Architecture as Story-Telling

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found it difficult finding the nexus between the avant-garde and innovative architecture I want to create in school and display in my portfolio while recognizing the importance of the individual and serving clients and people in the real world. The two desires – one artistic, one humanistic – seem to be in perpetual competition, particularly when it comes to architectural practice. “We serve the needs of our clients” is often seems a marketing excuse for “we don’t make beautiful buildings.”

Meanwhile, architecture has taught me that the size of a budget should have no correlation to the quality of design. Are the two considerations mutually exclusive?

I don’t think so.

Perhaps that was the case with modernist architects like Le Corbusier and his vision for the “Radiant City” that eventually gave rise to the typology of the “projects,” or for urban planners like Robert Moses whose grandiose plans for a better city for everyone, in the process, made life a lot worse for a lot of anyone’s. Contemporary architects aren’t necessarily exempt either; Peter Eisenmann, in the Samuel Mockbee biopic “Citizen Architect,” stated, “I don’t believe architecture is about making a better world.” Well, okay then.

But today, leading architects innovate through a process that speaks to everyone, including client and user: telling a story.

Within humans, there is an innate inclination to story. It is how, before reading and writing, history and heritage were passed down. It is often, in public speaking settings, a much easier and more memorable way to connect with an audience. This is because – and I’m no scientist, but I’ve learned this from those smarter than me – our brains want to understand the world around us in the simplest terms, spending the least amount of energy to do so. We can immediately place ourselves in a story and, thus, understand it more easily than we would otherwise.

This has obvious implications for how we might approach reviews and crits, but, more than that, I believe it can be a guiding principle for how we approach design. And don’t just take my word for it. Marlon Blackwell, when interviewed by Bespoke Careers last year, answered a question about what they look for in candidates by saying, “I think what fits well with what we do is the ability to tell a story, the love of story.” Sir Norman Foster, in an interview with Louisiana Channel, talked about how architecture is the telling of multiple stories that come together and “sing” as one; for instance, when describing a project, you may talk about form, or material, or the sustainable aspects, but they must all come together to tell a singular story. That, to Foster, is what makes architecture meaningful and successful.

Why do you think so many people are drawn to that style of diagrams the Bjarke Ingels Group does for all of their projects? They explain their design process of how they got to a seemingly interesting or complex solution through a series of iterative diagrams that start simple and show how they make simple tweaks to come up with something beyond the everyday. They’re using these diagrams to tell a story – even though we know the iterative process of design is never that easy and straightforward. For architecture students and designers, we see those diagrams as the process that we also go through and put ourselves in it; we say, hey, I can make those same kinds of decisions in whatever I’m working on.

BIG’s work is clearly innovative; Ingels, in several forums, has talked about a theme of “social infrastructure,” or, essentially, a more human-centric approach to design. I’d encourage you to look more into this if you’re interested, but I believe their work – and their process – is an excellent example of how to innovate around people via story-telling.

The notion of story seems to me why adaptive re-use projects are so popular. When you think about old urban factories turned into loft apartments, shipping containers used for housing (or, in Austin, a bar), or projects like Ponce City Market in Atlanta, which took an old Sears and Roebuck building and turned it into a hip marketplace that’s revitalized a neighborhood, what is it about them that speaks to us all? The past life – of an era no longer recognizable but that we can tangibly be a part of – has something to say. A story to tell.

When we look at the future of parking in cities and our lack of affordable housing, I wanted to explore – as part of a presentation for South by Southwest here in Austin last spring – how we might be able to reuse parking structures that could one day become obsolete and retrofit them into a living solution. The result – prefabricated micro-apartments that could plug into the existing structure – creates a total shift from something machine-oriented to something now human-centered. The desire wasn’t to take the garage and transform it into something unrecognizable; I wanted to showcase, “this is a parking garage” that we now made more relevant to you.

You can make excellent architecture that revolves around the people it is made for. It doesn’t have to be a tradeoff. Just tell them a story.