Reality Modeled after Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image 9780367711771, 9780367711832, 9781003149682

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REALITY MODELED AFTER IMAGES

Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image explores architecture’s entanglement with contemporary image culture. It looks closely at how changes produced through technologies of mediation alter disciplinary concepts and produce political effects. Through both historical and contemporary examples, it focuses on how conventions of representation are established, maintained, challenged, and transformed. Critical investigations are conjoined with inquiries into aesthetics and technology in the hope that the tensions between them can aid an exploration into how architectural images are produced, disseminated, and valued; how images alter assumptions regarding the appearances of architecture and the environment. For students and academics in architecture, design and media studies, architectural and art history, and related felds, this book shows how design is impacted and changed by shifts in image culture, representational conventions and technologies. Michael Young is an Assistant Professor at The Cooper Union. He has taught design studios and seminars at Yale University, Princeton University, Columbia University, and SCI-Arc. He has published numerous articles in academic journals and publications including the book The Estranged Object, published by the Graham Foundation in 2015. Michael was the recipient of the 2019–2020 Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome. He is also a founding partner of the architectural design practice Young & Ayata.

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REALITY MODELED AFTER IMAGES Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image

Michael Young

First published 2022 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Michael Young The right of Michael Young to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-71177-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-71183-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-14968-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003149682 Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Reality Modeled After Images

vii

xiv

1

PART I

Poché and the Rendering of Labor

17

1

The Labor Hidden in the Poché

19

2

The Shadows of Information (Second Version)

47

PART II

Entourage and the Politics of Objects

67

3

Montage-Entourage; or, The Politics of the Seam

69

4

Episodic Informality

99

vi

Contents

PART III

Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality

131

5

Fluctuations of Attention

133

6

The Shallowness of Depth

164

Index

200

FIGURES

1.1a and b Francesco Borromini, Sant’Ivo della Sapienza (1642), plan rendering close-ups, Archivio di Stato di Roma, Cimeli, 77, photos by the author 1.2a Francesco Borromini, Sant’Ivo della Sapienza (1642–1660), plan rendering, Archivio di Stato di Roma, Cimeli, 77, photo by the author 1.2b SANAA, Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion (2006), plan diagram, image courtesy SANAA 1.3a SANAA, Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion (2006), photo © Iwaan Baan 1.3b SANAA, Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion (2006), section, image courtesy SANAA 1.4 Donato Bramante, Parchment Plan of St. Peter’s Basilica (1506) 1.5a and b Michelangelo Buonarroti, modano for the Laurentian Library, recto (a) and verso (b). Florence, Casa Buonarroti, inv. 92A (1524), photos by author 1.6 Emmanuel Brune, Main staircase of the palace of a sovereign (1863), cross section, brown and black ink, 108 × 2343 cm. PRA1232–4. © Beaux-Arts de Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY 1.7a and b Antoine Le Pautre, Hôtel de Beauvais (1657) (a) ground foor plan and (b) frst foor plan 1.8a John Carl Warnecke, AT&T Longlines Building (1974), Tower Plan, Base Plan, Exterior Wall Cable Ducts, images courtesy of John Carl Warnecke Architectural Archives

19

20 20 21 21 22

24

28 31

33

viii Figures

1.8b 1.9

1.10 1.11a 1.11b 1.12

1.13 2.1

2.2 2.3 2.4

3.1 3.2a 3.2b 3.3 3.4a

3.4b 3.5a

John Carl Warnecke, AT&T Longlines Building (1974),

photograph by author Le Corbusier, ‘plan paralyse vs. plan libre” from Precisions

(1930), drawings from the 1929 Buenos Aires lectures

© F.L.C./ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS),

New York 2020 OMA, Très Grande Bibliothèque (1989), plan diagrams, image

courtesy of OMA OMA, Très Grande Bibliothèque (1989), model of voids as

solids, photo by Hans Werleman/© OMA OMA, Très Grande Bibliothèque (1989) digital wireframe

model, image courtesy OMA Robert Venturi, Vanna Venturi House (1964), frst and

second foor plan, The Architectural Archives, University

of Pennsylvania, by the gift of Robert Venturi and

Denise Scott Brown Clark Thenhaus/Endemic Architecture, Queen Anne House

San Francisco (2018), image courtesy of Clark Thenhaus Detail of Room portrait, by Veronica Skeppe, Cecilia

Lundbäck and Ulrika Karlsson (2019), from Interiors

Matter: A Live Interior LiDAR-USA, aerial view of Snoopy Highway Mapper

LiDAR System (2019), image courtesy of LiDAR-USA Andrew Saunders, Lidar scan of San Lorenzo, Tornio (2018),

image courtesy of Andrew Saunders Photogrammetry scan of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s altar

in Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome (1765), scans and

images by the author (2019) Jacques-Louis David, The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies

of His Sons (1789) Paul Letarouilly Edifces de Rome Moderne (1840)

perspective view, Santa Maria del Popolo Paul Letarouilly Edifces de Rome Moderne (1840)

perspective view, Palazzo Massimo Max Ernst, La Femme 100 têtes (1929) © 2020 Artists

Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris Eduardo Paolozzi, It’s a Psychological Fact Pleasure Helps your

Disposition (1948) © The Paolozzi Foundation, Licensed

by DACS/ARS 2020 Eduardo Paolozzi, Untitled (1948) © The Paolozzi

Foundation, Licensed by DACS/ARS 2020 Superstudio, Continuous Monument – Empire State

Building (1969), image courtesy of the C. Toraldo di

Francia collection

33

35

38

39

39

42

44

52

56

59

63

71

73

73

80

81

81

84

Figures

3.5b

3.6

3.7

3.8 3.9

3.10

3.11

3.12 4.1

4.2a, b, c

4.3a 4.3b 4.4 4.5

S uperstudio, Continuous Monument – Rockefeller Center (1969), image courtesy of the C. Toraldo di Francia collection Hans Hollein (1934–2014) © Aircraft Carrier City in Landscape. Project. Perspective (1964) Unbuilt. Cut-and-pasted reproduction on four-part photograph mounted on board, 8 1/2 × 39 3/8 ins. Philip Johnson Fund. (434.1967) Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY Hans Hollein, Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape (1964), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Philip Johnson Fund, 1967 © Private archive Hollein Archigram–Ron Herron, Instant City (1969) © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London Archizoom Associati, No-Stop City: Interior Landscapes (1971) © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris Superstudio, The Fundamental Acts – “The Distant Mountain” – Life-Supersurface (1971), image courtesy of the C. Toraldo di Francia collection OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, Border Crossing (2005), image courtesy of OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen Philipp Schaerer, Bildbau No 2 (2007) © Philipp Schaerer, image courtesy of the artist Gio Ponti and Antonio Fornaroli, Villa Planchart – Piano terreno. Blueprint (blue line and superposed sketch paper piece with design alternative for bathrooms, ground foor and library) (September 8, 1953), Album de la Variante Negra, Plans and Drawings, Archivo Gio Ponti Caracas, Fundacion Anala y Armando Planchart, Caracas, Venezuela. (b – center) Ryue Nishizawa, Moriyama House (2002–2005), (a – left) No Entourage vs. (c – right) No Architecture, removals by author MOS, Housing Laboratory (2016), image courtesy of MOS Architects MOS, School No.1 (2015), image courtesy of MOS Architects Mansilla + Tuñón, Museo de la Vega Baja de Toledo (2010), image courtesy of Emilio Tuñón Sou Fujimoto, Residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed children (2007), image courtesy of Sou Fujimoto Architects

ix

84

85

85 86

87

88

93 95

103

104 106 106 108

109

x

Figures

Ruye Nishizawa, Tomihiro Museum (2002), image courtesy of Offce of Ryue Nishizawa 4.7 Herzog & de Meuron, Parrish Art Museum – frst scheme (2010), 277_DR_0701_006_DD04 © Herzog & de Meuron 4.8 Young Projects, Six Square House Plan (2020), image courtesy of Bryan Young 4.9 Jun Igarashi Architects, House O (2009), image courtesy of Jun Igarashi Architects 4.10 Stan Allen Architect, School Cluster Assemblies (2010), image courtesy of Stan Allen Architects 4.11a Louis I. Kahn, The Dominican Motherhouse of St. Catherine de Ricci, Schematic Design (August 1968) Louis I. Kahn Collection, The University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission 4.11b James Stirling, Michael Wilford, and Associates, Plan for Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin, Germany (between 1979 and 1987), ink and graphite on paper, 20.9 × 29.8 cm, AP140.S2.SS1.D57.P6.20, James Stirling/Michael Wilford fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture 4.12a Gehry Partners, LLP, Winton Guest House (1984–87) © Frank O. Gehry. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2017.M.66), Frank Gehry Papers 4.12b John Hejduk, Site Plan for Victims (1984), pen and black ink on paper 98.5 × 137 cm, DR1998:0109:003:017, and pen and black ink on paper 98.5 × 137 cm DR1998:0109:003:018, John Hejduk fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture 4.13a John Hejduk, Partial Site Plan for Victims (1984), reprographic copies mounted on translucent paper, 92 × 145 cm, DR1998:0109:003:019, John Hejduk fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture 4.13b John Hejduk, Partial Site Plan for Victims (1984), pen and black ink on paper 98.5 × 137 cm, DR1998:0109:003:017, John Hejduk fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture 4.14a and b Institutionen för Byggnadsfunktionslära, Furniture layout analysis (1968), Chalmers research group Byggnadsfunktionslära, Bertil Olsson and Rolf Nilsson 4.15 A rchizoom, No-Stop City (1968–74), Furniture Layout © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris 4.16 Common Accounts, Closer Each Day (2016), image courtesy of Common Accounts 4.6

109

110 110 111 113

115

115

115

115

118

118

119

121 124

Figures

5.1

5.2

5.3 5.4 5.5a

5.5b

5.6a

5.6b 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10

5.11 6.1 6.2

6.3a 6.3b

xi

Style Transfer Neural Network study (Baptistry of Saint

John in the style of Wat Phra Kaew). Tucker van

Leuwen-Hall in David Ruy’s Cyborg Misprision, Vertical

Design Studio at SCI-Arc (Spring, 2020), image courtesy

of David Ruy 134

Joseph Bernard, “Concours du Grand Prix de Rome,

Un Etablissement D’Eaux Thermales et Casino”

(1900) – from L. Farge, Les Concours D’Ecole, 1re Année 138

First Offce, PS1 Dolmen (2016), photograph of model,

image courtesy of Anna Neimark and Andrew Atwood 141

First Offce, PS1 Dolmen (2016), rendering of elevation,

image courtesy of Anna Neimark and Andrew Atwood 141

Bridget Riley, Shift (1963) emulsion on hardboard, 30 × 30 ins, (76.2 × 76.2 cm) © Bridget Riley 2020. All rights reserved. 150

Zaha Hadid Architects, Zaragoza Bridge Pavilion (2008),

Expo Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain (2008) © Luke Hayes/VIEW 150

Bridget Riley, Current (1964), emulsion on board,

58 3/8 × 58 7/8 ins (148.3 × 149.5 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Philip Johnson Fund 576.1964 © Bridget Riley 2020. All rights reserved. 150

A. Michael Noll, Ninety Parallel Sinusoids With Linearly

Increasing Period (1965) © 1965 A. Michael Noll 150

Jennifer Bonner/Mall Architecture, Haus Gables (2018),

image courtesy of Jennifer Bonner 153

T+E+A+M, A Range Life (2018), image courtesy of

T+E+A+M 154

MVRDV, Glass Farm (2013), image courtesy of

MVRDV 155

“Convolutional Neural Network Image Generation” from

Convolutional Neural Network class, www.deeplearning.ai/

generative-adversarial-networks-specialization/ 158

Notre Dame de La Tourette, Ruy Klein (2019), image

courtesy of David Ruy and Karel Klein 160

Charles Garnier, Place de l’Opéra, Paris, detail of the foyer

ceiling (1862) © RIBA Collections 166

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Santa Maria del Priorato

(1764), ceiling photogrammetry scan and image

by the author 168

Drawing from Gaspard Monge Géométrie Descriptive

(1795) 173

Axonometric diagram by author (2020) 173

xii

Figures

6.4

Girard Desargues, etchings by Abraham Bosse, published in La Maniere universelle de M. des Argues Lyonnois (a) Stonecutting (1643), (b) Sundialling (1643),

(c) Perspective (1648) 174

6.5 Desargues’ Theorem, ten projective relations diagrammed

by author (2020). Pictorial representation, bottom right,

based on a diagram from Peter Jeffrey Booker, A History of

Engineering Drawing (1963). The multiplicity of projections

was frst introduced to me by Miles Ritter 175

6.6 Desargues’ Theorem, Projective confgurations from point

perspectival projection towards oblique parallel projection

(2020), image by the author 176

6.7 Andrea Palladio, I quattro libri dell’architettura (1570). The line

engraving on the left represents Palladio’s theoretical ideal

of the Corinthian Column; the shaded engraving (right) is

the precedent from the “Temple of Castor and Pollux,”

Temple of Dioscuri, Naples (frst century BCE) 178

6.8 Henri Labrouste, Pantheon Capital Study (1830), image

courtesy of Académie d’Architecture, Paris 179

6.9 Charles Garnier, Paris Opera House Façade (1862) 180

6.10 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper,

Berlin-Mitte, Germany, (1921), elevation study, charcoal

and graphite on brown paper mounted on board,

21 3/4 × 34 1/2 in, Mies van der Rohe Archive, gift of

Mary Callery, digital image ©The Museum of Modern

Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY 180

6.11 Michael Webb, Furniture Manufacturers Association

Headquarters, High Wycombe, England (Furniture factory),

elevation, Michael Webb © Archigram 1957–58 181

6.12 Luigi Moretti, “Il Girasole” house, Rome (1949)

© Prospectus on viale Bruno Buozzi (Central State

Archive, Luigi Moretti Fund) 181

6.13 Neil Denari, Prototype School (1991), courtesy

of Neil M. Denari 182

6.14 Bureau Spectacular, Queen Anne House (2018), all rights

Bureau Spectacular 182

6.15 BairBalliet, The Corner – The Next Port of Call (2016)

courtesy Kelly Bair and Kristy Balliet 184

6.16a and b Ludovisi Sarcophagus (CE 250–260), Palazzo Altemps,

photo by the author 188

6.17 Photogrammetry scan of the Ludovisi Sarcophagus, Palazzo

Altemps (2019), distant view, image by the author 193

Figures

6.18 6.19 6.20

Photogrammetry scan of the Ludovisi Sarcophagus, Palazzo Altemps (2019), near view, image by the author Photogrammetry scan of the Ludovisi Sarcophagus, Palazzo Altemps (2019), frontal view, image by the author Photogrammetry scan of the Ludovisi Sarcophagus, Palazzo Altemps (2019), oblique view, image by the author

xiii

193 194 194

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The list of those to whom I owe a debt of gratitude in the development of this book is long, and any attempt on my part to cover all will unfortunately miss many that deserve acknowledgement. As it stands there are several groups of individuals I wish to thank for their contributions and support, both recent and past, intellectual and emotional, architectural and otherwise. My professors: Jesse Reiser, Peter Eisenman, Ed Eigen, Paul Lewis, Mario Gandelsonas, Miles Ritter, Bilgi Denel, Terry Hargrave, Karen Lange, John Lange, Laura Joines, and Gil Cooke. My colleagues: Diana Agrest, Diane Lewis, Stephen Rustow, Tamar Zinguer, Tony Candido, Felicia Davis, David Gersten, Kevin Bone, Guido Zuliani, Elizabeth O’Donnell, Sam Anderson, Lydia Kallipoliti, James Lowder, Anthony Titus, Eva Franch, Hayley Eber, Mersiha Veledar, Steven Hillyer, Rosalyne Shieh, David Allin, Lauren Kogod, Michael Webb, Nora Akawi, Lorena del Rio, Ben Aranda, Farzin Lofti-Jam, Jonah Rowen, Mark Foster Gage, Sunil Bald, Brennan Buck, Michelle Addington, Joyce Hwang, Bimal Mendes, Martin Finio, Kent Bloomer, Nina Rappaport, Mario Carpo, Forrest Meggers, Michael Meredith, Beatriz Colomina, Elizabeth Diller, Spyros Papapetros, Marcleyn Gow, Liam Young, Tom Wiscombe, Marcelo Spina, Maxi Spina, Florencia Pita, Peter Testa, Axel Kilian. My deans: Anthony Vidler, Nader Tehrani, Deborah Berke, Alejandro ZaeraPolo, Stan Allen, Robert Stern, Hernan Diaz-Alonso, Mark Wigley. Those whose ideas and conversations continually provoke and inspire, and have infuenced the arguments in this book: David Ruy, Rhett Russo, Ferda Kolatan, Jason Payne, Johan Bettum, Peter Trummer, Ulrika Karlsson, Jeff Kipnis, Sanford Kwinter, Nanako Umemoto, Karel Klein, Cynthia Davidson, Kristy Balliet, Kyle Miller, Kelly Bair, Adam Fure, Jimenez Lai, Andrew Atwood, Ellie Abrons, Andrew Holder, Thomas Kelley, Carrie Norman, Ariane Lourie

Acknowledgments

xv

Harrison, Alicia Imperiale, John May, Jennifer Bonner, Mike Szivos, Caroline O’Donnell, Andrew Kovacs, Nate Hume, Abigail Coover, Mariana Ibañez, Anna Neimark, Michael Osman, Mark Ericson, Catie Newall, Clark Thenhaus, Matthew Brennan, James Casebere, Andrew Witt, Andrew Saunders, Antonino Saggio, Nat Chard, Neil Spiller, Riet Eeckhout, Mark Dorrian, Shaun Murray, Mark West, Nada Subotincic, Mark Smout, Laura Allen, Bryan Cantley, Peter Cook, and Perry Kulper. The staff, directors, librarians, and fellows of the American Academy in Rome where much of this book was researched and written. My amazing editor: Chelsea Spencer. My incredible architectural partner: Kutan Ayata for the constant collabora­ tion that is Young & Ayata. And my truly wonderful family: Caroline, Gabriel, Jasper, Greg, Jacky, Bryan, and John for everything.

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INTRODUCTION Reality Modeled After Images

When architecture and politics are discussed, it is typically through one of three lenses: the politics of the architect, the politics of the building, or the politics of the client.1 These are all legitimate areas of research and important for understanding how architecture impacts society. However, they tend not to address what it is that architects labor over in the day-to-day negotiations that defne and redefne the discipline. The values that defne a discipline are maintained through its conventions. Conventions are what is taught, what is handed down, what links generations. They consist of tools and techniques, norms and models for the production and interpretation of what qualifes as signifcant work. Conventions specify accept­ able modes of appearance, verify expertise, and narrate lineage. They defend the boundaries of what constitutes a discipline. Accordingly, all conventions are nec­ essarily biased, they are established to maintain the privilege and power of certain groups at the expense of others. But this does not mean that they are stable, per­ manent, nor completely dependent on origin. Opposed to [the principle of ] the author . . . disciplines are defned by groups of objects, methods, their corpus of propositions considered to be true, the interplay of rules and defnitions, of techniques and tools: all these constitute a sort of anonymous system, freely available to whoever wishes, or whoever is able to make use of them, without there being any question of their meaning or their validity being derived from whoever happened to invent them . . . For a discipline to exist, there must be the possibility of formulating—and of doing so ad infnitum—fresh propositions.2

DOI: 10.4324/9781003149682-1

2

Introduction

To challenge a set of disciplinary conventions, they frst must be identifed, and their operations explicated. As Michel Foucault states in the passage above, the persistence of a discipline depends on the possibility of formulating new state­ ments, new work, new concepts. As opposed to legitimacy through author­ ship, a discipline forms a kind of “anonymous system” that structures how these exchanges occur. Foucault’s interest lay in understanding how disciplines pro­ duce knowledge, and how this process is continuously verifed, challenged, and maintained by collectivities of objects, people, texts, and institutions. Disciplines require a shared set of norms and models to frame and focus discourse; they set the terms on which a politics becomes sensible to a specifc constituency. One of the primary ways that the discipline of architecture is disciplined is through conventions of representation. Representations are partial presentations of the world; they focus attention on “this” and in the process conceal “that,” establishing qualities to be commended and overlooking those less desirable. They also set criteria for what is taught as precedent, what becomes part of the canon, what enters the archive. It is one thing to argue for the consideration of different content as exemplary, and quite another to dismantle the apparatus that allows that argument to take place. To challenge the conventions of representation thus requires a critical examination of both how they developed and how they continue to operate. What are their assumptions regarding where value is placed? What knowledge structures do they construct and are they constructed on? How do they manifest aesthetically, with certain qualities and not others? When do conventions change, and why does this occur sometimes and not at others? The following chapters in this book will primarily focus on shifts and exchanges in conventions ranging between twenty-frst century digital media and nineteenth-century rendering as developed at the École des Beaux-Arts. This may initially seem an odd combination, or to be another instance of the BeauxArts playing straw man for a host of contrasts and condemnations. I assure you it is not. The representational concepts of the École des Beaux-Arts play a funda­ mental role for the following arguments, neither as villains nor as historical alibi but instead as key moments in the assemblage of a disciplinary apparatus that is still with us today, operating in remarkably similar ways. Focusing on this lineage does locate the arguments within the traditions of Western European art and architecture, a bias that I acknowledge is problematic, but given that so many of architecture’s disciplinary conventions trace back through this history, to ignore this lineage hinders an understanding of how these systems developed, and thus how they can be challenged and transformed. Most studies that reference the École des Beaux-Arts do so in relation to for­ mal design procedures, typological studies, or discursive arguments through his­ torical precedent. These will not be primary issues for the following arguments; instead, it will be conventions of rendering, of imaging that will be discussed. The Beaux-Arts rendering may seem to be an even more suspect object of study as it has long been jettisoned by modernism and returns only in moments of interest

Introduction

3

for fetishistic aesthetes. Again, I assure the reader that these affective fourishes of ink and watercolor washes will not be the focus of attention. The reason for a look back to the nineteenth century is that the Beaux-Arts had a fully structured system of imaging architectural designs. One that operated integrally with pro­ duction and evaluation. One that bound the aesthetics of imaging with concep­ tual arguments. One that established distinctions maintained through modernism even when the content represented, and the style of the representations changed. Three terms describe different aspects of this imaging system within the BeauxArts, and it is these three terms that provide the organizational structure for the following book: poché, entourage, and mosaïque. It may be argued that a historical examination of imaging is unnecessary today, given how radically architectural design has changed with computation. Digital technologies are frequently posited as a paradigmatic revolution, a recur­ ring theme in many felds, not just architecture. That changes attributable to the ever-accelerating modernization of technological media have upended conven­ tions of representation is irrefutable. But the situation is not as straightforward as it initially appears. Infuence can also work the other way around: established conventions can domesticate new media technologies toward disciplinary prac­ tices, continuing the biases of the past through different means and mediums. This phenomenon can be found in arguments that describe the computer as just a tool; a faster, more precise, and more effcient tool, but not essentially dif­ ferent from earlier tools and techniques. Under this belief, the discipline is not transformed by technology, instead, it transforms technology to operate within disciplinary conventions. Regardless of which side of this debate one concurs, implicit in both argu­ ments is that technology is neutral, and the primary concern is to learn how to use it properly. But technology is never neutral, for it is itself the result of a constantly shifting assemblage of people, machines, ideologies, and conventions. A transfor­ mation within architectural representation occurs not only with the appearance of new tools and techniques, but also when conventions become devalued and revalued. This brings us to the question of images, for ultimately what is being fought over and what is being negotiated is how the background of the built environment will appear. Reality as mediated through images is a much larger cultural question than architecture’s internal disciplinary battles. The images that architecture produces are not only used to defne disciplinary expertise, they also play a fundamental role in how near future realities will appear, how they will be interpreted, what values will be privileged, and who will see alternative pos­ sibilities for occupation and inhabitation. These are crucial questions about how architecture understands and uses the images it creates, and how these in turn alter relationships between people and environments. When I refer to the relationship between politics and architecture, it is to the ways in which the discipline struc­ tures relations between representation and reality, for it is ultimately on this that the politics of the architect, the building, and the client rest.

4

Introduction

Representational Boundaries Representation is a confusing term in many ways precisely because it can mean so many different things depending on which discipline is considered. It also has an extremely heavy role to play within Western traditions concerning the relationship between art forms and reality, what is captured by the concept of mimesis. Reductively, its philosophical structure has three parts: the world is pres­ ent, humans perceive it through the senses, and fnally it is re-presented a second time through a medium. We will leave the debates about whether the world truly exists outside of human perception to the side for a moment and try to describe two primary philosophical interpretations of these relations. Some posi­ tions see this process as a sequence that moves from reality toward representation, each step further away from contact with the “real” as an ideal truth. In this, images are twice removed and thus not to be trusted. Other positions understand representation to consist of appearances that intervene between us and world. Representations mediate—and as such are used by cultures to construct coherent and communicable signifcations regarding its values. It is a generalization, yet useful to consider the frst position as descended from Plato and the second from Aristotle. For the Platonic side, representation is always a diminished, degraded copy of the real: for the Aristotelian, representation constructs a parallel reality as cultural mediations.3 Western aesthetic discourse is, by and large, the rhetorical practice of explicat­ ing the gaps between the world and the artwork, between art and signifcance. The philosophies more strongly Platonic are concerned with the gap between perception and reality, as all sense experience is a shadow of transcendent truth. The arguments descended from Aristotle consider the artwork to be a media­ tion, the gap to be explained is between art and its cultural meanings. For these explanations to operate, representations must both resemble and alter appearance, for this is how they can be interpreted as both related to, yet different from real­ ity, as art. Genres, styles, and movements argue for how these differences should be produced and how they should be understood, but underlying it all is the idea that the artwork is not a simple copy of reality, but an expression of cultural values which can be formulated and debated as conventions. This understanding of art falls under what the philosopher Jacques Rancière calls the “representa­ tional regime.” For Rancière, this is a specifc paradigm whereby art is valued for legibility within a structured hierarchy of genres.4 He locates the apex of the representational regime in Western art traditions from the Italian Renaissance to the École des Beaux-Arts, but this does not mean that aspects of it did not exist before the early modern era, nor does it mean that we are free of conventionally constructed codes today. An architectural drawing—a plan for example—is structured through disci­ plinary conventions that can be taught and debated. These allow historical com­ parisons and establish values for evaluation. Within Rancière’s divisions, these drawings can be understood within a “representational regime” as descended

Introduction

5

from Aristotelian poetics. A plan drawing requires training and knowledge to be properly interpreted. A realistically rendered image is treated differently, however. It is considered by the discipline of architecture as a false copy of reality, too close to vision, too close to other disciplines such as painting and photography, too close to the spectacle of entertainment, too close to the seductions of advertis­ ing. Rancière has a category for this assignation as well, he defnes it as within an “ethical regime,” descended from Plato where art is understood in relation to its truth content and end use.5 Orthographic drawings are verifable through measure and are valued as “true” precisely because they do not deceive the eye, whereas perspective renderings are suspect because of their simulations. Archi­ tecture defends its disciplinary boundaries by defning some images (drawings) as epistemologically grounded and ethically honest while relegating other images (renderings) as extra-disciplinary and even potentially unethical in their visual seduction. The problem with architecture continuing to maintain this distinc­ tion is not that a plan drawing operates through metrics while a rendered image through optics—these attributes are accurate; their difference is important. The problems arise when “drawings” are categorically privileged over “renderings,” a hierarchical distinction increasingly untenable in a world where text, sound, and image are all illuminated manifestations of discrete signals, stored, transmitted, and processed through digital media. To render a digital image to appear within the conventions of an architectural drawing is an aesthetic decision. I would like to stress this point. The appearance of an architectural image is not simply the outcome of correct knowledge and sound beliefs, it is an aesthetic decision with epistemological and ethical implications. Conventions may provide a sense of continuity and consistency for the practice of architecture, but they also reinforce certain modes of appearance and interpretation, codifying the relations between representation and reality. Within the standard set of archi­ tectural representations—plan, section, elevation, axonometric, and perspective— each has its own histories and modes of interpretation that involve complex discur­ sive conficts. Through these representations, architects are trained to see the world in a particular way, to understand the value of their labor in specifc ways, to con­ struct arguments through the qualities and attributes of these representations, and to address specifc audiences. As part of Foucault’s “anonymous system” these conven­ tions are necessary for disciplinary propositions. But they also contain numerous problematic assumptions about how the environment and its inhabitation should be understood, perceived, surveilled, and exploited.

