by at least one other person. Setting aside questions about the nature of such ideational triggers until later, it is important to communicative intent means fictions are neither accidents nor solipsistic. That is not to suggest that individuals cannot author their own private fictions, even unconsciously, or that any given fiction will be understood by anyone other than its author. But it is to say that even in the example above regarding animistic projections in normal child development, such fictions exist in constellations larger than children’s private universes. There is the child, the toy, the various settings through which child and toy move, the ‘duplicating machine’ and all the stories and concepts of family, of life and death, etc. that the child imbibes and projects. The toys are seen by the children as siblings or children or pets. Or talisman of their parents or grandparents. They are characters. The fictionalizing process is innate, but absent such a constellation of contingent influences – for an individual uninformed by the external world and various socially acquired norms – thought is reduced to hallucinations and delusions, not fictions.
“Fiction and Meaning Ecologically Considered” begins here. It assumes these processes and mechanisms and takes the canonical works of perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson as its underlying conceptual framework. In his magnum opus The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979) Gibson argues that perception is not a collection of sensations and that our ability to see, understand, and act in a world will remain opaque to us as long as we conceive of these abilities in the terms of physics (photons and sound waves) and neuroscience (sequences of neurons firing). Perception is made possible by physical reality and our biological hardware but, in Gibson’s view, is comprehensible only in a broader ecological perspective.[iii] That is, it occurs in an environment coded with names in which meanings are “discovered,” not projected. This is the realm in which the fictions of architecture and its potential meanings are to be found.
[i] G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
[ii] Bruce Hood and Paul Bloom, “Children Prefer Certain Individuals over Perfect Duplicates,” Cognition 106, no. 1 (January 2008): 455-62. 20% of the children in the study refused to turn over their favorite toy for ‘duplication.’ Of those that participated, 77% chose their toy over the ‘copy.’
[iii] The term “ecological” has become synonymous with sustainability and protecting the planet. In these pages, ecological is employed in its broader meaning: patterns of relationships animals and environment.
Architecture is Fiction 