I’ve been going back over some of my observations about the relationship between writing about architecture and writing online. Here in Italy, it’s evident that we’ve failed to appreciate the changes that the digital format entails for the act of writing. Writing online, in fact, implies a new range of communicative tools: links, images, audio, video, maps. Links immediately enlarge the field of discourse by means of images, audio, video and maps can supplement the experience of reading with that of seeing and hearing and tracing ever more detailed geographic perambulations. In a practical sense, then, websites do not consist of words alone.
One interesting example of digital storytelling is the work of
Orsola Puecher (in Italian), whose posts for the website Nazione Indiana make use of digital grammar’s extensive palette of expressive forms. “Others write; Orsola creates,” posted a commentator named NC, echoing a comment by either Sparzani or Biondillo.
The webpage, as Puecher has it, pushes writing towards a creative leap in which it becomes a ‘blob’ of words, images, video, sounds, map and territory.
Three architecture bloggers who have taken this creative leap are Lebbeus Woods, Ai Weiwei and Léopold Lambert.
