Architectural Representations

Le Corbusier symbolizes rational modern urbanism, whose rigorous planning effort requires a parallel effort of understanding. It opposes this contemporary urbanism that wants to perceive and enjoy the city sensibly. Feeling and reason, however, are not opposites and Le Corbusier gave us at the time keys to try a synthesis, uniting them in a singular way by means of his 'boîtes à miracles' or 'magic boxes' those "architectural spectacles of synthesis" that he defined in the IX Ciam, 1951. This paper tries to approach to the first one of these spectacles: the 'diorama', seeing it as Corbuserian strategy of mediation between the rational and the sensible in modern and contemporary city.

In the essay ‘The Gesture of Writing’, Vilém Flusser describes writing as a ‘penetrating gesture that informs a surface’. Understanding drawing as another form of ‘superficial’ graphic inscription, this paper looks into the implications of this material expression within the drawing as an object and a signifier. This essay addresses the process of architectural representation as a series of consecutive re-sitings. Taking into account not only the material situation of the drawing but also the virtual and physical loci of fabrication that precede it, the essay discusses the role of the drawing surface as an operative agent of reterritorialization. Drawing from the concept of site-specificity as it has emerged in art (Kwon) the paper suggest that the drawing surface constitutes not merely a new form of site, that is, a hyperreal counterpart of an origin (Baudrillard), but an intertextual accumulation of a number of sites that consecutively emerge in the transcriptive operations that occur in the process. This both projective and projected situation is further investigated through the author’s installation Draw of a Drawing, a ‘re-sited’ representation of the city of Edinburgh. Considered here a form of ‘drawing in space’, installation is treated as a means of illustrating the depth of the drawing, directly expressing the relation between the spatial and the superficial by bringing into appearance the negotiations that occur between surface and viewer.

This paper presents an investigation of the agencies of representation in architecture. Registering these agencies I stress the major transformations that they have undergone in recent decades, mainly along two axes: digitisation of the media and the increasing multiplicity of architectural imagery. Developing from this, I show that a structural transformation has taken place in the architectural discourse: beyond facilitating the creative design process and communicating information for the construction of the building, architectural representation began to engage directly and critically with architectural discourse itself. Operating on a surface that is historically occupied by text, drawing has facilitated reflexive and critical inquiries
in architecture.

"El desafío de integrar él medio digital en el proceso de diseño arquitectónico se encuentra en la actualidad con la falta de métodos, técnicas y teorías que relacionen lo electrónico con lo manual. En los últimos años se han realizado investigaciones prometedoras, sobre el uso de interacciones múltiples entre medios análogos y digitales. Sin embargo, estos experimentos no han desarrollado todavía una base teórica que conecte sus procedimientos a una estructura conceptual comprensiva, ni tampoco han sido lo suficientemente relacionados y/o verificados por terceros para conformar una base de conocimientos confiable.
En el libro de SIGraDi’98 publicamos un trabajo que estableció tal base teórica. En esta ponencia encaramos la segunda problemática ofreciendo una base de conocimientos preliminar sobre la cual asentar un nivel de competencia profesional a la altura de la era informática. Definiremos 19 hipótesis que juntan y sintetizan críticamente los descubrimientos hechos por más de 20 investigadores de los Estados Unidos. A pesar de que esta base de conocimiento es preliminar, la intención es que ofrezca una asistencia inmediata a la práctica y educación arquitectónica a la vez que defina áreas de estudio que verifiquen tales hipótesis o exploren territorios no definidos por ellas."