Exchange Rates Arguably, a work of art is valuable if it successfully follows an artistic tradi­ tion of recognized value. When it does, a new work of art is made to con­ form to certain criteria and patterned after certain models so that it may count as a valuable work of art . . .

6

Introduction

But what is the basis for the value of a work that breaks with traditional models? . . . To answer that question, we need to turn back to the idea with which we began, the one from which the question of truth as a relationship to extra-cultural reality sprang. Reality is complementary to the cultural tradi­ tion: what is not culture is real. Reality is profane if the cultural tradition is normative. The new work that does not resemble cultural models is for that reason recognized as real. The reality-effect or truth-effect of a cultural work consequently originates in a specifc way of interacting with tradition. Hence innovation is an act of negative adaptation to cultural tradition.6 Boris Groys defnes the culturally valued as “sacred” and the valueless extra-cultural as “profane.” For his argument, innovation occurs when the sacred is devalorized or the profane is valorized, an exchange that often happens in tandem. Cultural practices spend an extraordinary amount of time defending and maintaining the borders between these two realms, precisely because they are unstable. The pres­ sures for innovation can come from within or without, but for Groys, the spe­ cifc causes of the transformation are not always as important as the degree of exchange, for it is this redrawn boundary that will redefne a discipline. Disciplinary conventions include technologies of mediation. Media theorist Friedrich Kittler posited that the differences between them lie in how a specifc media stores, processes, and transmits information.7 Storage relates to how the phenomena of the world are captured and indexed, whether by the scratch of a needle on a gramophone, the reaction of chemical emulsion to light, the elec­ tromagnetic triggering of a photosensitive diode, or the outlining of a template on a block of stone.8 Once stored as media, this information can be processed: that is, translated, shifted, reversed, slowed, fltered, fragmented, shuffed, recom­ bined. The third aspect—how information is reproduced and disseminated as transmission—concerns speed, reach, and interface. Media changes as technology increases the quantity and fdelity of storage, alters the possibilities for manipu­ lation, or accelerates dissemination. Technologies of mediation are constantly being asked to provide ever more accurate models of “the real,” and with the advent of computation this means the abstractions of discrete bits of data orga­ nized as digital information. The nineteenth century saw radical changes in mediations for image making. Photography and cinema are the most evident, but these were not simply techno­ logical developments. These media captured and stored an excess of information outside of what the human sensorium consciously pays attention to. This excess was initially considered an error, as unwanted distortions, as noise because it chal­ lenged conventions. But over time, the aesthetic effects of the fltered, clipped, fipped, delayed, and sequenced sample have come to defne contemporary pho­ tography, cinema, music, animation, graphic design, digital modeling, and the

Introduction

7

culture of the internet. Changes in technologies of mediation made it possible to capture, edit, and reassemble fragments of reality and in the process alter what is valued as cultural expression. For Rancière, art that identifes an “instance of suspension” between art and non-art operates within an “aesthetic regime.”9 His formulation of “the politics of aesthetics” describes the political exchange that occurs when aesthetics alters the relationship between what is seen and what can be said, allowing new con­ stituencies to form.10 Rancière argues that this began when the representational conventions structuring art production and consumption were challenged by mid-nineteenth-century painting (Gustave Courbet) and literature (e.g., Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert).11 These aesthetic experiments fattened the hierarchy of traditional genres, introduced high levels of episodic detail, and appropriated ele­ ments from the everyday. In short, they created an aesthetic tension between reality and representation that was termed realism.12 It is important to reiterate that realism, whether speaking of its nineteenth-century manifestations or its con­ temporary appearances, should not be equated with a mimetic resemblance to “natural” perception. It is always a tension, a friction between how the world is assumed to appear and how the artwork redistributes sensible information. Within aesthetics defned in this way, abstraction and realism are not antithetical; on the contrary, they often work in combination.13 As Rancière points out, in order to have a black square qualify as art (as Kazimir Malevich proposed), one must frst dissociate the value of the artwork both from the content of what is painted and from conventional structures of interpretation.14 This occurred not only through challenges mounted from within painting and literature but also through the assemblages of media machines developed in scientifc laboratories to study human perception, later becoming the basis for the spectacles of popular entertainment.15 The performance-based drives for greater realism—faster processing, greater distribution, smoother translations, larger storage, higher fdelity—lend technolo­ gies the feeling that they are not political in themselves, that they are only put to political ends by those who own and deploy them. Political scientist Davide Panagia argues that this notion underlies critiques of media based on the poli­ tics of transmission:“As instruments of transmission,” they are seen as “‘infuence machines.’Thus, the effectivity and extent of their infuence (otherwise imagined as their power of coercion) is what makes them political.”16 Critiques of media technologies often seek to expose the ways in which they exploit members of society, for whose beneft, and to what effects. As important as an awareness of these effects of technology may be, they do not reveal much about how the meditations operate. The apparatus will continue to function regardless of you knowing that it is exploiting you. In discussing the politics of algorithms—which are technologies of mediation—Panagia proposes an alternate way to practice criticism in this context, based on the idea that mediations participate in the “formation of worlds.”What is critical is not necessarily to dismantle, dissect, and

8

Introduction

dissolve algorithms (the breakdown of code is, after all, more code) but to under­ stand how they arrange, associate, and dissociate relations between humans and objects.17 This begins with how a mediation makes things sensible, perceptible, intelligible—how it structures attention through aesthetics.

The Mediated Background Walter Benjamin famously claimed that architecture “offered the prototype of an artwork that is received in a state of distraction and through the collective.”18 In other words, architecture operates below the level of conscious attention as an aesthetics of the background. Currently, and increasingly, computational networks of information exchange determine much of this background. Simultaneously, digital images have become the mediations through which architecture models and presents it speculations about the near future. As the distinctions between digital mediations and reality become blurred, there is the fear of a loss of critical distance. This fear is legitimate, but the target of its address is often misplaced. The problem is much older than the emergence of digital technologies, and it is ultimately one that stems from the entanglement of ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics. The terms ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics describe three philosophical modes of relating to the world. Ethics appeals to a higher ideal, of which specifc physi­ cal instances are but contingent manifestations. Epistemology is concerned with knowledge—how we know what we know, and how this is substantiated and communicated. Aesthetics refers to the ways in which qualitative information is made sensible and delivered to the senses.19 These three terms will be used quite often throughout the book, and it is to these defnitions that I intend their usage. The relationship between ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics is complex, and we will obviously not be able to track its philosophical development in the space of this introduction. What concerns us here is that confations between the three often underlie arguments regarding the uses and abuses of the image. These arguments claim that images mask what is true about a given situation: images conceal knowledge. Often this belief takes on an additional valence, that images conceal knowledge for nefarious purposes. This statement implies that images are not merely problematic but unethical because they disturb access to “truth.”The critical approach following from this would be to analyze and dismantle images in order to raise awareness and reveal underlying motivations. Within this belief system, these three distinct modes of engaging the world become ranked, with aesthetics given a subservient, secondary status. The supposed conclusion is that if an artwork is ethically and epistemologically solid, it will be aesthetically good. There is an odd contradiction in treating aesthetics in this manner. Either aesthetics is so powerful and manipulative that it must be broken apart to dispel its seductions that are themselves commanded by capital, or aesthetics is so weak and inconsequential that it can be left as an afterthought, a function of other,

Introduction

9

more consequential forces. This contradiction creates serious problems insofar as it both overvalues and undervalues the impacts of aesthetic transformations. The treatment of aesthetics in this manner leads to distrust, and a diminishment of discursive exploration of its effects. If architecture is most often experienced unconsciously in the background of attention, then to alter the aesthetic appear­ ance of this background is a political act with ethical and epistemological implica­ tions. These three modes of engaging the world need to be brought into a more balanced, less hierarchical structure to understand how they affect each other. Architectural design labor is valued through the practices of drawing. The attributions of authorial originality, of methodological rigor, of precedent analysis are all dependent on aspects associated with drawing—for many architects, draw­ ing is design. Images produced after the labor of design has occurred are devalued as mere representations. This is attested to by the fact that the rendering of an image is often done by another set of laborers, uncredited and unacknowledged. This bias extends back to the École des Beaux-Arts, where rendering was learned early in one’s education, as the younger students in an atelier would render the older student’s Prix de Rome competition entries. Today, rendering is viewed as an automated computational process to be handled by “render farms,” third-party services with large computational power, typically located in other countries, employing an unknown number of people and machines, cranking out images through unseen human and non-human labor. The following arguments will focus on the necessity for challenging these assumptions regarding the architectural image. This will be done not to jettison drawing and its specifcity, but to consider it as one mode in which architecture creates images through disciplinarily regulated conventions. The most impor­ tant questions relate to how conventions mutate over time, how they pressure and are pressured by new technologies into alternate manifestations, and how this is also a discursive process much older than the current phase of digital media. To best understand what is at stake, will require a leveling of all archi­ tectural mediations under the rubric of images, for it is only then possible to ask how a specifc concept becomes redistributed by shifts in ethical, epistemic, and aesthetic manifestations. The changing relations between architecture and the image have been explored often over the past century, with some exemplary book-length inves­ tigations published in the last quarter-century. Hyungmin Pai’s The Portfolio and the Diagram (2002), studies transformations in disciplinary discourse during the shift from the Beaux-Arts engraved portfolio to the photographs and diagrams published in early twentieth-century journals.20 Beatriz Colomina’s Privacy and Publicity (1994), claims convincingly and provocatively that architecture becomes modern by engaging changes in media.21 Mario Carpo’s Architecture in the Age of Printing (2001), locates the formation of the modern discipline of architec­ ture during the Italian Renaissance, around the problem of reproducing images through textual code.22 And fnally, John May’s recent Signal. Image. Architecture.

10 Introduction

(2019), makes the point that within computational design interfaces “Everything Is Already an Image.”23 The argument that I undertake in this book is deeply indebted to these books and their close examination of architectural representa­ tion in relation to disciplinary concerns and the extra-disciplinary realities of media immersion. Nevertheless, my book departs from them in two ways. First, an attempt will be made to place ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics on an equal footing, with the hope that the frictions between them can aid an exploration of architecture’s entanglement with contemporary image culture. Second, the primary interest is in how architects model reality through images. This is part of the act of design and to explicate these exchanges will require both critical and speculative propositions on the part of the author.

Poché, Entourage, Mosaïque The École des Beaux-Arts is most often discussed for its stylistic debates over neoclassicism, its procedural methods of composition, its engagement with newly emerging building types, and its importance as a modern pedagogical system with worldwide infuence, especially on the American architecture schools emerging in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Beaux-Arts also had a fully developed system for rendering architectural images. As the architectural historian Richard Moore writes, The plan was given an exceptional visual and intellectual importance by a number of supplementary dessin processes. The most dramatic was the entourage. Ambient space around the building was rendered in dark tonal washes. Circulation areas were left white, and solid areas were recorded in the deepest India ink, an effect called the poché. Poché and entourage were modifed to work together as a mosaïque, or mosaic pattern. This highly distinctive technique of the mosaïque harmonized part and whole, large- and small-scale parts.24 Poché, entourage, and mosaïque formed part of a discursive system for evaluating the legibility of architectural ideas through the rendered image. These were not an afterthought added to make a drawing simply more visually appealing but rather a central part of the École’s design pedagogy. It is diffcult for us in the early twenty-frst century to fully access how these conventions operated within the École (although we will speculate on some of their implications). More important for us, however, is that as conventions of imaging they raise fundamental disciplin­ ary questions about what is and what is not the labor, ontology, and appearance of architectural images—questions that are still critical today. These three terms—poché, entourage, and mosaïque—provide the organizational structure of this book: three parts, two chapters each. While each chapter addresses

Introduction

11

the historical development of each concept in various ways, I do not attempt to justify contemporary representations with historical precedents. Instead, I use these terms as loose conceptual categories, tracking changes in architectural images less as a linear narrative than as episodic interventions, each revolving around its own struggles with disciplinary conventions and technological media. In what follows is a brief introduction to the three parts and their related themes.

Part 1: Poché and the Rendering of Labor Poché is known to architects as the graphic technique of shading masonry walls in an orthographic drawing. When it emerged in Italy at the end of the ffteenth century, however, its signifcance lay in the conceptual effect of rendering “space” sensible as fgure and ground. In the process of this redistribution, poché concealed the physical labor of construction within its graphic abstractions, shifting atten­ tion from material craft to intellectual concept. This exchange, enacted through revealing and concealing, went through several transformations throughout his­ tory, each phase introducing new discursive implications. During the seventeenth and eighteenth century, for instance, these pockets between the inside and outside were increasingly used in domestic architecture to conceal the work of servants in corridors, basements, back stairs, attics, and shafts. When modernism thinned out the wall and foor structure for the sake of an ideal of effciency in material expenditure and the honest expression of program, the word poché was banished, but the concealment of labor continued, taken over by the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing services now hidden in the hollows and plenums of the poché. This relation would be inverted in the late twentieth century as increasingly it was the public that occupied the gaps between the infrastructures of information and surveillance. Our environments are currently undergoing a massive digital scanning oper­ ation, translating the world into overlapping models composed of discrete ener­ getic points. Within this, poché takes on new meanings, expanding to include zones concealed from photon detection, pockets hidden from surveillance, gaps in data collection. These are very real absences scattered behind, between, and beyond thresholds of information scans. In this situation, all elements in the environment are discretized as points indexing electromagnetic energy. Build­ ing, landscape, object, all become equivalent, as poché operates in the shadows of information.

Part 2: Entourage and the Politics of Objects Entourage consists of all the supplementary things rendered into a representa­ tion: the vegetation, furniture, vehicles, rocks, and people. These objects operate somewhat independent of the design, positioned within architectural images to

12 Introduction

introduce a sense of familiarity and suggest scenarios of potential use. An impor­ tant discursive development occurred when the elements of entourage merged with the techniques of photomontage. The aesthetics created through the jux­ tapositions of images appropriated from popular culture brought with it politi­ cal arguments regarding capitalism and modernity. Over the twentieth century, architectural images became a species of “montage-entourage,” a practice that has only grown with digitally assembled mediations, sampled and extracted from the image-recycling archive of the internet. Not only did the objects of entourage help convey familiarity, scale, and implied use, but they also required a different organizational strategy, connect­ ing them to informality and the “non-compositional” as an episodic organiza­ tion of local relationships between independent objects. There are examples of this throughout architectural history, from Piranesi’s Campo Marzio to John Hejduk’s Victims plan, yet there has also been a noted increase in the popular­ ity of this strategy since the beginning of the twenty-frst century. Architecture is increasingly designed as the accumulation and aggregation of objects where local relations outweigh a dominant overarching logic. This response can be understood as a reaction to a mediated world experienced as multiple inde­ pendent realities, articulated as ecologies of object relations, and an economiccultural exchange of image refuse.25 This can also be understood as a fattening of hierarchies and distinctions between what was formerly considered the archi­ tectural and the non-architectural.26

Part 3: Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality Mosaïque concerns how surfaces are rendered, specifcally with how attention is directed through an architectural representation. It is thus tied to the aesthetics of surface articulation as ornament and decoration. Ornament attracts attention— it wants to communicate, to be interpreted. Decoration, on the other hand, diffuses attention into an all-over background of mood or atmosphere. This is, in many ways, a political question about the relationships between the appear­ ance of the environment and behavioral norms, a question of intense focus in the Beaux-Arts system, but it also concerns the present collapse of the building as image into the image as building. Furthermore, the algorithmic processing of images—through machine vision, image searches, attention mapping, facial recognition, etc.—all have histories tied to psychological studies of attention and distraction. The mosaïque complicates disciplinary distinctions between drawing and image. As loaded and lengthy as this history is, a question nested within these debates continually returns: how does a representation manage depth? This is a material problem in relation to the description of a three-dimensional construction, a computational problem in the scanning of the environment, and also an aesthetic problem in that an image optically simulates the recession of space. Throughout

Introduction

13

its history, architectural representation oscillates between realism and abstraction, the deep and the fat, even when space is digitally scanned and imaged as a cloud of points.

Rendered as Data As the multimedia artist Hito Steyerl writes, Machines show one another unintelligible images, or, more generally sets of data that cannot be perceived by human vision. They are used as models to create reality. But what kind of reality is created by unintelligible images? Is this why reality itself has become to a certain degree unintelligible to human consciousness?27 Images are now modeling reality in ways inaccessible to humans. Note that a digi­ tal image is not a photograph, even if we sometimes may evaluate it in terms of photorealism. Architect John May explains,“Images are thus the outputs of ener­ getic processes defned by signalization, and these signals, in their accumulation, are what we mean when we say the word data.”28 A digital image is information that can be stored, processed, and transmitted. It knows no difference between some­ thing that looks “abstract” and something that looks “natural.” This difference only matters to human observers. Zoom into any image and you will fnd a mon­ tage of discrete pixels, each of which is defned by a numeric combination of red, green, and blue. For the machine, what matters are these patterns and sequences of numeric variables. This is how machine-vision algorithms identify an edge, calculate depth, and distinguish “content” from “style.”Technologies of mediation can be examined to reveal the biases and assumptions embedded in their code, but as Panagia suggests, these algorithms are also building worlds—they are col­ lecting, collating, and linking associations between humans and objects. They are modeling reality, and their impact is aesthetic, technical, economic, and political. What could an esoteric set of two-hundred-year-old architectural rendering conventions, with their origins at an elite Western European institution, possibly have to add to a contemporary conversation around the digital image? Fair ques­ tion, but to answer it requires a reformulation: how does digital imaging affect the disciplinary discourse of architecture? The environment as scanned through digital images is a mapped, exploitable, collection of data: it is reality modeled after images. Within these technologies of mediation, conventions of representation mutate. Poché becomes the gaps between thresholds of energetic information. Entourage becomes the environmental equality and precarity of all objects. Mosa­ ïque becomes the manipulation of attention as a mediated exchange. What the following book suggests is that the discipline of architecture has an incredibly strange relation to images and has so throughout its history. A rela­ tion that cannot be reduced to a fear of simulation, of realism. It also cannot be

14 Introduction

reduced to a history of geometric techniques and the abstractions they substitute for the appearances of the world. Furthermore, the conventions that architecture places so much value on as important for maintaining disciplinary expertise are not and have never been as stable as they are believed to be. It is to the displace­ ments of these conventions that the arguments of this book are dedicated. And to the wildness that ensues. Note: Portions of this introduction were initially developed in the essay “Fear of the Mediated Image,” published in Fear: Cornell Journal of Architecture 11 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell AAP Publications, 2020).

Notes 1 In discussions surrounding the relationships between politics and architecture, several possibilities appear: the political views of the architect; the ways in which a practice is organized regarding labor, the environment, and social equity. This is the question is of how the politics of the individual affects the different manifestations of the built environment. Buildings themselves have an impact on their contexts, just as activities, events, and the contingencies of history can give a place political meaning. Buildings are also clearly political in terms of access. Accessibility can be economic, cultural, psychological, or physical and is entangled with issues of prejudice and privilege, class, race, gender, disability, and identifcation. Finally, there is the monument, the memorial, the ceremonial building intended to communicate to a population specifc messages of status, mourning, victory, legitimacy, continuity, freedom, power, and so on. In this relationship to politics, architecture is the expression of power and capital. 2 Michel Foucault,“The Discourse on Language” (1970), in The Archeology of Knowledge, and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 222. 3 The following book is not one dedicated to philosophical aesthetic discourse. The brief mention of the differences between Plato and Aristotle here in the introduction is done simply because aspects still motivate assumptions and debates on representation to this day. For Plato, see Part Ten of The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (New York: Pen­ guin Classics, 1955), 421–435, and Plato’s Theaetetus, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 45–75. For Aristotle, see Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 65–73. Furthermore, much of my interpretation and use of Plato and Aristotle is in debt to arguments put forward by Jacques Rancière. 4 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006), 16–19. 5 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 20. 6 Boris Groys, On the New, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London:Verso, 2014), 13–16. 7 Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 26. 8 W. J. T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology,Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 120–121. 9 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 16–19. 10 Rancière, 7. 11 Rancière, 28. 12 Rancière, 19. 13 Michael Young, “The Aesthetics of Abstraction” in Aesthetics Equals Politics, ed. Mark Foster Gage (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 127–148.

Introduction

15

14 Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 16. 15 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 29–30. 16 Davide Panagia, “The Algorithm Dispositif (Notes towards an Investigation),” AI PULSE Papers, January 23, 2019, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/154618gr, 3. 17 Panagia,“The Algorithm Dispositif,” 5. 18 Walter Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (1936), in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writ­ ings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 40. 19 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (Lon­ don:Verso, 2013), ix–x. 20 Hyungmin Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 21 Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 22 Mario Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 23 John May, Signal. Image. Architecture. (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2019). 24 Richard Moore, “Academic Dessin Theory in France after the Reorganization of 1863,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 36, no. 3 (October 1977): 164–165. 25 Groys, On the New, 127. 26 See Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011), 139. 27 Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art (London:Verso, 2017), 70–71. 28 John May,“Everything Is Already an Image,” Log 40 (Spring/Summer 2017): 12.

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Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfra ncis.com

PART I

Poché and the Rendering of Labor

9

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfra ncis.com

1 THE LABOR HIDDEN IN THE POCHÉ

FIG. 1.1A AND B

Francesco Borromini, Sant’Ivo della Sapienza (1642), plan render­ ing close-ups, Archivio di Stato di Roma, Cimeli, 77, photos by the author

Look closely at the hatching in Francesco Borromini’s plan drawing for Sant’Ivo della Sapienza (Fig. 1.1a and b). The red ochre lines are primarily at forty-fve degrees to the drawing’s frame, as would be expected given the use of the right triangle as template. Yet the lines subtly tilt in an almost imperceptible manner to match the angles of the interior plan geometry. These manipulations allow the notation to sink into the rendering, shifting attention away from itself, and heightening the legibility of the spatial fgure (Fig. 1.2a). Decisions to image the solidity of architecture in this manner have little to do with communicating the DOI: 10.4324/9781003149682-3

20 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

Borromini, Sant’Ivo della Sapienza (1642), plan rendering,Archivio di Stato di Roma, Cimeli, 77, photo by the author

FIG. 1.2A Francesco

FIG. 1.2B SANAA, Toledo

Museum of Art Glass Pavilion (2006), plan dia­ gram, image courtesy SANAA

construction of the building; in this case masonry walls hidden inside stone and stucco surface fnishes. The aesthetic is deployed purely to render volume as a coherent and compelling fgure, a spatial concept, all indications of material labor removed. What hides in the cavities of these walls is a reality withdrawn from per­ ception; an internal shadow behind surfaces, sensible only through the abstractions of a notational image, labored through the conventions of architectural represen­ tation, and evaluated through the trained intellect of the architect. Now compare the plan for Sant’Ivo with the plan for the Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion designed by SANAA (Fig. 1.2b). The Toledo Glass Pavilion plan describes a cluster of glass-enclosed volumes, surrounded by a second glass enclosure that aligns with the outer limits of the roof. Interior rooms are distin­ guished from each other and the exterior “mass” as objects loosely packed into an overall frame. The glass walls are thus double, with a pocket of space between the interior and exterior. The drawing seems to indicate that all the construction material has vanished leaving only an architecture of diagrammatic lines. The gap between is clearly visible from both inside and outside as a space that is large enough to inhabit yet apparently inaccessible. It is in the section drawing that the cavity is revealed as a zone of radiant heated air thermally buffering the interior spaces of inhabitation from the Ohio winter (Fig. 1.3b). The cavities are flled with the labor of service systems and sized for access by an invisible cleaning staff necessary to maintain the transparency of the glass. Labor concealed through transparency; one reality concealed in order for another to become present. This architecture ricochets refections of the exterior on the interior, the interior on the exterior, the exterior-interior on the interior-exterior; compounding,

The Labor Hidden in the Poché

FIG. 1.3A

SANAA, Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavil­ ion (2006), photo © Iwaan Baan

21

Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion (2006), sec­ tion, image cour­ tesy SANAA

FIG. 1.3B SANAA,

layering, distorting the environment into a collection of volumes within volumes, foating alone together (Fig. 1.3a). As different as their expressions may be, there is a linkage between Sant’Ivo and the Toledo Glass Pavilion that concerns how a representational convention is engaged in a shifting array of political implications regarding labor. Poché, that “familiar term for the horizontal sections of walls and piers appearing in plan, which are ordinarily blacked-in with India ink,”1 is a word known to all architects, used almost exclusively by architects. Yet when an explanation is put forward regarding the implications of the term, it proves ambiguous, elusive, and often contradictory. Is it the solid mass of material, or empty pockets of space? Is it a notational convention, or a rendering effect? Does it make presence absent, or absence present? This chapter follows a set of related ideas regarding how poché has operated at different moments within architectural history. The term may initially seem fxed in academic traditions, but on closer inspection a sequence of episodic reinven­ tions become apparent. The rhetorical questions above circumscribe several of the qualities that the term has come to embody, for poché is constantly between things, simultaneously revealing and concealing, allowing one form of labor to be exchanged for another as it negotiates between the interior and the exterior. There are a number of starting points available for this exploration, but as with so many issues that have come to infuence and haunt the Western traditions of the discipline of architecture, the initial problems are laid out in the Italian Renais­ sance. Thus the frst paradigmatic example for this discussion is provided by what has come to be known as the “parchment plan” of St. Peter’s Basilica rendered by Donato Bramante in 1506 (Fig. 1.4).

