Narrative, either based on successive actions in a story or on spaces that are seen sequentially, is at the centre of creative imagination. There are creations, in which fictional and spatial narratives are inseparable from each other.

Sophia Psarra

Our movement through space as it correlates with time, has a profound effect on the way that we perceive our surroundings. As one travels through space, a personalized narrative is created that informs individual experience of the surrounding environment. Our past intermingles with our present and is projected towards our future. An architecture evolved through the unfolding narratives generated through our movement might begin to offer the potential of personal meaning as it interweaves with our memories. Umberto Eco speaks of the freedom of interpretation a maker may give the viewer through the duality of such an open work.

Carlo Rovelli states Thinking of the world as a collection of events, of processes, is the way that allows us to better grasp, comprehend and describe it. [...] “The world is not a collection of things; it is a collection of events. The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have limited duration. He notes, we are our memories, we are event.”

In movement our mind creates pictures that present themselves as sequences within our memories. Moving through a space presents one with images relative to the physical position of the viewer as a sequence over the duration of time. Such sequences contribute to our perception of an environment. Sergei Eisenstein discusses the potential of the montage sequence as we move through space, and Tschumi of the opportunites held within sequences. The images in these sequences do not act alone, each one relies on its predecessor to weave a descriptive story for the observer to witness and interpret.

This cumulative nature of sequences allow their frames to derive significance through juxtaposition. Narratives are thereby authored in our minds as we move forwards, with our memory holding preceding frames as they are interwoven with the present and projected into the unfolding of events on the edge of the future. Explorations of the perception of space through the lens of montage, can begin to uncover alternative or distorted realities and the new narratives these can write. Experimentation within the realms of memory, perspective, creative narrative construction, framing and chasing the unexpected explored the potential of these concerns, asking the question, how might such individual narratives be encouraged through design?

To experience and follow an architectural sequence is to reflect upon events in order to place them into successive whole

Bernard Tschumi