Rapunzel Tower by Guy Nordenson and Associates

When Walter Benjamin wrote that “Architecture is the most important testimony to latent ‘mythology,’” he was describing how we dream in architecture–namely, through collective buildings and the commerce and spectacle they inhere. Benjamin was explicitly pointing to 19th-century arcades, which he believed fostered the necessary conditions for the generation of dream worlds. Presently, from student projects to those of “emergent” practices, science fiction has been exhibited as the object of architecture’s desire, providing it with the visionary schemes; opening it up to alternate avenues of thought; and, not least of all, reinvigorates a field typically faulted for its poorly-disguised pretensions with an operative vulgarity [e.g. replace Derridean terminology with references to China Miéville novels]. This is an exciting and incredibly inventive development that, as Evan Douglis has said, negates architecture’s traditionally Greek imperative to build from the horizon line upwards in order to explore possible futures where the conceptualization and building of architecture “descends from the sky down.”

The same could be said for all other influences which perpetuate the production of architectural mythologies, including–conveniently enough, the subject of this post–fairy-tales. When envisioning the architectonics of fairy tales, popular imagination can’t seem to move beyond the picturesque castles of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. As a response to this, Design Observer’s three-part series “House on Chicken Feet” invited architects to reimagine classic fairy tale narratives and the architectures which inhabit them. Curated by author Kate Bernheimer and architect Andrew Bernheimer, the project asked three participating firms–Berheimer Architecture, Leven Betts Studio, and Guy Nordenson and Associates–to each choose one tale and produce a corresponding work that “exploring the intimate relationship between the domestic structures of fairy tales and the imaginative realm of architecture.” See what they came up with!

Bernheimer Architecture- “Baba Yaga”

The Russian folk story revolves around a child-snatching witch who lives deep in the forest in a spectacular hut supported by chicken legs and that spins when she becomes angry. Accordingly, the architects designed a house whose mechanics examined “how one might make a structure or an architecture “chicken-like,” both externally and internally.”

Leven Bett Studio- “Jack in the Beanstalk”

Taking the beanstalk as “an infrastructural network between Jack’s world and the Giant’s world,” the architects dreamt up a synthesized environment of writhing organic matter, responsive material surfaces, and, of course, robotic chickens.

Guy Nordenson and Associates- “Rapunzel”

The architects re-engineered Rapunzel’s Tower and fused it with their own pre-existing design for the Seven Stems Broadcast Tower and with fun details such as “Timber Frame Roof-Very Pointy” and “Small Window-Only Means of Egress,” not to mention an entirely worked out structural system for Rapunzel’s braided hair.

by Samuel Medina

posted in Uncategorized

tagged design, fairy tale, speculative

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