The birth of fiction architecture is similar to the birth of the novel

The basic idea of this blog is that a fictional mode of expression  should exist within architecture which is equivalent to the novel in literature.  So, how did the novel begin?

 The earliest ones were imitations of real accounts of adventures (eg Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe) and were originally published without the author’s name on them, but purported to be written by the ‘hero’. While most people would have been well aware of their fictional status, it is not unlikely that some readers would have thought they were real accounts!

Very soon the novel blossomed into a much fuller expression with complex plots, intimate descriptions of the thoughts and feelings of the characters, and the phenomenon of the ordinary person as hero.

It is hard to imagine life without novels but, before the eighteenth century, they didn’t exist.

It is this perspective that has led me to the position of proposing that a similar situation exists in the world of architecture at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and that there is a huge amount of pent-up energy amongst architects to explore a fictive mode of expression.

Like a novel, a work of fiction architecture is only possible if the architect adopts pretence as the starting point for the narrative aspects of the design. And like a novel, the building is ‘read’ as a pretence by the knowing viewer, and enjoyed as such.