Material culture is a fantastic way about learning more about another society, just ask your average archaeologist. The arrangement and appearance of goods and tools, the division between public and private spaces, the materials and decorations used, the way that settlements are laid out, all of these things can tell you a great deal about how a past society lived their lives – the rituals and virtues they prioritised, the resources they had available to them, the patterns of their daily routines, and how their societies were structured in terms of class, religion, and interaction with other societies.
A worldbuilder can use these tools the same way, only instead of digging up ruins and artifacts to determine how a real-life past society might have lived, a creator can make their own material culture a storytelling tool, a form of implicit exposition which tells the audience what a fictional culture values, how they live, and how they might be interacted with or engaged with by a player, a reader, or a watcher. This kind of worldbuilding not only gives your setting depth in a way which does not require you to sit the audience down and exposit all this stuff like a tourist brochure, but it also helps give your world an inner logic if done right. If members of a fictional society must do certain things in the context of the plot – and the material culture they live supports and contextualises those actions, then this helps make otherwise unreasonable actions more sympathetic. A character from a culture in which iron is rare and is used as jewelry and currency might prize steel more than life itself. A traveller from a society without silk may see a silk scarf as a treasure beyond words.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the architecture of a given fictional society. The way which buildings are placed, built, decorated, and laid out can tell us a great deal about a society’s priorities, culture, and material conditions.
For ease of comprehension, I’m going to split this discussion into three stages: concept, function, and form. It’s my intention that this will give you a simple framework on how to determine how the inhabitants of your own fictional societies build their buildings.
Concept is arguably more about urban planning than it is strictly about architecture, but it still needs to be part of the process. Where a building stands will tell a story about it and the society which builds it, just as much as what it is and what it looks like. The capital city of a heavily urbanised industrial state will look vastly different from the feudal holding of a decentralised aristocracy in an iron-age society – which will in turn look very different from the camp of a nomadic and pastoral people. The buildings (or tents, or clearings) which take up the most space in the central (and thus, most valuable and accessible) part of a settlement will often tell a story about how important the function of that building is to those with the power to decide what gets built where.
You can see this in the examples which our own past provides. Towns in the late medieval period often centred around trade and transportation, which means they often centred around markets. At the same time, in places like Italy, wealthy merchant-princes and hereditary aristocrats showed their piety and excess wealth by sponsoring the construction of vast, monumental cathedrals, which dominate the centre of their home cities even to this day. European cities in which the Catholic Church held similar sway (and wealth) provide similar examples. Notre-Dame de Paris sits at the very heart of the city of Paris, for example.
Likewise, cities which were expected to be centres of political power often possessed monumental citadels, which created a heavily fortified position, usually atop high ground. The most famous example of this would be the Acropolis of Athens – which not only possessed fortifications, but multiple temples to Athena, patron goddess of the city, and of wisdom in war: a demonstration of how the Classical Athenians saw both the goddess who gave the city its name, and their own identity as a city of wise – but militarily capable citizens.
For another example, take the public spaces of Roman cities, which were laid out with a keen awareness of the power of the free citizenry which not only served as the political bedrock of Roman society, but the primary source of first conscripts, and then long-service recruits for Rome’s armies. Two of the most salient features of such a city were almost always the amphitheatre, and the aqueducts. The amount of resources and labour needed to clear the space and provide the resources to provide the citizens of a Roman city with a permanent public entertainment venue and running water demonstrates just how much Roman society valued maintain a loyal citizenry.
History is full of examples like this even for more mundane purposes like simple living space, from Haudenosaunee longhouses to the fortified Tulou of Western China, some societies build for communal defence and social support. Likewise, from the rural gentry of England to the modern American suburbs, self-contained single-family residences imply an entirely different set of values and priorities. Tram lines and eight-lane highways, private game reserves and public parks, military parade grounds and village commons; all of these tell stories about the societies which build them.
Perhaps you can already see how these elements can be played with. Maybe a city ruled by a foreign regime will have a more spacious and better-serviced quarter for the colonial overlords, or deny the services they rely on to those they rule over. Perhaps a country in a state of near-permanent war might heavily fortify every single settlement worth taking (this happened in the Netherlands during the 16th and 17th century), or a country in a long-term state of peace might decide to demolish its fortifications altogether (Paris did this – perhaps prematurely, after World War 1). Temples could show how seriously or un-seriously a religion is taken. A nobility which is wealthy and civic-minded might sponsor big public works, whereas one which is more insular and contemptuous might reserve beautiful things for their own guarded and private palaces far away from the unwashed masses (this was half the point of Versailles).
Once you figure out how your buildings are going to be laid out for this fictional settlement, it’s time to figure out how they’re actually going to be built. I’m not going to go into too much detail here, because a lot of the information which I’d normally go into is historical – which means it stems from physical limits imposed by things like tensile strength and infrastructural bottlenecks – stuff that might not apply to a fantasy setting with levitation or teleportation magic, or a sci-fi setting with anti-gravity technology.
That being said, there are still some basic physical principles to keep in mind: nearby materials are always going to be cheaper to source than materials from further away. When it comes to building material – especially for building things like residences for common people, this is going to be the biggest determinant of what a building can look like: wood and stone can only be built so high, likewise mud-brick and sod. Generally speaking, people will try to build as sturdily as they can, as cheaply as they can, and this affects how large and especially how tall a building can be built.
