Introduction

Confabulation is one of the most essential, least acknowledged, skills of the archi-tect. Confabulation finds connections, proposes questions, and offers an expanded field for architectural insights. But the fable itself possesses a different sort of relation to the counterfactual: the writer of fables endeavors to “tell the truth but tell it slant,” as Emily Dickinson suggested. If a confabulation is fiction, it is not false: rather, its truths are undertones and overtones, intimations of the unspoken. Confabulations weave together the incommensurable, investigate the ineffable, and return us to everyday experiences of life and an altered-ordinary. Storytelling is often overlooked today because it tends to withdraw in the face of analytic methods. Architects build stories while buildings edify inhabitants. Storytelling and architecture are fundamental forms of what philosopher Nelson Goodman calls “world-making,” and, in a storytelling architecture, we may come to understand the fabrication of fabrication.