Architectural History for Gamers 2: telling stories with spaces

We’ve talked about communicating via city walls and we’ve talked about buildings that want to tell you about their character, but we haven’t really talked about ways that ordering things in space can itself communicate messages. How landscape and architecture tell stories – about what happens in them, and about their visitors’ station.

So…

…a giant mountain smokes in the distance, looming through all 400 pages of book 2. It’s your certain doom, but maybe your salvation;

or: you stand on a cliff overlooking a rich land of golden fields. Only the black rock fingers in the east spoil this view of an orderly, heavenly kingdom;

or: the thick moss curtaining the river banks suddenly opens to reveal a vine-covered temple, nearly reclaimed by the jungle. The dungeon lies under the central pyramid;

or: north of The Wall, all is snow and meandering tracks up craggy mountainsides that spiral on and on into the bleak white. Nothing could live here, which is why the dead have annexed it;

or: this place is not a place of honor. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.

early design for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, New Mexico.

These are all communicative landscapes – they tell you what to expect will happen where the landscape gets special – and they transform you as you approach the special bit.

First, though, a few bits of theoretical orientation to bear in mind:

1. there’s no meaningful distinction between landscape and architecture. (a) Landscape is often designed and sculpted – golf courses and American cemeteries get that picturesque quality by judicious use of earth-moving equipment and planting trees in just the right places. (b) You can’t possibly build a whole holy mountain (yes you can) but you can tell people which way to go up it by putting a path there, and then you can put, like, stages of the cross or something along that path to turn your little river-grotto into Jesus’s cave or whatever. Or you can just tell stories about it, that reconfigure its parts into a memory palace for your story elements, or you can tell people they must be this holy to go there.
2. architecture communicates social order – it situates its users and assigns them a status, it expresses social hierarchy and specific roles – who is in charge of or responsible for whom. This is generally the most important thing architecture does – more than keeping the rain off or the grain dry. Social order is king: dry followers and dry grain, if they’re involved at all, are generally part of the project of social ordering.* And usually architecture does this as part of a complicated textual program that involves writing and rituals and everyday practice and rites of passage and so on. Very often, the actual built architecture refers to another place that’s so special you can’t go there, you just have to imagine it, so the architecture you can see is just a pale imitation of that greater, deeper reality, which means the users have to fill in the missing details (or scrub out the non-ideal intrusions) themselves.
3. architecture is in the first place the assembling of ideas, and a lot of architecture is composed of nothing else. Societies “produce spaces” to keep their functions separate or to usefully intertwine certain concepts (like, say, indoctrination of children, by having them be born only inside a controlled institution, which is also where they’ll get their moral education). So landscape design is as much about steering the visitor’s thoughts and opinions as it is about moving their body.

It’s at around this point that someone (usually Vitruvius) inevitably complains that architecture is most of all practical. It has to be fit for purpose. But what purpose? Things aren’t “just practical,” they’re practical because they support a practice, which is to say, a ritual of putting society in its place.

So to really understand what a bit of architecture/landscape is doing – the full program of ideas it’s serving – you’ll probably have to read (and, yes, maybe even dance) about it. But also, there is a bit of this big program that is (maybe must be) communicated through spatial arrangement. Probably because it communicates below the level of discourse – that is, it doesn’t tell you in words (that you could disagree with, if you heard them) what it means, it just is and continues to be all the time you’re moving through it. You understand maybe without being able to put into words what you’ve understood. Holy mountains are solid and tall and difficult to climb – they have a sort of morality of perseverance built right into them, just like alcohol and hangovers contain a morality of brief euphoria and lingering painful consequences.

Landscape, even more that buildings, is a thing you generally can’t experience all at once, so its communications tend to happen over time, in series.

The pilgrim trail prepares the visitors by having them follow a specific path where you can frame their views and by revealing things one after another – so they can work like story beats, but also so the visitor can be put into a particular mood before they get shown the next thing.

After walking a few hundred miles of pilgrim track from Paris to get to Rocamadour in the south of France, you are first of all greeted with a sort of player map of the site, that shows the Ordinary People (like you) at the bottom, and then a set of gatehouses guarding the Holy People at the top:

Once you’ve checked into your lowly guesthouse at the bottom of the cliff,

you climb up a twisty path to get to the holy places

and along the way, when you’re out of breath and you’ve been turned around half a dozen times and everything gets a mystical soft-focus glow, you get shown the (local) Cave of Christ’s Sepulchre…

…hidden behind a gate, and… it’s oddly convincing that this is a sort of extension of Jerusalem.

So when you get to the paved abbey/church at the top and you finally get to go into another dark… cave-like structure:

you’re ready for revelations that you feel you’ve earned – special realizations reserved just for you, from the blue-shrouded figure above the altar.

The point here is, it doesn’t work if you can stroll in straight from the market. With apologies to Charles Reade, “make ’em shlep, make ’em wheeze, make ’em wait.”

If this sort of thing is good for spiritual awakening, it’s also good for inspiring awe in a king’s subjects.

Before the British conquered Ceylon, it had an independent kingdom tucked into its central highlands, called Kandy

or “Candea” in 16th century Portuguese, ringed by forbidding mountains.

Part 2 to follow……

* for a really cool and complicated, totalizing vision of architecture ordering society, check out Pierre Bourdieu’s classic study of the Berber (or Kabyle) House, in which all the episodes of social life, birth, marriage and death, are set out in the ideal ordering of a family home. One of Bourdieu’s observations is that the whole world of traditional Berber men is made up of stuff that’s offered properly to the right or the left hand – a sort of manly ordering of the habits of the body, and that inside the house that whole order is reversed… because the house is orientated for the woman, who sits at her loom facing the door, waiting for her man to come home with his hunting trophies.