It is possible to misinterpret the argument so far as suggesting that the stuff of physics doesn’t matter when thinking about meaningful experience. Obviously, this is not the case. Fiction rests upon, or is recorded in, matter. What is resisted is the notion of a neat division between matter and our understanding of it. Natural science prior to Galileo did not cleave the world into categories of sensible qualities, on the one hand, and measurable phenomena such as size, shape, position, and motion, on the other.[i] Early science attended to both. If there is a detectable bias against the worldview of science in these posts, it is directed only against science denuded of sensual characteristics.
World-fictions in the form of settings and events are sharable. That is, they presuppose a minimal world of giver, shared content, and by extension, recipient. This trajectory – giver/designer at one end, receiver/inhabitant at the other – enlarges the world. At a minimum, existence independent of a solitary mind is necessary. Existence here means the totality of stuff only separated into quantifiable and qualitative elements for the purposes of various disciplines. The fictions of literature and drama require real books (or at least illuminated screens or digitized sound bites) along with stages, props, costumes, and actors through which to convey ideas to other minds – so too with architecture.
“If the world of Lucretius is composed of immutable atoms, Ovid’s world is made up of the qualities, attributes and forms that define the variety of things, whether plants, animals, or persons. But these are only the outward appearances of a single common substance that – if stirred by profound emotion – may be changed into what most differs from it.”[ii] Italo Calvino here argues that the physical world that makes up our perceived environment is equal parts sensory stimulus and affective accommodation. Environments are made of real stuff. Some aspects of their relation are understandable and predictable. People take comfort in these aspects and architects can plan for experiences in this register with some degree of certainty. Other aspects of the relation between sensory information and affective response, the parts that trigger our most thrilling experiences, are far less predictable. Arguably, those are the experiences we seek whenever we want to break out of the banal habits of daily life. And opportunities for such experiences seem to be the prize most coveted by architects. Be that as it may, we need to understand the predictable parts first – as a pre-Galilean scientist or Ovid might have.
[i] Philip Goff, Galileo’s Error: foundations for a new science of consciousness, (New York: Pantheon, 2019), 15-17.
[ii] Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 9.
Architecture is Fiction 