Archive for the ‘Storytelling’ Category
Saturday, March 27th, 2010
In the past year I have become increasingly critical and curious as to why many architects insist upon, or at least have a habit of, using jargon and speaking in a superfluous manner. In my experience, this trait is particularly acute in academia, where it seems that the more convoluted and lofty you sound, the wiser you are and the better your projects or opinions are. This trend does not serve a clear purpose or hold much value in my opinion, but there are surely reasons for its prevalence.
The following paragraphs will seek to shed some light on the anthropological drivers of this behavior and the role it plays in architecture.
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Tags: Anthropology, Architecture, Built Environment, intelligence, jargon, reproductive success, Social group, Social Norms
Posted in Anthropology, Architecture, Built Environment, Social Norms, Storytelling | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
An article in the New York Times reported on a study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania questioning what kind of information travels fastest through social networks and why? A six-month intensive study of the most-emailed articles in the New York Times revealed some very interesting trends.
Image via Wikipedia
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Tags: Architect, Architecture, awe, beijing, Building, Dubai, emotion, experiences, New York Times, Olympics, reciprocal altruism, science articles, social networks, university of pennsylvania, Vancouver
Posted in Anthropology, Architecture, Built Environment, Storytelling | 5 Comments »
Saturday, January 30th, 2010
This interesting article published by the BBC outlines two men and the books they have written arguing that storytelling influences voters far more than facts or logic. I think that these are quite poignant observations given our evolutionary bias to storytelling as well as the increasing absurdity of American politics. The authors propose that voters may even vote against their own interests because they have such strong attachments to stories surrounding the issues, regardless of logic or facts that may counter the storylines.
Cover via Amazon
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Tags: american politics, Anthropology, authenticity, Built Environment, emotion, logic, politicians, Politics, Storytelling, urbanism
Posted in Anthropology, Architecture, Built Environment, Storytelling, urbanism | No Comments »
Friday, January 15th, 2010
I just read an interesting blog post from Richard Smith about the possibility of self-fulfilling prophecies driving the increase in urban surveillance networks. He wrote that while attending a conference on surveillance cameras, a presentation was given examining the public opinion of surveillance in 9 countries. More often than not, public polls reveal positive attitudes toward increased surveillance, despite studies in San Francisco and London that show how ineffective they actually are. And don’t forget about the Moscow police who spent 5 months watching pre-recorded footage.
Smith goes on to reference a post by Clive Thompson that questions the power of self-fulfilling prophecies in pop culture. Sociologist Robert Merton wrote an essay in 1949 on “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.” The thesis was that “it was indeed possible to convince people of a false proposition merely by telling them that lots of other folks believe it to be true.” Merton’s own definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy was:
“a false definition of the situation evoking new behavior which makes the original false conception come true.”
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Tags: anthropology studies, clive thompson, hurrican katrina, kingdom of fear, moscow police, richard smith, robert merton, self fulfilling prophecy, social influence, Social Norms, surveillance cameras, surveillance networks
Posted in Anthropology, Social Norms, Storytelling, Surveillance | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
Nick Gogerty has put together an interesting and brief post on the coinciding events of economic bubbles and skyscrapers. The latest example of this is of course the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which began five years ago in a boom. The newly completed tower now stands in a very different Dubai that is suffering economically. So why do we continue to make the decision to build these monolithic and amazing structures in such a competitive and one-up manner?
Image via Wikipedia
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Tags: Add new tag, Architecture, Arts, Building, Dubai, Skyscraper
Posted in Anthropology, Architecture, Built Environment, Social Norms, Storytelling | No Comments »
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010
An upcoming presentation at the club Sinema Old School in Singapore will feature a film by Mike Kowalski about sound and storytelling. According to the brief:
“This presentation will explore how sound can be used creatively in film to expressively tell the story. One of the main themes of the presentation is that by applying an understanding of the principles of psycho-acoustics and human perception to the sound design process we will not only create better sounding films but also films that are more expressive and engaging.”
Image via Wikipedia
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Tags: Add new tag, Film, Hearing, Perception, Peter Zumthor, Sound, Storytelling
Posted in Anthropology, Architecture, Built Environment, Storytelling | No Comments »
Friday, December 25th, 2009
“We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.”
Hunter S. Thompson —”Extreme Behavior in Aspen,” February 3, 2003
In similar veins of exploration to previous posts on storytelling and surveillance, this post will seek to examine how the stories told in our 24-hour media culture affect our vision of the world; our perceived reality. As previously discussed, storytelling plays a large part in cultural transmission and learning. So what affects are seen when we embed ourselves in an environment of stories about disaster, disease, death and terrorism?
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Tags: Add new tag, Gallup Poll, Hunter S. Thompson, New York Times
Posted in Anthropology, Fiction, Storytelling | 2 Comments »
Monday, December 21st, 2009
After completing the previous post of Storytelling, Cultural Transmission and Architecture I began to wonder if there are any architectural folklore or stories, and if there are, how they affect the built environment and people’s preferences toward architecture and cities. Vernacular architecture is the most promising place to begin, as the architecture varies highly among different cities even within the same country, particularly in Europe, Asia and Africa and the American Southwest. Building methods, aesthetics, spatial arrangements and materials are all closely tied to the local environment and culture. Spatial arrangements at the urban scale are also influence highly by the culture and its customs.
Image via Wikipedia
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Tags: Add new tag, Architecture, Folklore, History, Vernacular architecture
Posted in Anthropology, Architecture, Social Norms, Storytelling | No Comments »
Saturday, December 19th, 2009
Storytelling has a great value among societies as a method of cultural transmission and social learning. I have recently reread an anthropology article entitled Cross-Cultural Comparison of Learning in Human Hunting. The goal of the article was to examine the role of learning on the evolution of human life history patterns including why humans have such a lengthy juvenile period. In particular, researchers studied several different cultures of hunter-gatherers and how young boys learned about hunting. In addition to learning through experience by accompanying adults into the forest to check traps or for simple hunts, the boys are exposed to hunting conversations at a very early age. Conversation expose children to hunting knowledge but stories in particular are valuable. From a very young age, boys will hear stories of past hunts that are laced with knowledge about different types of prey, animal behavior and human-prey interactions. Myths and folktales also add to the knowledge and ideas children gain access to through hearing stories.
Image by paalia via Flickr
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Tags: Add new tag, Fiction, Folklore, Great Gatsby, Literature
Posted in Anthropology, Social Norms, Storytelling | No Comments »
Saturday, December 12th, 2009
In the same storytelling vein of yesterday’s post, I have been reminded of the idea that fiction can be effectively used to illuminate truth. While reading some of Hunter S. Thompson’s writings, particularly reflections on his infamous style called Gonzo Journalism, he mentions William Faulkner. Thompson writes “it is a style of ‘reporting’ based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism…” The idea behind Gonzo journalism was to record events as they happened and submit them for publishing without any editing. A very interesting idea that Thompson points out is that neither fiction nor journalism is truer than the other, but that they are different means to the same end.
Image by thorinside via Flickr
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Tags: Add new tag, Gonzo Journalism, Hunter Thompson, Reality, William Faulkner
Posted in Anthropology, Architecture, Narrative, Storytelling | No Comments »