22 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

FIG. 1.4

Donato Bramante, Parchment Plan of St. Peter’s Basilica (1506)

A Rendered Image of Finality There are several things to be said initially regarding the aesthetics and concepts unleashed by the parchment plan. First, it is produced by slicing an imagined fgure of the building with a horizontal plane elevated and parallel to the ground. This aspect is so ingrained in architectural thought that it is diffcult to realize how novel it initially was. “Plan” drawings up to this point in time were primarily con­ sidered under the term ichnographia, which along with orthographia and scenographia formed the triad of Vitruvian representational ideas.2 Ichnographia, the inscription of a trace on the ground, is concerned with the geometry that determines areas, boundaries, centers, and proportions. “Ichnogra­ phy,”Vitruvius writes, “is the skillful use, to scale, of compass and rule, by means of which the on-site layout of a design is achieved.”3 It has direct ties to surveying and the successful laying out of a building’s foundation and structure. The parch­ ment plan, however, is not an inscription on the ground; its cut foats above, high enough to pass through niches and windows. Furthermore, this cutting plane is coincident with the plane of the paper on which it is rendered, confating real and abstracted material. In this drawing, walls are articulated through two graphic conventions: one, the continuity of a ruled line in black ink traces the intersection of vertical material surfaces with a horizontal abstract plane; two, the area between these lines is rendered solid with a red ochre wash, which became known later in the French Academies of the eighteenth century by the term poché. Defning poché will require several attempts, none of which will succeed in pinning it down in all its specifcity. Among its cognates we fnd poché,“petit sac, pièce cousu(e) dans ou sur un vêtement et où l’on met les objets qu’on porte sur soi” (small bag, piece [of fabric] sewn in or on a garment in which one puts the objects that one carries on oneself).4 In other words, a pocket, a space that is

The Labor Hidden in the Poché

23

between the outside and the inside. This “between-ness” of poché is modulated by other defnitions, such as the “hollow” or “swollen”5 which lead us to questions such as, what exactly does poché hide? Why is it swollen? Pocher as a verb can also mean to stencil in, to fll a given area graphically on a page.6 It was a typical prac­ tice in the École des Beaux-Arts to “have the precise profle of the plan inked by the designer, while the rougher work of flling in the outlined area could be done by beginning students.”7 This lends poché its affliation with something akin to a lesser, almost mechanical labor, a menial action lying outside the primary design considerations of the architect. One may be surprised to fnd this word in the phrase œil poché, which translates approximately as “swollen black eye.”8 This is a brutal image, yet oddly resonates with the way that poché participates in a blunt attack on vision. Its graphic impact releases an aesthetic of solid/void, fgure/ ground, and through this, assists in the conceptual development of space as dif­ ferentiated from mass. A common way to approach poché is to see it as giving visual expression to the solidity of mass. Masonry walls are typically thick for large structures, especially those that aspire toward enclosing expansive volumes through vaults and domes. This is true for the parchment plan of St. Peter’s, but there is something else also apparent here. Jacques Lucan would point out that, “poché, by its variations in width, actually helped bond rooms to varied geometry by a sort of ‘spatial’ ste­ reotomy. It allowed the architect to fx, to ‘make up for’ irregularities in order to create enflades of symmetrical suites.”9 The mass of walls and piers in the parch­ ment plan is articulated with apses, niches, alcoves, piers, and moldings aligned across empty voids. With the poché, mass becomes articulated—it is formed— while simultaneously volume is “formed” as a spatial idea. In this we have the emergence of the architectural concept whereby space becomes legible in relation to the mass that forms it—arguably one of the more signifcant conceptual devel­ opments of Renaissance architecture. As with all paradigmatic examples, there are precedents and appropriations. Several related representational practices existed in the late ffteenth century, allowing us to speculate on how Bramante’s parchment plan developed its muta­ tions. One such precedent was the use of large section models for the presentation of architectural interiors. These models were constructed by woodworkers and cabinetmakers skilled in the carpentry techniques of planing, dadoes, and jointed panels. In order to allow a viewer to occupy the interior volume, the model would either be made in sections that could ft together or be hinged to fold around the observer. In either case, this meant that when the model was open, it was seen sectioned by a fat plane—the relationship between interior surfaces and exterior surfaces negotiated by a solid mass of material. (This effect could also be studied in the ruins of antiquity, specifcally the Colosseum in Rome).10 Other infuences came from felds outside architecture. Especially important were techniques concerned with how to record and visualize measurements of physical matter, such as the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci at the turn

24 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

of the sixteenth century. Da Vinci’s technique did not attempt to pull the ele­ ments of the body apart, (as was common at the time for anatomical illustration, which implied a delamination of skin and tissue), he instead deployed a cut.11 This cut, coplanar with the drawing page, allowed the representation to be processed through Euclidian geometry, thus rationalizing the body through measure. As important as these precedents were, the most signifcant for poché may be found in the drawings and templates of stonemasons. Stonemasons used mold drawings, modani, to construct iron or wood templates in order to transfer cut profles to planed stone blocks. Modani were literally cut out along the profle edge of the drawing, making them documents some­ where between drawings, models, and objects. Used increasingly through the Renaissance, these representations conveyed a form of design authority between architects, clients, and scarpellini (stonecutters).12 They transferred the abstract rep­ resentation of a drawn line into the cut material of reality. A related technique that emerged with the modani was the use of shading on one side of the profle drawing to ensure that the material mass was clearly inter­ preted (Fig. 1.5 a and b). (Ink washing was also a practical mode of reproduction, as the ink would bleed into the other side of the paper to allow the profle to be worked on the verso side.)13 These shaded cut drawings fell under the term sciographia or skiagraphia, “shadow inscription.”14 Shadows exist where a building surface intersects a projection of light. A section-cut drawing can be understood

Buonarroti, modano for the Laurentian Library, recto (a) and verso (b). Florence, Casa Buonarroti, inv. 92A (1524), photos by author

FIG. 1.5A AND B Michelangelo

The Labor Hidden in the Poché

25

as a representation of the shadow cast “inside” material. As Jacques Guillerme and Hélène Vérin note, it is not until the end of the seventeenth century that, one fnds a clear identifcation between sciographie and profl, in [Frédéric] Ozanam, who defnes the latter as the ‘geometric and orthographic eleva­ tion that lets one see the inside of a building.’ Henceforth, the etymology invoking shadow refers to the object described (the insides of which are in shadow by defnition) and no longer to the manner of representation and image alone.15 The graphic shading or hatching of sectioned material would continue to be used in engineering and fortifcation drawings from the ffteenth through the twenti­ eth centuries. Within these representations there was an effort to render the cut as physical and solid, yet also visually inaccessible—a combination of the materiality of the real template and the abstraction of an ideal planar cut. The rendering styles varied from solid ink flls to engraved line hatches to red or pink washes. When poché becomes dominant for imaging architectural plans and sections, an often-overlooked political transformation occurs. The drawing plane is no longer just an apparatus used to maintain and regulate dimension, no longer a set of instructions for construction; instead, it becomes an aesthetic device for mak­ ing sensible the conceptual arguments of the architect. The aesthetics of poché shifted attention from material craft to intellectual concept. It is part of how the emerging discipline of architecture legitimized its expertise, claiming social dis­ tance from manual labor. Many authors, from James Ackerman to Robin Evans to Mario Carpo, have argued for the emergence of the modern defnition of the architect during the Renaissance.16 The architect came to be defned as one who works through representations, who could pass judgment regarding architec­ ture through drawing rather than by participating in physical construction. The emphasis of these historians has been on projection and the procedural operations of geometry. Equally important are transformations in architectural imaging, and poché is part of this story. The sequence of construction, the specifcities of mate­ rial, the details of assembly, the computations of joinery, the surveying of the site, the labor of building architecture: it is all removed, all hidden in the poché. As noted above, the traditions of ichnographia contained the traces of survey­ ing and geometric layout; they produced drawings meant to aid in the successful “planning” of the building and became the basis for both modern construction documents and nineteenth-century techniques of formal analysis. These traces of geometry, these drawn lines indicating formal order, are what is typically valued as the design labor of the architect. The rendered poché, on the other hand, is not a “design” drawing indexing the residue of procedural decisions. Nor is it a con­ struction drawing explicating means and methods for building. It is an abstrac­ tion rendered for disciplinary consumption, an imaging that requires training to

26 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

correctly decipher, an expertise that distances the profession of architecture from the knowledge of both builder and layperson. Let me repeat this in a slightly different manner. Poché conceals both the labor of material construction and the labor of geometric underdrawings, it does this in order to shift an audience’s engagement with the representation. The aesthetics of poché produces the affec­ tive attitude of fnality regarding the relation between form and space as an intel­ ligible concept.17 Its statement is not one of process, of becoming; instead, it solidifes a design idea as an image.

Virtual Graphics As an architectural term, poché was frst established in the eighteenth-century French Academies and developed in the discourse and pedagogy of the École des Beaux-Arts as a convention for rendering the design parti.18 The dark and light of solid and void were evaluated as a pattern of fgure and ground, a gestalt-type pat­ terning that made the primary ordering ideas legible.19 This allowed the trained eye to rapidly take in the organizational idea of a plan. Furthermore, poché unifed mass and ornament into a visual fgure that allowed the building’s “character” to be read by those who understood its allusions. As architect and Beaux-Arts gradu­ ate Jean-Paul Carlhian elaborates, The aim of such efforts, all resulting in the poché (the black portion of an architectural plan representing solids such as walls and columns), was not restricted to the expression of volumes; it offered also an opportunity for the expression of character: industrial plants, studios, military barracks rated only straight unadorned walls, while theaters, spas and other programs dedicated to recreation called for a profusion of niches, pilasters, columns and the like. The poché, fnding its inspiration in 18th-century precedents, such as the engravings in [Jean] Mariette’s Architecture Française was also used as a means of conveying a pulsating feeling to the expression of the plan; the squeezing of corridors and the opening up of vestibules were underlined by the addi­ tional pinching of crucial junction points. Intersections of galleries received special attention and elaborate treatment. The poché began to ‘sing its own song’: a consideration far removed, and sometimes totally divorced, from the realities of 20th-century construction! To the rich array of vestibules, lobbies, corridors, galleries, halls, passages was bestowed the mission of tying all the elements together in a clear and readily grasped ensemble which could, ideally, be taken in its entirety and therefore ‘read’ at a glance.20 Poché was part of a system of architectural imaging integral to the design meth­ odology of the École. Hyungmin Pai writes that “a good plan sustained a depth

The Labor Hidden in the Poché

27

and transparency achieved through the dessin techniques of entourage, poché, and mosaïque—graphic codes that made the plan legible to an architectural audience.”21 It is important to consider poché within this trio when discussing its use during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for it is rarely discussed in isolation. Within the Beaux-Arts, entourage was considered as the rendering of landscape and vegetation— things outside the building that expanded the design concepts into context. Mosa­ ïque refers to the techniques of surface decoration, the rendering technique aiding the legibility of circulation, character, and program. As a member of this set of imaging conventions, the Beaux-Arts poché should be considered as a render­ ing technique that expanded the organizational concepts of the parti beyond the abstractions of formal geometry. The dominant poché graphic styles employed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were black fll and pink wash, or else simply unflled, leav­ ing the poché as the perceived absence of information, the blank surface of the paper.22 The desire was to avoid confusion between the abstract cut and the visually rendered surfaces, an intention not dissimilar from the profle shad­ ing used in medieval stonemason template drawings. The color choice was a symbolic convention for legibility, conveyed to those trained to read it. Basile Baudez explains, This convention appears indeed in a systematic way in France around 1680 in the drawings of Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707), a military engineer who reformed the entire corps of French fortifcations under the Sun King. Vauban strongly favoured drawing over text as a means of com­ munication between engineers,Versailles and the network of forts and ports that he devised to defend the kingdom along the frontiers. Everything, every construction had to be submitted to military engineers in Paris and then sent to the periphery as models, and in order to avoid any kind of ambiguity in the nature of materials to be employed,Vauban established in a written Instruction, sent all over the kingdom, a series of graphic conventions mostly based on colour coding. Of these colours, pink served to denote cut masonry in an unambiguous way in section drawings. Vauban borrowed this colour from the Dutch engineers with whom he worked and against whom he fought during the multiple wars on the Northern frontier. But where the Dutch, like the Germans, use pink to reproduce the appear­ ance of the material,Vauban severs any mimetic link between the hue in the drawing and the material’s actual colour: pink wash now denotes any type of cut masonry—not only brick, but also ashlar, rubble stone or even rammed earth or timber frame. Architects soon afterwards began to adopt the colour codes devised by Vauban under the infuence of the frst trea­ tises of architectural draughtsmanship, all published by military engineers— beginning with the French, in the frst decades of the eighteenth century, who then spread them to the rest of Europe.23

28 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

FIG. 1.6

Emmanuel Brune, Main staircase of the palace of a sovereign (1863), cross section, brown and black ink, 108 × 2343 cm © Beaux-Arts de Paris, Dist. RMNGrand Palais/Art Resource, NY

A section of a palace stair drawn by Emmanuel Brune in 1863 serves as a good example for the use of pink for poché (Fig. 1.6). Outside the palace the sky is washed with gradient blue, while the interior surfaces are rendered in ornate, colorful detail. The poché is literally between the entourage of the background and the mosaïque surfaces of the interior foreground. The pink hues “abstract out” the section cut, referencing a world other than the visible surfaces of the proposed design. The poché transforms into an absence to be looked past as much as it is a pattern to be decoded with disciplinary knowledge. As Sylvia Lavin suggests, poché exists between the real and the ideal, as the “virtual”.24 The codifcation of representational conventions was a key component in the development of an educational system for architecture. The regulation of graphic techniques also established a visual document that could be used to determine and police professional identifcation. Any modern discipline has its manners and modes that both allow an expert discourse to develop and serve to differ­ entiate those who have gone through training from those who have not. The use and proper interpretation of notational systems marked architecture’s move from a hodgepodge collection of different working methods at the end of the seventeenth century into a standardized modern practice by the middle of the nineteenth century. The accrual of these decisions became the discipline’s con­ ventions of representation. Repetition in representation is often how disciplines are disciplined. As the early twentieth-century American architectural professor Nathaniel Cortlandt Curtis advised in the 1920s: The best way to study poché directly is to trace on thin paper from the documents in which the best examples occur. In doing this the effort ought to be for relative proportion—for form and weight, rather than for small

The Labor Hidden in the Poché

29

details. The value of this training is in the exercise, which gradually estab­ lishes correct principles in the mind. It is not essential for the mind to be burdened with the effort to remember the actual forms traced.25 Coding representation in manners such as the regulation of color or the fne­ tuning of hatch directionality may seem to reek of an internally focused reverie removed from the realities of the world in an extremely problematic manner. This perception of the École des Beaux-Arts—as having fallen into disconnected decadence—would be criticized in the later nineteenth century not only by mem­ bers of the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain but also internally by architects such as Viollet-le-Duc.26 Poché signifed all that was wrong with “academic” archi­ tecture. When the Beaux-Arts system was further attacked by early twentiethcentury modernists, it was again the notational conventions of poché-rendered plans that so often became the focus of arguments.27 Although explicit uses of the term would largely disappear from modern architectural discourse until the 1960s, the concept remained, continuing its aesthetic effect of concealing and revealing labor.

Human and Non-human Labor Michael Osman opens his book Modernism’s Visible Hand by identifying two inter­ related issues architects faced around the start of the twentieth century:“frst, the effect of machine-made building components on developing new architectural forms, and second, the stylistic impact of adding mechanical plants for manag­ ing the interior environment.”28 Latent in these two points is a brewing confict. The advent of frame construction and standardized industrial elements spelled the demise of stone architecture and its methods of stereotomy, providing the basis for the modernist desire of an architecture of thinness, transparency, and the functionalist ideal that the interior volume should be legible as exterior mass. These “machine-made building components” would seem to relegate poché to an academic affectation of bygone eras. The second of the two issues identifed by Osman, however, created a problem for this “functionalist” stance. The question was how the mechanical systems should be expressed, given that they were not programmatic volume, yet were fundamental for managing the interior environ­ ment. Fortunately, standardized industrial construction systems largely consisted of linear structure and panelized cladding, meaning that walls and foors were hollow. These gaps, plenums, shafts, and their spatial expansion into boiler rooms, cooling plants, and mechanical foors would conceal a new kind of labor: the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems of modern building. The Renaissance poché as concealed construction labor thus transformed into the modernist concealment of building-performance systems. Pipes, ducts, and wires were now hidden in the poché. These technologies lay outside an ideal for architectural expression, even as they were crucial components allowing that expression to take place. The concealment of building systems in the wall

30 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

and foor cavities was another attempt by architects to lay claim to the image of architecture. This desire to control the expression of the surface, regard­ less of the services operating within the wall, is a fundamental schism in how architecture has been conceived since modernism. At one level, the hollow cavity is where you hide the technological labor of the building. At the same time, however, these pockets allow the surfaces of architecture to become a cultural screen representing effciency and transparency. One outcome of this was that the hollow voids inside structures were made visible in architectural drawings. These gaps became necessary for the architect to visualize not the pipes and ducts themselves but the interfaces, valves, and perforations of surfaces that allowed an exchange between inhabitable interiors and the technological systems hidden inside the walls and foors. The surfaces enclosing these spaces became increasingly thin both functionally and aesthetically; more precisely, their function was aesthetic. Reyner Banham’s The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment plays a cru­ cial role in the history of architectural discourse regarding the development of environmental systems. He observes that the suspended ceiling, implies opening up the top of the room volume to admit environmental power over the entire area. Paradoxically, this opening-up is commonly considered as an act of concealment; the ceiling, in spite of its general per­ foration, is seen as a way of concealing the fact that the upper part of the room volume is occupied by ducts, conduits and service adits generally.29 The history of locating spaces for services outside the primary areas of inhabita­ tion, yet inside the building’s envelope, is much older than twentieth-century modernism. These transformations initially occurred as early as the seventeenth century in palatial domestic architecture as it absorbed human labor into its inte­ rior. This altered the organization of the plan with the introduction of the cor­ ridor, which allowed functional separation and connection in the servicing of the house. Robin Evans writes: Accordingly, the integration of household space was now for the sake of beauty, its separation was for convenience—an opposition which has since become deeply engraved into theory, creating two distinct standards of judgement for two quite separate realities: on the one hand, an extended concatenation of spaces to fatter the eye (the most easily deceived of the senses, according to contemporary writers); on the other, a careful contain­ ment and individual compartments in which to preserve the self from others. This split between an architecture to look through and an architecture to hide in cut an unbridgeable gap dividing commodity from delight, utility from beauty, and function from form.30

The Labor Hidden in the Poché

31

One way to understand Evans’s argument in “Figures, Doors, and Passages” is as a history of what is concealed in the poché. He opens the essay with an investiga­ tion of the plan of Raphael’s Villa Madama (1518). This plan organizes its interior spaces as a cluster of linked rooms conceived through poché to become legible as spatial fgures. As he moves into discussions of the English manor house, such as Coleshill designed by Sir Roger Pratt in 1650–67, Evans points out that the development of corridors and back stairs allowed the building to function more effciently. But this spatial differentiation also refected a social hierarchy, a division between servant areas and those they served (this is also the beginning of the cor­ ridor circulation spine that will come to organize prisons, schools, and hospitals.) In the domestic examples, the spaces of inhabitation for the owner’s family and guests are articulated as primary fgures, while the spaces of service fll the pockets that exist between these and the exterior mass. The Hôtel de Beauvais is an early example of these poché pockets for service as developed through the French Hôtel Particulier (Fig. 1.7 a and b). As described by Alan Colquhoun, In the plans of these houses there were specifc spaces which were not part of the ‘architecture’ but were necessary to the practical functioning of the building. This planning by means of poché, which became codifed in the teaching of the Beaux-Arts, is noticeable in many eighteenth-century Pari­ sian hôtels where the needs of comfort and privacy demanded a sometimes quite elaborate series of service corridors and stores tucked away behind the main rooms, which are arranged according to the Baroque tradition, en échelon.31

FIG. 1.7A AND B

Antoine Le Pautre, Hôtel de Beauvais (1657) (a) ground foor plan (b) frst foor plan

32 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

What happens in poché spaces is the hidden labor that enables the lifestyle of others. Within this concealment are problems of suppression and exploitation, problems within social structures that reach well beyond the privilege of the landed gentry and urban aristocrats of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although the term is not used in common language outside of architecture, the concept of poché often operates in the popular imagination as a metaphori­ cal space in which hidden secrets, suppressed truths, and the concealed realities of economic, social, sexual, and psychological power struggles lie just beneath the surface. The notion of “upstairs-downstairs” social class division animates a whole genre of novels, flms, and television, from E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019). Poché becomes an allegorical device for delving into the exchanges between what is concealed and what is revealed. In these novels and movies, architecture provides the background and framework for establishing feelings of condemnation and outrage at the stratifcation of class relations, but it is also used to subvert assumptions. There is a power in occupy­ ing the poché, as pockets of freedom outside a dominant eye allow opportunities for the development of alternative expressions. These spaces, concealed between interiority and exteriority, are where resistance develops in a lacuna from the gaze of the public and the gaze of the “master,” it is where experimentation can fer­ ment, where the repressed festers in wait for a return of the real. In many ways, we consider what is in these spaces as “real” precisely because it is hidden, withdrawn inside gaps outside cultural control.

The Brutal Truth The division of labor refects the inherent contradiction in the aesthetics of poché. It makes legible a clear articulation of spatial organization and at the same time con­ ceals functional service within internal pockets. The division of social class within architectural organization may feel of a different age tied to extreme privilege, but the corridors that conceal and connect the circulation of people are the predeces­ sors to the shafts that allow the mechanical systems of air, gas, electricity, and water to circulate, servicing without disrupting the primary spaces of inhabitation. In the Larkin Administration Building (1906), designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the stairs and mechanical systems are expressed as solid blank masses on the exterior but concealed from the interior, where space is cleared for the open, light-flled atrium. “Wright explained that his design process was driven,” Osman writes, “by a ‘principle of articulation,’ a stylistic interpretation of the building’s incorporation of machinery. Wright’s retrospective tale, then, posi­ tioned his design between the function of mechanical systems on the one hand and his approach to modern architectural aesthetics on the other.”32 This idea is furthered by Louis Kahn in the Richards Medical Research Laboratories (1960), where the mechanical shafts are fully detached from the offces and laboratories, articulated as objects of their own. This division of labor was theorized as an

The Labor Hidden in the Poché

33

explicit architectural agenda, attributable to Kahn, and known as “served” and “servant” spaces.33 The connections between the Larkin building and the Rich­ ards Laboratories have been noted by many scholars including Reyner Banham.34 The fnal stages of this trajectory can be found in buildings such as the AT&T Long Lines Building (1974), designed by John Carl Warnecke (Fig. 1.8 a and b). Not primarily intended for human inhabitation, the Long Lines Building housed the telephone switching equipment for AT&T in Manhattan. It is a collection of giant service shafts rising 550 feet, clustered around stacked foorplates of machines. There is a double poché condition here at different scales. The structural bay of the building forms towers of shafts for stairs, elevators, and air, while at the detail level, the exterior walls contain thousands of ducts for electrical conduit running though concrete block, sandwiched by terracotta tile on the inside and precast concrete with granite facing on the outside. The building is essentially a vertical cable chase surrounding exhaust shafts servicing stacked foors of switch­ ing machines. Its exterior expression is a blank, blunt collection of solid masses with huge, oversized exhaust openings at the top. The three buildings shown here follow the development of a specifc attitude toward the expression of circulation shafts as inhabited by both humans and non-humans. The buildings all also track a trajectory of the architectural style known as Brutalism, which owes a signifcant amount of its aesthetic power to the poché-as-shaft expression.

Carl Warnecke, AT&T Longlines Building (1974), Tower Plan, Base Plan, Exterior Wall Cable Ducts, images courtesy of John Carl Warnecke Architec­ tural Archives

FIG. 1.8A John

Carl Warnecke, AT&T Longlines Building (1974), photograph by author

FIG. 1.8B John

34 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

The desire to visibly express the functional shafts is understood as a key con­ cern for the emergence of British High-Tech architecture, where the mechanical services are celebrated as the elements of architecture itself.35 When considered within the legacy of poché, however, it feels forced to connect a building like the Richards Medical Laboratories with a building such as the Pompidou Center. Kahn may have articulated the mechanical shafts as individual objects, but they were not expressed mechanically; rather, they were hidden in the pockets. These spaces may now be “honestly” expressed as building elements, but they are still in service of the primary interiors and lie ontologically outside the more signifcant program.36 For our discussion, their importance is less a question of their func­ tional success (or lack thereof, a constant complaint concerning buildings like the Richards Laboratories37) than in how poché is renovated within modernism. Kahn was educated within the Beaux-Arts system, and poché would have been part of his representational indoctrination. Kahn’s historicism, his spatial stasis in the face of the free plan, his emphasis on mass and solidity—on the clarity of “rooms” as distinct and coherent spaces and his return to primitive form, has as much to do with his reimagination of poché as a modern problem of the hollow wall as it does with tectonics or material honesty. Banham’s analysis of the mechanical plant services for Queen Elizabeth Hall at the South Bank Arts Centre is another interesting case for this discussion. The building is a largely solid precast concrete brutalist expression. What does become expressive in the silhouette of the building are the intake and exhaust openings and the concrete-encased duct plenums. Banham sees these as rhetorical expres­ sions of the functions housed within them. The word ‘rhetorically’ is used advisedly, since the making manifest has a large element of symbolism in it. Although the externally visible casings (normally distinguished by their elegant in situ beton brut from the inhabited spaces, which are clad in pre-cast panels) do in fact contain air on the move, it should not be normally assumed that what is seen from outside is neces­ sarily the form of the ducts through which that air is moving. Most usually, the visible concrete work gives only an approximate idea of the true forms of the metal ducting within, which in many cases is quite a loose ft inside, with room for service engineers to crawl past it. Nevertheless, the general external form takes its cue fairly directly from the facts of air-fow within.38 There is an implicit critique here that in its expression of its services, the archi­ tecture is not “truthfully” expressing the services themselves, but instead symbol­ izing them through form and material. It is an visible expression of honesty, not the brutal truth. It is more of an aesthetic than an ethic.39 Rather than judging this aspect of the building as deceitful however, what I fnd important is Banham’s acknowledgment of these hollow spaces as “loose ft”. They are spaces for the

The Labor Hidden in the Poché

35

circulation of human and non-human services, oversized for the changing tech­ nologies of mechanical systems, and the servicing of these services by human engineers. Given this, they are required to be hollow, loosely occupied, and thus adaptable. This is one of the fascinating legacies of brutalism, it is poché architec­ ture in both the heaviest most primal sense of solidity, yet it is also hollow, occu­ piable, and thoroughly modern. The labor of services monumentalized as voids concealed in what appears to be a solid object.

Free Poché

Corbusier, “plan paralyse vs. plan libre” from Precisions (1930), drawings from the 1929 Buenos Aires lectures © F.L.C./ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2020

FIG. 1.9 Le

36 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

According to the theory of the free plan, these spaces are no longer con­ cealed but become an integral part of the architectural experience. Inher­ ent in the idea of the free plan, though never explicitly mentioned by Le Corbusier, is the principle that every kind of space has a right to architec­ tural expression and that no part of the building should be concealed. If a wall creates a convex surface in one space, there must be a corresponding concave curve in the adjacent space; in this way the structure of the space is entirely explained and there is no ‘space left over.40 Alan Colquhoun’s description posits Le Corbusier’s free plan as an attack on the traditional concept of poché as an exhausted idea tied to former paradigms of plan making and material construction.41 The free plan allowed space to fow cleanly and clearly between programs with no space left over. This is evident in Le Corbusier’s diagrams that refer to traditional masonry structure as “cave” and “plan paralysé,” juxtaposing them with the light, open piloti of the free plan (Fig. 1.9). Within this, the walls of spatial enclosure are free to describe habitable areas as determined by the will of the architect or the necessity and convenience of the program. This leads to interior spaces as a collection of objects freely foat­ ing within a grid of support. Michael Dennis argues that this notion, which may appear to be a negation of poché, is closer to its inversion: The projects for the Maison de M.X. in Brussels (1929) and the Villa Meyer (1925), as examples of citrohan and dom-ino, respectively, show succinctly how Le Corbusier literally inverted interior space and gave new imagery and meaning to old principles. If the traditional plan can be seen as con­ cave voids carved out of a solid, the new plans may be seen as convex solids inserted into a space. In the old plan, the spaces were fgural and the solids served as ground. Both plans utilize the concept of poché, but in the tradi­ tional plan the poché is that which is left over after the spaces are particular­ ized; in Le Corbusier’s plans it is the poché itself that is particularized—the space is only defned, not enclosed.42 What Dennis is describing is an inversion of value in the aesthetics of poché. Tra­ ditionally, the fgural void is made sensible as a coherent space when read against the hatched ground of physical mass. In Dennis’s claim of inversion, the volumes become fgural objects freely slipping and sliding along the plane of the free plan. Le Corbusier’s proposition is a critique of a former paradigm through an aesthetic redistribution. Poché remains the relevant concept, but its qualities have been exchanged. Space would now fow continuously through the plan, no longer constrained as a sequence of rooms with their traditional modes of inhabitation. Space was free to be used in unforeseen ways, infected, directed, and affected by fgural objects that disturb its uniformity.

The Labor Hidden in the Poché

37

There are several interesting ramifcations if the free plan is considered in relation to poché. One has already been broached with brutalism insofar as the elements that one now moves around are often where the objects of labor are hidden: circulation, shafts, and structure. But since these are now distributed about the inhabitable interior as foating objects, as opposed to being pushed to the exterior or fused in a wall, they take on roles of spatial demarcation. What this implies is that there is another interior inside these objects, more concealed, more “inside” than the primary free plan spaces of inhabitation. The residual spaces of the poché are now enlarged to a size appropriate for inhabitation and designed with intention to be read as objects. We can inhabit the ducts and plenums. This idea will be pursued further through several projects designed by Rem Koolhaas and the Offce for Metropolitan Architecture at the end of the twentieth century.

