Why great architecture should tell a story

For much of the past century,

architecture was under the spell
of a famous doctrine.

"Form Follows Function" had become
modernity's ambitious manifesto

and detrimental strait jacket,

as it liberated architecture
from the decorative

but condemned it to utilitarian rigor
and restrained purpose.

Of course, architecture is about function,

but I want to remember a rewriting
of this phrase by Bernard Tschumi,

and I want to propose
a completely different quality.

If form follows fiction,

we could think of architecture
and buildings a space of stories:

stories of the people that live there, of
the people that work in these buildings,

and we could start to imagine
the experiences our buildings create.

In this sense, I'm interested in fiction

not as the implausible but as the real,

as the reality of what architecture means

for the people that live
in it and with it.

Our buildings are prototypes,
ideas for how the space of living

or how the space of working
could be different,

and how a space of culture
or a space of media could look like today.

Are buildings are real.
They are being built.

They are an explicit engagement
in physical reality

and conceptual possibility.

I think of our architecture
as organizational structures.

At their core is indeeds
structural thinking, like a system:

how can we arrange things
in both the functional

and experiential way?

How can we create structures
that generate a series

of relationships and narratives?

And how can fictive stories of
the inhabitants and users of our buildings

script the architecture,

while the architecture scripts
those stories at the same time?

And here comes the second term into play,

what I call narrative hybrids,

structures of multiple
simultaneous stories

that unfold throughout
the buildings we create.

So we could think of architecture
as complex systems of relationships,

both on a programmatic and functional way

and in an experiential
and emotive or social way.

This is the headquarters
for China's national broadcaster,

which I designed together
with Rem Koolhaas at OMA.

When I first arrived in Beijing in 2002,
the city planners showed us this image:

a forest of several hundred skyscrapers to
emerge in the central business district,

except at that time,
only a handful of them existed.

So we had to design in the context
that we knew almost nothing about,

except one thing: it would all
be about verticality.

Of course, the skyscraper is vertical.

It's a profoundly hierarchical structure,

the top always the best,
the bottom the worst,

and the taller you are,
the better so it seems.

And we wanted to ask ourselves,

could a building be about
a completely different quality?

Could it undo this hierarchy

and it could it be about a system
that is more about collaboration

rather than isolation?

So we took this needle and bent it
back into itself,

back into a loop
of interconnected activities.

Our idea was to bring all aspects
of television-making

into one single structure:
news, program production, broadcasting,

research and training, administration,

all into a circuit
of interconnected activities

where people would meet in a process
of exchange and collaboration.

I still very much like this image.

It reminds of biology classes,
if you remember the human body

with all its organs
and circulatory systems, like at school.

And suddenly you think of architecture
no long as built substance,

but as an organism, as a life form.

And as you start to dissect this organism,

you can identify a series
of primary technical clusters.

Program production
broadcasting center and news:

those are tightly intertwined
with social clusters,

meeting rooms, canteens, chat areas,

informal spaces for people
to meet and exchange.

So the organizational structure
of this building was a hybrid

between the technical and the social,

the human and the performative.

And of course, we used the loop
of the building as a circulatory system,

to thread everything together
and to allow both visitors and staff

to experience all these different
functions in a great unity.

With 473,000 square meters,

it is one of the largest buildings
ever built in the world.

It has a population of over 10,000 people

and of course this is a scale that exceeds
the comprehension of many things,

and the scale of typical architecture,

so we stopped work for a while
and sat down and cut

10,000 little sticks and glued them
on to a model,

just simply to confront ourselves
with what that quantity actually meant.

But of course, it's not a number,

it is the people, it is a community
that inhabits the building,

and in order to both comprehend this
but also script this architecture,

we identified five characters,
hypothetical characters,

and we followed them throughout their day
in a life in this building,

thought of where they would meet,
what they would experience.

So it was a way to script
and design the building,

but of course also to communicate
its experiences.

This was part of an exhibition
with the Museum of Modern Art

in both New York and Beijing.