INTRODUCTION
This article will outline an approach and methodology as a new tool in architectural education that allows us to reach an in-depth understanding of space and place. Moreover, it will present a theoretical framework, the importance of research, and samples of the methodology’s implementation in teaching and students’ work.
As an architect myself, through my work process, I realised the importance of narrative. When discussing a project with clients, common metaphors of their own life revealed an architectural narrative intimately connected with the place and landscape of the given site and environment. As a researcher and PhD author years ago, I was guided by phenomenological and hermeneutical methods, anthropological principles and ethnographical observations in composing eight fictional narratives out of spatial, social, and landscape narratives and truths.
Consequently, after years of teaching theoretical and design courses, in this article/ presentation, I will present new tools for architecture students to develop their understanding of place and the ways in which life is negotiated within the boundaries of each public, private or common place. This methodology distances itself from drawings and modelling tables and introduces the world of texts, given that narrative and imagination have been tools in the hands of both architects and authors.[1]
Within this research and work with students from different departments of American universities during a study abroad program as well as architecture students from Greek universities, I will discuss how these methodologies affected their understanding and perception.
Philosophical framework: the use of narrative
Primarily through my PhD research, which took place in a farming landscape and a small community on the island of Tinos, I became aware of the value of metaphor as a natural language of sharing a communal way of living connected with the natural and built environment. It was revealed to me that the stories shared by a small community of villagers connect language with mimetic action, habit, which not only connect our physical and mental experience with the environment, but also place and space. This was adopted to discover and reveal the truth through fiction/story/myth as argued by Paul Ricoeur, through the “mediating role” of fiction as a weaving procedure of different things that make up life. It is this complexity of life that narrative tries to imitate.[2]
Implementation in study abroad programmes: “Public spaces in Athens. Contemporary stories in an Ancient City”
Since 2017, I have been teaching the contemporary urbanism course, “Athens through time, space, narrative” later developed into “Public spaces in Athens. Contemporary stories in an Ancient City”. This allowed me to share with students the idea that the use of narrative and the creation of fictional narratives can develop a deeper understanding of what life is, offering a foundation for the imagination to flourish and anchor.
This course approached Athens as a city evolving in time, bringing together historic and contemporary architecture, as well as spaces of the communal, public and private realm, the Athenian landscape and its environs, and its social, cultural, and urban fabric. It aims to reveal boundaries and places of crisis, migration, negotiation, and coexistence, as this takes place between the ancient and the new, between the centre and the edges of the city. These places were recorded through the students’ observations, videos, photos, texts, literature and discussions during each seminar. The seminars followed by field trips were developed chronologically from the ancient past to present, while remaining connected with the reality of the contemporary city.
Learning Objectives
In this course, research, experience, and imagination through fiction are presented as tools to help students gain a thorough understanding of what this Mediterranean capital really is by following their personal route in the city. By the end of the seminar, students are able to write their own fictional narrative on the truth revealed to them by the city and work on a methodology aimed at a deeper understanding of a 'foreign' reality, a way of seeing, thinking about the series of negotiable or non-negotiable boundaries that coexist in the city of Athens. They create a valuable archive of data about life in Athens and develop different ways of documenting the city in order to reveal a reality based on their experience and interpretation.
Excerpt 1 by a student in spring 2020 (during covid-19, lockdown):
“The pedestrian street was entirely empty as the wind raced up its incline. Any warmth offered from the Mediterranean sun directly overhead was rejected by the chilling gusts. We continued on our
journey past the massive Acropolis Museum, our heads sweeping left to right, from neo-classical
buildings to the pinnacle of classical architecture: the Parthenon. I had neglected a visit to the top
of the rock for the first part of my trip, thinking I had all the time in the world, but in that
moment I felt grateful to have scoured its treasures a week earlier.
At the top of the Dionysiou Areopagitou there were no red and yellow tour buses. We ducked into the forest, turning sideways and lifting our arms to make it past the barrier gate with our bellies full of roast pork, grilled pita, and tzatziki. The wind was muted by dense growths of olive and pine trees all around. The trees also blocked out the warming sunlight, sending a sharp shiver through my body. We stopped at the Church of Agios Dimitrios Loumbardiaris to admire its mixed stone exterior and were greeted by the smell of burning incense seeping through the loose window frames. As we turned right, the two dogs behind the barbed-wire fence, who usually bark at me when I run past, sat with their heads on their paws, tracing each of our steps with their beady eyes. We climbed up the metal ramp, our loud steps drawing an attentive gaze from one of the pups, and were welcomed to the lookout by a blast of wind. We had reached our destination.”