Free Section In OMA’s Très Grande Bibliothèque (1989), Koolhaas critiques Le Corbusier’s cri­ tique of poché by developing another redistribution (Fig. 1.10). The competition proposal consists of several foating voids of public space carved through a solid­ ity of “private” space; an effect akin to a Boolean subtraction where one solid is removed from another to create a residual void. (Given the ease with which a digital model can handle them, Boolean operations offer one of architecture’s most prevalent techniques for manipulated poché today, typically resulting in spa­ tial voids that are independent of the exterior forms.) The Bibliothèque makes its argument diagrammatically clear in black and white graphics: the dialectic between access to program and the denial of access. The dichotomy of public reading rooms (white) and private book stacks (black) provides a programmatic alibi for the use of poché as a blunt image. The hatched fll no longer encodes mass or material; here it instead describes a solid block of information, a storehouse for all forms of memory: books, laserdiscs, microfches, computers. In this block, public spaces are defned as absences of the built, voids dug out of the mass of information. These absences are presented as multiple embryos foating in the stacks—each one endowed with a technological placenta of its own.43 Though this diagram offers crisp conceptual clarity, it is not exactly clear how the architecture itself would allow this idea to be experienced, how these voids would become “embryos foating in the stacks.” As with many arguments concerning poché, the abstraction of the representational graphic creates a legibility obscured in the reality of material existence. The spatial and perceptual experience becomes more evident in two other representations for the Grande Bibliothèque: a model

38 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

FIG. 1.10 OMA,

Très Grande Bibliothèque (1989), plan diagrams, image courtesy of

OMA

in which the public spaces are built as solids (Fig. 1.11a) and a series of digitally generated wireframe ghost renderings in which fgures hover like luminous den­ sities (Fig. 1.11b). The model clearly owes a debt to the plaster cast models of Renaissance and Baroque church interiors produced by the students of Luigi Moretti for the journal Spazio.44 In the case of the Grande Bibliothèque project, these fgural voids as fgural objects are completely independent from the box enclosure, an extension of Le Corbusier’s poché objects into what could be called “objects inside of objects.” But this, of course, is not what the project is spatially. The public spaces are “fgured voids” foating within the generic neutrality of inaccessible stacked free plans for books, volumes cut through the striations of the horizontal foors. As Christoph Lueder suggests, it is a “free section” slic­ ing through “free plans.”45 Thus, the x-ray-like wireframe drawing is somehow a more “accurate” representation, true to its “volumes inside of volumes.” (There is a precedent for this aesthetic in Borromini’s drawing of the spire/lantern for Sant’Ivo, where the front elevation and hidden interior volume are made vis­ ible through each other, an effect produced by the then novel instrument that

The Labor Hidden in the Poché

Très Grande Biblio­ thèque (1989), model of voids as solids, photo by Hans Werleman/© OMA

FIG. 1.11A OMA,

39

Très Grande Bibliothèque (1989), digital wireframe model, image courtesy OMA

FIG. 1.11B OMA,

responded to pressure in the production of tonality: the graphite pencil.)46 In the Grande Bibliothèque, then, we have an acceleration and a critique of Le Cor­ busier’s fgural objects on the free plan toward one of fgural volumes foating in the free section. The Grande Bibliothèque transforms the free plan into a conceptual solid as stacks of information. The human public now tunnels its way through this mass of inaccessible data. There is an interesting ambiguity in how OMA treats this exchange between poché as non-human solid and as human void. Most of the “space” in the project is removed from access; the space afforded to public occu­ pation is quite modest in comparison. It becomes possible to interpret the human pockets and shafts as in service of the information; the cultural valuation of labor is shifted from the human to the non-human, as we tunnel our way through the ever-increasing detritus of information that our actions deposit in the world. The free plan was developed by the modern city into what Koolhaas calls “The Typical Plan,” it organizationally allows the accumulation of archives, the fles underlying institutional bureaucracy. Indeed, the free plan is just as likely to get clogged with stacks of information waste as it is to encourage free speculation and movement; the free plan is no longer free. The Grande Bibliothèque proposes

40 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

poché as a random-access volume cut into the body of knowledge, a service space for the human to non-human exchange of information in the construction of contemporary culture. Both Le Corbusier and OMA disengage the labor of the poché from the enve­ lope of the building, the exterior enclosure is differentiated from volumes as free foating objects within. In this, there is an acknowledgment of poché as a con­ ceptual and experiential negotiation between internal and external pressures, the difference between what is interior and what is exterior no longer determined by the material matter of mass. This shift has come to defne how the term operates within contemporary architecture and it owes a great deal of its redefnition to the writing of Robert Venturi.

Objects Inside Objects, Volumes Inside Volumes When the term poché returned to architectural discourse in the 1960s, it was ush­ ered in by a handful of sources, but the most infuential is likely Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), especially the chapter on the tensions and frictions between “The Inside and the Outside.” The infuence of Venturi’s “gentle manifesto” has been thoroughly investigated over the past halfcentury as a starting point for postmodern architecture, but if we look exclusively at the question of poché, we fnd several ideas that can illuminate contemporary investigations. “Designing from the outside in, as well as the inside out,”Venturi writes,“creates necessary tensions, which help make architecture. Since the inside is different from the outside, the wall—the point of change—becomes an archi­ tectural event. Architecture occurs at the meeting of interior and exterior forces of use and space. These interior and environmental forces are both general and particular, generic and circumstantial. Architecture as the wall between the inside and the outside becomes the spatial record of this resolution and its drama.”47 A partial list of terms that Venturi uses to try to grapple with the complexi­ ties of this difference between the inside and the outside includes “open poché,” “redundant enclosure,”“crowded intricacy within a rigid frame,”“residual spaces,” “detached lining,”“spatial nest,”“space within a space,”“things in things.”48 Venturi’s project is aesthetic. He is interested in how the relations between interior volumes and exterior mass create “tensions,” and “the spatial record of this resolution and its drama”. Venturi realized that he could critique modern architecture not by raising awareness of its hidden systems, but by exchanging the values of its aesthetic expressions. He was not a “classical” architect; he saw no need to return to historical modes of expression, construction, or organization. What he was interested in were the effects that former architectures created and how these could be dealt with in contemporary conditions. If the residual volume of the poché was flled with service spaces, stairs, ducts, etc., that was fne with Ven­ turi. More important was the friction that occurred when the interior was not in

The Labor Hidden in the Poché

41

complete agreement with the exterior, which with modern building systems no longer required a thick mass to negotiate but could be accomplished through thin surfaces, detached from the building’s mass. Consider the entry-stair-freplace-window-bathroom compression in the Vanna Venturi house. (Fig. 1.12) This knot of circulation and service all lies within what would traditionally be the poché, but in this case, surfaces are detached and pressured, poché is open and residual. The arrangement is not fully enclosed but involved in a peek-a-boo movement of concealing and revealing what is solid and what is open. It is almost baroque in its packed volumes, yet completely modern in acknowledgment of the thinness of surface planes that defne the boundaries. Venturi sought to develop a discourse that could articulate these aesthetic effects as a conceptual agenda. Each term was an attempt to describe qualities that he found in previous architectures that he hoped could be redeployed in contemporary expressions. The infuence of these redefnitions would take many forms. We have already discussed projects such as OMA’s Grande Bibliothèque and SANAA’s Toledo Glass Pavilion, each indebted to formal ideas that might fall under Venturi’s “crowded intricacy within a rigid frame,”, “open poche”, “space within a space,” and “things in things.”Tom Wiscombe Architecture has explored the notion of objects nested inside an overall surface enclosure that is some­ times tight, sometimes loose, in relation to inner forms. He has developed his own vocabulary to describe the qualities of these poché spaces with phrases like “chunky nested masses,” “loose-ft and tight-ft interstitial spaces,” “fgure-in-a­ sack,” “implied outer shell,” “objects-in-objects-on-objects.”49 Wiscombe’s verbal conjunctions of these various conditions refect an evolution of the combinatory contradictions found in Venturi’s terms. In Venturi’s development of these terms and descriptions of their qualities, the architecture of the baroque was crucial. His discussion ranges from the “residual spaces” of Borromini’s Sant’ Ivo that opened this chapter to the “detached lining” of Bernardo Vittone’s chapel ceiling at Santa Chiara and the “spatial nest” found in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Santa Maria dell’ Assunzione at Arricia.50 For all the emphasis that most historical studies place on the curvature of form, the gilding of ornament, the intricacy of geometry, and the eroticism of spiritual ecstasy, there has also always been another argument in the poché of baroque architecture: the interior is not a refection of the exterior, nor vice versa. The transition across this difference is a transit between realities. Though it may have been tied to specifc religious and political meanings particular to the Counter-Reformation, the effect of creating and slipping between worlds as an intensifcation of archi­ tectural experience will resonate for centuries to come. Part of what is at stake here is very much tied to questions of “the real.”Venturi is typically associated with the thinning of architecture into surfaces as symbolic images, but when considered in relation to poché and baroque architecture there is

42 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

FIG.1.12 Robert Venturi, Vanna Venturi

House (1964), frst and second foor plan,The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, by the gift of Robert Ven­ turi and Denise Scott Brown

The Labor Hidden in the Poché

43

another aspect to consider and it has to with realism. All of the terms that Venturi uses to discuss poché are about its thinness, its detachability, its residue, in a way, the absence of matter. The contemporary philosopher Graham Harman uses a word to describe one of the key qualities of reality, it withdraws.51 This aspect is very similar to how poché operates conceptually. It is a reality that withdraws behind and within the surfaces of architecture. When the labor of what constructs and maintains the performance of a building as an environmental enclosure is removed from visual expression, the building often comes under attack for being superfcially concerned with sur­ face appearance. This is a fair critique, but what typically follows is mislead­ ing. The idea that by explicating material assemblies, performance technologies, and the physical labor involved in construction and maintenance, architecture becomes more truthful towards the realities of the world is a mistaken belief. The modernist dream of transparency towards all innerworkings can also become a nightmare of surveillance and intrusion. The question of “the real” is as much a question of what is hidden and how it is hidden as it is an act of hon­ esty towards construction and building systems. This is very much an aesthetic project, but one with political implications. Poché is not only a negotiation between the interior volume and exterior mass, but also between what is con­ cealed and what is revealed, a tension which can productively and provocatively manifest as cultural expression. In the residential plans shown here by Clark Thenhaus/Endemic Architecture, interior spatial fgures negotiate a relationship between interior domestic indi­ viduality and exterior local preservation codes (Fig. 1.13). The interior intensifes the sensuous experience of material and form through furry pockets that nestle into the walls, while the exterior is a subtly manipulated code-compliant San Franciscan Victorian. Thenhaus exploits the discrepancies that exist between front and side elevation regulations to develop a negotiated poché that responds locally along the building’s edge to the combating desires. Poché is again entangled in acts of concealing and revealing, of negotiating difference. It should be stated outright that how poché is occupied—the ways in which its concealments allow for forms of inhabitation deemed marginal by normative society—is what has given poché a political signifcance throughout its history. What is compelling about Thenhaus’s project is that these social negotiations are frst acknowledged and then intensifed through aesthetics. This is not the representation of an identifable political ideol­ ogy; instead, it is an understanding that in the tensions between the desires of the interior and those of the exterior, a pocket for agency opens. The question of how architecture transitions from exterior to interior is the realm rendered by poché. This is its proposition, its wager as an imaging paradigm: it produces a gap by selectively washing out what exists between the surfaces of architecture. This has been described as the concealment of labor, but it would be a mistake to believe that all that is necessary is to peel back the surfaces to reveal the truth within. Poché conceals as a result of constant negotiations between

44 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

FIG. 1.13 Endemic Architecture, Queen Anne

House San Francisco (2018), image cour­

tesy of Clark Thenhaus

technology, aesthetics, and politics. It is residual through resistance. And in this gap, in how it is rendered, in how it is imaged, lies a potential to redistribute the relations between inside and outside, which is of course one of the fundamental acts of architecture. Note: Portions of this chapter were frst developed in the essay “Paradigms in the Poché” published in the Proceedings of the ACSA National Conference (2018).

The Labor Hidden in the Poché

45

Notes 1 Nathaniel Cortlandt Curtis, Architectural Composition (Cleveland: J. H. Jansen, 1923), 111. 2 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, ed. Ingrid Rowland and Thomas Noble Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24–25. Orthographia referred to a measurable exterior elevation drawing in which parallel lines remained parallel. Sceno­ graphia was a pictorial view of the building. The inability to determine what kind of pictorial view sparked much debate during the Renaissance leading to the substitu­ tion of sciographia in sixteenth-century translations of Vitruvius, giving the discipline its triad of plan, elevation, and section. See Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981). 3 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, 24–25. 4 Le Robert, s.v. “poche,” accessed June 1, 2020, https://dictionnaire.lerobert.com/ defnition/poche. 5 Auguste Scheler, Dictionnaire d’Etymologie Francaise (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot, 1862), 265. 6 Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, The State of Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 7 Michael Dennis, Court and Garden: From the French Hôtel to the City of Modern Architec­ ture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 5. 8 Collins Dictionary, s.v. “poché,” accessed June 1, 2020, https://www.collinsdictionary. com/us/dictionary/french-english/poché. 9 Jacques Lucan, Composition, Non-Composition: Architecture and Theory in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Lausanne: EPFL Press, 2012), 177. 10 Jacques Guillerme and Hélène Vérin, “The Archaeology of Section,” trans. Stephen Sartarelli, Perspecta 25 (1989): 226. 11 James Ackerman, “Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci,” in Ori­ gins, Imitation, Conventions: Representation in the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 143–174. 12 Jonathan Foote,“Tracing Michelangelo’s Modani at San Lorenzo,” Mitteilungen des Kun­ sthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 61, no. 1 (2019): 48. 13 Foote, “Tracing Michelangelo’s Modani, 67. 14 Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997): 106–107. 15 Guillerme and Vérin,“The Archaeology of Section,” 231. 16 Ackerman, “The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renais­ sance,” in Origins, Imitation, Conventions, 27–66; Robin Evans, The Projective Cast (Cam­ bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); and Mario Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 17 Lucan, Composition, Non-Composition, 177. 18 Hyungmin Pai writes, “The term parti derives from the phrase prendre parti (to take a side, make a decision) and to say a parti was well found (trouvé) was to praise a design for the integration of the whole.” The Portfolio and the Diagram (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 43. 19 Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram, 51. 20 Jean Paul Carlhian,“The Ecole des Beaux-Arts: Modes and Manners,” Journal of Archi­ tectural Education 33, no. 2,“Beginnings” (November 1979): 13. 21 Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram, 52. 22 Basile Baudez, “Inessential Colors: A History of Color in Architectural Drawings, 16th–19th Centuries,” February 2016, Bard Graduate Center,YouTube video, 1:07:59, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyy7p8hlwiw. 23 Basile Baudez,“Karl Friedrich Schinkel,” Drawing Matter, June 7, 2017, https://www. drawingmatter.org/sets/drawing-week/karl-friedrich-schinkel.

46 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

24 Sylvia Lavin,“What Color Is It Now?” Perspecta 35,“Building Codes” (2004): 106.

25 Curtis, Architectural Composition, 113.

26 Richard Moore, “Academic Dessin Theory in France after the Reorganization of

1863,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 36, no. 3 (October 1977): 145–174. 27 Lucan, Composition, Non-Composition, 177. Lucan notes Le Corbusier’s attack from L’Esprit nouveau, No. 1, 1920 “The architects of the present day, lost in the sterile poches of the plans . . . have not learned to conceive primary volumes”, 95. 28 Michael Osman, Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America (Min­ neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), xii. 29 Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment (London: Architec­ tural Press, 1969), 195. 30 Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors, and Passages,” in Translations from Drawing to Building (London:AA Press 1991), 73–74. 31 Alan Colquhoun,“Displacements of Concepts in Le Corbusier” (1972), Essays in Archi­ tectural Criticism: Modern Architecture and Historical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 62. 32 Osman, Modernism’s Visible Hand, xiii. 33 “I discovered a very simple thing. I discovered that certain spaces are very unimport­ ant and some spaces were contributing to the strength of the larger spaces. They were serving them.” Louis Kahn, interview with John Peter, Philadelphia, 1961, in The Oral History of Modern Architecture: Interviews with the Greatest Architects of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 214; quoted in Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2001), 107. 34 Banham, Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment, 90–91, 249–250.

35 Banham, 249–266.

36 Lucan, Composition, Non-Composition, 498.

37 Banham, Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment, 252.

38 Banham, 261–262.

39 Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? (New York: Reinhold Publish­ ing Corporation, 1966). 40 Alan Colquhoun,“Displacements of Concepts in Le Corbusier”, 43–50. 41 Le Corbusier, Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City Planning, trans. Edith Schreiber Aujame (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 38–44. 42 Dennis, Court and Garden, 192. Dennis’s argument is compelling for other reasons as well since it places Le Corbusier in a lineage with the French hotel plan of the eighteenth-century and its roots in Baroque poché, observations in large part due to the expanded defnitions of poché put forward by Robert Venturi in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 86. 43 Jacques Lucan, OMA—Rem Koolhaas Architecture, 1970–1990 (New York: Princeton Architecture Press, 1991), 132. 44 Luigi Moretti,“Strutture e sequenze di spazi,” Spazio 7 (December 1952–April 1953). 45 Christoph Lueder, “Poché: The Innominate Evolution of a Koolhaasian Technique,” OASE 94 (2015): 131. 46 Ackerman, “The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawings,” in Origins, Imitation, Conventions, 295. 47 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 86. 48 Venturi, 71–86. 49 Tom Wiscombe Architecture website, https://tomwiscombe.com. 50 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 78–83. 51 Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011), 35.

2 THE SHADOWS OF INFORMATION (SECOND VERSION)

The surfaces of our environments are scanned, stored, monitored, cross-referenced, and monetized. This is done by governments, militaries, corporations, and you. It is done by satellite imaging, lidar scans, Google Street View, Bluetooth beacons, and what was formerly known as photography. Knowledge of this monitoring produces an unavoidable dystopian anxiety, the fear of constant surveillance, and the disappointment in knowing that everywhere will soon be transformed into information. Yet all technologies of mediation produce residual effects. In the case of our digitally mediated environments, this excess is the very real space lost between and behind the discrete instances of scanned points. This loss manifests as shadows—gaps where scans skip and stutter, struggling toward fdelity. These shadows also open zones for occupation; they are inherently political. There is a concept that relates to these hidden zones, emerging initially in the late ffteenth century as a graphic abstraction in architectural representation. This chapter argues that the shadows that hide behind and between the scanned imaging of the environment can be understood as a transformation of the concept known as poché. The way in which architecture understands these gaps as alterna­ tive possibilities for inhabitation is a pressing issue, given that reality is increasingly mediated through the digital image.

Image as Information Our cameras are not cameras anymore. Data scanners, photon collectors, discrete energy arrangers: these are more apt names. Not everyone has noticed. Though we still treat the images that our digital cameras reproduce as if they are photo­ graphs, our digital cameras do not index light as a chemical interaction with flm

DOI: 10.4324/9781003149682-4

48 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

emulsion. Instead, they capture, translate, and store arrays of energy intensity as information.1 As John May articulates, In our lives, imaging is a form of photon detection. Unlike photographs, in which scenic light is made visible during chemical exposure, all imaging today is a process of detecting energy emitted by an environment and chop­ ping it into discrete, measurable electrical charges called signals, which are stored, calculated, managed, and manipulated through various statistical methods.2 Display screens are performance spaces where captured information is transformed into luminous pixels, pulses of energy that human eyes evaluate as images. These images are typically engaged through the conventions of previous visual arts, such as painting and photography, which offer important avenues for understanding such loaded concepts as realism and abstraction. Yet these aesthetic categories take on different aspects within digital mediation, where concerns are less human based interpretive questions of representational resemblance than the disinterested record of scanned points as exchangeable data. How these differences manifest discursively is a key question. Let us begin with resolution. Resolution is the product of a technological, economic, and aesthetic negotia­ tion. The discretization of the environment into bits of information begins with the technology of capture and carries on into storage, display, and transmission. As higher resolutions take longer to process, requiring faster and more expensive computational power, image information is compressed in order to be manipu­ lated, transmitted, and consumed. There is a constant struggle in the appearance of digital images between fdelity and the econometrics of attention and distribu­ tion. Resolution is a valuation made through digital information, an exchange between competing priorities. If our eyes perceive the pixels of the discrete array, we call the image “low-res”; if they don’t, we call it “high-res.”These terms may feel quantitative and objective; after all, we key specifc numbers for PPI (pixels per inch) in Photoshop. But the difference between what is “high” and “low” is ultimately subjective, a differentia­ tion made based on human perception. Gaps between points of scanned data are often discussed with a sense of mourning, a nostalgia for a lost analog richness of reality. This sentiment refects an aesthetic judgment of realism in its guise as mimetic resemblance, comparing the sense of vision to the representational arti­ fce. However, a digital image does not operate within traditional disciplinary con­ ventions of representation, it is a technological mediation, and thus the aesthetic questions are different. Technologies of mediation attempt to record everything that can be processed through its mechanisms. The gaps, noise, and errors that occur in digital scans are artifacts of the technology, the terms refecting an aes­ thetic response based on previous assumptions and representational conventions. It is only after these qualities have been digested, or after they fundamentally alter

The Shadows of Information

49

what is valued within a discipline, that they become features for working with these technologies. Yet, as important as these aspects are, they elide a crucial fact: digital images are also information captured by machines for machines and thus operate in manners hidden from human perception and understanding. Resolution has become such a key feature of our daily lives that its most important aspects often go unacknowledged. As mentioned above it is only com­ mented on when our eyes register its artifce of discrete pixels, that is, when it effects the resemblance to human perception. But before resolution is manifested through a display screen, it is energetic information captured by a scanner (com­ monly referred to as a “camera”). We tend to associate higher resolution as closer to human vision, as closer to natural appearances, but this is misleading. Quali­ ties that exist outside a scanner’s thresholds are not present, they do not exist as information in the array. For instance, an edge between objects is one of the key perceptual cues for human vision. A scanner cannot “see” edges no matter how high its resolution may be. Edge detection, however, is a key question for machine vision as determined through an algorithmic analysis of pixel adjacencies in comparison with thousands, if not millions, of similar photon arrays. Resolu­ tion in this situation relates less to realism in appearance than probability in spatial accuracy, it is statistical. Digital artist Trevor Paglen reminds us,“The image doesn’t need to be turned into human-readable form in order for a machine to do something with it.”3 In this context, resolution is little concerned with the human eye, yet the quantity and density of data contained in an image will determine how it will be analyzed, fltered, and combined with other data sets. For a machine exchanging informa­ tion with another machine, gaps are a given, as digital information is and always has been discrete. This discretization structures processing in relation to other information, impacting the interpretation and actions taken by very real forces in the world. In their study of how scanning, computation, and visualization are expanding into political, ecological, legal, and cultural realities, the architects Eyal and Ines Weizman write, “The exclusion of people from representation is thus complemented by their gradual exclusion from the increasingly automated pro­ cess of viewing and also . . . from the algorithmic process of data interpretation.”4 Digital images are used today to determine the reality of everything from human rights violations to the quantifed extent of glacier retreat to potential military targets. Furthermore, as they are evaluated by machines using criteria foreign to humans, every digital image also redistributes what counts as the background of reality. In this, the gaps between points mean very different things depending on who, or what, is engaging the mediation.

Blind Pockets Information carried through electromagnetic radiation generally cares very little for the built environment it passes through. Only a small specifc range of energy

50 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

is refected off surfaces and detected by human vision. It is this range that digital cameras simulate. The question of “seeing” the world through digital mediation in a manner similar to vision takes on a different implication when expanded to technologies that use images to build three-dimensional models. The information captured, stored, and processed through lidar and photogrammetry is not only trying hard to see as many qualities of environmental surfaces as possible, it is also trying to give them spatial depth, in a way, it is trying to touch reality.5 The representation of depth is a fundamental question for all visual media, especially for drawing, painting, photography, and digital images, which are evalu­ ated on a fat plane or screen. Lidar and photogrammetry appear to have resolved it through automation. Through these technologies, depth is computed as part of image capture itself. The image no longer signifes depth through representation but instead measures space as an inherent component of its computation. Our environment, our objects, and ourselves are collected as three-dimensional digital bodies. These scanned approximations of the environment determine what is stored, cross-referenced, and distributed, which aspects are “real” for the valuations of digital exchanges and how that in turn alters our occupation of the world. A loss of information or a lowering of resolution literally changes the shape of reality. The scanning of the environment is also its surveillance. Liam Young has made a series of flms that explore the narrative possibilities of a world known through lidar scans. Where the City Can’t See (2016), co-directed by Tim Maughan, looks at the potential for inhabitation in relation to the scanning technology of our urban environments: Set in a futuristic Detroit that has become heavily surveilled . . . it tells the story of teenagers organizing illegal parties while hiding themselves—and even whole buildings—by wearing clothes made from ‘defection fabrics.’ These materials, the patterns of which are designed to defect and diffuse the LIDAR’s laser scans, make them invisible to the eyes of automated vehicles.6 The zones hidden from the scan become spaces for occupation. Young and Maughan suggest that these spaces open possibilities for human activities that require freedom from surveillance. Architecture can create gaps through a kind of camoufage that intervenes and “defects” the capture of surface location as ener­ getic information. Or, to put this another way, the decoration of surfaces alters the information that is collected in a digital scan, and all objects in the environment can potentially intervene in its energetic capture to create gaps in the continuity of information. Such blind zones can also be described as shadows, skiagraphias, invisible to data collection, dark pockets looming on the other side of the scan.7 Shadows are an occlusion of light, and there is a long history in architectural representa­ tion that entwines optics, perspective projection, and shadow drawing.8 In its

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attempts to record surfaces, scanning technology does not differentiate between the articulated layers of decoration (mosaïque); transitory objects such as people, cars, furniture, and vegetation (entourage); or the solidity of architectural mass (poché).9 These are all smushed together into a thin, glitchy body of surface topology foating in three-dimensional space, absent of thickness and solidity. The differences between lidar and photogrammetry will be discussed later. For now, it is important to note that both have linear relations between the cap­ turing source and the frst surface struck, occluding all that exists behind that instance of refected energy. The intersected line of sight, or ray of light, con­ nects art and mathematics through projection as formulated by painters, survey­ ors, and stonecutters in order to represent visual depth on a two-dimensional plane. Architectural representation was born of this exchange between the met­ ric computation and visual image of the environment, and it is the history of this entanglement that allows architecture to engage these questions in signif­ cant ways. The relations to projection, optics, and photography, tends to classify lidar and photogrammetry within ocular and visual media, but this is only part of how they operate. What is imaged in a three-dimensional scan is an interfer­ ence between matter and energy. Scanning passes over things evenly, distract­ edly, objectively, it is as tactile as it is visual, its mediation is a point, not a line, and the gaps consist of what lies outside thresholds of detection as much as what hides behind visible surfaces. As discussed at length in Chapter 1, poché emerged through the representa­ tional technologies of the Northern Italian Renaissance and was codifed in the pedagogy of the French Academies and the École des Beaux-Arts during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.10 According to the most common archi­ tectural understanding, poché is the representational convention of using graphic hatching or colored fll to render the cut material in plan and section draw­ ings. But this defnition of the term is complicated by other associations, such as “pocket,” “hidden,” and “swollen.”11 Poché presents contradictory issues simulta­ neously. First, it renders fgure-ground relations, where spatial voids become aes­ thetically sensible and conceptually legible. Second, in the abstraction of notation, it conceals all information regarding material, construction, assembly, and building systems. When a drawing is rendered with poché, it is concerned not with con­ veying how to build the design, but instead with imaging architecture in a way that exists as representation, for an audience that will evaluate the design through this abstract mediation. Poché exchanges construction labor for intellectual labor, material assembly for spatial conceptualization. One reality withdraws to allow another to become sensible. It may prove helpful to look more closely at a mediation produced through three-dimensional digital scanning. A recent research project, Interiors Matter: A Live Interior by Ulrika Karlsson, Cecilia Lundbäck, Veronica Skeppe, Daniel Norell, and Einar Rodhe looked at how scanning technology could be used as a tool to document the domestic interior of several apartments in Stockholm

52 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

FIG. 2.1 Detail

of Room portrait, by Veronica Skeppe, Cecilia Lundbäck and Ulrika Karlsson (2019), from Interiors Matter: A Live Interior

Interiors Matter:A Live Interior, is funded by The Swedish Research Council and hosted by KTH School of Architecture and the Built Environment in collaboration with Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design.The research is carried out by Ulrika Karlsson, Cecilia Lundbäck,Veronica Skeppe, Daniel Norell and Einar Rodhe. Image by Ulrika Karlsson, Cecilia Lundbäck, Veronica Skeppe.

