Architecture has both interactive and analogical relationships with language. A designed building originates in a linguistic document, the design brief providing a list of functional categories and quantities. In the case of building programmes, such as libraries, museums and art galleries, the word-like function of the classifications of contents in space are preceded by classifications recorded in texts and reflecting the history of thought. The analogical relationship between architecture and language goes back to the 19th century and the idea that works of architecture should be read like books, narratives or texts (Forty, 2004). Quatremère de Quincy for example, likened historical monuments to libraries - public inscriptions or records of the people. This idea came under strong criticism in the 20th century after modernism asserted that buildings were to be read as autonomous works. Writing on the occasion of the Museum of Modern Art’s fifth anniversary in 1934 Alfred Barr, Jr., MoMA’s founding director, set up a dichotomy between an intellectual understanding of art mediated by words and a direct experience of art that comes from the unmediated encounter between the viewer and the object. ‘Words about art may help to explain techniques, remove prejudices, clarify relationships, suggest sequences, and attack habitual resentments through the back door of intelligence. But the front door of understanding is through experience of the work of art itself’ (Barr, 1934). Similarly to art, architecture has been affected by a longstanding assumption that ‘experiences mediated through the senses are fundamentally incompatible with those mediated through language’ (Forty 2004, 12). Yet, as Adrian Forty explains, even if architecture is not a language this does not lessen the value of language for understanding architecture. Bill Hillier for example, has made a productive analogy between the syntax of space and the syntactic and semantic structure of language. The characteristic spatial relationships that define the cultural inhabitation of space are similar to linguistic rules we use in speaking and writing, or the unconscious mechanisms we ‘think with’ (Hillier 1996). If ordinary language offers a paradigm for understanding the unconscious apparatus of meaning-making in architecture, what about the literary function of language? This question concerns works of architecture as intentional aesthetic systems rather than as unconscious structures shared within a society like language. It also allows literary narrative to function as a critical tool and a design tool as opposed to explanatory paradigm. If the principles of spatial structure function similarly to those of ordinary language, what can we say about narrative devices or rules used in literary texts? Or what about buildings as social objects, understood in a historical context and the ordering mechanisms of language to organize cultural messages and relations of power? In this essay I address these questions first, by focusing on how devices ordering our perception of space and time in literature can illuminate spatial practices as aesthetic systems; second, by exploring our perception of space-time in buildings housing collections, such as museums, galleries and exhibitions. Buildings devoted to displays share the assumption that the spatial arrangement of objects, supported by object-based interpretation, offer a narrative to be understood through the physical experience of reading, looking, and walking. This experience is staged by the linguistic strategies of classification, taxonomy and lists, and the architectural strategies of viewing sequences, mediating the encounter between the architect, the curator, the objects and the viewer. Museums, galleries and private collections therefore, are ideal candidates for addressing the analogic and interactive encounter of architecture with linguistic strategies and narrative form. The choice of these narrative strategies is critical when the container is itself a historical monument or is embedded in a historical context, as the meanings that are attached to the building and the displays can be motivated and invested with potential significance. Although separated by a century and a half, John Soane and Carlo Scarpa had a strong relationship with history and context as artistic practices and inspirational resources. Soane’s house-museum and Scarpa’s projects such as the Castelvecchio, the Olivetti Showroom and the Canova’s extension, seem to present a common paradigm: all housing collections, albeit Soane’s house-museum accommodates his own private collection; all fusing the architects’ own interventions within the existing fabric; all collaging contemporary architecture over the substrate of previous historical episodes; all eschewing the idea of a single unified form as the central governing composition by which the building could be read; all forcing the visitor into sinuous routes and around art works to see the building and the objects. For Nicholas Olsbeg, Scarpa opened the possibility for an architecture in union with poetry, sculpture, painting and craft around the themes of memory, allegory and metaphor (Olsberg, 1999). Soane also conceived his house-museum as a union of architecture with the arts, engaging in spatial optical mechanisms and an eccentric taste in narrative expression (Soane 1830, 1832, 1835-36). Deriving from these common tendencies for itineraries and multiple associations, works of the two architects present suitable examples to examine the perception of space, time and meaning, drawing parallels between motifs in architecture and narrative
