What is an event, architecturally speaking? We sidestepped this question in the previous sections and focused, instead, on the most variable aspect of any environment – i.e., the perceiver, the subject, the human being, your standard-everyday-run-of-the-mill fiction-making animal. To that end, we latched onto the role of language in constructing events: Narrative emerges when we can tell, or retell, a sequence of events such that they appear as a story. That is, when experience fully becomes language (meditation 44). Correct as this might be, it addresses half the problem at most. More importantly, the half, or more, left out is the part this blog is ostensibly about.
An event is not something that occurs only, or even primarily, in our heads. Gibson notes, in general terms, an event is “a disturbance in the invariant structure of the array.”[i] In other words, unless we are talking about psychic experiences or psychotic breaks, an event is a discontinuity in the stuff of a world or environment otherwise assumed to be fixed. Architecture, for example. This is not meant to imply that buildings somehow create events without the co-participation of people. Things are not events; without people to perceive them, things are not even things. An event obviously assumes a frame of reference.
Gibson’s point is the structured environment is what gets framed by perception. The scenographic and cinematography-like fade-in/fade-out quality of our attention is based on occasional disturbances (Gibson’s term) in an otherwise relatively fixed scene. The totality of invariant environment and disturbances to it/within it provide a figural collection of information that we frame as an event or events.
The vagary of “a figural collection of information” should give you pause. I mean, architecture and the changes that happen within it constituting together a figural collection of information is straightforward, in a commonsensical way. But how that prosaic observation is or can be actionable is vague.
Earlier in this blog and throughout the second half of my Architecture History and Theory in Reverse, I argued that naming is required for experience. The acquisition of names is the acquisition of information. Naming, however, should not be understood as an act always directed at immediate observation (i.e. there is a that) but can just as easily apply to conditions outside the present (in the form of that will, that did, that might or could, etc…). Tense, or time as experienced, comes into play – specifically, the conditional. Ricoeur states, “the conditional is to narrative what the future is to commentary; both signal anticipated information.”[ii] The relatively invariant structured array that is any work of architecture provides a condition that we name both directly (this is) and conditionally (this was, this could be).
This explains in broad strokes how architecture provides an invariant array underpinning an event. But can architecture contribute to its own disturbance? Can it trigger an event within itself? I think the answer is yes. And the notions of tense and order are key.
[i] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 95.
[ii] Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 2, 70.
Architecture is Fiction 