Traditional forms of storytelling are communicated via written or verbal language, but storytelling through architecture opens the gate for a new level of complex narratives. These stories can go past the one or two dimensionalities seen in typical communication and bring storytelling into a three-dimensional form of language. Architecture makes room for every story to be a choose-your-own-adventure. The architectural story has infinite possibilities based on a combination of a structure’s age, time of day/year, weather, materiality, form, and so on. All these factors combined can allow the architect to string together an intricate narrative that allows for a variety of experiences. Despite this, it is not the designer who determines the full breadth of stories that a structure can tell. The ultimate randomizer to the change of story is the unique perspective and semi-unpredictable nature of each person who inhabits the structure. Each person pursues a different route, notices different details, and moves at different paces making the seemingly infinite array of story variation a reality. Despite all this possibility, it is rare for architecture to reward curiosity. Many structures of today abandon this diverse idea of storytelling in place of those that are akin to a book with a beautiful cover but filled with blank pages. That is not to say there are no successes in the development of this sort of architectural storytelling. Nearly all examples, however, range from spiritual to full on religious in nature. Just like a good book engages the reader and forms a connection with them, the built environment can generate interest and instill a sense of mystery and discovery into those who occupy it. storytelling is a medium that has the power to incite personal connections between people and their surroundings.
Study 1: What is a story?
What is a story? A story, at its core, is a collection of individual moments, thoughts and feelings, that when brought together form a completed being; a thing that can immerse participants and allow them to travel beyond their immediate reality. A story, by its very nature, requires engagement to be to be experienced and understood.
What is the story worth telling?
Those who prospered and found great wealth in th Magic City were quick to abandon it, leaving behind a scarred landscape riddled with industrial remnants. The area surrounding McLendon Park is occupied by those people who were left behind after the departure of industry from Birmingham. These people fueled the industry that shot Birmingham into existence, but are now left to exist in a city littered with artifacts of another time, representing a past they never owned. This project aims to tell a story about reclamation of the industrial language and re-purposing it to serve the community.
Study 2: Learning a Language
All stories are told through some type of language. Architecture is no different. In order to tell a story about the reclamation of an industrial past, you must learn the formal language of Birmingham’s industry. This language is seen scattered around the city and most preserved in the now inoperative Sloss Furnaces. If you perceive each form as but a single letter that works with another to produce a word and another to make a paragraph and another to create a chapter then you begin to understand the inter-connective ability that form has to tell a story.
wherein ones eyes may travel through the scene and piece together a narrative in any order and with varying degrees of interpretation.
What is the story worth telling?
The moment where one is at their deepest point of immersion in a story is often at point such as the climax, plot twist, big reveal, or moment of clarity. All the words before these moments exist to set them up. These moments exist also in the built environment and are equally capable of immersing an occupant into a story. Even these forms that are devoid of life and existed solely for a utilitarian purpose are capable of conveying powerful and complex thoughts and emotions.
A collage illustrating how a collection of individual moments and singular ideas can come together and form a complete world or landscape
Study #4: Application
With a thorough understanding of industrial language comes the opportunity to manipulate and re-purpose that language in a way that communicates the intended story. The program that will support this story is public campus that includes a workforce development school, a public park area, and a local market. These programs all work to generate wealth and foster a greater sense of community for the area.
Limestone! Coal! Iron! These are the resources that once flowed rich in the Valley of Jones. The unstoppable forces of Mother Nature worked slowly and tirelessly for millions of years so that mankind could one day discover the wealth she accumulated. The Red Mountain reached toward the sky as it pulled these anthropic riches from deep within the earth. Twas not long before the valley was ringing with the unnatural sounds of machine and man as they wrestle against the inherently stubborn nature of the matter they so violently ripped from the earth.
Screaming serpents, formed by plates of metal, coursed along their tracks through the heart of the city, carrying precious cargo to and from all ends of the country. Although it was in their mission to connect and distribute, by doing so they inadvertently severed links and divided the landscapes that they tore through.
The once unbreakable beast of industry, who had propelled the city to greatness, fled with tail tucked timidly between wounded legs, abandoning its lair of flame and smoke. The valley, scarred by the forces of man and riddled with the remnants of another time, will reclaim what it once owned. Just as the roaring furnaces once shaped the stubborn metals found rich in the valley, those left in the city bear the responsibility of molding Birmingham into something new. Indeed the remnants of our past shall become the tools with which we use to construct our future. From the ashes of a once sturdy industrial giant, personified in the image of Vulcan, a new, gentler creature, forged from empathy, can rise in its place.