Similar principles are followed in the summer course, ‘Greek Island Architecture, Culture, and Identity: Amorgos, Santorini, Tinos’ where, for four-weeks, students are travelling and exploring the life, the architecture and the possible future of these three Cycladic Islands. They pose and answer questions about dwelling, belonging, and identity after investigating the local communities and their historic practices of creating sustainable architecture and means of living. Students have the opportunity to explore how the environment and the local architecture is related with the psychosomatic equilibrium of communal life in these places. By the end of this course, students have gained a way to interpret and connect with places, individuals, and communities through the composition of a logbook as a narrative record.
Excerpt 2 by a student, in summer 2024:
“She missed these days when there were barely any private boundaries except for home spaces. When they would all gather together in communal spaces, dance to local songs, and drink their raki. The days when artisans would work secretly on marble artifacts and give them to one of the members of the community on their birthday. The sense of community was so strong, that the shared meals
were uncountable. But those days were long gone. Where did the rain start beating them? About this time down in the port town, things were slowly beginning to change. The number of foreigners coming to the port was constantly increasing, business was booming. Every few weeks a construction project was begun to host a new taverna, or a fashion clothing store, or a tourist hotel. It didn’t change a lot of things earlier on, because the tourists then would blend in with the locals, learn their way of life, and live it that way. It was before the advance of phones even, so the intricate tapestry of the island remained tightly woven together, communal events still happened, and vernacular architecture was still upheld.
A few years later, however, things started to change. There came a new generation of tourists. These were not like the ones before them who were used to the locals, they only cared about the aesthetic of the island. They came to teach their ways, not learn the ways of the locals. They didn’t learn the language, they pioneered divergent forms of architecture and they popularised their small Island with their social media posts.”
Architectural theory courses:
Architectural theory courses, such as "Understanding and Imagination before Designing” at the University of Thessaly school of architecture and “Theory 1 & 2 / Architecture and Landscape” at the University of Ioannina school of architecture, were based on highlighting the theoretical and experiential concepts of architecture and landscape. Their purpose was to introduce students to the architectural discourse aimed at understanding landscape as a dynamic element.
These courses were based on case studies to reinforce research and experience and get students to analyse life in small communities through the creation of a file - a collection of observations, texts, interviews, stories, measurements. Field trips allowed students to create their personal archive by experiencing, recording and understanding the cultural and social structure through observations based on the following: what they see, listen, touch/ step on, smell, their observations of what is old and what is new, the differences in scale, the shadows, vegetation, human movement and uses of space. Students were asked to respond by exploring maps and physical spaces of the city, objects, landscapes or monuments, creating in that way their own archive of texts, photographs, images and critical interpretations.
The young architects needed to be aware of all these before beginning to imagine and create a new piece of architecture in this structure. Moreover, tools of interpretation were given to them (historical, anthropological, philosophical guidance) so that architecture and design could be understood as practices that were traditionally used to connect people with their community, place, religion, and environment.
With an understanding of a "different" reality, the final assignment was the composition of a fictional story using theory and history too in a creative effort to understand and interpret a place, space and architectural complexities.
Architectural design courses:
Architectural design courses, such as “The scale of vernacular architecture in a contemporary city” which took place in Volos, at the School of Architecture of the University of Thessaly, and the “The anthropogenic shaping of the natural/rural environment in combination with a typology of Greek settlements” at the University of Ioannina school of architecture, invited the students to give three different readings of the landscape that would be chosen through different scales. They are invited to explore how our perception of place can be developed in connection with our participation in charitable and private events or activities of everyday life. These events express, reflect and maintain a dialogue between place and body, or between place, body, and an object, installation, or furniture in public space.
In these courses students were also challenged to further deepen their reading and understanding of design in an area with a fragile physical footprint. This goal was achieved through research, archiving and through the study of the elements that define the urban or rural landscape of an area such as boundaries. Their interpretations connected with the public, the private, and the community space, the importance of threshold, the importance of shadow, the use of various materials that compose the different scales within the urban or rural landscape. Students then compose a story of their understanding of what life is like in these areas, introducing characteristics, qualities of place, the locals’ stories and how they contribute to the social and cultural life of the area.
