narrative and fiction

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While construction as a technological process is prosaic –deriving directly from a mathematical equation, a functional diagram, or a rule of formal combinations- architecture is poetic, necessarily an abstract order but in itself a metaphor emerging from a vision of the world and Being.
Only by engaging our own imagination (with its inescapable horizon of language, and despite its dangers) can we be truly compassionate. It is our imaginative faculty that allows us to identify with the other, and truly understand her suffering. This entails a very real, yet opaque connection between words and deeds. Alberto Perez Gomez

Narrative and fiction, have always played a role in architecture, not long ago however suppressed through modern architecture. If we think about rituals, even back to religious and ancient mythodologies, mankind tries to understand its condition through symbols and the words described within.
Architecture often is a metaphor for those interpretations and the words become inscribed into its processes and more so into its representation. Architecture affords to be read in those terms.
The architectural narrative in the last century has been replaced for most projects with the mathematical orchestration of a program, nothing but a rational quantification of volumes, sizes, proximities etc..
With this project, it is now the time to revisit the power of the architectural narrative and to establish an association between architecture and fiction.

Kiesler>Endless House

What is the projected interrelation of spaces to the distinctiveness of means of how we inhabit architecture and even in a larger sense …the world.
You need to accommodate the "individual" first, but also extend your concept to the larger group, the family, friends, environment…The interior as a place is addressing life and the methods of occupation of space as you would define it.
Think about the recent emerging reflection back to the ritual and the mystic, as it informs architecture.
Get interested into the more intimate territories of life, which includes also the insecurity of life, death, tradition, the family, ceremonies, the richness, rite, secretness... How do we obtain or reconsider a new significance in daily life? How do you see the idea of the modern minimalist open space as opposed to the “house” with a lot of small secret spaces? What about the violence or public exposure through media?
Or is the human condition the center point of decision where we need to reflect first on the environmental and sustainable conditions before we inhabit space?

Assigments:
Due friday 5:
Give a brief written description of the physical and psychological condition of the typology of the person inhabiting the space. Explain through your narrative in how you see “him or her” in relationship to a variety of external conditions. Take notice of the specific environment in which the occupant/s are situated, New York. Your narrative needs to incorporate a vision on how one sleeps, works, eats, uses the bath etc...
Give few words (1-3) in a loose list that describe the atmosphere as you imagine it.
Enhance the narrative through a collage of few images, describing the words.

Due Monday 8: Set up a potential time line of the described daily activities, which you then transfer into an abstract diagram or drawing.
The diagram will be read as being in three dimensions as it inscribes the essence of those activities and time into space.

The type of occupation will be situated somewhere within the project to be designed.

Films: Michelangelo Antonioni, >L’Avventura >Blow-Up >La Notte > Eclipse (not to forget Terry Gilliams > Brazil)
Format: printouts letter size & pdf on class server!
Books:
• Frederick Kiesler, Selected Writings
• Frederick Kiesler, Endless Space
• Frederci Kiesler, Inside the Endless House