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20 / BUILDING DIALOGUE / November 2019 In Modern Age, Buildings are Collections of Stories W hen we study new languages, idiomatic phrases and linguis- tic similarities can drive us crazy. This study can also bring into per- spective the idiosyncrasies of our native tongue and how baffling it can be for the newcomer. Homo- graphs, for example, are words that are spelled the same but have dif- ferent meanings offering a barrel of confusion for those who are learning English. Take theword “story,” which describes both a narrative and the levels of a building. These apparently different words both originated from the Latin historia and, when we ex- ploremore fully, bothnarrate our his- tory through differentmeans. Throughout history, humans have, quite literally, written stories onto buildings and into architecture. You can probably bring to mindmany fa- miliar examples, from the carvings on every surface of every level of the complex at AngkorWat in Cambodia, to the pyramids of Egypt and Mesoamerica. From the friezes andentablatures of ancient Greece, to thepalac- esandcathedralsofmedievalEurope, each“story”used carvings, paintings, and stained glass to illuminate cul- turally prominent narratives to a mostly illiterate au- dience. Old photos of Denver showwalls layered with the mercantile narrative of the day. LoDo’s ghost signs bearwitness to offers of seeds, fences, food and liberty. According to the 1972 book “Learning from Las Ve- gas” by Dennis Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, the lineage of storytelling in buildings, both in signs and symbols, ended with the Modern Movement and the International Style. Signs painted on buildings selling goods, or stained glass windows illustrating religious teachings, were an obvious and legible language. Cur- tain wall office buildings, brick ballparks, and exposed steel airports were ostensibly honest expressions of structure and technology not bound by traditional no- tions of story and thus silent compared to traditional narratives. However, is it really a line in the sand of his- tory? The indictment that modernism killed meaning is too neat and tidy to reflect reality. One hundred years of modernism has taught us to read the implied lan- guageof thebuildingsaroundus theway thatpast gen- erations could read the messages inscribed in ancient carvings. Most of us can no longer read the difference between hieroglyphics and cuneiform carved into a wall, but can almost intuitively glean that an all-glass box next to a highway is a spec office build- ing, without a second glance. Bal- conies signify residential build- ings anddurablematerials signify institutions that expect longevity and historical significance. We have become adept at reading the basic language of our buildings even without formal signs and symbols. Form and material have de- veloped a symbolic significance in architecture that sometimes borders on dogma as strong as the religious carvings on ancient temples and tombs. Brick equals quality, stucco equals junk, met- al is ideal to some and blasphe- mous to others. I had to explain to a builder recently that a more expensive, higher-qualitymetal panel beingconsidered was not allowed in a design review district because it wasperceivedas too industrial for anarea that thought that only brick and stuccowere appropriate for the im- age theareawantedtocommunicate.Weall readdiffer- ent stories into our buildings. I heard an interviewwith Richard Rogers, one of the most influential British architects of all time, during which he described his commission for the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He described a very specific sto- ry that shaped the design of the building. This struck me because the building is referenced in every archi- tecture textbook and guide to Paris, and is famous for many reasons –noneofwhichmatchhisnarrative. The storywe read into the building is not at all the story he and Renzo Piano set out to tell when they designed the building together. History does not judge the intention; it judges the results. In our modern age, buildings are collections of sto- ries – in every sense of the word – and they continue narrate our history whether we intend to or not. Iron- ically, a quest to be timeless and outside of history has simply led to a new vocabulary of architectural mean- ings, recording our history just as tirelessly as ever. To be timeless is to always be changing. Generations from now, people will look back and evaluate our architec- ture through their own stories, not by our intentions. Instead, they will read the stories that endure; the sim- ple levels of simple buildings. \\ Andre LH Baros, AIA Architect, Shears Adkins Rockmore In the Details We build buildings pretending that they are silent monoliths when, in reality, they are stacks of stories told, retold, interpreted and re-interpreted.