ABSTRACT
While all building elements tell their own stories, this is particularly true of ceilings. Suspended ceilings are in-between places, cleaving an up-above from a down-below, entwining materials with stories, hiding and revealing narratives within and without the recto-verso condition of architecture. These suspended ceiling stories fall-into-place under the abductive hypothesis that ceilings are suspended (sus-pense) in a deeply metaphorical and ephemeral sense. All ceilings-coela are firmly suspended (firmament), especially when one can contemplate through them, and all the more so in the case where the roof collapses. This storytelling about the levity of suspended ceilings begins in pre-Galilean time uniting seemingly disjointed clues, which belong to authors and fabrics separated by chronology, and yet deal with cross-narratives to reveal a discourse on the imagina-tion of suspended ceilings, as the paradigmatic first details of “the double-faced role of technology, which unifies the tangible and intangible of architecture.”.
