stories in stone

My housemate's dad is coming for dinner tonight, a prospect I am not entirely keen on, as I can't stand the guy.  He is very affected and loves the sound of his own voice (maybe we're too similar)... but he really does love the sound of his own voice.  So much so, in fact, that he has finished a long career in the police and is now a professional storyteller.

I don't know if there's much money in it, but doing that is quite interesting when you think about how it would actually work.  It recalls a time of pre-literature, sitting around the camp fire, passing down the stories of the tribe.  The Norse sagas were never written down - Beowulf only comes to us from a later record of a remembered tale.  All this got me thinking about literature and architecture, and I'd never really understood why we link the two together - as some have said, that architecture IS literature.

All architecture can be 'read' - a useful word in this instance - to some degree.  Some is easier to read than others, because the message is more definitive, more basic.  The pyramids are stories about individuals, and about their everlasting greatness.  If you saw the pyramid and was told that at its heart was the tomb of one man, you would instantly be able to 'read' that the person was powerful, that such greatness should endure forever... a blunt, but successful message. The cathedrals are stories about other-worldliness and the hope of 'another place' - more difficult to interpret, as they are more complex shapes (because the message is to be read in the space created internally, not as a singular form showing as an icon of one man) - but still a clear message.

And for thousands of years, until very recently, buildings acted exactly as literature, not just in form but covered in symbols, hierogylphs and carvings.  To reinforce the message the builders were trying to convey.  So now, with sheer white walls of modernist buildings or functional industrial, the decoration has disappeared and gives us less direct interpretation.  We may recognise a modernist building now, and the values attached, but it is all far more ambiguous if we had no prior knowledge.
From a zero start point, how would you judge whether a white cube was trying to be good or bad, humble or great?  You could analyse the construction, the modular units and distances and ascertain that the builders were trying to give an impression of uniformity and equality, but this is a far more complex conclusion than the brute simplicity of a pyramid tomb.

Pyramids are headlines, printed in bold.  RAMESES IS GOD.
New buildings are ambiguous - they should be novels with cliff hangers, anti-heroes and an R-rated certificate.