Table of Contents Foreword
7
Drawing Stories
8
by Ann Patchett
by Andrew Bernheimer
Telling Tales
10
The Butterfly Dream
14
T he Death of Koschei the Deathless
22
F latland
30
Goodnight Moon
40
G ripho
50
T he House on Chicken Feet
58
J ack and the Beanstalk
64
T he Juniper Tree
72
T he Library of Babel
82
T he Little Match Girl
92
by Kate Bernheimer
Interpreted by Bernheimer Architecture
Interpreted by LTL Architects
Interpreted by Ultramoderne
Interpreted by Peterson Rich Office
Interpreted by Smiljan Radić
Interpreted by Bernheimer Architecture
Interpreted by LEVENBETTS
Interpreted by Bernheimer Architecture
Interpreted by Rice+Lipka Architects
Interpreted by Bernheimer Architecture
L ittle Red Riding Hood
102
T he Monkey King
114
Rapunzel
120
T he Seven Ravens
128
Interpreted by Mary English and Xavier Vendrell
Interpreted by SO – IL
Interpreted by Guy Nordenson Associates
Interpreted by Bernheimer Architecture
Snowflake 138 Interpreted by Abruzzo Bodziak Architects
T he Snow Queen
148
St. Ides, Parked Cars, and Other Peoples Homes
160
T iddalik the Frog
170
W hy the Sun and the Moon Live in the Sky
180
Interpreted by Young Projects
Interpreted by Bernheimer Architecture
Interpreted by Snøhetta
Interpreted by studioSUMO
Acknowledgments 186 by Kate and Andrew Bernheimer
Contributors
188
E ditors’ Biographies
190
F oreword BY ANN PATCHETT
Of all the things there are to love about fairy tales, I love the role of the house the most. Whether hovel or castle or a gingerbread wish-fulfillment shingled in Necco wafers, where the character lives becomes the physical manifestation of his or her circumstance. Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel are told they must stay inside forever, while Snow White is taken from her stepmother’s castle to be murdered for the crimes of beauty and youth. Lucky for her, she finds safety in the messy cottage of seven little men. Cinderella still lives in her castle, but is confined to the lowly hearth and a life of service. Shall we envy these girls their splendid surroundings? Of course not. They’re in constant danger. In fact, there seems to be a correlation between the number of turrets and the trouble they’re in. But the threat isn’t always external. The fisherman’s wife starts off in a shack and the more her demands for greater power and bigger palaces are met, the more loathsome she becomes. The dear fish, who sees fit to give the poor fisherman a break, returns the wife to direst poverty while granting her a loving heart. As it turns out, it was never the castle anyone needed after all. It was the love. Of course, true and faithful love often arrives with yet another castle, but I like to imagine this new home cannot be taken from the beleaguered girl later on. She is wiser now, after everything she’s been through. She gets her name on the deed.
AN INTRODUCTION BY ANDREW BERNHEIMER
8 Andrew Bernheimer
Architects rely on drawings. We learn through drawing. We teach through drawing. We instruct others how to build through drawing. Everything we do effectively requires drawing. Conceptualization of design. Documentation of how buildings and spaces go together. Memorialization of our own work, for ourselves as self-critique or for record-keeping. As practitioners our work requires any number of graphic diagrams, images, and visual documents that demonstrate our conceptions of how they are fabricated. Drawings are intensely specific, telling stories of time, fabrication, and use. They are moments captured. They are also, primarily, utilitarian. They do not typically perform as narrative. Rather, they provide rules. Whatever the rules of these drawings are, architects each create as individuals. Our drawings are delineations imbued with our experience and memories. Our projects and their documents, while mostly technical, do contain recollections of places, powerful memories. Despite their seeming sterility they are still intensely —though perhaps latently—personal. Architects’ drawings are products of a psychic space, a projection of how we see (or want to see) the world around us. We idealize. We polish. We draw flawless iterations of our own concoctions. We do not confront, at the outset, presumed flaw. From Mies’s collage of the Resor House (perfectly framing the Grand Tetons) to Zaha Hadid’s immersive, monumental paintings of cluttered (yet clean) urbanity, to Atelier Bow Wow’s intensely populated, masterfully drawn (yet un-weathered) sections, we imagine functionality, smoothness, delightfulness. These picturesque instances of process present one version of reality, mostly absent the friction of our world. Often this type of representation is left, more appropriately, to the artist—visionaries sufficiently separated from the functional requirements of a trade, a vocation. They are able to address politics in the service of a broader statement and not of a client. Architects? Our drawings remain, for the most part, technical and less overtly political. We do not imagine disaster, or emergency, or defect, which
Drawing Stories
D rawing Stories
fairy tales are filled with. We avoid the unimaginable. The rarest of architect-artists, such as Lebbeus Woods, and Alexander Brodsky can pull off darker, fractious, and politically charged visions. Architects’ delineations traffic in a kind of purity. Because our images do not portend change they are a kind of abstraction, a frozen figuration. They are an illusion. The idealized architectural drawing is, itself, an unreality. This lends itself well to the explo ration of the psychic and figurative spaces of the genre of fairy tales: stories that traffic in magic, require a suspension of disbelief, and transfigure the prosaic into the grotesque. While we rarely imagine our own creations in that way, we are equipped as delineators to foresee that metamorphosis. When we began this project, we asked questions: what was different about how architectural drawings might present fairy tales and differ from mere illustrations of stories? What was it about the process of constructing a drawing, of telling a tale through assembling a vocabulary of parts (and not just scenes) that would permit invention in representation? How might the language of plan, section, detail, isometric projection, or perspective differen tiate these images from those we find in storybooks? In answering our collaborators sent maquettes, animations, diagrams, digital fabrications, as well as plans, sections, and details. They all tell stories of places, of structures, of worlds written about and described, built of magical languages. The works within are unique for their precision—and for the purity of their impurity. These images, such as they are, could only have been drawn by architects (and one engineer).
Character line-up
Basic forms of Flatland characters
The House on Chicken Feet
62
Bernheimer Architecture
The Flight Paths
JACK AND THE BEANSTALK
Interpreted by LEVENBETTS
I
n this familiar story, a poor mother sends her son to town with a cow to sell, and he trades the cow for magic beans. His mother becomes angry when he returns home and throws the beans out the window. Even the youngest reader understands that she is very tired and hungry and desperate to care for her son. She is not a bad person; this is not a story about a bad mother. It is the story of a hero climbing a beanstalk: a huge beanstalk that grows overnight from the magic beans. He climbs and climbs, sometimes through the clouds, until he reaches a rich giant’s house. Of course, it is no safe haven. There is treachery and madness about. The boy escapes narrow death more than once, with help from the giant’s wife and, in some versions, a sleeping cat or a teakettle. All forces come out to protect this boy and his desperate mother. Perhaps most commonly associated with this story is its delicious refrain: Fee-fi-fo-fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he ‘live or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread. This song can be seen as a twist on the household game in which a child is gleefully chased by a grown-up who teases, “I’ll eat you up!” In some variants of the tale, Jack actually kills the giant; in the cleaned-up versions, he escapes as the giant snores deeply and contentedly. Often he must escape three times before returning home to great wealth. The vehicle for all the magic in this story—its adventure and triumph—is the beanstalk. It leads up to the sky, where we find the giant’s house. The beanstalk is rarely described; such a great and powerful structure needs no description. Fairy tales are exemplified by spare and abstract detail, leaving enormous space—big as the sky—for the reader to wonder. What comes of Jack’s magical beanstalk? Usually, at the end, it’s cut down. —KB
Why the Sun and Moon Live in the Sky
Visitation
182
studioSUMO
Arrival