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53

(Fig. 2.1). Lidar and photogrammetry are often accompanied by claims of increased precision and fdelity. The most common uses in architecture have been instances where documentary evidence is desired; as-built models, archeo­ logical sites, landscape vegetation, historic preservation. Why these technologi­ cal mediations appeal in these cases is not only the accuracy of measurement, but also the attitude of objectivity, the appearance of a uniform unbiased document of things in space as they exist. Tied to these images are questions regarding the aesthetics of realism. Yet this is not the realism found in the paintings of Gustave Corbet or literature of Emile Zola. Nineteenth-century French realism developed within and against estab­ lished genre conventions which allowed it to create its tensions between reality and its representation.12 In the images from Interiors Matter: A Live Interior, repre­ sentational conventions from architecture, the section and elevation drawings in this case, are transformed through technological mediation, one of which hinges on a revaluation of poché. The white area on the left of the image seems to be a good place to begin. The edge of this zone marks the boundary of the interior surface of the room. Some of it is wall, but some is also book, and pillow, and couch. Poché is under­ stood traditionally as an abstract cut, and this is how this empty voided absence is initially interpreted, but what is actually registered here is all the informal un­ designed irregularities of life as lived. If a previous paradigm uses the cut to gain representational control over the edge between space and mass, in the situation presented here, there is no edge to control, just a tactile record of environmen­ tal noise. Realism is no longer based on a comparison to “reality,” determined by the fdelity of its resemblance; it is now literally the capture and display of energetic refection bounded within a specifed range. The implications of this aesthetic shift become clearer when attention is directed to other artifacts of the scan. The white ghosts to the left of the fower vase and to the left and slightly above the curtain rod are the overlapped “shadows” of three different scanning passes. These areas are not different in kind from the poché of the “wall-book­ couch” just discussed. Both are produced through the occlusion of the scanning pulse. One absence however is interpreted as the abstraction of a cut while the other is the shadow of an object. These interpretations refect the traditions of poché in architectural representation which treated these areas as lacuna, as out­ side the concern of the architect, as a different ontological status, thus able to be rendered through the abstract notations of hatching or the pink of a colored wash. What the mediation of the scan reveals, however, is that these gaps exist everywhere, they are created through the interference of matter and energy, a shadow inside a wall is equivalent to a shadow behind a scanned surface. This interaction is then made sensible by rendering the refected energy as illumi­ nated points in a point-cloud model. That which withdraws into this poché is as real as the visible veil of surface information, even if it is not illuminated for the human sensorium.

54 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

Services of Surveillance As discussed in Chapter 1, the pockets of space that exist between the interior and the exterior; the basements, attics, back stairs, passages, plenums, shafts, and cavities are not empty, they are flled with services, both human and nonhuman. These poché spaces are often purposefully hidden to keep them from disrupting the cohesive visual image of the environment. As Mark Wigley explicates: Seemingly simple, smooth, continuous surfaces are desired. Simplicity itself is the goal. No building form is as complex as the systems that service it or the activities it services. Architecture is an act of simplifcation or of veiling com­ plexity. It is dedicated to the skin more than it can ever acknowledge. Per­ haps nothing can be as thin as architecture, the art of suspending perforated surfaces within a myriad of fows to paradoxically represent seamless solidity.13 In Buckminster Fuller Inc.:Architecture in the Age of Radio,Wigley extends this “veil­ ing of complexity” to include the electromagnetic energy of wireless communi­ cations.14 Energetic pulses captured on cellphones relay through foors and walls, in route from phone to satellite to server to database. These wireless networks determine much of what currently defnes the background of our daily interac­ tions.15 We have come to depend on and expect connectivity at the same time that we increasingly feel the need to escape this constant surveillance. Broadband connectivity is legally an infrastructural public utility, like water and electricity, it is expected to be continuously available.16 Backgrounded and black boxed, its operations withdraw from human attention, noticed only when service falters.17 Wireless media not only provide access to information; they produce information by monitoring user interactions. In this exchange, both sides prefer its operations to be invisible. The consumer wants digital information at the highest fdelity possible, in real time, providing news, commerce, and entertainment, constantly accessible everywhere, seamlessly operating outside of conscious attention. The provider of these services wants the consumer to use them habitually as a normal everyday interaction with the world. This integration into the background of the environment is important, for it is the unconscious behaviors of daily life that are the most valuable when monetized. This agreement is also the foundation of contemporary surveillance. The temptation is to locate surveillance entirely in the technology of the internet, but what turns these networks into apparatuses of control is not just computational algorithms; it is the way they have been naturalized as part of the environment. Which brings us to architecture. What is withdrawn in the poché is not removed from knowledge, it is simply removed from attention. We know that our walls and foors are full of structure, insulation, membranes, wires, ducts, and pipes running all over the place and connecting somewhere to an “outside.” The internet is part of this. It is a massive extra-planetary piece of infrastructure hidden outside the atmosphere, beneath the crust of the earth, below our city’s

The Shadows of Information

55

streets, and within our building’s walls. Hiding “the internet” in the pockets of the poché allows us to behave as if our environments are material, solid, real enclo­ sures, and digital information is an ephemeral cloud-like fow of data hidden until interfaced through a screen. Surveillance means to “keep watch”, it is an idea based in sight. Jeremey Ben­ tham’s panopticon, with its single, all-seeing watchtower at its center, has played the paradigmatic role within the cultural discourse of ocular-centric surveillance at least since Michel Foucault noted its architecture of control and discipline.18 Within this model, inhabitants of the periphery behave as if watched, even if there is no one watching inside the tower. Extending the panoptic model into the internet seems to make sense as all users become increasingly subject to constant surveillance by a handful of powerful private companies. But aspects of this paradigm do not quite fully describe internet monitoring. For instance, we know we are being watched, we just typically ignore it. Furthermore, we are not really being “watched”, we are being recorded and exchanged, scanned and statistically fltered. This should still instill anxiety, if not more so, given that all interactions on the internet are searchable and stored forever regardless of their importance, but it is exactly this constant tracing of meaningless noise that seems to undermine the ocular-centric control of vision. Professor of philosophy, Petra Gehring has challenged the extension of the panopticon as a model of internet surveillance. “It may well be that the presence of mass-media pictorial rhetoric is overestimated. Other techniques penetrate deeper, techniques that include knowledge of automatic registration and the permanent possibility of processing the traces that I leave.”19 Gehring continues on monitor­ ing technologies,“ . . . in their core they are post-panoptic. They rely on registra­ tion that is performed out of sight and on data acquisition procedures that run unawares—and which thus as a rule do not merely result in behavioral discipline, but rather lead to a fundamental subjective disquiet.”20 Poché offers a potential paradigm for the type of monitoring that operates in contemporary society—one more apt, perhaps, than the panopticon. Our actions are no longer watched from an analogical, geometrical, or diagrammatic center but instead from a zone hidden within and behind the screens and surfaces of our environmental background. Monitoring occurs below the threshold of attention not from a focal center. “Image” is simply a visual metaphor for the sound, light, heat, movement, time, attention, and currency exchanges that service our desires and monitor our behavior. What hides in the poché is the hum and hiss of the infrastructure; recording, fltering, and mixing reality.

Capture and Process Though the historical development of lidar and photogrammetry are closely related, there are some important differences to emphasize regarding how each captures and processes environmental surface data to build spatial models. Lidar works by measuring distances in the environment, photogrammetry calculates

56 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

depth through images. What is hidden, then, depends on how the environment is sensed, stored, and processed. Lidar (light detection and ranging) uses lasers to scan the environment. An electromagnetic pulse is sent out and bounces back to the imaging source, and a measurement of the time it takes for the signal to return allows distance to be calculated.21 This is considered an active sensor, as it emits energy. Every point is an individual measurement in x-y-z coordinate space, independent of ambi­ ent environmental lighting, color, texture, and pattern. The type of material, its refectivity, and the distance from the scan source all affect the return of the signal and can produce noise, irregularities, and other errors in the scan. Photogrammetry, on the other hand, measures depth by comparing two pho­ tos. Photogrammetry has been in use as long as we have had photography for surveying, most often in engineering and military contexts.22 The transforma­ tion that has occurred, thanks to computational technologies, is that huge sets of “photos” can be rapidly processed to produce spatial models. The identifcation of surface edges and detail thus depends on pixel comparison, which relies on the resolution and intensity of energy captured in the initial photographs.23 A ground-based lidar scan can be created from a single sensor origin, how­ ever this will have large areas of occlusion. Figure 2.2 shows the aerial view of a captured moment from a lidar sensor mounted to the roof of a car travelling down a street. The directionality of the laser pulses is clearly noticeable in the

FIG. 2.2

LiDAR-USA, aerial view of Snoopy Highway Mapper LiDAR System (2019), image courtesy of LiDAR-USA

The Shadows of Information

57

data shadows, a poché occluded by cars and other street objects as well as buildings. In order to get a more complete dimensional model of the space measured, scans from multiple origins are necessary. Photogrammetry, by contrast, requires more than one scanning position to produce any spatial information. The calculation is done through the differences between two images of a single object; depth mea­ sured through differential motion.24 Edges in scanned models are jumps between points representing different sur­ face planes. Edge in this context is thus not the geometric intersection tradition­ ally represented and controlled through the graphic drawing of a line. Edges in three-dimensional scans often look odd; they smudge and fray, sometimes drifting into the shadowy void. Multiple scans increase the model’s defnition and tighten its corners. When a model is of a lower resolution, one of the frst places distor­ tions appear is at the edges and corners. The displacement of points in depth is how the corner is determined, but as mentioned above, there is no line crisply defning this edge, instead it is an approximate attempt to resolve two neighboring points with distinctly different spatial locations. The number of points determines the level of detail. Lower resolution scans or increased distance from the object produces less accurate mapping of the sur­ faces. For photogrammetry, color and brightness of refected surface energy can produce data capture confusion, also resulting in loss of surface detail. Resolution in capture extends into the performance of the model as a point cloud. From a distance, these models can have a somewhat disturbingly high degree of realism. As one zooms in, the point cloud disintegrates: points spread, gaps open, and eventually the surface dissolves entirely. In this, the difference between realism and abstraction is but a matter of degree, or literally a matter of zoom. The shadows of occluded information are reduced by performing multiple scans, but there will always be pockets the scanner cannot access. Gaps in lidar scans are caused by occluded lines of sight and resolution, which are a function of the number of scanning passes. Gaps in photogrammetry, on the other hand, are dependent on the electromagnetic range that is captured by the sensing technol­ ogy, in simpler terms, the color and resolution of the initial digital images. What is missing and how those gaps are accounted for is different for each technology. In both cases, however, the most “successful” models work to complete the surfaces as they are seen from certain privileged views, which are different depending on the industry for which the model is intended. “View” should not be equated with vision; it is as likely to be an aerial drone or a satellite image as it is to be the height of a human eye. In the efforts to fll the gaps, an interesting side-effect is produced: the scan turns images into objects.

Image-Objects All digital models are double. They consist of an interior surface model foating inside an exterior surface model. Though this is true of all digital modeling, it

58 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

is rarely commented on, perhaps because most digital models are developed as a single surface that is then offset, making one surface the result of the other. This offset does not produce “thickness,” however, and digital models that develop both their interior volume and exterior mass are objects inside of objects, connected by funnels called “apertures.”A modeled building’s interior volume is independent of its exterior mass and can be made sensible as a fgured void, appearing as a solid object. In Baroque Topologies, architect Andrew Saunders writes, Although not technically able to see through external surfaces to the underlying hidden layers of composite structure, 3D-scanned point clouds produce a novel effect of transparency on the thin membrane surface of enclosure due to the spacing of points. This enables a unique topological vantage point to view the spatial envelope of the interior from the ‘outside’ as well as from the ‘inside’ simultaneously. It is as if the entire internal poché of the churches has been completely removed to reveal only a thin spatial residue of the interior shell volume, a view never before imagined. To view the inside from the outside and the inside turned out paints a completely new understanding of the total working of the interior volume as a whole. The interior becomes a manifold body providing an unprecedented repre­ sentation of the complete spatial capacity of Baroque interior.25 The digital model, as captured by three-dimensional scans and imaged as a point cloud, reveals the “volume as object” aspect. (As noted in Chapter 1, this effect is reminiscent of the cast models of voids produced by OMA for the Très Grande Bibliothèque project and of church interiors cast by the students of Luigi Moretti26). As Saunders points out, the technology of capturing these surfaces, as points mapping surfaces rather than lines representing edges, is not only a more accurate model, but also a novel mode of representation and visualization. Pointcloud models render the interior volume as a coherent whole, a “fgured void” (Fig. 2.3) In a way, all three-dimensionally scanned environments are interior volumes, even the exterior spaces of streets, parks, and public squares. The model is a collection of points registering the bounding volume of surfaces surround­ ing the sensor-camera. This capturing origin is within the space; it records all that surrounds it. When the model is then displayed—and especially when it is viewed from locations that humans do not typically inhabit—the gaps created by resolution and occlusion are revealed. In other words, to “see” the missing spatial information requires a disembodied eye, or more accurately, the acknowledgment that the model is a thin liminal layer of something not quite an image, an object, or a volume. Our environments are assumed to be continuous. This quality is part of how we defne reality: there are no holes, no gaps. Energetic scans of the environment attempt to collect this continuity. But because electronic storage and transmis­ sion requires signals, the environment must be cut into discrete bits of energetic

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59

Saunders, LiDAR scan of San Lorenzo, Tornio (2018), image courtesy of Andrew Saunders

FIG. 2.3 Andrew

information that can be processed.27 This discretization produces gaps, frays, and tears in the mediated surface. As Hito Steyerl observes, these models are never fully two-dimensional or three-dimensional: 3D technologies don’t only render the parts that are actually captured as locational measurements by a lidar scanner, but also the parts that are miss­ ing from 2D images: the shadowed, covered or cut parts of the image. The missing data are assigned a volume or a body. The shadows and blind spots

60 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

are not off frame, masked or cut off as they might be in a 2D shot, but treated as equal parts of the information. What emerges is not the image of a body, but the body of an image that itself presents information on a thin surface or differentiation, shaped by different natural, technological or political forces.28 There is a mistaken belief that to resolve the “glitches” and errors in the scanning of the environment, all that is required is a more advanced, higher-resolution, faster-processing technology. This line of thinking misses the point, for all tech­ nologies of mediation substitute abstractions for reality. It is the tensions and frictions that give each mediation its aesthetic characteristic. In the case of the three-dimensional scan these are; the point cloud as energetic interference, the edge as fray of resolution, and the data shadow as poché.

The Electromagnetic Threshold The Nuova Pianta di Roma, orchestrated by Giovanni Battista Nolli, engraved in 1748, and commonly known as the Nolli Map, abstracts the city into fgure and ground; the spaces of roads, squares, and the quasi-public of civic-religious interi­ ors are left blank, while the mass of the built is hatched. The Nolli Map renders the city as an intelligible public ground against the solid fll of the inaccessible private interior, or more precisely, as Pier Vittorio Aureli states, the distinction between the fgure of architecture and the ground of the city introduces a more subtle but decisive difference in the cartographic repre­ sentation of the city: the difference between architectural space and urban space. The Nuova Pianta di Roma is one of the primary illustrations of the change in representation of the city from architectural form to urban mass.29 The Nolli Map expands the imaging of poché from the fguration of a building towards the space of the city, through this, individual buildings disappear into the mass of the urban context. This imaging technique became fundamental for urban analysis, explicating the formal order of a city as access, circulation, systems of service distribution, and the public realm. Or, put another way, even though it is architecture that provides the visible experience of the city, representations such as the Nolli Map made sensible the background civic spaces that allow the city to perform. The Nolli Map infuenced the representation of urbanism from Camillo Sitte’s City Planning According to Artistic Principles (1889), to Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s Collage City (1978), to OMA/Rem Koolhaas’s urban proposals such as the plan for Melun Senart (1987). The city as mediated through scanning technologies raises doubts regarding the continued relevance of the Nolli paradigm. The differentiation of fgure from

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61

ground, solid building from empty space, becomes irrelevant when edges no lon­ ger constitute linear bounding contours, but instead the falloff at energetic thresh­ olds. The point-cloud model highlights this variability. It is no longer a hard edge, no longer a fgure on a ground determined by the drawing of a line, but instead a diaphanous fray of marks in a matrix. Edges scatter, scumble, and jump between surfaces. Since all objects have an equal opportunity to interfere with the electro­ magnetic spectrum, the traditional hierarchies between object, architecture, and landscape fatten into a background environment of refection and interference. The city is modeled as a ground of variable energy intensities with gaps, rips, and tears from lossy resolution and surface occlusion. This is the paradigm of Google Earth, of the world as photogrammetry model. Although the sharp binary of the Nolli Map evaporates when the city is imaged by scanning technologies, the concept of poché is still relevant in an altered man­ ner. This change has been described thus far as the gaps in electromagnetic infor­ mation that occur between and behind scanned points of the environment. It is a mistake to consider this as missing data, all scans have gaps, this is what resolution means. These gaps are only “missing” when comparing the technology of the scan to the world as available to our physical senses. In other words, at a certain level they are aesthetic. As far as the data is concerned, there are no gaps. To reit­ erate, resolution is a negotiation between technological, economic, and aesthetic factors; its value as information is determined in relation to other data sets that it is intended to be combined with. The desire to map the physical world with energetic pulses appeals to gov­ ernments, militaries, mining industries, archeologists, agriculture conglomer­ ates, advertising agencies, traffc planners, ecologists, and architects. Each of these industries, corporations, bureaucracies, and disciplines wants this digital double not only because it “looks like” the world but also because an environment mod­ eled as information can be combined, compared, fltered, and augmented to allow it to be understood, controlled, exploited, and manipulated in ever new ways. The expansion of electromagnetic scanning into infrared and thermal ranges has, since World War II, been part of the development of photogrammetry, used to create images that can be analyzed in ways foreign to human perception. These become representations of energy interactions outside the visible spectrum, thus imaging a reality that our eyes cannot see. This has been applied to everything from the extraction of “landscape features” for ballistic targeting to ecological studies that cross-reference heat maps with moisture models.30 Furthermore, the environ­ ment, modeled as information, can be combined and fltered with other sets of information. Data is meaningless in its raw state but gains value when combined with other data to become interpretable as a statistically legible pattern of behav­ iors. It is these patterns that are valued, that are used to make decisions, that are trusted as real. For industries with an interest in rendering the environment as an augmented, three-dimensional model, the gaps, errors, and tensions between energetic scans

62 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

and the physical world become problematic. For instance, as the movement of commodities are mapped for the purposes of storage logistics, on-demand deliv­ ery, and location-information accrual, the zones of absent information appear as lost capital or the mismanagement of services. Furthermore, a misregistered depth or frayed edge presents signifcant problems for all applications using machine vision, such as; self-driving cars, facial-recognition software, and drone-missile targeting; technologies that exceed, but also extend,“capital services.” The digitally scanned environment is not a simple doubling, however. Media­ tions are models of reality. The question is not which one is closer to the “real”, but how these models alter human and non-human engagement with the world. As Shannon Mattern reminds us, “We inhabit a data space defned by various levels of intersecting protocols that direct our connections, facilitate or close off access, and thus subtly shape the geographies—both informational and physical— we are then able to explore.”31 For the discipline of architecture seeking to occupy the city in alternative modes, knowledge of how the environment is scanned is indeed essential, but it is not enough to simply locate and identify the errors or gaps in these scans, the problem is also aesthetic.

The Aesthetics of the Unregistered The photogrammetry scan of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s altar in Santa Maria del Priorato raises several issues (Fig. 2.4). These three views are rotations from above the sculpture towards the back of the altar. The black areas are gaps of missing information, some are literally inside the sculpture; some are occluded shadows. Their existence is due to the location, direction, and frequency of the initial energy captures, but it is the “view” of the point-cloud model from alter­ nate locations that manifests their visibility in the images. In specifc areas this allows the viewer to look through missing surface information towards the inside of a surface on the other side of a solid object. This is a strange topological inver­ sion of volume and mass. For instance, in the images shown here, the face of St. Basil is seen down through the top of his head, the red strips are the carpet on the foor of the chapel. Disorientations such as this are an interesting effect of scanned mediations. Even though the object is recorded with as much objective fdelity as possible, the aesthetic response is one of the familiar becoming strange as recogni­ tion and fguration are detached from the traditions of silhouette and bounding contour. Line as edge is part of the representational lineage of drawing, the divi­ sion of fgures from grounds. Lines both focused the eye for formal evaluation and were pragmatically the “handles” through which to control form. These are no longer available in a point-cloud model captured through a digital scan. As noted above, edge is no longer a line. The fray of edges pulls solid material into a diaphanous veil, fuzzes fguration into noisy distortion, and fades photorealism into abstraction along a gradation.

The Shadows of Information

FIG. 2.4

63

Photogrammetry scan of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s altar in Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome (1765), scans and images by the author (2019)

64 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

How architecture is designed without lines poses a signifcant challenge to many of the disciplinary conventions that rest on the traditions of drawing. Part of the adjustment that new media raises is not only to understand how they transform the techniques and practices of a specifc discipline, but also how that discipline will alter the use of the mediations towards its own biases and desires. In this process, the relationship between conventions of representation and tech­ nologies of mediation is closer to an exchange than a single direction of infuence. To understand how a rendering concept such as poché is transformed by scanning technologies is also to change how architecture understands and engages those same technologies, for they become participant in other strains of disciplinary discourse. Poché has always been residual. It now includes the unregistered zones pro­ duced through interferences in the electromagnetic spectrum. This is an exten­ sion and mutation of the traditional concept of poché. As residual, information shadows are an interference of the material with the energetic, an aesthetic redis­ tribution that shifts away from the sharp distinction between fgure and ground into the scumbled lacunae located behind, between, and within the image-objects of clustered points. Scanning mediates the background, both in terms of how machines capture and store the environment, but also how our lives are ever more defned by the data trails we excrete and inhabit. In this, resolution is a cultural-economic nego­ tiation between information and visualization, a political zone that entangles humans and non-humans in the computational mediation of the environment. There is so much at stake in the monetization of this information, so much at stake for the ethics of controlling identity, so much at stake for what is shared as a commons, as civic space, that aesthetics must seem out of place or insuffcient in relation to these matters. In a way, aesthetics is “out of place”, and this is its importance. For as much as it is crucial to identify how information is gathered, how it is used, who is exploited, and who stands to gain, for architecture to intervene in this fow, it must be able to manipulate the information that is being exchanged. And this requires the discipline to question its systems of representa­ tion and mediation. How architecture can open alternate possibilities for the ways in which these images build realities is an aesthetic investigation, as much as it is a question of epistemology and ethics. Framing transformations in technologies of mediation within the disciplin­ ary history of architectural representation is also crucial for the development of discourse. Every new technology is initially posited as being more faithful, more accurate, more “real” than the previous. Tracing the relationships between con­ cepts and aesthetics challenges the assumption that each new technology is a revolution in the representation of reality. It is important to remember that no mediation has a privileged access to the real. Each produces its own traits, which come to defne its qualities. The digitally surveilled world runs parallel to the material world, but also intersects and is intwined with it as well. If we assume

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65

authenticity is something to be found only in one or the other, we let an imbal­ ance of political power be given over to technology, economy, or the institutional entities that enforce, police, and monetize how reality appears. For architecture, the complexity of these issues will require a transformation and expansion of its disciplinary concepts to engage, occupy, and subvert these mediations. Note: Portions of this chapter were initially developed in the essay “In the Shad­ ows of Information” published in Perspecta 53: Onus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020).

Notes 1 John May,“Everything Is Already an Image,” Log 40 (Spring/Summer 2017): 12. 2 John May, Signal. Image. Architecture. (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2019), 45. 3 Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You),” New Inquiry, December 8, 2016, https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are­ looking-at-you. 4 Eyal and Ines Weizman, Before and After (Moscow: Strelka, 2013), 38. 5 “Despite this de-skilling, claims that photogrammetric machines offered an experi­ ential continuity were integral to their acceptance as truthful ‘restitutors’ of reality. Although this system dramatically reduced the time that surveyors spent on building sites, it became known as a ‘tactile’ technology,” Lucia Allais, “Rendering: On Expe­ rience and Experiments,” in Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice, ed. Zeynep Çelik Alexander and John May (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 60. 6 Tim Maughan, “No One’s Driving,” in Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the PostAnthropocene, ed. Liam Young (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2019), 96. 7 Sciographia or skiagraphia is derived from scio-, skia-, “shadow” and graphy-, writing or inscription. 8 Thomas Kaufmann, “The Perspective of Shadows: The History of the Theory of Shadow Projection,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 38 (1975): 258–287. 9 “A good plan sustained a depth and transparency achieved through the dessin tech­ niques of entourage, poché, and mosaïque—graphic codes that made the plan legible to an architectural audience.” Hyungmin Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 52. 10 Michael Young, “Paradigms in the Poché,” Proceedings of the ACSA Annual Meeting (Washington, DC:Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2019), 190–195. 11 Wiktionary, s.v. “poché,” accessed June 1, 2020, https://www.en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ poché. 12 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006), 28. 13 Mark Wigley, Buckminster Fuller Inc.:Architecture in the Age of Radio (Zurich: Lars Muller, 2015), 77. 14 Wigley, Buckminster Fuller Inc., 14. 15 Wigley, Buckminster Fuller Inc., 14. 16 Cecilia Kang,“Court Backs Rules Treating Internet as Utility, Not Luxury,” New York Times, June 15, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/15/technology/net-neu trality-fcc-appeals-court-ruling.html. 17 This combination of “blackboxing” and “withdrawal” owes a signifcant debt to Bruno Latour and Graham Harman and will be explored in greater detail in other writing.

66 Part I Poché and the Rendering of Labor

18 Giorgio Agamben, “What Is a Paradigm?” in The Signature of All Things (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 16–17. 19 Petra Gehring, “The Inverted Eye. Panopticon and Panopticism, Revisited,” Foucault Studies, No. 23, (August 2017): 60. 20 Gehring,“The Inverted Eye,” 62. 21 Todd Neff, “Lidar History Timeline,” online supplement to The Laser That’s Chang­ ing the World: The Amazing Stories behind Lidar, from 3D Mapping to Self-Driving Cars (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2018), https://toddneff.com/books/lidarhistory/ extras/lidarhistory-timeline. 22 Helen Wickstead, “Drawing on Photographs: Aerial Photogrammetry and Virtual Mapping 1865 to 1900,” Royal Anthropological Institute Conference, British Museum, May 28, 2014. 23 Methods of pixel comparison are fundamental for machine vision, CNNs, GANs and image search algorithms, i.e., facial recognition, atmospheric pollution emissions, traffc patterns, etc. 24 Matthew Magnani and Matthew Douglass, “Photogrammetry and Stereophotogram­ metry,” The SAS Encyclopedia of Archaeological Sciences, ed. Sandra L. Lopez Varela (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2019). 25 Andrew Saunders, Baroque Topologies (Modena: Palombi Editori, 2018), 61. 26 Luigi Moretti,“The Structure and Sequence of Space,” Spazio, no. 7, 1952–1953. 27 Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 26. 28 Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art (London:Verso, 2017), 197. 29 Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011) 108–109. 30 John May, “Sensing: Preliminary Notes on the Emergence of Statistical-Mechanical Geographic Vision,” Perspecta 40 (2008), 48–49. 31 Shannon Mattern,“Ether and Ore: An Archeology of Urban Intelligences,” in Ways of Knowing Cities, ed. Laura Kurgan and Dare Brawley (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2019), 125.

