Readers who have followed this far will be relieved to hear that the story of architecture as a form of fiction is finally turning to issues of how. How do the basic building blocks of architecture – materials and proportions – coalesce to become fiction-bearing objects?
This question is quite old. The history of architectural theory can be conceived as a collection of attempts to answer that question. The main difference between theoretical approaches is the words chosen to replace “fiction” in the question above. You can pick a word almost at random – Being, context, equity, experience, form, function, policy, politics, program, religion, regionalism, resilience, Truth, typology, vernacular – and you will have identified a trend or movement or at least a significant moment in architectural thought. There are many reasons I believe “fiction” to be a better choice. For the moment, however, it is important to identify two misconceptions that get in the way of answering regardless of the word that gets hyphenated into the question above. First, we tend to assume that the world of experience in which we move about is fragmented, that it exists as a collection of objects, seen pictorially. Second, we tend to envision ourselves as masters of the universe divinely unifying those fragments in consciousness.
The first misconception grows out of the latter which philosopher Daniel C. Dennett calls Cartesian Theater – the myth that we know ourselves and possess something like a cohesive consciousness.[i] This Cartesian Theater imbibed and taken as some mystical power hides the structure of the environment. The environment is not a collection of discrete objects or figures. It is not figures on a ground, to use design language. It is not pictorial. It is all encompassing. The environment is a location that provides a sense of location – a sense of finding one’s position from which to act – to fiction-making animals. To alter one of Jordan Peterson’s phrases slightly, a narrative environment “is a place to act, not a place to perceive.”[ii]
We will turn to the role location plays in narrative communication in the next section. For the moment, lets address only the implications of thinking of the environment as an already-cohesive location on the rudiments of experience foregrounded in architectural theory at least since Pallasmaa: light, sound, touch, smell.
The environment as a pre-existing and all-encompassing location grounds the three constellations of experience identified in mediation #21, “In which events happen:” prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration. To briefly recap, we said that prefiguration is the constellation of what is already there, what you enter knowing, and what you expect to come away knowing. Configuration happens in the encounter itself – the mental framing that takes place in-situ. And refiguration, finally, is the realized take-away – the world re-construed in the wake of an event.
Prefiguration does not mean that everyone in a location attends to or even perceives the same aspects of an environment but simply that they are capable of doing so given position and expectations. Configuration means that an environment becomes a setting in which you, other people, animals, and organizations become characters. The interactions of characters with other characters or characters with settings witnessed through the frame of prefigured knowns render actions as plots, motives and portents. It is here that meaning takes root, or fails to do so, through refiguration. Events either affect us sufficiently to alter our prefigurations or behaviors or both (and are therefore meaningful) or they leave us more or less as we were before.[iii]
Light, sound, touch, and smell are not perceptual awarenesses. They are boundary conditions. These elements, in other words, are not constructs of the subject but are prefigurations imparted by the location. What we casually think of as perception is the configuration of one’s own location in response to the environment as encountered. Reconfiguration emerges only as a third and nearly purely subjective response to the locating of oneself in relation to the environment as a whole.
Now, why does this restatement matter? The steps outlined above move from what might be deemed objective physical reality, through an intermediary condition, and finally into subjective meaning. Light, sound, touch, and smell are manipulable in the first realm, somewhat predictable in the second, and meaningful when internalized in the third. Despite the counter-intuitiveness, the territory of operation for designers of fictions is the first realm – cold, hard, stuff. With this simple awareness, the question, “how do the basic building blocks of architecture – materials and proportions – coalesce to become fiction-bearing objects?” appears poorly formed.
[i] Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, (London: Penguin, 1993).
[ii] Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 109. Italics in original. I have altered the quote only insofar as I replaced “the mythic universe” (his words) with “a narrative environment” (mine). I will argue over the coming sections that this substitution does not alter the original intent.
[iii] Even two events that look the same from the outside and occurred to the same individual in the same location but at different times can have different results in meaning. A person might trip and fall on the steps outside his or her home on multiple occasions, for instance. The times this occurs in which no long-term damage is done to one’s body or self-esteem tend to fade into meaninglessness. An instance in which the person suffers a lingering disability or draws the laughter or loving attention of onlookers, however, tends to be recorded as a meaningful event in that person’s life.
Architecture is Fiction 