Architecture and narration: the architect as storyteller?

Abstract

Since we are deeply involved in the era of communication, the interest in the relationship between architecture and forms of narration is not surprising. Amongst the many declinations in which the relationship can be interpreted, it’s successful to combine architecture with a concept of contemporary communication: storytelling. Architecture and narration maintain, however, a deeper bond if we consider them in terms of the boundaries they create between humans and the real world. The common hermeneutic tension of construction and narration/poetize can be fully understood in the work of the architect-poet, or those architects whose work also includes poetic composition. The issue is how the application of contemporary techniques of storytelling influences the sense of hermeneutic narrative of the architecture, considering that the effectiveness of storytelling seems to reside more in explanatory simplification that in problematic complexity

Keywords

• storytelling
• narrativa
• narratività