Coming to a Narratorium Near You

Professor Clive Knights and his architecture students at Portland State University are revisiting an interesting project that embraces the city as ongoing narrative. Called Plotting the City: Telltale encounters with the mythic city (the key word here being 'city'), it intertwines storytelling, walking and architecture.

Check out this invitation I recently received by email. It's a great example of why having a solid academic presence in the city provides wonderful ideas, even if they're as nutty sounding as a 'Narratorium':

Students have been asked to consider the identity of the city of Portland. They are exploring identity not as a single definition or absolute but as a multitude of myths embedded in the landscape, buildings and unfolding human drama of everyday life.

As if the city were a complex, layered script awaiting interpretation through continued acts of involvement and concern, they have trodden the streets, read signals, and plotted narratives about the neighborhoods they have explored. The project speculates on the contribution of the act of walking in interpreting urban space, architecture and cultural meaning. Quite literally, they have been walking the city in somebody else’s shoes (acquired from thrift stores) and over the past several weeks have explored 8 neighborhoods of the city on foot.

Simultaneously, they developed a character study inspired by the shoes using narrative to generate a fictional ‘other’ whose detail developed in parallel with the unfolding of the city through multiple ambulations. Students then developed stories that
interlaced these characters with a particular route and destination. These stories, and the walks that unfold within them, were then creatively translated into the form of handmade book-maps, a hybrid of literature and map, each of which can accompany and guide the reader across the city in unique ways.

This e-mail is an invitation to offer your insight and response to the project and its themes by exploring the website we have constructed and by responding to any of the 17 linked ‘blogs’ that reveal each student’s experiences more fully.

We are now engaged in a discussion to define a new civic institution that we are calling a Narratorium: a place for nurturing and archiving expressions of cultural identity through storytelling. Your insights and participation are sought and welcomed. We intend to have a forum for discussion to pose ideas for the Narratorium, to which you are cordially invited (date and time will be announced shortly). We look forward to your contribution.