There’s also the climate to consider. Heat rises. That’s a basic principle of thermodynamics which almost every fictional setting shares with the real world. Rain and snow fall (more or less) downwards and have mass. That’s another universal principle. Buildings have to account for this. Low ceilings and minimal ventilation in a hot and humid environment will cause organic goods to rot and inhabitants to drown in their own sweat. Flat roofs in an area with heavy snowfall will not stand up to the weight of that snow unless that roof is made of steel and pre-stressed concrete. Wood rots quickly in tropical climates, and it lasts forever in dry and cold ones. Mud-brick doesn’t stand up to rain well, and massive temperature variations can make even concrete crack and wear with remarkable speed (as any Montreal driver will tell you).
Just as important is the actual reason for which a building is built, which is turn informed by not just the climate and the availability of the materials, but also geological conditions, and the state of the art when it comes to how the function of the building is fulfilled. In early modern Europe, fortresses were made from massive, heavy stone bastions built low to the ground to absorb cannon fire. In China, walls were built of rammed earth because that made it relatively quick and cheap to encircle a large city with fortifications which could shrug off rams and other siege weapons. In Japan, where regular earthquakes made rigid stone construction structurally unreliable and mountainous terrain delayed the development of heavy siege engines, castles were built of more flexible wood – to weather seismological tremors as well as arrows and infantry assaults.
Just as important as material is the internal layout of the building itself. While the size and position of a building might tell you how important its broad function is to a given society, the way that building is laid out on the inside shows how that function is seen and performed in a more specific sense. For example, the size and location of a prison tells you something about how much emphasis a society puts on crime deterrence and punishment – but the conditions within that prison, the size of the cells, the existence of an exercise yard, the amenities available – all those things tell how a society views their prisoners, like whether they are seen as ontologically evil individuals to punished, or people who have made a mistake and must be rehabilitated.
As always, there will be exceptions. The fact that local materials are cheaper will necessarily mean that those who wish to show off their wealth or influence will consider building from foreign ones. Sometimes economic realities will be overridden by political or military ones. Sometimes a combination of hubris and stupidity will lead a particularly powerful individual or group of individuals to build in ways which are manifestly unsuited for the climate – as is often seen in many colonial enclaves built by conquerors from a different part of the world (or the Montreal Olympic Stadium). People behave rationally, but their idea of reason is often distorted by existing biases, cultural inertia, and the simple arrogance of the fortunate who believe that just because they’ve bucked the odds so far, reality no longer really applies to them.
Finally, we come to the actual appearance of the building itself, because architecture is not only a craft, but an art. A building can look more than one way to fulfil a specific purpose under specific conditions, and what specific way a building appears can just as readily tell a story about how the society that built it, its aesthetic standards, and its attitudes towards not only those who build a structure but those who design and think about how structures are built as a whole.
For example, a society which is proud of its engineering technology or the skill of its builders might show it off – as might a particularly powerful and ambitious patron. Towering spires, gigantic domes, impossible-looking archways, these are all the hallmarks of a society (or someone within that society) who wants to show off the fact that they’re rich enough, or knowledgeable enough, to do the impossible.
Alternatively, drab and functional looking buildings, with minimal ornamentation or decorative flourishes can also demonstrate an emphasis on bare function with minimal cost or effort expended – the sign of a society which wants everyone to at least have access to a given function, even if getting access to it doesn’t fire the soul. My alma mater, SFU, provides what could be a perfect example of that. The brutalist and often minimalist construction of the Burnaby Campus has been used multiple times as a futuristic and dystopian setting for various science-fiction TV shows and films, but it was built in a time when it was becoming current to believe that university educations should be for everyone, not just the economic elite. Its intended purpose was to symbolise a democratisation of higher education – but shifting societal trends and cultural perceptions have made that same aesthetic into something ominous.
Another example is the difference between two generations of Soviet public housing. The “Stalinka” of the 30s was built in a vaguely neoclassical style, with high ceilings and artistic flourishes and stone facades which make them resemble New York City brownstones or the apartments of Haussmann’s Paris. They were intended for the favoured individuals of the Stalinist era – the “Red Aristocracy” which carried out policy, and skilled workers in particularly prioritised industries. Following the mass destruction of the Second World War, these buildings became more simplified and utilitarian. Flourishes were cut out, living spaces were shrunk, tall and monumental apartment blocks were shortened into buildings which did not need steel cranes to construct. This culminated with the “Khrushchevka” – mass produced low-rise apartments, sometimes derisively referred to in the West as “commieblocks”. Concrete paneling replaced brick and mortar, internal walls were made of fibreboard. The priority of the state – and of society – had gone from producing a relatively small amount of excellent housing for the chosen few, to producing as much good-enough housing as possible for the millions of people who’d lost their previous living spaces to Nazi bombs and artillery shells.
Hopefully, all of this will give you some idea regarding how the architecture of a society can help tell the stories of its existence in a way which will give depth and texture to your setting. The same can be said of other aspects of material culture: food, tools, means of transportation, weapons and armour. I could probably do a whole series, focusing on each one of these aspects, and how carefully crafting them can help add to the setting you create.
Who knows, maybe I will?
Paul Wang 