PART II

Entourage and the Politics of Objects

9

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfra ncis.com

3 MONTAGE-ENTOURAGE; OR, THE POLITICS OF THE SEAM

Entourage refers to how all the stuff of the world—trees, furniture,vases,cars,lamps, rocks, animals, and people—is represented in an architectural image. These items are not typically designed by the architect and are often the last things added to a representation, but they are crucial to how the image is received, often noticed and commented on before the architecture itself. Given the ubiquity of these objects, it is strange that there is little in the way of considered argumentation about the roles played by these things that populate architectural images. Seen as mere scale fgures, blandly dismissed as “not architecture,” called out for cultural biases, or generally treated as kitsch accoutrement, they are rarely recognized for the different ways they operate within architectural representation. This chapter argues that for much of the past century, architectural entourage has operated within the aesthetic paradigm of montage. There are two implica­ tions that follow from this. First, entourage is typically considered as something added, assembled into an architectural image in order to alter the interpre­ tation of the design. It consists of elements extracted from extra-disciplinary sources and combined to visualize a possible reality, a convergence where differ­ ent ontologies mix. Montage is fundamentally a question of cutting, sampling, and mixing media tied to technologies of reproduction. Over the course of the twentieth century, the relationships between architecture and entourage have become scrambled, an exchange that produces signifcant problems for how images are to be evaluated as critical or commercial, speculative or documentary, disciplinary or popular. Although there has always been “visionary architecture” that operated primarily through the drawing rather than the constructed build­ ing, with the montage of entourage, the design of architecture became the design

DOI: 10.4324/9781003149682-6

70 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

of worlds through the manipulation of assembled fragments of reality. And this leads to the second implication. Throughout the twentieth century, from expressionism to cubism, surrealism to conceptual art, minimalism to pop, architecture associated itself with avant-garde art movements by appropriating aspects of their aesthetic techniques. Quite often these associations also brought with it the discourse surrounding the artform. Montage was a key technique for the emergence of modern media theory (Walter Benjamin), theories on the autonomy of art (Theodor Adorno), the project of critical theory (Manfredo Tafuri), and theories of the avant-garde (Peter Bürger). Architecture found that in its relation to montage, aspects of these arguments could be brought to bear on its representations, and through this, the imaging of architecture could engage social, technological, ecological, political commentary and critique. Criticality is entwined with a general concern for exposing artifce, and in the context of montage, this issue found an association in the visibility of the seam between disparate parts, and the role this seam can play in expressing or obscuring the artifce of an assemblage. The revelation of the seam became both literally and metaphorically associated with ideas of honesty and awareness versus seduction and distraction. As all images of reality experienced through our digi­ tally mediated interfaces are a species of assembled montage, and given the pos­ sibilities for concealing the artifce of these assemblages, the relationship between the aesthetics and the politics of montage is as charged as it has ever been. For architectural images, the seams that receive the greatest attention often concern the entourage, in other words, the seams between architecture and everything con­ sidered not-architecture.

Entourage Stories The date and location of its introduction into the architectural image can be debated, but many of the issues concerning entourage frst appeared in painting. For late medieval and early Renaissance painters, fgures and their groupings were a primary focus of the artwork. This is the istoria that Leon Battista Alberti dis­ cusses in Della Pittura.1 Groupings of fgures conveyed narrative through gesture, posture, and formal composition within genre conventions. A neoclassical paint­ ing by Jacques-Louis David, The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789) (Fig. 3.1), displays these issues in their most academically formalized manner. The story depicted is one from classical antiquity in which Brutus defends the Roman Republic at the cost of his conspiring sons’ lives. In the politically charged context of Revolutionary France, the painting presented a poignant allegory of sacrifce and civic duty. Interpreting it required viewers to know not only the story itself, but also the conventions and codes that structure its organization. For instance, the central column row vertically divides the two primary emotional registers of the narrative while also supporting a fabric drape that highlights the fgures’ expressive gestures. Much of the architecture operates just below the threshold of

Montage-Entourage; or, the Politics of the Seam

FIG. 3.1

71

Jacques-Louis David, The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789)

attention, organizing the picture plane, modulating light, framing action, suggest­ ing depth, and establishing mood and atmosphere. What matters are the human fgures, their emotions, their interactions, their narrative. The eighteenth century brought to Northern Europe a renewed interest in classical Greece and Rome, inspired in part by the discovery and excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii. The infux of tourists to Rome and other sites along the Grand Tour created a market for etchings and engravings of ancient sites, for instance, consider Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Vedute di Roma (1750–1778), the popular series of prints he sold to visitors of Rome as his primary means of liveli­ hood. The emergence of the architectural representation as a commodity, with a value outside of its notational function in the building process, required both technologies of reproduction and a consumer audience. As art historian Basile Baudez describes, This period, in which people started collecting as souvenirs drawings and prints of places they visited, saw a profound change in the way buildings were represented, because the architects tried for the frst time to create effects that would appeal to non-architects.2 The introduction of vegetation, of material qualities, of context, lighting, and the human fgure into an architectural representation refected this shift in audience.

72 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

The “rendered views” of architectural sites at this time combined different aes­ thetic positions. While the choice in depicted subjects was dominated by a neo­ classical reverence for antiquity, the aesthetic conventions used to represent them were often drawn from the picturesque (in the cases of Piranesi and Étienne-Louis Boullée, evoking the sublime). The picturesque is typically seen in architecture and landscape as an attempt to alter the environment to resemble painting. Art historian David Marshall explains that for the eighteenth-century aestheticians Uvedale Price and William Gilpin, The picturesque represents a point of view that frames the world and turns nature into a series of living tableaux. It begins as an appreciation of natural beauty, but it ends by turning people into fgures in a landscape or fgures in a painting.3 The human fgure was indeed an essential element of the picturesque image but did not serve as the narrative subject, as in neoclassical painting. People in a picturesque painting are instead objects: they give scale, lend familiarity, and aid in visually domesticating the landscape. The wildness of nature becomes casu­ ally ordered, the rigidity of architecture softened, roughed up, and broken into irregular “natural” forms.4 Images in the picturesque mode might include ruined fragments of buildings, vegetation, geological outcroppings, and scale fgures posi­ tioned somewhere in the middle ground—objects that allowed viewers to project themselves into the scene. This was the aesthetic sold to tourists in the late eigh­ teenth century and its infuence can be seen in postcards to this day. But the pic­ turesque also conditioned the emergence of entourage as an architectural concept, one that would become ingrained in the pedagogical practices of the École des Beaux-Arts. Writing in the early twentieth century, Nathaniel Cortlandt Curtis notes that the role of entourage at the École was related specifcally to the repre­ sentation of landscape and context: According to the generally accepted usage of the atelier, the term entourage embraces all features of landscape architecture immediately surrounding the building . . . Compared to building architecture the latter compositions may be said to be analogous to informal and picturesque types of building plans, which although they are possibly as much arranged as the more regular types of symmetrical and unsymmetrical partis, are by nature of their programs and the special effects sought not subject to strictly formal rules.5 There are several key differences that distinguish the entourage of architectural images from the human fgures found in genre paintings. First, the hierarchy is reversed, with architecture becoming the object of focus and the fgures serving as

Montage-Entourage; or, the Politics of the Seam

73

support context. The perspective views in Paul Letarouilly’s Edifces de Rome Mod­ erne (1840) provide apt examples (Fig. 3.2 a and b). In these renderings, human fgures interact with the architecture and thus reveal possibilities for inhabita­ tion. Their gestures do not establish a narrative but instead draw the viewer’s eye, directing attention to particular features of the design. This reversal of foreground and background is a matter of attention. While the entourage is still literally “the foreground” and the architecture “the background,” the entourage serves to redirect attention onto the architectural environment.6 These fgures are radically different from those in neoclassical painting for they act more like objects—sculpture, fur­ niture, vegetation—than like people we might encounter in social settings. They are also informally arranged, in contrast to the symmetry and formal stasis of the architectural interiors that surround them. Letarouilly’s rendering emphasizes the difference between architecture and entourage, giving the fgures shade and shadow while representing the architecture through linework alone. This distinction pulls the two entities into different realms, almost different ontologies, yet allowing them to somehow share the same space. From this initial discussion we may claim that entourage conditions the recep­ tion of an architectural image through three issues; familiarity, scenario, and audience. First, familiarity. At a basic level, fgures, vegetation, and recognizable objects give scale to the representation. But familiarity has other implications

Letarouilly Edifces de Rome Moderne (1840), perspective view Santa Maria del Popolo

FIG. 3.2A Paul

FIG. 3.2B Paul Letarouilly Edifces de Rome

Moderne (1840), perspective view Palazzo Massimo

74 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

as well involving habitual behavior, qualities of mood and tone, and modes of attention towards daily life. Entourage domesticates natural surroundings while loosening up more controlled architectural environments. It makes the artif­ cial appear more natural and more real, the wilderness more manageable and more understandable. Second, it creates a scenario. Entourage renders social events and programmatic inhabitation, but it does so in service of evoking atti­ tude, demeanor, and interaction—encoding what architects would describe as the relations between program and context—rather than overtly narrating a story. Scenarios also raise the issue of “lifestyle,” and thereby the many design questions that are too often ignored or dismissed by the discipline of architec­ ture, such as interiors, furniture, textiles, fashion, gardens and plantings. Lastly, entourage frames an audience. This is at one level a question of content. What environment, landscape, urban scene is imaged? What objects occupy these sce­ narios? Who is it that lives and inhabits these spaces? How these questions are answered reveals much regarding the biases of the designer and the assumptions of who the image is addressing. At another level however, an audience is more than a generalized group of viewers, for it also involves networks of commu­ nication and technologies of reproduction. An image in a book or journal is different than one produced for a client presentation or the legal processes of a design review board. Finally, the way “the entourage” is differentiated from “the architecture” is also largely determined by whom the representation is intended to engage. An architect can indicate if the image should be engaged as a disciplinary critique or a commercial promotion largely by how the entourage is represented, a discussion to which we will return later in this chapter. These three aspects of entourage—familiarity, scenario, and audience—assist the argu­ ment the architectural image is attempting to formulate and play an important role to determine how the politics of the project is interpreted.

A Cultural-Economic Exchange In From Ornament to Object,Alina Payne reframes early twentieth-century archi­ tecture’s rejection of ornament as less a total banishment than a shift in the location of manifestation. With modernism, the cultural meaning traditionally conveyed through architectural ornament is displaced into the designed and manufactured objects of daily life.7 In the modern mode of nomadic inhabita­ tion, objects are carried from place to place as signifers of personal sensibili­ ties, demanding that architecture become more neutral, less decoratively busy, and “calmer,” as Le Corbusier claimed in The Decorative Art of Today.8 (This attitude can be seen both in his perspectival drawings and in the staged pho­ tography of his completed buildings.)9 Early twentieth-century architecture may have driven ornamental meaning out of architecture and into objects, but decoration was maintained in the clean, often white, “a-tectonic” articulation of surfaces. A later chapter will explore the relationship between ornament

Montage-Entourage; or, the Politics of the Seam

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and decoration, but here it will suffce to locate their essential difference: while ornament attracts attention, decoration diffuses it. In this, ornament becomes the objects in the foreground, and decoration the surfaces in the background. And if we believe that the role of ornamental signifcance is now to be found in objects, this means that, for the rendered image, the communicative import of ornament is transferred to the entourage. Furniture, dinnerware, lighting fx­ tures, trees, plants, artwork, hats, ashtrays, and even things like automobiles and airplanes—commodities, in short—are asked to carry the signifcance formerly conveyed by architectural ornament. By borrowing images of objects that are also, thanks to advertising, encoded as signifers of social aspirations, architec­ tural renderings also adopt the lifestyle aspirations attributed to these objects. As this suggests, the implications of entourage extend well beyond simple mat­ ters of scalar reference for the architectural image exists within the commodity exchanges of capital wither it wants to or not. For Boris Groys, innovation is defned as a “cultural-economic exchange,” wherein value is transferred between two realms. “One result of every inno­ vation is that certain things in the profane realm are valorized and enter the cultural archive, while certain cultural works are devalorized and enter the pro­ fane realm.”10 This process of creating “the new” is an exchange that alters the dividing lines established and policed by disciplines and institutions.11 Most art­ ists refne and extend accepted, archived, and valued traditions. When the tradi­ tion appears to stabilize, however, incentive to innovate appears. This can occur through a devaluing (negative adaptation), a revaluing (positive adaptation), or both, a shifting of ideas and objects between realms simultaneously.12 The most innovative objects and ideas are those that exhibit the most extreme tension in the transferences between the two realms. The profane realm consists of that which is considered outside culturally valued traditions, its content continually chang­ ing. Essence, authenticity, reality, nature, reason, desire, spirit, the unconscious, the primitive, the mechanical, the kitsch, the digital: these concepts have all served at different historical moments as the content of the profane realm. Groys argues that these terms are often mistakenly seen as sources of innovation in themselves as they are used to classify and evaluate art once it is accepted into the cultural archives; what matters is not the specifc source idea, but how innovation occurs through the exchange. To consider “ornament” as the objects of everyday life, is to heighten the importance of the entourage inserted into an architectural image. In Groys’ terms, this can be understood as a cultural-economic exchange that shifts value from the ornamental articulation of a building into the social scenarios performed within the fction of the image. There is a legacy throughout the twentieth century for these combinations between different cultural registers. As Beatriz Colomina astutely observes, The dichotomy between high art and mass culture, construed as a relation of opposition and exclusion . . . is undermined by Le Corbusier’s work.

76 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

His use of publicity material and clippings from newspapers next to images extracted from art books represents the intrusion of the materials of ‘low culture’ into the realm of ‘high art,’ an intrusion that, if it cannot be con­ sidered a direct, avant-garde attack on the institution of art, nevertheless undermines its ideology of autonomy from the realm of everyday life.13 The desire to blur and question the distinctions between “art” and “life” is one of the recurring themes in twentieth-century art. For architecture, this desire is doubly charged, for it not only takes place in the representations that archi­ tects produce, but also in the lived experiences of architectural environments as built. The twentieth century was changed by the mass-produced commodities of industrial production and transformations in technologies of reproduction. The photographic print allowed for the appropriation of images as cut fragments that could be juxtaposed to create new relationships. Through montage, the images of everyday reality were used to question traditional values such as authorship, originality, composition, and precedent. The assemblage of cut images of real­ ity became material objects in reality. By combining found technologically reproduced images—extracted from photo journals, advertising, newspapers, or online image databases—montage revalued what was typically considered kitsch. In architectural representation, entourage became montaged as an assemblage of image-objects; selected, extracted, inserted.

Reality Fragments Peter Bürger argues that, A theory of the avant-garde must begin with the concept of montage that is suggested by the early cubist collages. What distinguishes them from the techniques of composition developed since the Renaissance is the insertion of reality fragments into the painting, i.e., the insertion of material that has been left unchanged by the artist.14 There are two claims juxtaposed by Bürger in this passage. First, that the his­ torical avant-garde art begins with a fragment from reality, selected, extracted, and inserted into the context of “art.” This point and its connections to cub­ ism may seem more directly tied to the physical objects used in collage by Picasso and Braque than the photographic images of photomontage, but the principle remains, montages assemble fragments from different realities. These fragments are an interruption into the realm of representation, they create a confict, a tension, and as such, heighten attention to the ruptures between dif­ ferent ontologies. Second, the fact that these fragments are not transformed or

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manipulated by the artist, challenges techniques of composition as traditionally defned through notions of authorship and conventions of formal organization. As Bürger explains, The avant-gardiste work neither creates a total impression that would permit an interpretation of its meaning nor can whatever impression may be created be accounted for by recourse to the individual parts, for they are no longer subordinated to a pervasive intent. This refusal to provide meaning is experienced as shock by the recipient. And this is the inten­ tion of the avant-gardiste artist, who hopes that such withdrawal of mean­ ing will direct the reader’s attention to the fact that the conduct of one’s life is questionable and that it is necessary to change it. Shock is aimed for as a stimulus to change one’s conduct of life; it is the means to break through aesthetic immanence and to usher in (initiate) a change in the recipient’s life praxis.15 “The principle of montage,” claims Manfredo Tafuri, “had always been linked to the theme of activating the public.”16 For Tafuri, this technique was crucial to the historical avant-garde’s address of the modern metropolis, industrial commodity production, and capital accumulation: The law of assemblage [legge del montaggio] was fundamental. And since assembled objects belong to the real world, the painting became the neutral feld into which the experience of shock, suffered in the city, was projected. Indeed, the problem now became that of teaching not how one should ‘suffer’ that shock, but how one should absorb it and internalize it as an inevitable condition of existence.17 Montage aids in the production of a conscious public by revealing the artifce of the industrialized world,“shocking” the blasé fâneur into participation in the processes of modernity. This idea can be found in various forms in the work of several twentieth-century thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Clement Greenberg, as well as Tafuri and Bürger. For these theorists, montage had the capacity to place the fragmentary pieces of modernity in dialectical tension, a task also pursued by critical theory itself. Let us review the implied sequence here. The aesthetics of montage creates a rupture between two or more images in juxtaposition, the inability to resolve this combination at the level of shared reality, cultural conventions, or clear intended meaning is experienced as a “shock” by the viewer, this impact raises awareness of the artifce of modernity, and fnally, this awareness politically activates the viewer to behave differently in “one’s conduct of life.”That this chain of linked associa­ tions can occur is accepted, that it must occur is doubtful, for there are several

78 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

contingent variables. First, raising awareness is not always enough to politically motivate a public, as Jacques Rancière states: . . . understanding does not, in and of itself, help to transform intellec­ tual attitudes and situations. The exploited rarely require an explanation of the laws of exploitation. The dominated do not remain in subordination because they misunderstand the existing state of affairs but because they lack confdence in their capacity to transform it.18 Second, as noted by Bürger, the aesthetic effects of shock are impermanent.19 An initial response is bound to diminish when experienced a second or third time and will affect different audiences in different contexts in different ways. Lastly is the question of the seam, literally. The entire chain of associations is based on the presence of a juxtaposition between fragmented images. There must be a gap, an edge, a disjunction in the montage. But what if the physical seam is not visibly present as a material artifact on the surface of the artwork? What if it takes effort on the part of the observer to identify the artifce? What if the fragmentation is conceptual as opposed to material? What if the desires of the artist are exactly to problematize these seams between art and life as opposed to demonstratively expose or seductively conceal them?

The Presence of the Seam The Berlin Dada is where the implications of this new aesthetic paradigm frst became apparent. The montages created during the frst decades of the twentieth century appropriated found photographs and assembled them to spark an alterna­ tive imaging of the world.20 Sharp dialectical juxtapositions positioned images as material fgures jacked into tense often absurd relations with each other at formal, material, conceptual, and semiotic levels. The initial engagement of architectural representation with montage can be seen in the early work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Ivan Leonidov, and Oscar Nitzchke, among others. Embedded within the early twentieth-century avant-garde art movements of Dada and constructiv­ ism, these architects bore their infuence in what historian and curator Martino Stierli describes as their “quest for alternative means for the production of visual knowledge beyond established conventions.”21 One of the questions fundamental to the aesthetics of montage is the presence of the seam in the fnal artwork. The exposure of the seam of construction with sharp disjunctive adjacencies is one of the traits associated with Dada montage, and it is often this expression of the assembly that is aligned with critical theory’s efforts to reveal the artifce of modernity. The visibility of the seam heightens the sense that the montage is an abstract production, that it belongs among the indus­ trial mechanical productions of modernity. If the tectonic of the artwork is laid bare for the viewer to inspect its construction, the viewer is invited to critically

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break apart and analyze the dialectics of juxtaposed images, processing the shock through intellectual contemplation. There is also an ethical implication here: to reveal the seam is to be truthful about artifce; to hide it is dishonest and seductive. From this claim it follows that if the assembly is disguised and its seams concealed, then the artwork will not only be less provocative, less political, and more tradi­ tional, but also suspicious. Borrowing a distinction put forward by Croatian musicologist Viktor Žmegacˇ between “demonstrative (open, irritating) and integrative (disguised) montage,” Stierli writes, While demonstrative montage displays the breaks and ruptures (and makes use of them for the production of meaning), integrative montage seeks to conceal the heterogeneous nature of the image and avoids the dialectical juxtaposition of elements. In the visual arts, demonstrative montage is often employed in order to convey political or polemical messages . . . Whereas Ernst’s disguised collages continued—albeit satirically—the tradition of the organic work of art of the nineteenth century and its illusionistic space, the Dadaists opposed the traditional idea of art with an exposed, openly imper­ fect visual confguration. As Žmegacˇ notes:‘Whereas covert montage does not break open, but rather affrms the idea of the “organic” work of art that is sealed by means of illusion, provoking montage resists the conventions of organological aesthetics.’22 The montages of Max Ernst are used here as examples of a disguised seam, thus organically traditional and not politically radical. Ernst worked through a plethora of collage and montage techniques in the production of his art, which included novel inventions such as frottage, grattage, and decalcomania. Stierli categorizes Ernst’s production as integrative montage because the seam of assembly is often disguised on the surface of the material. The suggestion that this makes the work less provocative or political may be too quick of an assignation however, for I would argue that Ernst’s montages are disjunctive and shocking, in part because the combinations of disparate elements are smoothed into a more naturalistic illu­ sion. The work does indeed create a rupture, but the seam is displaced from the surface of the medium onto a conceptual domain, leading the viewer to question the world conjured by the montage. At one level Ernst’s work is a celebration of immersive illusion, yet at another it implicates its own medium as an absurd media machine of reproduction and deception. It is this questioning of separations and the doubt that is raised regarding what is illusion, what is real, what is artifce, that becomes the aesthetic argument. Ernst’s montages conceal their seams subtly, allowing the fragments to fuse into hybrids and chimeras belonging to a strange, other world momentarily intersect­ ing with the quotidian.23 For his image novel La femme 100 têtes (1929), Ernst mined late nineteenth-century popular journals, drawn to the textural qualities

80 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

of their etchings and engravings (Fig. 3.3). These images thus not only revalue the kitsch artifacts of disposable reproductions, but also use the visual traces of mechanical reproduction as the aesthetic expression of the artwork itself. The objects of a previous era and the nostalgic patina of former media are radically deployed in a collision that hints towards what would now be considered as coun­ terfactual histories or parafctional art.24 The explicit embrace of the technologi­ cal residue of reproduction would prove similarly important for the montages of 1950s pop art. Art which would further investigate the ambiguity between the concealment and revelation of the seams between art and life. The transformation of Dada techniques into pop art, crystalizing initially around the Independent Group in London in the 1950s, refected a shift in political ideology and a deeper engagement with commercial advertising. The photomontages of Eduardo Paolozzi, John McHale, and Richard and Terry Hamilton used Dadaesque dialectical juxtapositions but altered the terms of the social critique.25 Their source material was derived from the bourgeon­ ing advertisement and lifestyle magazine culture of the 1940s and 1950s. Pop montage extracted idealized images of the everyday, especially from the domes­ tic interior and its ever-changing range of commodity accoutrements. Prime examples include Paolozzi’s montages of the late 1940s such as It’s a Psychological

FIG. 3.3

Max Ernst, La Femme 100 têtes (1929) © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

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Fact Pleasure Helps Your Disposition (1948) (Fig. 3.4a), or the now famous mon­ tage, titled Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, created by Richard Hamilton,Terry Hamilton, and John McHale for the Inde­ pendent Group’s 1956 exhibition “This Is Tomorrow.” According to architec­ tural historian Pablo Martinez Capdevila, What makes this home so ‘different and appealing’ is, precisely, everything that is not home: the set of consumer goods ready to meet any need, any desire, in short, the market. A market that, as was felt even then, was beginning to have an unlimited dimension, to occupy everything. While Banham persuaded us that ‘a house is not a home,’ Hamilton, by present­ ing in his collage the commodifcation of all spheres of life including leisure and intimacy, shows us a home that, dissolved in the market, has ceased to be.26 At face value, pop montages such as Paolozzi’s bluntly express the artifciality of their assembly and thus fall on the demonstrative side of the dialectic. Yet the image also coheres a familiar inhabitable environment and has affnities with Max

FIG. 3.4A Eduardo Paolozzi, It’s a Psycholog­ FIG. 3.4B Eduardo Paolozzi,Untitled(1948)

ical Fact Pleasure Helps your Dis­ position (1948) © The Paolozzi Foundation, Licensed by DACS/ ARS 2020

© The Paolozzi Foundation, Licensed by DACS/ARS 2020

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Ernst’s mode of surrealism. The scale of elements, perspectival alignments, color and resolution, and fgural profles are managed to fuctuate between revealed and concealed seams. This tension creates an artwork that sometimes calls attention to the fat surface, the material support, and at other moments presents naturalistic illusions of spatial recession. Pop montage is concerned less with dismantling the modern media machine than it is with redirecting its effects. Media becomes co­ author as the artist intervenes in the constant fow of imagery by selecting, sam­ pling, and recombining. Pop montages thus ficker between abstract contrasts and apparent naturalism, as does any magazine advertisement or television viewing experience. This is its aesthetic argument, the provocation of its exchange. The tensions and frictions embedded in pop montage are as much concerned with the subconscious illusions and allusions of everyday media as they are with proposing an overt conceptual critique. These pop montages were also clearly assemblages built out of the commodities of daily life, when seen through architectural imag­ ing it is entourage that is montaged.

Montage-Entourage The most well-known architectural montages in the frst half of the twentieth century are most likely those of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Although there are important differences in the approaches to these representations over his career, there is a consistency to the stance regarding the seam between entourage and architecture that is maintained from the early Friedrichstrasse towers (1921), through the layered interiors perspectives of the Resor and courtyard houses (1937–45), and even the large interior of the Chicago Conventional Hall (1954). This is a dialectical juxtaposition of abstraction and realism. Often this is manifest by art objects and furniture cut out as full-color photorealistic objects foating in the abstract lines of a drawn architectural environment. Other situations heighten the difference between the architectural proposal and the environment, as seen in the contrast between the traditional urban context and the Friedrichstrasse sky­ scraper, or in the fragment of nature as two-dimensional image montaged as the foor-to-ceiling window wall of the Resor House interior. (A scene from John Huston’s flm Treasure of the Sierra Madre, complete with cowboys.) In these mon­ tages, the juxtapositions of abstraction and realism, artifce and nature, are used to heighten the distinction between architecture and entourage. Martino Stierli interprets the Resor montage as follows: Mies’s drawing not only illustrates the transformation of nature into an object of aesthetic consumption, a landscape, it also includes a defnition of what architecture is. For even though architecture is radically reduced to almost nothing, its existence is nevertheless strongly asserted by the way it is distanced from the space of nature—and from the ‘atrocities’ (to quote Reinhold Martin) of the outside world in general. Both these later

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visualizations, in their relation to nature, and the early Friedrichstrasse proj­ ect, in its relation to the metropolis, seem to assert that modern architecture is that world’s other.27 The sharp, seamed contrasts of Mies’s montages would continue throughout the second half of the twentieth century and are still in practice today, but there was an important shift in the discursive use of montage in the 1960s by a number of architectural practices directly infuenced by the pop montages of the Inde­ pendent Group. Archigram, Hans Hollein, Superstudio, and Archizoom, among others, fundamentally rearranged architectural representation through photomontage. This work has been so thoroughly studied since its emergence that it is unnecessary to rehearse the particulars of these architects’ careers, for what concerns us here are the ways these practices altered the technical, aesthetic, and conceptual relationships between montage and entourage. What I wish to propose is that the innovations of these practices constitute a form of exchange in line with the arguments of Boris Groys. They revalue the “profane” elements of the everyday and devalue the “sacred” disciplinary conven­ tions of architectural representation. If entourage was traditionally added to render­ ings in order to allow the architecture to be understood as the culturally valued artifact, then architectural representations inspired by pop montages shifted value from the architecture itself to the landscapes, objects, and scenarios performed by the entourage. Even though each group of architects addressed their work to different issues and held differing political positions, they each in their own way devalued aspects of traditional architecture while at the same time revaluing the transitory, image-objects of the everyday as important determinants of envi­ ronmental aesthetics. The three issues of entourage, which I identifed earlier— familiarity, scenario, and audience—can be used to frame these transformations. First, to familiarity. In the images created by Archigram, Hans Hollein, Superstudio, and Archizoom, an unstable relationship is proposed between what is and what is not architecture, what is real and what is fctive—a line of valuation the discipline had traditionally sought to maintain. The device of defamiliarization, initially posited by the Russian formalist poet and theorist Viktor Shklovsky, is often mentioned with reference to montage, where language is used as found, appropriated, and combined in ways that radically alter its familiar meanings and sense.28 For Shklovsky this was one of the fundamental tasks of aesthetics, to elon­ gate and intensify attention by making the familiar strange.29 “The new objects are at once things and images of things: the dream car is a car and the projection of a car, the new monument is the image of the monument.”30 This statement launches the trajectory of what would become the architectural collective of Superstudio. The montages produced by Superstudio, such as those for their Continuous Monument project (1969–71) (Fig. 3.5) pitted abstrac­ tion against the photographic image of “the real.” The stark difference between the gridded surfaces and the fragments of photographs extracted from tourist

84 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

Continuous Monument – Empire State Building (1969), image courtesy of the C. Toraldo di Francia collection

FIG. 3.5A Superstudio,

Continuous Monument – Rockefeller Center (1969), image cour­ tesy of the C. Toraldo di Francia collection

FIG. 3.5B Superstudio,

postcards is what encouraged interpretations of these projects as critical commen­ tary for they appear to confront the commodifcation of spectacle with the brutal abstraction of technological artifce. It is important to note, however, that what allowed this friction to occur was not only the sharp difference between the two aesthetic orders but also Superstudio’s intense efforts to situate the gridded intru­ sions within the image so that these volumes of abstraction are perceived to exist in the world, not just on the surface of the representation. “Such composition,” architectural historian Craig Buckley notes, “required a careful and consistent adjustment of the grid to the scale and perspective of each photographic land­ scape. While such photomontages might appear to place an architectural object in a location, the effect was arguably the reverse; the repetition of the grid-monument enabled readers to conceive of entirely distinct landscapes cut from different sources as part of one continuous project.”31 These effects required that the entou­ rage of clouds, sky, and buildings be convincingly refected in the abstract surfaces, a realism rendered on abstract planes. Without the fuctuation between realism and abstraction, the juxtaposition of aesthetics would lack much of its provocative strangeness. The refective grid intervenes to create doubt, to estrange the real, to transform the wasteland of a southwest American desert, the grit of an industrial British streetscape, and the pleasure of a Mediterranean beach into a sequence of objects collected along a continuum. Manhattan becomes entourage. With the early work of Hans Hollein, specifcally his Transformations series of 1964—Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape, Highrise Building, Sparkplug, and Urban

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85

Renewal in Manhattan—the scalar mismatch of the mechanical objects inserted as entourage into expansive landscapes makes them appear as monumental megastruc­ tures. Buckley describes the impact of these montages as tied to the shock effect of defamiliarization through scale.32 Both the context and the inserted object were appropriated as species of ready-mades. These are indeed photographs of an aircraft carrier and a landscape (the title is a literal description), but their positioning in relation to each other transforms both and, in the process, throws into question the familiarity of the image-objects. The scalar indeterminacy and estrangement occur in the viewer’s perception rather than in the assembly of the material. Take a look at the original montage for Aircraft Carrier in a Landscape (Fig. 3.6) alongside the image as reproduced for publication and exhibition (Fig. 3.7). It is an art historical convention to study the original work for the way it bears the material traces and aura of authorial contact. Yet with montage, as a technique of mediation intended for reproduction, the relationship between orig­ inal and reproduction is different, such that it is possible to see the reproduction, the intended artifact, as the “original” and the physical collaged object as process. Aircraft Carrier in a Landscape requires a seamless surface to create its estranged real­ ism. The viewer is to believe it, and to simultaneously doubt this belief. Scenario is the second issue. Entourage in these montages is no longer simply in support the architecture, it becomes equal as generator of the character of the environment. These objects and fgures, machines and screens, create epi­ sodic scenarios, drawing attention to aspects of contemporary society, which are extracted and accelerated. The intensifcation of the mediated event becomes the environment.

