Metaleptic Space: Installation Architecture as Design Methodology

Where a transposition suggests a switch, or exchange, between different or oppositional elements, metalepsis is a narrative mode that cross-contaminates both. ‘In its narratological sense, metalepsis … is a paradoxical contamination between the world of the telling and the world of the told (Pier, John: “Metalepsis”, Paragraph 2. In: Hühn, Peter et al. (eds.): the living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. URL = http://lhn.sub.unihamburg.de/index.php/Metalepsis.html#:~:text=In%20its%20narratological%20sense%2C%20metalepsis,%2C%20etc.)%2C%20or%20the ).’ An advanced form of allegory, in metalepsis the shifting between the ‘sacred frontier’ of the world in which one tells and the world of which one tells is maintained as a position. As opposed to a conventional use of allegory, in which illumination may be shed on a concept or subject within the text, it is a simultaneous and ongoing occupancy of both positions. Architectural projects work in largely abstract and discontinuous modes that allow in their reading a performative inhabitation in which the viewer generates spaces within their imagination; Evans describes this as the ‘frontal subject’ (Evans, Robin. “In Front of Lines that Leave Nothing Behind. Chamber Works.” AA files 6 (1984): 89–96). This tendency towards abstraction, while being enormously productive in terms of expanding the generative capacity of architectural tools, necessarily abandons the embodied space of the observer, along with the figurative and literal and their narrative conventions. The metaleptic architectural project bridges the gap between abstract representational modes and an embodied self-awareness by creating within itself a double-reading, one that operates conventionally between disparate, abstract representational modes and one that generates an immediate space for inhabitation by the body and that organises and situates the other layer. This paradoxical set-up allows for new ways of seeing and engaging with architectural projects and their projective spaces. In this chapter I will discuss examples of metaleptic architectural projects and the creative and pedagogical opportunities they contain.