Encountering the Geometry and Rhetoric of Lamb’s House, Leith, Edinburgh, Scotland

Abstract

This paper considers geometry and rhetoric through an examination of the empirical and the narratological, comparing the architectural experience of dimensionality (geometry, scale, proportion, material, weight and measure) and the order of telling tales. Of interest here is the experience of stories through material constructions, and there are two aspects to such architectural narratological experience that concern the designer. First, the experience of geometry and narrative in the built artefact; second, the experience of geometry and narrative in the course of the design process, as narrative becomes construction, architecture and building. The second part of the paper discusses an architectural project for a restructuring of Lamb’s House in Leith, Edinburgh. The discussion and project draw associations and sparks the communicative potential between the lines of construction, which are by nature geometric, and the lines of narrative, which conventionally are textual but in architecture are represented through its construction.