Figure 1,2,3. Students’ work/ public furniture/ installations in the city: Spring semester, University of Thessaly 2019
Why this methodology is important:
a. The role of research: During their research into verbal history and local narratives, students were helped to understand a small community’s perception of ownership and dwelling through the different set of metaphors and interpretation that boundaries reflected onto their lives. Then, phenomenology and hermeneutics helped them understand and interpret places created by boundaries that actually exist through the negotiation and narration of stories taking place in communal or public spaces.
b. The role of experience: Small communities such as the those experienced, as well as larger communities in the city, allowed the students not only to observe and engage with different ways of living and spatial perception through architecture, but also through the narratives of its inhabitants. Experience helped them create an imaginary plot, with a mediatory function rather than mimetic, not a duplication but a creative reconstruction.
c. The role of Metaphor: The students soon realised that the people’s stories consisted of a series of metaphors about what dwelling is in this part of the world, in this specific landscape. Gadamer claims that “in language and only in it, can we meet what we never “encounter” in the world, because we are ourselves and merely what we mean and what we know from ourselves.”[3]This knowledge from ourselves also involves emotio[i]ns, which is another way of connecting ourselves with place and environment through fiction.
d. The role of Imagination: Through this reconstruction of a fictional narrative, the students realised how Kearney, in connection to the work of Ricoeur, explores the ability of language to open up new worlds, not as a collection of the subjective, but through productive linguistic imagination, “the metaphorical imagination”,[4] as he calls it, which “not only combines the verbal and non-verbal, it also produces new meaning by confronting a literal with a figurative sense.”[5] Pérez-Gómez also cites Ricoeur’s preference for a “linguistic model of imagination,”[6] that is the replacement of a visual model with a linguistic model, writing that “imagining folded into the function of metaphor.”[7]
e. The role of fiction: As Pérez-Gómez argues, the mindset that rejected both the significance of myth for human beings and poetry as a legitimate form of knowledge, led to a contemporary architecture based on economic benefits, technological production, institutionalised frames and political authority.[8]
Additionally, another aspect of the role of fiction that Grassi mentions is how this “metaphorical imagistic form of language,” as he describes it, can offer a different manner of philosophising.[9][ii]
EVALUATION - CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
During the research process, the students created their own narratives based on the metaphors of the local communities and their reality, fused with their personal experience in the city as a version of reality - many students’ stories are being compiled for a book initially on the city of Athens.
They enjoyed both the engagement with the phenomena and places and working together in a group. They expressed enthusiasm about learning from narratives things they had not experienced before. I noted that initially it was very difficult for them to actually observe and record a place in order to learn from it. They needed to develop mindfulness and understand that their senses are their initial tools. Their difficulty in using their imagination and fiction to express aspects of their experience in these places was very instructive to me. Independently of that, they produced beautiful works both in terms of archiving, understanding, and composing their narratives either as a final work or as a process for a design project. There was a lot of excitement in the group of students who were introduced to the design part. The engagement and interaction with a place, under specific methodology and guidance, helped them primarily to develop a common approach or “language” to communicate with each other and share their findings and understanding. The creative part then came easily using their experience, common understanding and imagination and by focusing on variations of the scenarios. The different projects from each group at this stage were particularly interesting and stimulating.
Research, experience and imagination are presented as tools for young architects to achieve a broader understanding of what the world that we design for really is by being released from the preoccupation of what this world should be according to contemporary social and political edicts, or urban rules that do not reflect a place’s reality. Metaphor, narrative, and fiction allow different versions of reality to emerge. They equip students with a way of interpreting/incorporating the local tradition into a contemporary way of living, as opposed to responding to architecture and dwelling merely through form and the dominant architectural trends. It inspires them to bring forth the complexity and meaning of architecture, a “meaningful regionalism”[10] related with place and environment, culture, and human life.
NOTES
1Maria, Vidali, Liminality, metaphor and place in the farming landscape of Tinos: The village of Kampos, A thesis submitted to University of Thessaly in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, (University of Thessaly, School of Architecture, 2017).
2 Ibid, 27-28.
3Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and eds. Linge E. David, (Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1976), 20.
4 Richard Kearney, “Paul Ricoeur and the hermeneutic imagination”, T. Peter Kemp and David Rasmussen, eds. The Narrative Path: The Later Works of Paul Ricoeur, (Cambridge, MA, London: The MIT Press, 1989), 3-6.
5 Ibid., 15.
6 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Attunement, architectural meaning after the crisis of modern science, (Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 2016), 187.
7 Ibid.
8 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, “The Architecture of Richard Henriquez: A Praxis of Personal Memory,” ed. Shubert, Howard(ed.), Henriquez, Richard: Memory Theatre, Catalog of the exhibition co-organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Canadian Centre of Architecture, Montreal, 1993.
9 Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy. The Humanist Tradition, (University Park, London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980), 101.
10Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Attunement, architectural meaning after the crisis of modern science, (Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 2016), 193.
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