←

Photography    Paintings    Moving Image    Writings    Thinking Book   About

Story As Design Ground

Selcen Karatay
March 2026

Story is not limited to the form or references of a designed space; it emerges from the conditions produced by context, time, and geography, and from how accumulated memory, everyday patterns, and relationships—sometimes over centuries—transform into space and mass.

And story is not something added afterward; it is the ground that directs decisions and makes production possible. When it is constructed properly, it does not need to be explicitly expressed—it is already felt.

This relationship cannot be understood solely through visible features or dominant formal language. A house built on a mountainside does not establish a relationship with its context simply by repeating local roof forms or masses. While this may be a gesture of respect, when the conditions behind these references are not understood, it often becomes a semi-conscious imitation of the past. A context is never just its visible physical properties. Culture, belief, memory, habits, contradictions, and even the long-term relationships between landscape, structures, and topography all form part of this whole.

Within this whole lies a layer—described in Bachelard’s terms—where space is not only physical but also an imaginative and psychological field of production. Psychological traces accumulate over time, along with a subconscious that is often carried without awareness.
.








                                                                  For this reason, some decisions may not align with expectations at first glance. They emerge from tensions embedded within the context rather than from abstract spatial possibilities. Even in seemingly predictable situations, outcomes may shift. A location with a strong view may result in a closed structure. A sequence expected to feel open may instead compress before expanding. These decisions are not simply functional responses; they relate to deeper modes of looking, hiding, approaching, and withdrawing.



A corridor does not always need to meet accepted standards of comfort. It may instead become deliberately narrow, allowing the relationship to the space it opens into to produce a different condition.



User experience cannot be reduced to fulfilling a list of needs. As Yi-Fu Tuan suggests, place can be understood as a pause within movement, pointing to the temporal and fluid nature of experience. Experience is shaped by how one sees, moves, and perceives over time. The eye’s adjustment, transitions between light and dark, shifts in speed through compression and expansion—all become part of design decisions. As James Gibson proposes, an environment is not only something seen, but something that suggests possible actions. When this relationship is established, space does not simply function—it unfolds as a sequence. As in cinema, not everything needs to be explained; guiding the viewer is possible, but thinking or feeling in their place is not. In space, it is enough to allow perception to operate at its own pace.

Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus Field Chapel exemplifies this approach. One enters through a narrow threshold into darkness; vision adjusts slowly, and the space gradually reveals itself through light from above. Movement, perception, and time are organized together. The narrative is not added—it is embedded.

This experience shows that decisions are shaped not on the surface, but within deeper layers. These layers are rarely explicit, yet they manifest through tension, direction, and distance.

Story does not justify decisions; it allows them to emerge.

It appears in moments of opening, closing, slowing, and shifting—often unseen, but always felt.




References

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place

James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception

All images © Selcen Karatay