This thesis is concerned with the way that architecture, (that is space, buildings, cities and urban environments), has been and continues to be speculated upon through a rich palette of narrative methods. Taking NATØ, the group of young architects led by Nigel Coates that emerged from the Architectural Association in the early 1980s as its subject matter, the thesis questions how architectural production is able to narrate and the modes and methods it employs. The research reveals echoes and resemblances between NATØ projects and a wider artistic, filmic and literary culture that emerged from the specific political, social and physical conditions of 1980s London. Personal archives of original NATØ material – including drawings, photographs, magazines, ephemera and writings – are exposed for the first time. Combined with personal interviews with NATØ members and other significant individuals, the narrative traces the group’s evolution and development at the AA in Unit 10 in the late 1970s, to their active period between 1983-1987. The thesis also examines the key influences of Coates and his early work: exploring his relationship with Bernard Tschumi, the influence of a period spent in New York and his association with diverse artists and filmmakers in London. As such, the research presents the first detailed examination of NATØ and produces original insight into the territory of architectural narrativity. The thesis contextualises this moment of narrative architecture with the evolution of narratology over the same period – a discipline whose changing consideration of narrative in the 1980s expanded from a literary basis to take in a broad range of media. Engaging with contemporary narratology, the thesis employs concepts and terms from narrative studies to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of how narrative functions in architectural production. The thesis also constitutes a history of postmodernism that represents an alternative to the dominant architectural mode, considering NATØ’s output as a subcultural form of architectural production that drew on techniques of bricolage, montage, fragmentation, polyvocality and defamiliarisation. Framing NATØ’s work through an understanding of the way in which their use of medium evolved alongside their conceptual ideas, the thesis considers the material in relation to four distinct areas, each constituting a chapter: performance and video, the drawing, the magazine and the exhibition. Chapter 1 on performance and video exposes the influence of both Tschumi and a pivotal year spent in New York on Coates, and the development of his ideas from student to co-tutor at the AA in the late 1970s. The chapter proposes a move from the highly cerebral and literary approach of Tschumi, to one concerned with the presentness of direct experience via video. Chapter 2 takes the architectural drawing as its subject, showing how Coates evolved the drawing in his unit at the AA in the early 1980s, and how in turn NATØ employed the drawing as an 8 expressive narrative medium. Chapter 3 considers the group’s self-published magazine, NATØ, produced between 1983-85, drawing parallels with street style publications i-D and The Face, of the same era. The chapter proposes the graphic design of the magazine as a medium through which NATØ developed the explorations of the drawings into a more complex form – positing the idea of the mise-en-scène of the magazine. Finally, Chapter 4 examines the apotheosis of NATØ’s output: the exhibitions Gamma City at the Air Gallery (London, 1985), and Heathrow part of ‘The British Edge’ at the Institute of Contemporary Art, (Boston, 1987). Taking the ideas established in the previous chapter into three dimensions, the chapter proposes the installation as a microcosm of the narrative experience of the city that NATØ sought – evoked through an embodied drift through space, and the replacement of the architectural scale model with the auratic object or stimulator artefact. Concluding, the framework of narrative architecture set out in the thesis is proposed as both a period preoccupation and a way of thinking about spatial narrativity more broadly. It critical assesses the potential for such architectural narrativity to be designed and built, finding the truest form of narrative architecture emerging from the city condition itself. Finally, the conclusion proposes a lineage of projects and ideas that have evolved since the late 1980s whose concepts represent a continuation of NATØ’s preoccupations.

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This thesis attempts to account for the appearance, persistence, and eventual decline of an architectural motif, derived from ancient pagan temples, widely used as the principal feature on an increasing variety of building types in Britain, during the period 1630 to 1850. The thesis seeks to do this by defining both the word 'portico' and the architectural forms to which, historically, it was applied, and by examining the religious, political, social, and stylistic contexts in which the portico, as a metaphor for the temple, was utilized. The rationalization within the Vitruvian-Christian tradition of the ancient temple's pagan connotations; the portico's intrinsic capacity to symbolize virtue, distinction, and authority; the changing perceptions of the idea of the temple; and the different nature and sources of both the authority and the architectural style which the portico expressed, are investigated. Architecturally, the portico expressed grandeur, centrality, and an entry; it controlled, defined, and gave focus to urban space. Introduced to Britain by Inigo Jones, and based on classical Roman and Palladian models but with Salomonic overtones, the portico initially symbolized Stuart dynastic claims to divine kingship. As political and economic power shifted to an aristocratic oligarchy, the temple that was Britain, Rome's heir, symbolized a church and state united, and the secular virtues of the Augustan age. Palladio's fusion of Roman temple and villa provided the model for the oligarchy's power base, the porticoed country house. Archaeology and politics combined, first to project mercantile opulence through imperial Roman-inspired neo-classicism, then the more fundamental qualities of the Greek temple. The Pantheon gave way to the Parthenon; the temple of private wealth to the imagined temple of democracy. After epitomizing the characteristic early nineteenth-century public style, the too-pagan Greek portico succumbed - as did the classical ideal - in the anarchy of styles, to the Gothic.

In this thesis, I consider how Odilon Redon symbolized the theme of evil in many of his black and white prints. I examine Redon's compilation of these prints into portfolios in dialogue with literary interpretations of evil in Charles Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, Gustave Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony, and the New Testament Book of Revelation. I consider word and image interaction in Redon's engagement of these traditional and contemporary literary sources. I demonstrate that Redon's prints participated in Symbolist discourses, using traditional myths and symbols in new and evocative ways. Further, I show that Redon's prints, like the Symbolist texts with which they were in dialogue, participated in wider cultural discourses informed by traditional and contemporary theories of evolution and degeneration. I argue that the symbolism in these prints aligns with Redon's writings on art and spirituality, representing evil as a duality and part of a dialectical process of enlightenment. Redon's writing represented evil as false morality and unreflective adherence to societal norms in decadent society. Redon's portfolios depicted evil and alienation in bourgeois culture, using light and dark symbolism and the tropes of the Devil, the serpent, and the skeleton to connect with canonical myths while symbolizing resistance to dogma and contemporary materialism. I demonstrate that Redon symbolized evil in these prints, in alignment with his writings, as an element to be overcome in a dialectical process of spiritual growth. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester 2009. / April 20, 2009. / Discourse, Degeneration, Evolution, Decline, Decay, Twighlight, Crepuscular, Skeleton, Serpent, Escapism, Redon, France, Noirs, Decadence, Evil, Spirituality, Nineteenth Century, Prints, Symbolism, Spiral, Dialectic, Appocalypse, Myth, Satanic, Anthony, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Alienation / Includes bibliographical references. / Lauren Weingarden, Professor Directing Thesis; Adam Jolles, Committee Member; Richard Emmerson, Committee Member.