As Edward Hollis says: Buildings long outlive the purposes for which they were built, the technologies

by which
they were constructed, and the aesthetics that determined their form; and soon
enough their form and their function have little to do with one another.
The beginnings of architecture have been variously interpreted as the
primitive hut, or according to Eco the recognition that a cave can provide protection and shelter.
Despite architecture usually being thought of as the art of articulating spaces, connotative meanings abound in its
multi-various territories, and have done so from the outset. In architecture, narrative is a term that has risen in usage
since the mid-1980s, but to grasp its implications, it would be valuable to visit some exam- ples drawn from
disconnected historical and physical contexts. What follows is distinctly not a history but a series of vignettes drawn
from diverse times and places that together help define a context for narrative in architecture as an ap- proach to
practice. They are separated into the three gestalts; each one reveals narrative as the translation of a narrative spirit
into a tangible, physical form.
NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE
A narrative requires a narrator and a reader in the same way in which architecture requires an architect and a viewer.
Narrative enters architecture in many ways, from the conceptual
mes sages it is made to stand for to the illustration of a design through models,
drawings and other representational forms.1
We must, if you like, have a theory of how architecture can mean anything at
all, before we have a theory of what architecture might actually mean.
As Henri Lefebvre
observes, a spatial code is not simply a means of reading or interpreting space:
rather it is a means of living in that space
ARCHITECTURE AND NARRATIVE
Jezik arhitekture je mnogo promenljiviji nego govorni jezik. jer podleze transformaciji prolaznih kodova.
Carl Dzenks
Nigels subversive spirit first came to public attention in 1984 when he founded NATO (Narrative Architecture
Today) as both architecture group and eponymous magazine. A manifesto for a socio-culturally engaged and popular,
narrative-driven architecture, the magazine advised readers to be the architects of their own lives, and in doing so,
radically adapt the buildings around them.
Beyond issues of function or style, narrative, he asserts, is a language of design that builds on peoples everyday
experience. Form, he claims, should follow fiction. He has continued to explore the communicative and experiential
potential of architecture as a language drawn from (and in contrast to) the commonplace. He believes that the city
can best be understood when explored as a living entity. His work plays on psycho-geographic association between
the built environment and the people who live in it.
In architecture, narrative prioritises human experiences and the need to shape them into stories. It places the
emphasis on a buildings meaning rather than performance. To architects, the enduring attraction of narrative is that it
offers a way of engaging with the way a city feels and works. Rather than reducing architecture to a mere style or an
overt emphasis on technology, it foregrounds how buildings are experienced.
Nigel Coates