Hollein (1934–2014) © Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape. Project. Per­ spective (1964) Unbuilt. Cut-and-pasted reproduction on four-part photograph mounted on board, 8 1/2 × 39 3/8 ins. Philip Johnson Fund. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

FIG. 3.6 Hans

FIG. 3.7

Hans Hollein, Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape (1964),The Museum of Mod­ ern Art, New York, Philipp Johnson Fund, 1967 © Private archive Hollein

86 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

As part of Archigram’s Instant City project (1964–71), Ron Herron’s montageentourage of people, machines, and building-like objects fashion scenarios of ani­ mated commodity exchange (Fig. 3.8). The environment is composed of lines, with color display screens fickering, networking, and electrifying the city. The city is an assemblage of image-objects, transiently mixing to produce lifestyle desires.33 In the space of these montages, the valuation of the commodity and the devaluation of the traditional building is expressed through a fattening of the hierarchy between image and building, architecture and entourage. Consider the screens: they structure the background yet projected onto them is entourage. This means that not only is the environment inhabited by entourage, it is also created by projections of entourage. What is more, the frontality of the graphic text suggests a reading of the montage itself as an image projected onto a screen that we are looking at (not just through). The scenario presented is thus one of total immer­ sion into fuctuating mediation. Archizoom likewise developed scenarios that drew from the traditions of pop montage. In the representations produced for No-Stop City (1968) and its exten­ sion, Residential Parking Lot (1971), the background is radically abstract, blank, and neutral, while the entourage is bizarre, surreal, and kitsch. Environment is rendered as system, as the organizational matrix allowing commodity objects to collect and rearrange themselves as they desire.34 Offering speculations on emancipation

FIG. 3.8

Archigram–Ron Herron, Instant City (1969) © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London

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87

and imprisonment that critiqued the contradictions of modern technological life, Archizoom saw commodity objects as having as much, if not more, impact on the character of human environments as did architecture. To this effect, the blankness, abstraction, and formlessness of the endless horizontal spread of No-Stop City pro­ poses architecture as the playing feld of continual renewal through commodities. The models for the No-Stop City: Interior Landscapes (Fig. 3.9) are assembled scenarios.

FIG. 3.9

Archizoom Associati, No-Stop City: Interior Landscapes (1971) © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

88 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

The combinations of objects—natural and artifcial, interior and exterior, custom and mass-produced, technological and primitive—create an environment through an endless refected montage of multiplied entourage, a scenario in which all that remains is objects and a gridded feld for their distribution. Lastly is the question of audience. These images were not intended for con­ struction, nor were they directed toward potential clients. And nor were they art objects intended for museum collections, though they have often been exhibited and collected. They could be called discursive, yet their arguments are presented outside the coded conventions of traditional architectural representation through the mediations of popular images, advertising, graphic novels, cinematic story­ boards, and flm itself. Nowhere is this clearer than in the use of entourage. Let us look at the “The Distant Mountain” montage from Superstudio’s The Fundamental Acts project (1971) (Fig. 3.10). The Fundamental Acts was a flm project, and the image presented here is a storyboard fragment. In this montage, all that appears altered is the insertion of a new ground, the refective gridded “supersurface” that frames and isolates the cacti and girl jumping rope, transform­ ing the world into a collection of entourage. If “The Distant Mountain” were a montage intended for an art audience—Martha Rosler’s House Beautiful (Bringing

FIG. 3.10

Superstudio, The Fundamental Acts – “The Distant Mountain” – LifeSupersurface (1971) image courtesy of the C. Toraldo di Francia collection

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the War Home) (1968–72), from the same time period, comes to mind—this hypo­ thetical juxtaposition might, in Jacques Rancière’s words, “present itself as that which brings to light the hidden link between two apparently foreign worlds” (a critical disjunction that, in the case of Rosler, allows the viewer to make connections between the atrocities of the Vietnam war and the complicity of suburban American lifestyle).35 If “The Distant Mountain” were created for an architectural audience, on the other hand, the entourage would be in service of the architecture; fgures would give scale, divert attention away from themselves, reinforce the character of the design, and describe its programmatic use. If “The Distant Mountain” were a commercial advertising montage (the source material for both Rosler and Superstudio), the entourage would be used to create desire for the object, for the lifestyle, for travel, for a promised future. The montages of Superstudio are all three—art, architecture, and advertising—a crossing that has become the norm today, given the contemporary dissemination, consumption, and monetization of imagery through social media, and it is a combination that architecture is still not comfortable with. Audience was destabilized by these mediations of montage-entourage. This can be seen in the inability to determine whether these images constitute criti­ cal projects or fantasy spectacles. With Archizoom’s No-Stop City, architecture is reduced to systems of environmental management and then expanded to encom­ pass an entire world as an endless interior landscape. The project has often been interpreted as a critique of modernist homogeneity and technological rationaliza­ tion, and yet the images evoke an aesthetic pleasure, even joy, in shifting attention from environment to object to environment made from objects to no objects at all. This ambiguous stance can be found in the work of all four practices under discussion here. Remarking on the ambiguous criticality of Superstudio’s work, Buckley writes, “Superstudio’s ambitions were critical yet in a mode that was neither one of opposition nor of negation but of deliberate exaggeration and exacerbation.”36 It is not obvious in any of these projects as to whether the audience—that is, the viewer—should take their mediations as literal, as critical, as speculative, as complicit. A productive way to understand these projects is to see them as directed less at a specifc audience than at the possibility of building a different audience through aesthetics’ capacity to “redistribute the sensible,” in the words of Rancière.37 The use of mass media expanded the infuence of architecture outside its traditional representational boundaries, a shift in how architecture conceived its engagement with popular culture. The images produced by Archigram, Hollein, Superstudio, and Archizoom proved hugely infuential and are now culturally valued, exhibited, published, copied, and discussed; they have entered the archives of the institution, also infuencing cinema, furniture and industrial design, videogame environments, graphic design and countless other imagery in popular culture. They were not always treated with such respect, however; in fact, when these projects were frst put forward, they were viewed with suspicion by the institutional establishment

90 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

charged with defending culture from the dangers of seductive images deployed in the service of capital. The images of these architectural collectives were targeted specifcally by Manfredo Tafuri. Carnaby Street and the new utopianism are thus different aspects of one phenomenon. Architectural and supertechnological utopianism; the redis­ covery of the game as a condition for the public’s involvement; the proph­ ecies of ‘aesthetic societies’; invitations to establish the primacy of the imagination: such are the proposals of the new urban ideologies.38

Critical Montage Art is now called upon to give the city a superstructural face. Pop Art, Op Art, analyses of the city’s imageability, and esthetique prospective, all these things converge toward a single objective: that of dissimulating the contradic­ tions of the contemporary city, resolving them in polyvalent images, fgura­ tively glorifying that formal complexity which, when read with the proper parameters, proves to be nothing more than the explosion of the incurable conficts that elude the plans of advanced capitalism. The recuperation of the concept of art is thus useful to this new task of covering up. Just when industrial design assumes the lead in technological production, infuencing its quality for the purpose of increasing consumption, Pop Art, by recycling its residues, places itself at its rear guard. This, however, corresponds pre­ cisely to the twofold demand now made of the technologies of visual com­ munication. An art that refuses to place itself in the vanguard of the cycles of production, demonstrates, well beyond all verbal challenges, that the con­ sumption process extends to infnity, and that even rubbish, when sublimated into useless or nihilistic objects, can assume a new use value, thus reentering, if only by the back door, the cycle of production and consumption.39 This passage from Tafuri’s 1969 essay “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ide­ ology” lays out in no uncertain terms a position regarding aesthetics and the architectural image. The act of critique requires an unveiling to reveal the true underlying forces. The montages of “Carnaby Street” (Archigram) and “new uto­ pianism” (Superstudio, Archizoom), recycled popular culture to conceal and thus become complicit with capitalist ideology. For Tafuri, these representations pro­ vided no critical edge, no revelation of power structures, no shock, no seam, only seduction through images. Tafuri valued montages that were clear in their critique. For him, this was the art of die Neue Sachlichkeit, it was the flms of Sergei Eisenstein, the montages of Mies; these provided the shock of critical awareness.40 The montages of Super­ studio, Archizoom, and Archigram were an aesthetic wash covering up advanced capitalism. The difference between these montages and the earlier Dada work

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could be attributed to the diminishing shock provided by the technique by the late 1960s. It could also be due to the evolution of capitalism appropriating the aesthetics of the avant-garde for its own aims, thus trivializing, and domesticating the “shock.” Or it could simply be that Tafuri was unable to accommodate pop art within the discipline of architecture. These are all possibilities, but there seems to be something else here as well. Architectural montages from the 1960s no longer located the “seam” of the montage in the materiality of the medium, but instead in the concepts that the projects speculated on. The seam for these architects was between reality and rep­ resentation, and it refected the state of modernism in which they were immersed. Tafuri is right to critique them, for there is danger in their ambiguity. These images firt with an inability to distinguish fctive from real, spectacle from critique, commercial from disciplinary architecture. There is also the danger of losing the expertise and power that lies in the management of building through architectural conventions of representation. The images produced by these practices are as infu­ enced by the “profane” realm of flm, television, graphic design, and advertising as the “sacred” realm of plans, sections, and elevations. They are not aimed to facilitate the construction of a building, but to meld into the fow of modern media, prob­ lematically blurring distinctions the discipline tries so hard to defend. We know the outcome. From our contemporary situation in the early twenty­ frst century, the architectural montages of the 1960s and 1970s have become the basis for how a politically engaged architectural project should appear. This is a testament to how these representations succeeded in their “cultural-economic exchange,” redefning the boundaries of what is valued within architectural rep­ resentation. This transformation was not easy, it involved a radical change in theo­ retical discourse around social, technological, and ecological issues; it involved all the complexities of what is meant by post-1968 Europe, and it involved the images, publishing, and projects of Rem Koolhaas/OMA. These stories have been told countless times and they will not be rehashed here. What I would like to address in the remainder of this chapter are a few refections on these debates as they play out within the discourse on digital images. Interestingly, but not completely surprising, the 1960s architectural montage is now considered to be critical. Many contemporary digital montages actively resemble the material effects of cut and assembled photographs, precisely because this work has been discursively processed to enter the archive, and thus provide a model of what “critical” image-making should look like for the discipline. What is devalued today are the smooth, photoreal, digital montages that consume our attention within our electronic screens. Again, it is a question of the seam.

Realism and the Seam All architectural images are now a form of montage assembled through render­ ing engines, Photoshop, and the image database of the internet. These digital

92 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

processes of image construction allow multiple objects to sit together in a seem­ ingly coherent space. Perspectives can be distorted, resolutions resolved, scale adjusted, light-shade-shadow naturalized, color balanced, and seams erased. The seams in twentieth-century montage are the remnants of imperfect media transfer. Photography captured images as chemical reactions to light fxed to paper; physi­ cal objects which were cut, spliced, and combined to produce new confgurations. The material frictions between these actions create seams. In a computer, the transfer between the different functions of mediation are handled automatically and internally. The digital image is no longer an index of luminosity as chemical reaction, but instead a sampling of photon energy. This is typically treated as the font of digital artifciality, but a digital image is simply a montage of discrete lumi­ nous pixels, the seamed artifce concealed in the assembly of every digital image, the appearance known as resolution. The artifcial “naturalizing” of photorealism that digital composites can create is understandably viewed with suspicion. If criticality comes from exposing the artifce that is creating the illusion, what would this look like for digital media­ tion? What would a digital seam look like? Several propositions have been offered: low-resolution compression, abrupt jumps in image qualities, rough cut-outs, scale mismatches, cartoon graphics, exaggerated color palettes, multiple vanishing points, and so on. These are all ways of calling attention to digital artifce, many are also in the aesthetic lineage of pop art. In this there is a kind of recursive nos­ talgia where the digital montage renders “seams” to look like pop art techniques, which in the 1950s were aesthetic intensifcations of kitsch advertising, borrow­ ing techniques from 1920s’ avant-garde photomontage, which were initially con­ ceived of as a rejection of genre conventions in favor of the unaltered reality of a photo fragment selected, extracted, combined. Jesús Vassallo reminds us that, Today, the same digital workspace and associated family of programs is used by photographers, flmmakers, graphic designers, architects, and artists of all disciplines. Such shared workspace enables transfers of technique and content between different disciplines that were previously impossible or at least less fuid.41 All disciplines cut and paste, as does all software. But is it really the material pres­ ence of the seam that should remain the focus of the discussion? Is it not possible that there are other disjunctions, other provocations, other seams? The “seam” that often receives the most intense scrutiny in architecture is con­ ventional and traditional, Beaux-Arts even. This is the question of how the imag­ ing of the architecture relates to that of the entourage. As a generalization, if the entourage is imaged as “photoreal,” then the architecture is rendered more abstract; if the architecture is realistically rendered, then the entourage is abstractly shaded or cut out. There is nothing more suspicious than an image that montages entourage

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93

as seamless with the architecture—a slick kind of fantasy produced to persuade the general public. A clear juxtaposition between entourage and environment, by contrast, signals that the architect intends the image to be seen as advancing a disciplinary project, not a marketing pitch. Take the rendering shown here from Border Crossing (2005) by OFFICE Ker­ sten Geers David Van Severen (Fig. 3.12). The allusion to the architectural mon­ tages of the 1960s and 1970s is clear, especially as fltered through projects such as Koolhaas’s Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture (1972). The Border Cross­ ing montage consists of four distinct image-objects. Two are photoreal (the palm tree tops and the desert/bus/people). Two are abstract (the wall and the fence). The architectural elements hover between drawing and rendering. Linework can be seen at the edges of the wall, with an out-of-scale, low-resolution concrete texture map stretched across its surface. These elements are “the architecture”, the border separating desert from garden. But they also disrupt the realism of the image and thus clearly signify that this is a critical project. There is also a disjunc­ tion between a fat frontal elevation with a rapidly vanishing perspective that does not quite match the lines of diminution suggested by the view. The wall looms large, but its presence serves to draw attention to the people, the bus, the desert, and the palm trees—to the narrative told by the entourage. All these elements

FIG. 3.11

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, Border Crossing (2005), image courtesy of OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen

94 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

combine to create an image that expressly does not want to be read as deceptively real, for if the image were too realistic, it might dilute and confuse its political message. Criticality, in this instance, is telegraphed by a clear dialectical juxtaposi­ tion between graphic elements and photo-naturalism. To emphasize entourage is to elevate human activities and diminish the for­ mal expression of the architectural object. This is also part of the legacy of the architectural montages of the 1960s. Architecture clears a space for the events of social life. Architectural form is suppressed to ensure the legibility of the critique playing out as narrative. Yet if this is the only interpretation, we have a diminished understanding of what was truly “radical” in these montages. When entourage becomes the avatar of political concerns within the utopian realm of the represen­ tational, the distinction between architecture and entourage is comfortably main­ tained. A much more provocative position would be to challenge this distinction entirely, repositioning architecture itself as a species of entourage and fattening the hierarchy that arbitrarily divides the world into these two categories. In many ways, it is rhetorical to claim that this is a position that one may choose, the deci­ sion has already been made. The images of reality as produced, disseminated, and consumed online are all seamless montages of environments created by everything that is not architecture. Importantly, this is not an artifce that is susceptible to the same techniques of revelation as historically practiced, but that does not mean that seams no longer matter.

The Speculative Doubt There are a handful of artists (Philipp Schaerer, Filip Dujardin, Olalekan Jeyifous, Cédric Delsaux, Bas Princen, to name a few) that have been exploring digital image montage as speculations through the aesthetics of realism. When one looks at an image such as Bildbau No. 2 (2007), by Philipp Schaerer, it initially appears to be a photograph of a real building (Fig. 3.13). The profle of the building may seem a little odd, but the image presents itself to the viewer as a view of reality. It is only by tracing a series of curious details that intensify and elongate attention that we recognize it as a digital montage. Schaerer has constructed it from dozens of digital images, using Photoshop to conceal the seams of the assemblage. I would argue, however, that the seam is not actually removed; its conventional operations have simply been displaced and exchanged. In this montage, the seams of artifce shift from the surface of the medium into the reality that the image creates. For instance, material weathering is the result of real materials chemically interacting with the environment. In Bildbau No. 2, weathering is sampled and copied as a repeatable pattern. This is absurd, given that weathering would never repeat itself identically across a material. There are also multiple marks on the building’s surface that seem to be the traces of construction notations, of assembly, of labor. Upon further inspection, these are revealed to be copies of the same image fragment stretched and deformed. Lastly, an entourage of

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Schaerer, Bildbau No 2 (2007) © Philipp Schaerer, image courtesy of the artist

FIG. 3.12 Philipp

tables, trashcans, and lampposts are refected in the windows, yet the objects them­ selves appear nowhere in the foreground. Such logical ruptures make the viewer aware of the artifciality of the assemblage, but only after the viewer has accepted the image as a photographic depiction of a real building. The differences between this image and the “critical” images discussed above is that in Bildbau No. 2 the seam is implied in the reality depicted, rather than broadcast on the surface of the support medium. Jesús Vassallo titled his book Seamless: Digital Collage and Dirty Realism calling attention to this lack of apparent seams in digital image making. Traditional physical collage techniques expose the disparity of the frag­ ments being put together and in doing so call attention to the impossibil­ ity and precariousness of the ensemble. Because the union is impossible, traditional collage becomes a provocation, a disruption of the real. Digital collage on the other hand is seamless, concealing its own traces, and thus

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merging portions of the real into a plausible alternative. While traditional architectural collages operate in a rhetorical mode, the stealthy manipu­ lations involved with digital postprocessing are more ambiguous when it comes to revealing their ultimate intentions.42 The ambiguity of “ultimate intentions” binds the digital montages of Philip Schaerer and others to another aspect derived from the architectural montages of the 1960s and 1970s. Seizing on the ways media constructs and distorts what is seen as real, it opens possibilities for transforming our engagement with the world through aesthetics. The sowing of doubt in the very realism of the fctional image can be considered its critical act. This proposition recalls what Carrie Lambert-Beatty has termed “parafctional” art.43 Rather than displaying the seams of artifce on the material surface of the assemblage, parafctions create frictions, tensions, and problematic gaps, challenging viewers to reconcile the juxtapositions posited by the artwork.44 As Lambert-Beatty writes in her essay “Make Believe”: In this information regime, the challenge is not only to be vigilantly skepti­ cal. As Paul Virilio has said, control operates now not through the censure of true facts, but through the ‘over-information’ surrounding them. In the ocean of data we dip into to resolve both looming decisions and passing inquiries (and of course, to investigate parafctions themselves) the problem may be less how to remember to be skeptical, than how to decide when one has been suffciently so. What is due epistemological diligence? When does one decide that something is—in the epistemologists’ phrase now codi­ fed as Wikipedia’s primary criterion—true enough? It’s this, perhaps, that separates the implications of parafction from stereotypically postmodern assertions of the inaccessibility and relativism of truth or the real. In expe­ riencing most parafction—where the fctional hangs on the factual—one is evaluating not only whether a proposition is fctional, but what parts of it are true . . . Parafctions train us in skepticism and doubt, but also, oddly, in belief.45 What constitutes a seam within a digital image becomes a pressing question as we are constantly inundated with images on devices that never leave us, selling us as composite realities, as datasets rendered by machines for machines. There are several ways we can respond to this condition: we can reject, we can critique, we can engage. If we choose to engage, we will have to accept an aesthetics of doubt and speculate on how architecture can operate in its fuctuations. At one level, this is a question of the relation between architecture and entourage, as an exchange between the sacred and the profane. Architecture can no longer be comfortable with being defned as or defning that which is “other.” If reality is a seamless montage of media, architecture is simply an object entangled in multiple relation­ ships: like cars, clouds, trees, tables, and people.

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Note: Portions of this chapter were initially developed in the essay “The Aesthetic Recycling of Cultural Refuse” published in Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches, ed. by Hélène Frichot and Naomi Stead (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

Notes 1 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (1435), trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956). 2 Basile Baudez, “François Souffot le Romain,” Drawing Matter, June 22, 2019, draw­ ingmatter.org/sets/drawing-week/baudez-françois-souffot-le-romain. 3 David Marshall,“The Problem of the Picturesque,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 414. 4 David Punter, “The Picturesque and the Sublime:Two Worldscapes,” in The Politics of the Picturesque, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 2010), 222. 5 Nathaniel Cortlandt Curtis, Architectural Composition (Cleveland: J. H. Jansen, 1923), 208. 6 Andrew Atwood has developed a fascinating reading of fgures in relation to back­ ground/foreground attention in his book Not Interesting: On the Limits of Criticism in Architecture (Los Angeles:AR+D Press, 2018). 7 Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2012). 8 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, trans. James Dunnett (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 137. 9 Alex T. Anderson,“On the Human Figure in Architectural Representation,” Journal of Architectural Education 55, no. 4 (May 2002): 243. 10 Boris Groys, On the New, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London:Verso, 2014), 139. 11 Groys, On the New, 127. 12 Groys, 83–84. 13 Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 220. 14 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 77. 15 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 80. 16 Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth:Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 59. 17 Manfredo Tafuri,“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” (1969), trans. Stephen Sartarelli, in Architecture Theory since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 17–18. See also Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capi­ talist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976). 18 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 45.

19 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 80.

20 Martino Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation

of Space (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2018), 6–7. 21 Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis, 135. 22 Stierli, 5–7. 23 Max Ernst, La Femme 100 têtes, 1929. 24 Carrie Lambert-Beatty,“Make Believe: Parafction and Plausibility,” October 129 (Sum­ mer 2009).

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25 John-Paul Stonard,“Pop in the Age of Boom: Richard Hamilton’s ‘Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?’” Burlington Magazine 149, no. 1254 (September 2007): 607–620. 26 Pablo Martinez Capdevila,“The Interior City: Infnity and Concavity in the No-Stop City (1970–1971),” Cuadernos de Proyectos Arquitectónicos 4 (March 2013): 132. 27 Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis, 167. 28 Viktor Shklovsky,“Art as Device,” in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (McLean, IL: Kalkay Archive Press, 1991), 3–4. 29 Viktor Shklovsky,“Art as Device,” 6. 30 Superstudio – Adolfo Natalini, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Gian Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris “Superarchitecture II” manifesto poster (1967), translated in Craig Buckley, Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media, and Experimental Architec­ ture in the 1960s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 241–242. 31 Buckley, Graphic Assembly, 263. 32 Buckley, 145. 33 Hadas A. Steiner, Archigram:The Structure of Circulation (New York: Routledge, 2009), 32. 34 Capdevila,“The Interior City,” 131. 35 Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 47. 36 Buckley, Graphic Assembly, 244. 37 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006), 16–19. 38 Tafuri,“Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 30. 39 Tafuri, 29. 40 Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis, 216–219. 41 Jesús Vassallo, Seamless: Digital Collage and Dirty Realism (Zurich: Park Books, 2016), 171. 42 Vassallo, Seamless, 175. 43 Carrie Lambert-Beatty,“Make Believe: Parafction and Plausibility,” October 129 (Sum­ mer 2009). 44 Carrie Lambert-Beatty,“Believing in Parafction,” EP 2, “Design Fiction” (2016). 45 Lambert-Beatty,“Make Believe,” 78.

