The Narrative Potential of Architecture After-life in the Comics

Since Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, comic artists have been concerned with depicting architecture. The presence of architecture in comics has been investigated in the ways they represent historical architecture (Thiébaut 1984) and the city (Alberghini 2006; Thévenet and Rambert, 2010). Some authors have dedicated a philological attention to places depicted, from Francois Bourgeon to François Schuiten or Vittorio Giardino; others, like Moebius, have shaped complex futuristic or alien visual imaginaries. In this way, comic artists and cartoonists have accredited themselves as complete artists and have appropriated the narrative methods and painting techniques of major arts. Parallel to this, an interest in the use of comic graphic methods in the development and communication of the architectural project has surfaced (Van Der Hoorn 2012). From Le Corbusier onwards, some architects had adopted the sequential and graphic informality of comics and have oriented it towards narration, through peculiar atmospheres, environmental elements and human figures. This process of “communicating vessels” between comics and architecture has been largely mediated by cinema, whose production of “freely” moving images assembled through the montage technique has demonstrated the potential of the author's architectural imagination – and unbuilt designs, especially– in forging the image of futuristic, alternative, perturbing, often dystopian worlds. The "lost opportunities" cited by Pagano (1941) or of the "interrupted architecture" recovered by Patetta (1969) form a patrimony of visions and social contents. While most of it is destined to remain confined to archives and academies and to generate self-celebratory reflections, a part began to find a "second life" in literature and cinema. At the end of the last century, the vision of the Wrightian interiors of Ennis House in Blade Runner or of Jean Nouvel's unfinished Tour sans fin in Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World demonstrated the potential of the architect's design imagery in forging futuristic, alternative, perturbing worlds. Cartoonists are an integral part of this process of graphic appropriation and narrative transposition of the "lost opportunities" of architecture. In some cases, these are more or less innocent little “thefts”; in others, such as the New York projects included by Grant Morrison in the comic series Seven Soldiers, of a sort of act of love towards the city and its multiple sliding doors. The graphic novels by the Italian Manuele Fior, formerly an architect and now an illustrator and comic artist, reserve a central role for places and architecture. He appears particularly interested in the utopian and social potential of certain modern works and does not limit himself to setting the scenes in constructions by authors such as Wright or Kahn but, as in Celestia, he also resorts to their unbuilt projects, specially explored through plans and sections. Framed by the eyes of the characters, imbued with their human affairs and subordinated to the narration, selected buildings and places, in addition to describing the author's inner link with his own imagination and formation, reveal their unexpressed semantic potential, accentuate the enigmatic and dreamlike nature of the stories and reflect on the architecture as a cultural device and as a means to raise the spirit and represent individuals and communities. In this way, forgotten or never built architectures access an after-life, open up to a new public and enjoy the unexpected opportunity to host human life, realizing their narrative potential