Flaubert said, “I have always done my utmost to get into the soul of things.”[i] The famed novelist was not interested in communicating his impressions or judgements of things. He aimed, instead, at metaphorical truth that, as Walker Percy argued, is the artist’s job to render visible. As should be clear by now, I do not mean to suggest that architects should aim to be honest or reveal objective facts. “Fiction,” Albert Camus famously quipped, “is the lie through which we tell the truth.” This larger form of truth telling and seeing its value requires a reorientation.
Modernism’s infatuation with enlightenment and saving humanity through heroic honesty are so deeply ingrained that we take those values as givens. When architects talk about issues of interpretation or how a specific building might be interpreted, paradigmatic architects, their ideas, and their works are typically invoked to bolster or rebuff criticism. In fact, in academic settings, intra-disciplinary references are not only the norm but the required currency of validation. The linkages established serve as proofs for the rightness of certain moves and the wrongness of others. Unfortunately, even where such linkages are valid or at least interesting in a historical/academic setting, allusions to personages, concepts, and buildings that the public doesn’t know are useless to that public. Architecture that operates primarily at that level is mute to most people. And by ‘people’ and ‘public’, I mean the perceivers and occupants of buildings. I mean, in short, humanity.
There is no architecture aside from human architectural experience. That is to say, if no one has an architectural experience of a building, it is not architecture. The reorientation required is to understand that architectural experience is not educational but informational. For non-architects, people, the public, humanity, or laymen if you prefer, there is a vast reservoir of information that can be brought to bear on understanding buildings as architecture. Both known and unknown domains, explored and unexplored territory, contain information. Their cognitive models understand a world with gravity, sunlight and shadow, weather, materials, resistance to wear, proportions analogous to and different from human scale, repetition, rhythm, etc. These come in familiar and unfamiliar varieties. Comforting and fear-producing. The former gives people security and a safety net to explore the latter in hopes that these too will result in new paradigms of comfort eventually. “In the presence of the lovely but obscure metaphor,” Percy wrote, “I exist in the mode of hope, hope that the poet [or architect] may mean such and such, and joy at any further evidence that he does.”[ii]
The reorientation we must pursue now is toward a people-, public-, inhabitant-focused practice of meaning. This will include not just the body or the senses but the knowledge with which inhabitants encounter the world. And this matters for two reasons: 1) it is neither an architect’s responsibility nor right to educate his or her clients, if by this we intend to say that clients must understand what architects know in order to appreciate works of architecture; this is arrogant, self-serving, and a cheap avoidance of doing much harder work; and 2) the narrative reality in which non-architects live and in which we participate when we make works of architecture is the ground on which ethics and morality are constructed – buildings that acknowledge that narrative reality can confirm or confront ‘reality’ and serve to strengthen or alter it; and as we will come to see, buildings blind to narrative reality can only engage issues of ethics and morality in haphazard and potentially dangerous ways.
[i] Quoted in Kundera, The Curtain, 60.
[ii] Percy, Message in the Bottle, 74.
Architecture is Fiction 