Confabulations : Storytelling in Architecture

Paul Emmons, Marcia F. Feuerstein, Carolina Dayer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317162278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Confabulation is a drawing together through storytelling. Fundamental to our perception,

memory, and thought is the way we join fractured experiences to construct a

narrative. Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture weaves together poetic ideas,

objects, and events and returns you to everyday experiences of life through juxtapositions

with dreams, fantasies, and hypotheticals. It follows the intellectual and creative

framework of architectural cosmopoesis developed and practiced by the distinguished

thinker, architect, and professor Dr. Marco Frascari, who thought deeply about the

role of storytelling in architecture.

Bringing together a collection of 24 essays from a diverse and respected group of

scholars, this book presents the convergence of architecture and storytelling across a

broad temporal, geographic, and cultural range. Beginning with an introduction framing

the topic, the book is organized along a continuous thread structured around four

key areas: architecture of stories, stories of architecture, stories of theory and practice

of stories. Beautifully illustrated throughout and including a 64-page full colour section,

Confabulations is an insightful investigation into architectural narratives.

Part I
Architecture of stories

1 Glass and clay

Proust and Gallé

Elaine Scarry

The substance we call clay has such remarkable features that an array of scientists today believe that clay may have served as the worktable on which life learned to live. Clay has the capacity to replicate itself not quite in the way that crystals grow, and not quite in the way that DNA replicates itself, but in lattice works that are a hybrid—or something in between—crystals and DNA. NASA scientist Leila Coyne describes the “startling electronic properties” of clay, “defects” in its lattice work that enable it to store energy and information “and then re-emit it.” Leila Coyne states: “If you take a lump of clay and hit it with a hammer it blows ultraviolet energy for a month.”¹

The theory that clay is the worktable on which life learned to live is relatively new. But two features of this account have been with us for millennia. First, the association of clay with replication. On this northern European vase from the year 1900 [Plate 3], a simple ginger leaf is repeated across the base. But if we scan across Babylonia, Egypt, China, Islam, Greece, Rome, and North and South American pottery, we inevitably find lines and images imprinted on the surface in repetitive streams. Clay invites and incites repetition. The second feature of clay saluted across millennia is its association with aliveness: the claims that it is alive, that while wet it seems to move, that the “inert ball … acquire[s] a coiled spring of energy,”² or even, as is said by potters in the Andes, that “it is sensitive … and gets upset easily”³ are claims we have all heard all our lives.

For Proust, clay was a worktable for the creation of both cities and persons.

In Place-Names: the Name, Marcel pictures Balbec “as on an old piece of Norman pottery that still keeps the colour of the earth from which it was fashioned.”⁴ Marcel asks us to inscribe two vivid pictures on the surface of this clay vase. The first is of an innkeeper welcoming the boy to Balbec: “the inn-keeper who would pour me out coffee and milk on my arrival.” The image, in other words, is that of a man holding a serving vessel, a piece of pottery, from which he pours coffee and milk. Clay replicates clay on its own surface.

The second picture—let us say the picture we must now inscribe on the other side of the vase—requires us to imagine the innkeeper escorting Marcel down “to watch the turbulent sea, unchained, before the church” [Plate 4]. The welcoming civility of the first picture has been magnified in the upheaval of civilization out of the foundational rock—the eruption of a Norman stone church out of the seabed floor.⁵ Once again clay replicates clay, this time not in a local act of civility but in geological events.

The kinship between pottery making and geological creation was one appreciated by porcelain makers and scientists alike, as historian Robert Finley makes us aware. The picture in plate 4 is not the bay of Balbec, but the bay of Naples. It is the frontispiece of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology⁶ showing the ruined pillars of an Graeco-Egyptian Temple that Lyell believed had been lifted up by volcanic action from the seabed floor.⁷ The Wedgewood House, to which Darwin belonged and which funded the Voyage of the Beagle, believed the interior of the earth acted like “a titanic kiln, a heat-generating engine disgorging molten lava.”⁸

Emile Gallé was immersed in geology. His genius as a glassmaker was preceded by 15 years in which he performed color experiments on the local clays around Nancy.⁹ One of his masterworks in glass from the year 1900 is entitled Geology [Plate 5]. It depicts the gradual formation of crystals as one moves down its surface, from the radial and rectangular crystals half way down, to the three-dimensional jewels at the base. The rayed crystals are of particular interest because when x-rays were first invented in 1895, clay was a favorite subject of scientific inquiry; soon after, the major porcelain houses in Europe began creating crystalline glazes in which the radial structure of particles under heat emerged into view, as one can see in vases emerging from Sevres, the leading porcelain house in France, and again from Rorstrand, the leading porcelain house in Sweden.

