Postmedium narrative
by igsung so
We write to make ourselves see what we have got in the inescapable present... to give another interpretation of the same ruins...to show a glimpse of another aesthetic.
— Alison and Peter Smithson. Without Rhetoric – An Architectural Aesthetic 1955-1962. London: Latimer New Dimensions, 1973
Why bother writing about architecture when you could render it? Why would you verbally explain a work of architecture when you could make a video of it? Better yet: bake out a real-time virtual environment using ready-made video game engines for you to walk around in it. The digital age allows you to construct your own understanding of the space. You create your own narrative. It’s certainly more democratic this way. Writings are dumb. Don’t take offence: it’s true! Words are slow, unresponsive, and often misunderstood. They have become a medium that architects resort to when drawings and diagrams have failed to explicate the full breadth of their design. So why lament its transformation? Is there much use in reviewing the heydays of architectural writing? Why not instead attempt to uncover its post-medium specific condition in its unheroic, unexciting state? Simply accept the ruins of writing in its changing reality and present it so. In the mid-1960s and 1970s, in the midst what was then called the electric information age, collaborative efforts of Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel and Marshall McLuhan output a series of print matter marketed towards the mass public. Their principal aim was to be inexpensive and intellectually accessible. Most notable of these, as we all know, is The Medium is the Massage , a typo-pictorial translation of McLuhan’s esoteric writing geared towards a nonspecialist audience. Rooted in the techniques of cinematography, the reading experience was delivered as a casual synthesis of both visual and verbal matter, proposing a non-linear narrative to supplant traditional written communication; writing as a formal medium was dissolved; linearity of prose had collapsed. It heralded the end of nature as we knew it and inched us closer in accepting a postmedium condition of the arts, media and architecture: what we now commonly, and endearingly, refer to as interdisciplinary.
If images and movies are celebrated for their clarity, then writing can be championed for its ambiguities and misunderstandings. By extension, writing could be the last remaining medium that engenders multiple narratives and interpretations: critical subsistence in maintaining our collective imagination. The following is a series of orthographic and perspective drawings presented in pairs. In parallel, an undecorated prose accompanies the paired drawings. As such, the visual and verbal artefacts are presented simultaneously as a means to communicate specific qualities of a fictional building in Voss, Norway. The writing focuses on a fictional character, Malin. Via her brief encounters with the building throughout her life, the architecture is disclosed in fragments. In doing so, the architecture is not explained under architectural terms per se . The readers’ understanding of the building will draw from her personal memories evoking highly specific qualities of particular spaces within the building, all the while remaining ignorant of the rest of the building. After all, this is how we often experience a building only as it relates to us personally. The ambition of the writing is not to overwhelm the understanding of the project with a singular, machismo narrative, a PR tactic often deployed today to reduce architecture to bite-sized marketing packages. Similar to a cinematic soundtrack, the words construct a backdrop for the unfolding of the project’s architectural sequencing, events and materiality. Along with the visual artefacts, the words reveal spatial depth and evoke tactile memories. The content and delivery of the narrative are as plain as the visuals. Life in plain sight. Exceedingly conventional, exceptionally (sur)real. It is literally a story about architecture, vaguely familiar. Music...cue.
20
n
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator