Navigating Narratives
A Conversation with Joël León Danis, Athenea Papacostas,
and Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco
September 2024
For the fifth issue of Architecture Writing Workshop, Talking Places, the editors convened a roundtable on the intricacies of narratives and storytelling in architecture, bringing together perspectives from art and design, architectural history, and curatorial practice.
The myriad stories of those who build, inhabit, and interact with spaces provide a more nuanced understanding of how architecture operates in real life. This perspective challenges the tendency to view architectural narratives through a singular, often detached lens. Through various mediums—from exhibitions and walking tours to oral histories—the conversation that follows offers a path to redefine how we relate to, narrate, and design the built environment.
Editors Sebastián López Cardozo and Lauren Phillips moderated the discussion with Joël León Danis, Athenea Papacostas, and Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco. (This roundtable has been edited for length and clarity.)
Sebastián López Cárdozo (SLC): Why do stories matter?
Despite being a highly effective and often preferred vehicle for transmitting information, the use of narrative in formal and academic writing is often seen as subjective and perhaps not taken as seriously. How do we address these concerns? And is there an opening for personal writing to play a larger role in communicating architectural intent and experience?
Athenea Papacostas (AP): As director of the Museum of National Housing (MUNAVI) in Mexico City, I worked with RIWA Architects to build a narrative about housing that aimed to change how people relate to their home, and place more importance on the decisions they make in their daily lives. The curation process not only considered people’s role as renters or home buyers, but also as members and caretakers of their community.
Welcome section on MUNAVI’s permanent exhibition. Photo by GLR Studio. Courtesy of Espacio Cultural Infonavit.
I also have an ongoing project that is centered on my own spatial memory of the houses I’ve lived in, the process of leaving one for another, and how this shaped my experience of the city. This project led to an open event with a series of clay models, where I invited the visitors for a conversation. I asked them about the number of times they’ve moved, characteristics of their homes that have stood out, and their memorable experiences. The open dialogue changes the broader narrative about housing; we realize that it isn’t just about the size or location of the home, but also about the people we share the space with. It has social, economic, and emotional components—everything comes together in the domestic space.
Clay models at the performance opening on March 5, 2023 at Laguna, Mexico City. Photo by Laura Orozco.
Joël León Danis (JLD): There's a tendency in the discipline to over-academize how we talk about space—and this creates a barrier to those outside of it to engage in shaping how space is understood and described. Everyone experiences architecture and everyone has their own story to tell, and personal stories are just as valuable as any other stories we tell ourselves about buildings. They can help us reflect how architecture can better support the narratives people want to experience, versus a prescriptive or deterministic architecture that only supports a single interpretation.
With the Toronto Society of Architects (TSA), we held a Pride event this year, where thousands of people shared their experiences of queer spaces. Maybe only a handful of these stories had explicitly architectural components—and yet all the stories happened in architecture. The question is, can we use this kind of information to better understand how to design spaces—to encourage positive stories and prevent negative ones?
Attendees share their memories at the Toronto Society of Architects booth at the 2024 Pride StreetFair. Photo by Kurtis Chen.
Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco (ISO): Oral stories have been fundamental in architectural history to challenge a canon privileging a controlled, hermetic narrative that tends to erase the voices of those who actually inhabit spaces. Dominant histories privileging architectural archives often sidelined the fact that producers of space are not just architects. In the same sense that geographical constraints, policies and legal mandates produce architectures, the construction worker, domestic worker, third-generation inhabitants, draftsmen, and many more bring their own forms of experience to bear on the production of architectural space.
It’s interesting to compare storytelling and oral histories versus histories that are only based on archival evidence. It raises questions about how that archive was constructed, who owns it, who is tasked with its preservation, and so on. As a historian, I've been working to bring oral accounts into my work to address these concerns, without, however, leaving behind the archives to compliment oral histories—it’s a balance. And, ultimately, it’s important to admit that every story comes with an author and a certain kind of position—inherent subjectivity is not something we can avoid.
JLD: And what becomes a place’s dominant story can’t necessarily be controlled by those who created the space. A symbol of democracy in one era can become a symbol of a totalitarian regime in the next.
There is a building in Venezuela from the tail end of the dictatorship (built late 1950s) called El Helicoide. It’s a ramped, helicoidal project that allowed people to drive up to shops. It features a Buckminster Fuller dome at the top and it’s been said that Salvador Dalí offered to adorn its interiors—it was a symbol of prosperous Venezuela. When the dictatorship fell, democracy didn’t want to touch that building.
El Helicoide was never finished, and it remained a shell of a building for about 40 years, hosting a variety of uses. Then along came the country’s current government, and it became the headquarters for the Secret Police, a place where people are incarcerated and tortured. The building has represented different values to different people at different times—so it’s important to contextualize stories we hear about it. The architecture hasn’t changed, and it is still spectacular, but now it is very strange to tell people that you love it, because its current use is so terrible. Its narrative has evolved beyond the control of the architects, who could not have imagined that the little shops they designed would be used to make cells for prisoners.
El Helicoide building in Caracas, Venezuela, designed by Pedro Neuberger, Dirk Bornhorst and Jorge Romero Gutiérrez. Photo by Damián D. Fossi Salas.
Lauren Phillips (LP): There are many instances of architecture coming up with a solution, dropping it off in a community and assuming that people will figure out how to use and occupy that space in a “successful” way. Particularly when it comes to community-based projects, architects might construct a possibility based on their own imagined narrative. There’s an arrogance in believing that designs speak for themselves. Is there a role for narrative in communicating how spaces are to be used—almost as an architectural users’ manual?
AP: You use the word “manual,” and I love them—even the Ikea ones, they're wonderful. They help us put together our sense of how we can enable things to happen. However, they are also a cold way of communicating, especially when compared to storytelling. Storytelling and verbal communication can be much more impactful in communicating how a space’s use is envisioned. The written word is very important, but it cannot wholly replace conversations and the rapport that develops out of dialogue.
ISO: Any building is an accumulator of stories. It never stops—the plan is always accumulating different lives and different histories, sometimes antagonistic histories. So perhaps the idea of a fixed manual is too prescriptive for the many ways a building’s narrative will evolve over its lifetime. Architects are really good at pretending to design for eternity and to hang on to the illusion that the plan dictates the narrative. But I think there’s a different way of perceiving space—one that involves recentering the voices of those that are actually living in it.
The architect Enrique Ortiz, speaking of his work with Cooperativa Palo Alto in Mexico City, said the community is his school. That is something incredibly telling and humbling, as it redefines what the architect is—more of a service provider as opposed to a canonical figure that imposes his or her ideas.
Left and Right: A street and and andador (pedestrian road) in Cooperativa Palo Alto, the first cooperative in Mexico City with 221 houses and approximately 1,400 inhabitants. 2022, Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco.
Center: The first house built collectively in Cooperativa Palo Alto mid 1970s, Courtesy of Cooperativa Palo Alto.
SLC: When we talk about the process of communicating narrative, how much does the medium matter? We all work with different media, whether we’re talking about essays, exhibitions, oral histories, or architectural design. How do different mediums affect the process of telling a story?
JLD: I don't think the medium of storytelling matters so much as far as how stories are produced, but each medium has a different power of transmitting a story. Architecture is probably one of the worst mediums of communication, in part because it lacks the kind of shared language needed for meaningful engagement.
When we do walking tours with the TSA, we’re constantly thinking of how to build this shared language—to foster the ability to notice and read the stories embedded in buildings. Because the walking tour is a medium that lends itself well to conversation, it can be especially accessible.
A big part of the tour guide’s job at the TSA is to help people become comfortable talking about their built environment. Understanding a building’s history and how to access it is key to this. And it doesn’t need to be intimidating— these histories can be easy to understand once you remove some of the jargon that surrounds a lot of architectural talk.
ISO: As a discipline we’ve struggled to mainstream ways of talking about architecture that go beyond aesthetic responses. It is exciting to see that starting to change, and to see storytelling as a vehicle for widening that conversation. But apart from writing, drawing and other forms of visual representation are beautiful ways to tell stories.
I experienced this while working with Cooperativa Palo Alto, a community that lives in an intergenerational way with a high degree of nuance that is difficult to describe in words. For my own research process, I've been trying to redraw a few of their houses over time. Words can’t always communicate certain parts of the experience—in particular how the experience of a space comes into being.
AP: The medium also depends on the audience, right? Who do you want to reach? Do you want to reach other architects? Or the people living in Cooperativa Palo Alto? Depending on who you want to reach, you might (or might not) write an essay that is overly long and technical. I also agree very much that we have a plurality of tools and forms of representation.
It reminded me of an experiment which involved working with my own memory, the houses that I lived in, and the memory of those spaces. After I’d made models out of that process I thought, well, I should also do drawings. While I was doing the drawings, I recorded myself describing them. So I had the voice notes as well as the drawings and models.
As an extension of the project, I asked my girlfriend to describe the first house she lived in. She closed her eyes and started describing spaces, and I started drawing. Sometimes she described the furniture, other times a detail. When she opened her eyes, she asked: “How can you draw someplace you’ve never been?”
SLC: As a storyteller, whether you’re writing, speaking, or drawing, it seems the first component in shaping a narrative is to have a firsthand experience that you need or desire to communicate. But the intention behind that act of communication—is it meant to stand in or take the place of a firsthand experience on the part of the audience? Or should it spur them to go and have a firsthand experience of their own?
ISO: That's a very good question, and it's a difficult question. I'm working on another research project right now, related to the struggle for housing rights for elderly sex workers, where I’m trying to situate oral histories. I have struggled with it because, on the one hand, I don't want to speak on behalf of anyone—but on the other hand, I have a strong desire to communicate their histories. So there is a difficulty in trying to bring their voices into the conversation while also keeping my critical distance.
It sounds perhaps contradictory, but bringing oral accounts involves getting closer to your interlocutors. You don't visit them only one time, but many. You spend time with them that isn’t written about. You’re building a social relationship with them. And that's really where the trust of them sharing their stories comes about. But in that process you get very close to their lives. And then, when it’s time to write (at least in my experience) I felt like I really needed to come back to the paper by distancing myself again. Because it's still important to try to maintain a certain objectivity that also allows for the introduction of counterarguments.
In the end, there's a position—an argument that I’m trying to construct. With Cooperativa Palo Alto I realized, for example, that there can be counterpositions. At Palo Alto there were two accounts of how that space was produced: one from the people who were living there, and one from the people that had left that space, now called “the dissidents of the cooperative.” I was trying to contextualize the disagreement as well as look through other mediums such as records of legal proceedings.
My hope was to produce an article like that doesn’t just represent one version of the story told through one set of oral histories, but shows a relationship of these positions to other positions, the scope of the debate, and an understanding of a complex context. When you get so close to people, you feel a certain loyalty. But sometimes loyalty means bringing the frictions and complications to light. One can be merely an advocate, or one can ultimately allow their voices to be strengthened through a degree of struggle, of wrestling with the counternarratives.
AP: The first temporary exhibition at MUNAVI centered on the home environment. We opened the museum to the public and invited them to contribute through their own objects. We asked people to tell the story of their objects and explain how they made them feel at home.
Curating these objects and their stories was an emotional experience—everyone in the curatorial team related to at least one story, or two, or three. But some stories were more difficult to relate to. We had items from all over Mexico, from religious items to sports paraphernalia and books. If those contributing had written half a page about their object, we carefully selected one or two sentences for display. We wanted to represent the similarities and differences of how people live, and how they choose to make their house a home. The exhibition became a great medium for that.
Temporary exhibition, “Objetos que hacen hogar,” 2023. Photo by GLR Estudio. Courtesy of Espacio Cultural Infonavit.