As important as clay is to Proust in the invention of places, it is more important in the creation of persons, as we can see by turning to the high priestess of porcelain, Aunt Léonie. Bed-ridden, Aunt Léonie takes events occurring outside her bedroom window as narrative prompts for the invention of stories. But she is quite insistent that no distracting event should take place outside her window when she is holding a clay plate in her hands, a clay plate over which a story is hovering.

These were the only plates which had pictures on them and my aunt used to amuse herself at every meal by reading the description [la legende], of whichever [plate] might have been sent up to her. She would put on her spectacles and spell out: “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” “Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp,” and smile, and say “Very good indeed.”¹⁰

“The Arrival of the Unknown Princess.” Very good indeed. Plate 6 shows a plate made by Royal Doulton in their 1909 series on the Arabian Nights. Like Proust’s Balbec vase with its depiction of clay events on its own surface, here we see—on either side of the princess and her escort—huge clay vessels. They announce clay’s habit of self-replication. Equally important, they suggest the immense unknown interior of the Unknown Princess, the secret and sovereign interior that we see again depicted on the Royal Doulton pattern for Ali Baba: clay replicates clay and conjures up the unknowability of other persons [Plate 7].

In fact, the first time we hear about Aunt Léonie’s Arabian Night plates is not in the episode just cited, but in the “Overture” where Marcel first describes the mysterious interior of Swann, his “almost secret existence of a wholly different kind.” These are aspects of his life that no one in the Combray household could ever have inferred. To know about his bohemian-aristocratic life would have been as shocking to them as finding out that after dinner Swann entered the pages of Virgil and dove down into the arms of the sea-nymph Thetis. But now Marcel rejects that Virgilian story for:

an image more likely to have occurred to [Aunt Léonie], for she had seen it painted on the plates we used for biscuits at Combray … the thought of having had to dinner Ali Baba, who, as soon as he found himself alone and unobserved, would make his way into the cave, resplendent with its unsuspected treasures.¹¹

But if it is fair to call Aunt Léonie the High Priestess of Porcelain, it is less because of the Arabian Night Plates than because of the madeleine passage.

When we think about the biscuit that prompts memories and narratives, we some-times forget that there is a substrate, a worktable, that is prior even to the tea-soaked madeline and that is the porcelain tea-cup:

And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.¹²

Proust makes certain we do not miss this small porcelain lap of creation by likening the Combray teacup to the Japanese porcelain bowl. Three points deserve our notice. The specific clay mineral used in porcelain is kaolin; and kaolin’s major use is the making of paper. Almost every time Proust speaks of porcelain, paper resides nearby. Here what happens to the small bits of paper re-enacts the making of the porcelain itself: when wet, the paper morsels swell and bend, just as the moistened clay did in the making of the bowl. Second, the madeline that has infused into its surface the lime blossoms itself re-enacts the Asian clay bowl that traditionally has a blossom inscribed on its surface. The analogy between dough and clay, kneading dough, kneading clay, is universally recognized: clay that has been fired but unglazed is called “the biscuit.” Proust was acutely aware of the analogy as we can appreciate if we lift ourselves out of Swann’s Way for a moment and go to In a Budding Grove where the young girls in bloom are described first as dough, then as clay:

very young girls, in whom the unleavened flesh, like a precious dough, has not yet risen [comme une pate precieuse travaille encore]. They are malleable, a soft flow of substance kneaded [un flot de matiere ductile petrie] by every passing impression that possesses them. Each of them looks like a brief succession of little statuettes, representing gaiety, childish solemnity, fond coquettishness, amazement, every one of them modeled by an expression that is full and frank, but fleeting. This plasticity lends much variety and great charm to a girl …¹³

Conceivably, Proust could have been influenced here by the 10-inch high group of biscuit (unglazed porcelain) figures of Agathon Leonard’s The Scarf Dance which received the gold medal at the 1900 Universal Exposition [Plate 8].¹⁴

As we learn in Within a Budding Grove, Aunt Léonie underwrites Marcel’s creations by leaving him her estate: her money, her furniture, her collection of antique Chinese porcelain vases. Proust chooses to focus on the last, describing a moment when Marcel decides to sell a large porcelain vase so that he will have the money to give Gilberte endless days of pleasure, endless bouquets of roses and lilacs. How Proust must have longed to say, give her 1001 days of pleasure. In fact he almost does: Marcel surmises that the antique dealer will give him 1000 francs fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of plates
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: homo fabula
• Part I Architecture of stories
• Part II Stories of architecture
• Part III Stories of theory
• Part IV Practice of stories
• Index