studies in architectural narratives and digital design / secuencia de talleres de arquitecturas y narrativas digitales

-- narrative --



The World Building Institute is focused on research into narrative design, embedded narrative, and the dissemination, education, and appreciation of the future of narrative media through world-building. Through partnership with USC School of Cinematic Arts, its network transcends borders and boundaries in film, animation, fashion, gaming, theatre, television, music, architecture, science, and interactive media. 

One of the most important — if not the most important — criterion for creating a rich and original story is the creator’s ability to build the vibrantly elaborate world in which the story occurs. If the storyteller fails in doing so, the story rarely ignites the reader’s/viewer’s/listener’s imagination. If the storyteller succeeds, not only will the story enrapture the audience, this new world will also begin to take on a life of its own and have a direct influence on the creator’s intuition for where the story will go next. 

--World-building designates a narrative practice in which the design of a world precedes the telling of a story; the richly detailed world becomes a container for narrative, producing stories that emerge logically and organically from its well-designed core. World-building is founded on three beliefs, namely that storytelling is the most powerful system for the advancement of human capability due to its ability to allow the human imagination to precede the realization of thought; that all stories emerge logically and intuitively from the worlds that create them; and that new technologies powerfully enable us to sculpt the imagination into existence......The neural sparking between left brain and right brain is at the core of WBI — we are moving into a landscape where art and science, design and engineering are inseparable. At their intersection lies the new creative laboratory for the future of our narrative practices--


-- representation --


Albrecht Dürer, The Draughtsman of the Lute, n.d., woodcut on paper, sheet size 5 1/8 × 7 1/4".London-based architectural historian and critic Mario Carpo discusses how 3-D printing is transforming the world in terms of its cultural, manufactural, …

Albrecht Dürer, The Draughtsman of the Lute, n.d., woodcut on paper, sheet size 5 1/8 × 7 1/4".

London-based architectural historian and critic Mario Carpo discusses how 3-D printing is transforming the world in terms of its cultural, manufactural, design and engineering applications, and traces this paradigm shift in digital technology back to the development of technologies of reproduction and representation since the Renaissance.


Technologies like GPS have certainly not rendered maps obsolete; if anything, we are more “map-minded” than ever before. But maps clearly do not enjoy the authority they once did, and older concerns with geographic truth and objectivity have been upstaged by a new emphasis on simplicity, reliability, and everyday convenience. As a result, it no longer makes sense to regard territory as simply a well-bounded block of geographic space. This is the territory produced by maps. New forms of geographic knowledge have instead created new ways of being territorial.