Architectural Narratives: Traces and Performance

In this essay, I focus on the combination of programs and the architecture of cultural projects that have emerged within the last few years. These projects are characterized as “hybrid cultural projects,” because they intend to combine experience with entertainment, play, and learning. This essay identifies new rationales related to this development, and it argues that “cultural planning” has increasingly shifted its focus from a cultural institutional approach to a more market-oriented strategy that integrates art and business. The role of architecture has changed, too. It not only provides a functional framework for these concepts, but tries increasingly to endow the main idea of the cultural project with a spatially aesthetic expression - a shift towards “experience architecture.” A great number of these projects typically recycle and reinterpret narratives related to historical buildings and architectural heritage; another group tries to embed new performative technologies in expressive architectural representation. Finally, this essay provides a theoretical framework for the analysis of the political rationales of these projects and for the architectural representation bridges the gap between historical [trends?] traces and new performance.