Lisa Landrum's paper "Modus Operandi of an Architectus Doli: Architectural Cunning in the Comic Plays of Plautus"  appears as Chapter 15.  Also in the book are essays by Karsten Harries, Marco Frascari, David Leatherbarrow, Kenneth Frampton, Juhani Pallasmaa, Steven Holl, and other colleages and former students of Alberto Perez-Gomez including: Ricardo L. Castro, Tracey Eve Winton, Robert Kirkbride, Paul Emmons, Indra Kagis McEwen, Santiago de Orduña, Caroline Dionne, Lily Chi, Louise Pelletier, Lawrence Bird, Lian Chikako Chang, Natalija Subotincic, Stephen Parcell, Graham Livesey, Juan Manuel Heredia, Anne Bordeleau, Peter Olshavsky, and David Theodore.

Paper summary/excerpts: "At least five of Plautus’ twenty extant comedies involve what classicists call an architectus doli, an “architect of trickery.” … Plautus’ elaboration of the cunning slave character has long been considered one of his most original contributions to Latin drama; but the “architect” terms associated with these slaves (and with Jupiter) were likely transposed from the now largely lost Greek comedies that Plautus adapted and translated into Latin. These five imported “architects” were generally ignored in early studies of Plautine inventiveness. They eventually gained attention, however, in an important 1952 study on The Nature of Roman Comedy. Since then, Plautus’ architectus figure has been interpreted in a variety of ways within classical scholarship: as a euphemism for the play’s lowly agent of intrigue; as a proxy for the scheming playwright; and as a media-reflexive figure associated with other craft imagery used throughout Plautus’ plays to qualify and vivify not only acts of scheming and plot construction, but also moral edification. Yet, there are further interpretations to be made and important questions to be asked…This essay cannot answer these questions in full, but it will initiate an interpretation of Plautus’ architectus doli with such questions in mind. By lifting this Roman dramatist up out of the footnotes of architectural scholarship (where he is sometimes merely credited with providing the earliest extant use of the Latin term architectus), the following study prepares the grounds for discovering how the cunning agents and agencies of Plautus’ comedies meaningfully illuminate the modus operandi of architects..."

The analogy of the text is a common one for space and the city, whether it is referred to in terms of reading, enunciating (De Certeau) or writing it (Serres). In the beginning of the 20th century, the new theories of space-time and the increasing mobility and mechanization of the world brought forward the inadequacy of architectural notation to engage with the complex interactions of movement that take place in the city. Normative representations of the city conventionally forgo the microbe-like processes that occur within it. This partial illegibility of the city (Allen) appears to refer back to the illegibility of movement, and the temporal and kinetic character of space.

This paper looks at the transcriptive operations that take place between real space and the space of the architectural drawing as an opportunity to rethink and expand the limits of architectural representation in order to embrace the complex negotiations and interactions that occur in the city. This emphasis on the infraordinary (Perec) reveals the users and their non-human counterparts as the markers of différance (Derrida) within the text of the city, bringing individual experience to the centre of this reading. In the textual city the users configure space both physically and perceptively. This paper is further concerned with the transcription of this condition into another form of writing and particularly with the transference of the effect of various agencies from one to the next.The locus of the reading is transposed from the city to the drawing that forms a new site of investigation, yet the characters remain the same.

The drawing as ‘writing’ involves a series of ‘readings’. As the architect faces the duality of being a ‘reader’ and an ‘author’, the transition from the actual to the virtual cannot be considered as being merely a transcription from experience to sign. Moreover, the author’s intentions are not just liable to the intentions of an external reader but to internal agencies such as the material procedures involved and the autonomy of the signs in use. The drawing becomes an operator in the narrative of space while the architect himself acquires the status of the ‘character’. Drawing from Roland Barthes’ opposition between the text and the literary work, this paper will conclude that the textual nature of the city should already presuppose the nature of the drawing as a site of interpretative readings, a process itself temporal and kinetic, capable of revealing the possibility of new realities.

Document du mois (août 2020) présenté aux archives départementales de la Côte d'Or

Notice consultable et téléchargeable sur le site des Archives départementales de la Côte d'Or :
https://archives.cotedor.fr/v2/site/AD21/Decouvrir/Documents_du_mois/publications_en_2020_dernieres_publications