Translation and Narrative

“Translation and Narrative as Foundations for Spatial Literacy in Environmental Design”. Presentation given at Initiations: Practices of Teaching First Year Design in Architecture conference, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, October 2019.

This paper outlines the approach taken in a first year studio, Spatialité et parcours, in the environmental design program at UQAM’s École de design. Across seven short design exercises, a range of concepts and tools are introduced, framed by four principal vectors: abstraction, inter-scalarity, translation and narrative, understood to be foundations for spatial literacy in environmental design.

The notion of parcours, here, breaks away from path as architectural promenade to introduce the spatial agency of movement through translation and narrative. By expressing a relativistic view of space and time, translation and narrative tie spatiality to movement, relations, transformation and assembly. Spatial possibilities are determined by making sense of the relative movement between bodies, their organization and relative position, as well as of the movement between scales, abstract forms and representations.

If translation points to the way that space is the result of moving bodies, texts or representations between frames of reference, narrative points to movement itself as well as the structure that authorizes its sequence.

Published here, March 2021: https://lekythos.library.ucy.ac.cy/handle/10797/26836

Mélissa Caron-Labrecque + Anaïs Dessureault-Racicot

Antoine Quimper

Marie-Ève Martin