About a year ago I received a .zip archive of comic artist Chris Ware's entire series of Building Stories. These "funny pages" scrutinized the lives, dreams and space of a number of tenants in a varying states of melancholy and restlessness. Like all the characters in Ware's universe, these protagonists exist in a bleak and nostalgic world of missed opportunities and unfulfilled dreams. Despite this overbearing sense of emptiness, hope does glimmer in the background and subtext. Building Stories appeared in Nest Magazine, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine between 2003 and 2006. The purpose of this post is not so much to survey the complete series but to instead consider a specific installment, Building Stories: Part 3 (pictured above).
Building Stories: Part 3 conducts a narrative vivisection of a three-story apartment complex, pulling away walls to provide an omnipotent view of the history of the space. What is interesting about the structure of this comic is rather than delve into the complex, fragmented layouts (primarily composed of small multiples) that Ware is famous for, it provides a quantified overview of events that have happened in the space of a single panel. So while "nothing is happening" the moment that this snapshot is taken, a sum total of incidents is quantified and laid bare on various architectural surfaces and in the margins. The reader is provided with lists rather than shown events.
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Close examination of these lists reveals a variety of tracked values including "886 screams, 217 punches, 3 births, 74,316 newspapers, 5 spiritual crises, 64,418 orgasms, 22 pregnancies" and a personal favourite "32,655,497 water drips". Delivery of these quantities is deadpanned and major personal benchmarks are casually mixed with the trivial as if to suggest an indifference on the part of both the architecture and Ware. This depiction of domestic space as a living document (a tally sheet) and an "event-aggregator" speaks to some of the desires evident in Andy Stanford-Clark's "talking" home automation system [see previous post]. They key difference between these two models of scanning urban space is time - in Ware's fiction he can shoot with a wide-angle lens and speculate an absurd and fascinating endgame to this notion of quantified domesticity.
While spending time with this comic over the last several days I keep thinking that it is the architectural counterpoint to Tom Waits' take on meteorology on Nighthawks at the Diner. The final lines of Building Stories: Part 3 reads "This building now has to admit to feeling a little bit grateful for the arrival each day of 24 more hours" - and the events continue to accumulate.
Building Stories: Part 3 is available for PDF download as part of the excellent Acme Novelty Archive, an "unofficial directory" of the works of Chris Ware.
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