Architecture as an Emotional Narrative Machine

“A space can only be made into a place by its occupants. The best that the designer can do is put the tools into their hands.” – Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish

We are all designers. We want to adapt but we nurture and manipulate the environment, to suitably serve our needs. It is our decision to surround ourselves with objects of our wants and wishes. This is design. Through this act of design we show our personality and transform the otherwise anonymous, dejected, commonplace things. This makes us create a space, in our lives and in reality. This is the art of customisation. The continual small adjustment is unique to each being and generates an affliction for all separately.

The emotional response to any person, place, or thing is actually a segue to casting a foundation for calling things ‘good’. Expressions are keys to telling the tale of the design. This is true in the sense that the role of an architect is purely a task to define quality as how they see it taking in consideration the context and time, which in turn, would establish a ground for the term ‘icon’.

The point of importance now is to reflect upon the concepts of emotional machines. This is what we want and have become. Pop culture or the current trend is filled with narratives demonstrating our simultaneous fascination with and fear of artificial intelligence. This is an expression, hence the basis of any design.

Technology has changed the way we consume media.

Digitisation has generated rapid technological changes, and has had a fundamental impact on people, culture, and society as a whole. In the media and creative industry, convergence has grown, and narratives have become increasingly interactive and immersive. Architecture is nothing but a narrative, it is a story.

Architecture tells tales that we move through as characters, like a film. It can use other narrative tools as storyteller such as foreshadowing, flashback, and suspension of disbelief. The story becomes the hero and is entirely interactive by virtue of the sometimes-unforeseen outcome of the decisions made while navigating through the architectural journey, which is the premise.

This virtual world, devoid of worldly materiality, gravity and natural phenomena, call for the design to be appropriate and precise in order to deliver the expected experience that a physical entity would give out. This is where innovation steps in, in creating an emotional digital narrative.

Based on the responses, three-dimensional modelling environments became the norm in the practice of architecture, speculation has occurred about the ability to design virtual realms that are not of the corporeal world, but of a world of pure data. Part of the challenge of developing narrative virtual spaces is that there has been a shift towards more of an image-based tradition from one that has traditionally been oral.

The evolution of digital media has added a significant amount of complexity both in the story-building and in the architectural design process. The introduction of advanced computational tools has permitted designers to generate and construct highly complex forms, quickly shift between scales, work faster and compare models with unprecedented ease. The development of these tools, still to this day, however, leaves a lot to wish for in terms of its contribution to a deeper understanding of the user experience that comes beyond formal, functional and structural aspects.

Cartoonists, illustrators, photographers, draughtsmen and film directors have all contributed to encouraging the creation of images of buildings, cities and human dwelling that has gradually shifted attention from the object to its perception, from the static and abstract nature of form to the variability of concrete and perceptible qualities that can be measured in their temporal aspects. This is where the shift lies; the cinematic attribute is being shifted to obtain a contrasting result. The architects create the image of the buildings, cities and human dwelling to shell out the effect that is generated by a cartoonist, illustrator, photographer, draughtsman or a film director.

By merging the available digital tools with the representative intention of collage, some contemporary architecture firms have chosen to move away from the dominant hyperrealism, instead creating a new trend: post-digital representation. Undoubtedly, this is just the beginning of a new stage of negotiation between the cold precision of technology and the expressive quality inherent in architecture.