ARC 327R / ARC 386M / ARI 381R
Thurs 2:00 – 5:00pm, SUT 3.126
Open to all ARC students and all ARI students
Carlos Blanco: carlos.blanco@aya.yale.edu
Throughout the course of mankind, storytelling has become a device and vessel for comprehension, societal memory and oral documentation, informing what placemaking represents and how to navigate inhabited time and space. Through storytelling, the imagination creates maps that hold the thresholds, myths, and landscapes of various realms, creating physical realities of spoken words. This seminar will evoke the curiosities and dwell into the intersection of storytelling, representation, and architectural imagination. Students will explore how narratives—whether drawn from folktales, myths, fables, or speculative fiction—can be translated into spatial, formal, and material investigations. Through lectures, readings, and drawing/ design exercises, the course will emphasize the role of storytelling as a tool for architectural invention, allowing students to distill narrative structures, characters, and outer worldly environments into architectural realms of exploration and analysis.
Students will be introduced to a variety of alternative representational strategies, including drawing and collage, as well as physical and digital model-making, to construct evocative and critical design responses to a specific story of their choice. The course will unfold in three key narrative strategies: analytical distillation (extracting architectural potential from literary sources), representational translation (developing drawings, diagrams, and “drawels” that embody narrative conditions), and spatial synthesis (proposing architectural spaces that test ideas of form, scale, character, and composition).
By the end of the semester, students will have produced a body of representational work that bridges oral and literary stories and architecture and developed a theoretical framework for understanding how architecture can embody, challenge, and reimagine narrative worlds.
No story is left untold and no space is left unexplored - may the realms of the imagination find a space to rest for the night.