4 Episodic informality

When asked what made his hardboiled detective novels different than the typical murder mystery, Raymond Chandler offered that his stories focused on particular scenes, rather than plot as a linear narrative. Each scene is complete in its detail and resolved in its descriptions, but the way they connect is of secondary concern, haphazard even.This tension between the informality of the organization and the tightly coherent episode alters the reader’s attention as jumps between scenes cre­ ate unexpected combinations.As Chandler would have it,“The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing.”1 “The detective’s journey,” writes Fredric Jameson, “is episodic because of the fragmentary, atomistic nature of the society he moves through.”2 Jameson identi­ fes several elements in Chandler’s writing that relate to this episodic structure. He continues, “This separation [of society] is projected out onto space itself: no matter how crowded the street in question, the various solitudes never really merge into a collective experience, there is always a distance between them.”3 The compositional strategy of Chandler’s novels refects a world of disconnected objects. People, places, cars, hats, bottles, and cigarette lighters are a loose assem­ blage of things, each complete in itself, combined in an ad hoc, informal man­ ner. Sometimes these combinations result in intensely charged events—murder, for example. Sometimes they are banal, mundane, and accidental—murder, for example.4 This fattened hierarchy of relations between objects is a crucial com­ ponent for the aesthetic effects of realism within Chandler’s writing.5 Jameson locates Chandler’s fction at a specifc moment in the domestication of industrially produced products within Western culture. In the era of stable products . . . to which Chandler’s books belong, there is no longer any feeling of the creative energy embodied in a product: the DOI: 10.4324/9781003149682-7

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latter are simply there, in a permanent industrial background which has come to resemble that of nature itself. Now the author’s task is to make an inventory of these objects, to demonstrate, by the fullness of his cata­ logue, how completely he knows his way around the world of machines and machine products.6 Chandler’s novels operate within the genre of pulp fction, as popular entertain­ ment, treated initially as kitsch.The medium of the serialized magazines, such as The Black Mask, in which they were published was important in structuring their reception and determining their episodic nature.7 This was a modern form of media as commodity, built out of technologies of print reproduction, networks of distribution, and economies of consumption. Each installment of the story had to be interesting and gripping in and of itself, building intensity in each episode regardless of continuity. The opening ffteen minutes of Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948) are a drift through the streets, shops, offces, and apartments of New York City. Each scene is an independent, initially unconnected situation that will later link into a narrative for the flm. Besides the noir effects, there are strong similarities between how Dassin opens The Naked City and how Chandler describes his writing technique of arbitrarily associating descriptive fragments of reality. The Naked City is also the title of the most well-known psychogeographic map produced by the Situationist International in 1957. Guy Debord and Asger Jorn’s fragmenting of Paris into a re-sequenced cut-up is in many ways the urban representational equivalent of the textual and flmic juxtaposition under discussion. As a map, it not only reimages the city as a psychogeography experienced by its authors but also suggests possible rearrangements, alternate future drifts through the city.These operations embrace chance, allowing pieces of the city to be arbitrarily combined through situations outside the control of the architect or planner.This is a city defned and redefned by its inhabitants, by their actions and interactions with the environment as a col­ lection of episodes. As it happens, the flm this map was titled after was itself titled after a book of photographs, and it was a particular kind of photographic book.Weegee’s Naked City (1945) positioned photography as the blunt record of the effects of the city on the human object. These images often depicted crime scenes and murdered bodies—scenes that Raymond Chandler might write about. But to simply label them as crime photos misses the point.This book of images documents the city as a series of fragmented events created by the interactions of objects, placed next to each other, page after page. Some objects are alive, some dead, some strange, some normal, some famous, some not, some tragic, some hilarious, some mechanical, some natural, some imaginary, some real. Yet all are equally objects, informally crossing paths in the life of the street and juxtaposed page next to page in the afterlife of images.

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Entourage as Everything that is not-architecture Human fgures, furniture, plants, and other objects provide visual familiarity for an architectural representation, aiding in the interpretation of the proposed sce­ nario. In the previous chapter, I addressed the relationship of entourage to montage but did not dwell on the organizational attributes of entourage itself, especially as deployed in plans.The addition of entourage to a representation addresses issues of inhabitation, suggests the appropriate character for a specifc program, clarifes relations to site and context; it expands an architectural argument toward potential realities. Mobilized for speculation, entourage introduces aspects and effects outside of the control of the architect, such as the ephemerality of time, the irregular growth of vegetation, the seasons of landscapes. Codifed in the pedagogy of the École des Beaux-Arts, entourage was part of the project rendu—the elaboration of a project through rendering after the initial composition had been resolved, its focus, the area surrounding the building, the vegetation and landscape.8 The goal of entourage was to aid the legibility of the parti, in this, it was purposefully held apart from other rendering conventions such as poché; the entourage was not the architecture. But, at the same time, the entourage of landscape and vegetation was not exactly the opposite of architecture either, as Sylvia Lavin describes the conundrum fac­ ing the representation of trees in eighteenth-century plans: In other words, not cutting a tree to draw it in plan was a way of acknowl­ edging that trees are living beings that change over time, independent of human action, in ways that buildings do not. On the other hand, for archi­ tects seeking to convert architecture into an epistemology through the device of linear dictionaries, change over time was a form of instability to be overcome. The purpose of drawing trees into this architectural domain was not to present their essence as living beings but to deploy them as signs, particularly as signs of knowledge.9 This vacillation in the status of entourage would continue as early twentiethcentury modernism expanded its range of manifestations to include the interior landscapes of fxtures and furniture, domestic objects, plants, animals, and human fgures. In urban scenarios, the machines of transportation and the infrastructure of the street increasingly became part of the representation. To express both an architectural concept and a world outside of architecture, entourage developed an aesthetics that domesticated the natural and relaxed the artifcial. In practice, this meant that entourage became a mixture of abstraction and realism, a response to the question of how to represent the world “not designed” by the architect, yet under the infuence of architecture. Although there are clear differences in how entourage has been visually expressed in plan drawings over the past two centuries, some important qualities have

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remained consistent. Entourage clusters, groups, focks, clumps, piles, assembles, touches, and turns away. Objects can be aligned in accordance with an architec­ tural order, but this alignment is always understood as contingent. Entourage is often organized to appear unorganized—loose and informal, as if emerging from the processes of daily life, not the designs of an architect. It is stylized and carica­ tured, rendered differently from the way the architecture is represented. Entourage is placed—moved and rotated, positioned and collected. These placeholders can be abstract rectangles, irregular silhouettes, cartoon caricatures, or photo images, but all are treated as “blocks,” as objects to distribute. Entourage is typically not designed; it is selected, appropriated, sampled, found—hence its ties to collage and montage as technologically reproduced media. It is all the stuff that is not archi­ tecture, yet integral to the architectural design.

Utensils for the Home Throughout his career, Gio Ponti was as involved in the design of objects, textiles, cars, fxtures, and furniture as he was in the design of architecture. As a result, his plans offer great examples of the dynamics of entourage in relation to architectural organization. The plan shown here is for the Villa Planchart, built in Caracas, Venezuela, and designed 1953–1957 (Fig. 4.1). In design drawings of the interior spaces, the furniture and plant life are developed room by room in relation to programmatic events, to the architecture, and to each other. The furniture clusters and rotates in local groups, responding to the qualities of the spaces they occupy. The entourage is contingent and variable, inherently less stable than the architecture, yet key for interpreting the changing character of the spaces. When areas become more socially formal, the entourage responds; where informality is desired, it loosens up.The drawing is conversational, almost flmic in the sense of a screenplay where scenes of daily life are charged with the interactions of objects. In the Villa Planchart, the architecture and the entou­ rage are developed together, the qualities of the environment emerging from the exchanges between. Yet as much as this may be the case, architecture and entourage are still distinct both conceptually and representationally, a difference expressed through line weight, line quality, and notations. Plant life is rendered as a loose squiggled line, clearly not the actual shape of the vegetation, and also clearly not the architecture. Architecture and entourage are developed together in Ponti’s plan, but there are other examples where the relations become even more entangled, where qualities of entourage are used to challenge the organization of architec­ ture itself and in the process question the rigidity of the division between the two. Consider the relations between entourage and architecture in the Moriyama House designed by Ryue Nishizawa (2005). Three versions of the plan of the house are shown here (Fig. 4.2a, b, and c): in the center is the architect’s origi­ nal drawing; in the version on the left I have removed the entourage, and on the

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Ponti and Antonio Fornaroli, Villa Planchart – Piano terreno. Blueprint (blue line and superposed sketch paper piece with design alternative for bath­ rooms, ground foor and library), (September 8, 1953), Album de la Variante Negra, Plans and Drawings, Archivo Gio Ponti Caracas, Fundacion Anala y Armando Planchart, Caracas,Venezuela.

fig. 4.1 Gio

right the “architecture” has been removed. The Moriyama plan blurs distinc­ tions between privacy and community, the urban and the domestic, the natural object and the furniture object. The architecture and the plants and the chairs and the shoes are not different in kind, they are all objects at slightly different scales that interact with each other in variable ways. Without the entourage, the plan of the Moriyama House becomes a collection of generic, displaced blocks that could, notwithstanding the scale, be mistaken for an arrangement of tables and chairs. The plan without the room enclosures, meanwhile, appears as an even scattering of graphic symbols representing a variety of products. Both altered plans lack the spatial tension evident in Nishizawa’s original plan. The

fig. 4.2

(B)

(c)

(b - center) Ryue Nishizawa, Moriyama House (2002–2005), image courtesy of Offce of Ryue Nishizawa. (a - left) No Entourage vs. (c - right) No Architecture, removals by author

(a)

104 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

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conceptual signifcance of the project is legible only when the two are brought together as an exchange between enclosure and activity. Before proceeding it should be said that the division of architecture from entourage refects a Western cultural bias, for in the Moriyama House, plants and furniture are no less intrinsic to the architectural design than the thin walls that create the enclosure.Architect and theorist Olivier Meystre explains that, in Japan, the distinctions between architecture, furniture, and everyday objects has never existed in this way. The concept of furnishings is tradi­ tionally much broader than it is in the West. In Japanese, the word that best translates ‘furniture’ is kagu. It literally means ‘utensils for the home’ and is used to designate all domestic furnishings in the broadest sense.10 As Meystre points out, the representation of objects in Japanese architecture refects a non-hierarchical approach in which furniture and plants are understood as architectural elements that can be used to alter the design.11 This also relates to the way small articles of inhabitation are equally included in the representation— note, for instance, the shoes drawn near the entry doors.The overall impact of the presence of these objects in the plan is to convey a sensibility of equality between all objects of inhabitation, a feeling that echoes the idea of the project.12 Describing what she calls the “New Naïve” in contemporary architecture, architectural critic Milica Topalovic writes, A plan is a ‘horizontal world’, composed fact-by-fact, with careful atten­ tion. An apparent intellectual structure organizing the plan, such as uni­ versality or hierarchy, is withheld in favour of less controllable principles, such as juxtaposition, simultaneity and proximity.The rhetoric of the plan avoids the usual syntax; the plan doesn’t say much about the program. Space is conceived as ‘organic,’ elastic. Sometimes it is compressed to the utmost, into a kind of a cellular structure, and at other times structure is irregular and open: things can just happen amidst the forest of trees and columns. In this procedure, naivety and the nature metaphor go hand in hand. The effort to conceal the presence of design intelligence here—to ‘look undesigned’—serves as a promise of an architecture based on the natural order.13 To illustrate this tendency,Topalovic cites House Before House, designed by Sou Fujimoto (2007), but the description could equally apply to projects by SANAA, Ryue Nishizawa, or Junya Ishigami. Meystre and Topalovic both see this as an aes­ thetic movement that begins with representation, not with theoretical discourse. They identify similar attributes: childlike illustration, entwined incorporation of natural things, respect for the objects of everyday life, and avoidance of hierar­ chical confgurations.14 In Topalovic’s description of a “‘horizontal world’ that is

106 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

fig. 4.3B

fig. 4.3a

MOS, School No. 1 (2015), image courtesy of MOS Architects

MOS, Housing Laboratory (2016), image courtesy of MOS Architects

composed fact-by-fact,” through juxtaposition and proximity rather than through universal ordering systems, we fnd the idea that architecture itself can be object like, informally linked episode by episode. In these projects, the characteristics of entourage are used to challenge the extremely problematic division of the world into the binary categories of buildings on one side, and trees, tables, pigs, airplanes, clouds, food processors, fedoras, and detectives, on the other.15 Figure 4.3 a and b shows two plans by the New York-based architectural prac­ tice MOS. One is for an experimental housing laboratory in Mexico, the other for a school in Denmark.The two projects are in reality very different scales, yet here they are represented in a way that allows them to be put next to each other. Architecture’s traditional notational conventions have been jettisoned in these plans. First, there is only one line weight and two line types for all elements. Sec­ ond, there is no change in the level of detail described in differently scaled draw­ ings.Third, no thickness is given to indicate enclosure, nor indication of doors or windows. Fourth, the only elements rendered are walls and furniture, and these are shown as complete equivalents. These representations could be described as

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diagrammatic, but this is not their most important quality. Dora Epstein Jones identifes a quality she terms,“Quilting”: ‘Quilting’ is an invented term to refer to a quality in the drawing technique itself. Quilting describes the cartoon quality that is produced through the even use of line weights. Each piece, regardless of mode of existence – wall, chair, person – is outlined with the same line thickness.16 In these plans, abstraction is used rhetorically, to emphasize the similarity between the ordering of the architecture and the ordering of the entourage. The hous­ ing project shows a collection of independent pavilion-like buildings, a miniurbanism scattered informally like disrupted chairs. The school building consists of three, loosely placed bars that have an affnity in proportion and rotation to the tables and desks dispersed throughout the interior. Plans rendered in this manner fatten furniture, architecture, and urbanism into an equivalency.This is more than simply a rendering style however, this is also an architecture loosely organized as objects behaving like entourage, its implications extend to the organization of the architecture as elements informally distributed in plan.

the scattered plan A loose, local informality between buildings, as opposed to a structured, generalized system has become a common strategy in contemporary architectural design.These organizations of independent, stable objects situated in a “non-compositional” man­ ner suggest that their layout is temporary and contingent, open to rearrangement and recombination, responsive in a subtle, sensitive, natural manner to each other and their surrounds. There are several ways to describe these “scattered plans,” but the basic phe­ nomenon consists of multiple, similarly sized objects clustering together as a loose assemblage without a dominant formal hierarchy (Figs. 4.4–4.9). The practices that have engaged in this mode of organization range from some of the most infuential living architects in the world (Offce for Metropolitan Architecture, Herzog & de Meuron, SANAA) to established practices (Ruye Nishizawa, BIG, Sou Fujimoto, Mansilla + Tuñón) to younger studios (MOS,Young Projects, Jun Igarashi).The scattered plan could easily be called something else: “the a-formal plan,” “the non-compositional plan,” “the aggregate plan,” “the dispersed plan,” “the nonchalant plan,” “the tumbled object plan,” “the unplanned plan,” and so on. Explicit in this list of alternative labels, however, is that they are all plans. But this is not planning in the traditional sense, for these are not plan drawings con­ structed from an underlying compositional order. In the terms of the École des Beaux-Arts, the projects exhibit no parti diagram.Yet there is nevertheless some­ thing that binds them together—they are not random.

108 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

+ Tuñón, Museo de la Vega Baja de Toledo (2010), image courtesy of Emilio Tuñón

fig. 4.4 Mansilla

The use of these scattered organizations has been increasing during the frst decades of the twenty-frst century, but this is not the frst time aspects raised by these plans has been observed. In discussing Alison and Peter Smithson’s project for the extension of Sheffeld University, Reyner Banham would use the term “a-formal” to describe the plan’s organization.As Jacques Lucan elucidates, This was not, however, to say that the university project’s composition was in any way accidental or lacking in precise intentions, but that it was ‘based not on the elementary rule-and-compass geometry which underlies most architectural compositions, so much as an intuitive sense of topology.’17 Topology is often equated with the geometry of formal deformations, but funda­ mentally it is concerned with sequence and continuity, not the form of the build­ ing. Elsewhere in The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? (1966) Banham would link

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fig. 4.5

Sou Fujimoto, Residential Treatment Center for Emotionally Disturbed Children (2007), image courtesy of Sou Fujimoto Architects

fig. 4.6

Ruye Nishizawa, Tomihiro Museum (2002), image courtesy of Offce of Ryue Nishizawa

110 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

fig. 4.7

Herzog & de Meuron, Parrish Art Museum – First Scheme (2010), 277_ DR_0701_006_DD04 © Herzog & de Meuron

fig. 4.8

Young Projects, Six Square House Plan (2020), image courtesy of Bryan Young

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Igarashi Architects, House O (2009), image courtesy of Jun Igarashi Architects

fig. 4.9 Jun

this “a-formal” organization to both developments in modern art and aspects of nomadic settlements.18 As Banham states, this was, an architecture whose concepts of order were as far removed from those of ‘architectural composition’ as those of Pollock were removed from the rou­ tines of painterly composition (i.e. balance, congruence or contrast of forms within a dominant rectangular format . . .); an architecture as uninhibited in its response to the nature of materials ‘as found’, as were the composers of ‘musique concrète’ in their response to natural sounds ‘as recorded’.19 Another related concept is that of “group-form,” as theorized by Fumihiko Maki in the 1964 essay “Collective Form: Three Paradigms.”20 Group-form was described as a sequential approach to organization with distinct individual ele­ ments linked, not through formal composition or along a skeletal spine as in a mega-form building, but instead grouped looser, more informally.

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Forms in group-form have their own built-in link, whether expressed or latent, so that they may grow in a system . . .The element and the growth pattern are reciprocal – both in design and operation.The element suggests a manner of growth, and that, in turn, demands further development of the elements, in a kind of feedback process.21 The precedents Maki references are “medieval cities in Europe, towns in Greek islands, villages in Northern Africa” and traditional Japanese villages.22 Impor­ tantly, he also suggests a political implication that we will return to shortly, “It is worth noting that generally group-form evolves from the people of a society, rather than from their powerful leadership.”23 The scattered plans from the frst decades of the twenty-frst century show similarities to Banham’s “a-formal” category, and they also jettison the idea of a single binding mass in favor of discrete objects placed independently of one another, similar to Maki’s “group-form.” Since each volume is separate, each can be unique in size, shape, orientation and thus able to respond to site and program­ matic concerns in a more fnely tuned manner. Yet, as mentioned above, these plans typically arrange elements of similar shapes and sizes, often fairly generic squares or rectangles. What ends up attracting attention is how the sequence of rooms are distributed. Two types of circulation predominate: either one moves from room to room to room, as if through an enflade at the corners as opposed to a linear alignment, or one passes through an interstitial link, continually exiting and entering rooms held loosely together as a kind of village. In these scattered plans, meaning is derived not from overarching systems of order or an authorial signature of formal expression but from the unpredictable juxtapositions of local adjacencies encountered episode by episode. As we have seen with the Smithsons and Maki, there is a longstanding desire among many architects throughout the twentieth century to develop an architec­ ture that could engage a multiplicity of contextual conditions, be they social or environmental, with greater fexibility. One important, more recent development comes from the architect and educator Stan Allen. In describing his Mirabor Museum of Contemporary Art competition entry, he claims they were “thinking of a line of work that is more informal, working with a scattered disposition of blocks in plan.”24 This open and indeterminate mode of spatial organization Allen termed “feld conditions” (Fig. 4.10).25 To generalize, a feld condition would be any formal or spatial matrix capa­ ble of unifying diverse elements while respecting the identity of each. Field confgurations are loosely bounded aggregates characterized by porosity and local interconnectivity . . . Fields work neither through regulating grids nor conventional relationships of axiality, symmetry, or hierarchy.The rules of combination have less to do with the arrangement of distinct and identi­ fable elements, as with the serial aggregation of a large number of relatively small, more-or-less similar parts.26

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This is an architecture created through the relations of small discrete objects clustering into larger aggregations.Allen found similarities between these orga­ nizations and the postminimalism sculpture of artists like Barry Le Va, where control was displaced “as series of intricate local rules for combination, or as a ‘sequence of events,’ but not as an overall formal confguration.”27 Toward the end of the twentieth century these projects of loose distributions would also be associated with notions of complexity, computation, and emergence. There was a sense that by paying more attention to the local interrelationships than the overall fgural form, these organizations would be more sensitive to social and ecological contexts, they would operate bottom-up as opposed to being imposed top-down. Can an informally distributed collection of architectural objects critically dis­ mantle the power structures that operate through hierarchies of rational organi­ zation? No, it cannot, and I want to be clear: I am proposing this as neither the goal nor outcome of these architectures. In describing his “feld conditions” Stan Allen reminds the reader of Michel Foucault’s famous statement that “while there are constraining architectures, there are no specifcally ‘liberating’ architectures as such.”28 Yet insofar as the rationalization of planning is a form of control, it is tied to cultural biases that can be challenged.The dream of a bottom-up, ad hoc, informal organization that can resist or offer alternatives to traditional power structures has crossed through a range of disciplines—from social activism and

fig. 4.10

Stan Allen Architect, School Cluster Assemblies (2010), image courtesy of Stan Allen Architects

114 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

ecology to economic modeling and artifcial intelligence.Within what I am call­ ing the scattered plan, hierarchical formal organizations are exchanged for local relations between discrete parts. When this creates variations and surprise, it can redirect attention to the relations between buildings, contexts, and the social life around it. Moreover, in downplaying fgural expression and accepting objects as given, as found, design is shifted away from concerns of authorial originality into questions of how to aggregate, recombine, mash-up. Architecture typically spends a great deal of effort on the creation of a uni­ tary massing, a coherent clear enclosure, and a logical system of hierarchical subdivisions. By creating the appearance of a stable and ordered environment, architecture assumes permanence, providing a sense of comfort and security for people, property, and values. But what is it exactly that is being protected? And from what or whom? These questions raise serious problems in divisions of nature versus culture, access versus exclusion, us versus them.To propose that this arrangement is not stable, not permanent, only loosely assembled by spe­ cifc institutions at various times with particular biases, is to question the idea of architecture as the preservation and presentation of privileged values. It is to embrace precarity and the fragility of any assemblage, be it material or social. This is in every way a political project, for the conventions of planning in archi­ tecture are intimately tied to the management of capital as an abstraction of land ownership, of property.The scattered plans under discussion here cannot remove the power structures of planning, but they do offer an aesthetic alternative that calls attention to the local episodic relations between objects and environments, and this redistribution is an important aspect underlying the allure of these organizations.

loose affliations There are a handful of examples of precedents that should be discussed for both their similarities and differences to the scattered plan. These are: Louis Kahn’s Dominican Motherhouse (1968) and James Stirling’s Wissenschaftszentrum (1987) (Fig. 4.11a and b), Frank Gehry’s Winton Guest House (1987) and John Hejduk’s Victims (1984) (Fig. 4.12a and b). As similar as these four appear—the corner connections, the variable rotations, the scattered distinct elements—there is a signifcant difference between the two pairs. Both Kahn and Stirling are directly attacking Beaux-Arts conventions of plan organization (Fig. 4.11a and b).The composition of Kahn’s Dominican Moth­ erhouse consists of a repeated stable element—in this case, a square—that is rotated to one of three alignments to create circulatory links at the corners.This plan can sustain a formal analysis, and this analysis is where the attack on classical planning conventions is revealed.What appears at frst glance an arbitrary jumble is in fact a carefully calculated rotation to three different alignments. Similarly, Stirling’s Wissenschaftszentrum rotates a set of identifable historical plan types, appearing to

Episodic Informality

I. Kahn, The Dominican Motherhouse of St. Catherine de Ricci, Schematic Design (August 1968), Louis I. Kahn Collection, The University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsyl­ vania Historical and Museum Commission

fig. 4.11a Louis

fig. 4.11B James

Stirling, Michael Wilford, and Associates, Plan for Wissen­ schaftszentrum, Berlin, Germany (between 1979 and 1987), ink and graphite on paper, 20.9 × 29.8 cm, AP140.S2.SS1. D57.P6.20, James Stirling/ Michael Wilford fonds, Cana­ dian Centre for Architecture

Hejduk, Site Plan for Vic­ tims (1984), pen and black ink on paper, 98.5 × 137 cm, DR1998:0109:003:017, and pen and black ink on paper,98.5 × 137 cm, DR1998:0109:003:018, John Hejduk fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture

fig. 4.12B John

Partners, LLP, Winton Guest House (1984–87) © Frank O. Gehry. Getty Research Institute, Los Ange­ les (2017.M.66), Frank Gehry Papers

fig. 4.12a Gehry

115

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deny any dominant order. Axis, alignment, and symmetry are traditionally used to establish frontality, organize circulation, and indicate the relations between pri­ mary and secondary elements. The Wissenschaftszentrum plan establishes objects with strong axes, then shifts and rotates each such that the only apparent logic is that they touch at the corners. In effect, both projects challenge Beaux-Arts plan­ ning by directly engaging and tweaking its conventions. Gehry’s and Hejduk’s projects operate in a different manner (Fig. 4.12a and b). Their plans are more object-like in their relations, with affnities closer to midtwentieth-century art practices than to Beaux-Arts planning. No traditional for­ mal analysis will reveal anything about these two plans. Gehry’s Winton Guest House is composed of differently shaped volumes, each unifed in itself by a mate­ rial articulation, that pinwheel around a central mass joined at the corners. It is an architecture assembled from independent objects developed through physical models and as such emphasizes how each element meets in a loose awkward adja­ cency. This gives the overall arrangement a playfulness yet also a precariousness suggesting alternate future distributions, a quality attested to by the fact that the Winton Guest House has now been moved twice. John Hejduk’s Victims plan consists of a collection of pavilion objects tenu­ ously touching each other at their corners.The loose aggregation of these objects is placed against a grid of evergreen saplings on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Some of these entities are abstract poetic creations, while others are appropriated vernacular structures from fairs and park environments. Anthony Vidler refers to these character-like objects as “vagabonds,” which he describes both as “unruly, without order” and as “an inherent critique of social and legal norms.”29 He continues, In thus identifying himself with the tradition of vagabondage, Hejduk seems self-consciously to activate all its potentially critical roles, roles that derive from the confrontation of a fxed context with an unfxed and rov­ ing subject. For, like the vagabonds they emulate, Hejduk’s constructions literally construct ‘situations’ from the part-random, part-preconceived intersection of objects and subjects, insistent provocateurs of the urban unconscious.30 These local, object-to-object situations devalue conventional organizational prin­ ciples of alignment, axis, symmetry, and hierarchy that are typically used to imbue memorial sites with signifcance and solemnity.The placements and potential dis­ placements of each entity in relation to the weight of the site’s dark past subjects historical power to a play of ephemerality, moment by moment, episode by epi­ sode.As Hejduk describes it, The site plan . . . is one possibility for the total completion.The arrangement of the structures is only a suggestion. The concept of another structural

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ordering is open. A parameter to be considered is that each named struc­ ture can be connected at three points (points of tangent); a sort of pointal­ connective tissue foating within a nature-grid.31 In this exchange, it is “nature” that is the ordered background, while the entouragelike pavilions enter into fragile, momentary relations.The notion of exchange is used here in economic terms as a transfer of value. An architectural plan is typi­ cally rendered to emphasize stability, contrasting with entourage which renders the ephemeral and temporary. In the Victims project, an unstable balance is created between the natural world as a grid of saplings and architecture as an informal cluster of small buildings.The suggestion is that of course the trees will grow and outlive the pavilions, which are tenuous in their rearrangements. This could be described as innovation through a “cultural-economic exchange”, as theorized by Boris Groys.32 This exchange takes place between the profane realm and valorized cultural memory, which comprises the sum of cultural values preserved in museums, libraries, and other archives, as well as habits, rituals, and traditions govern­ ing their utilization. One result of every innovation is that certain things in the profane realm are valorized and enter the cultural archive, while certain cultural works are devalorized and enter the profane realm.33 How can architecture respond to a site where Western cultural values tortured and murdered a population, if not proclaim its profanity? Groys’ idea of innovation through exchange was introduced in the previous chapter to discuss how the kitsch value of the commodity was revalued through a montage-entourage.And, indeed there is a montage quality to the Victims plan, but the exchange that occurs here is less concerned with popular commodity culture than with how everyday ordinary structures and the processes of time manifest in an ephemeral entanglement between natural and cultural artifacts, in a way, it is an ecological exchange. There is also an important aspect regarding the technology of mediation. Consider two versions of the Victims site plan (Fig. 4.13a and b). One is a rub­ bing, the other a drawing. One is a transfer, the other a tracing. The plan is composed through independent moveable elements, “reprographic copies,” transfer-rubbed and then traced to become the fnal rendering as line work. No one could sit down and draw this composition. It requires the sampled object to be placed and then adjusted as new objects come onto the feld. Design proceeds locally and episodically through trial and error. Hejduk creates something inno­ vative and remarkable in this arrangement, but its value does not derive from the hand of the artist. Nor is it in the sophistication of a formal composition that would be congenial to traditions of close reading. A formal analysis of this plan would only reveal the latent geometries of each object, which all possess

118 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

Hejduk, Partial Site Plan for Victims (1984), reprographic copies mounted on translucent paper, 92 × 145 cm, DR1998:0109:003:019, John Hejduk fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture

fig. 4.13a John

fig. 4.13B

John Hejduk, Partial Site Plan for Victims (1984), pen and black ink on paper, 98.5 × 137 cm, DR1998:0109:003:017, John Hejduk fonds, Cana­ dian Centre for Architecture

at least one axis of symmetry, but there is no underlying system of grids, axes, hierarchies, or alignments regulating the feld.What underlies this composition is an aggregation of objects all given equal importance, tenuously linked together for a moment. In this project, architecture operates as entourage, challenging and altering the conceptual relation to context and inhabitation, whether historical, social, or spatial. It is also a challenge to planning as an act of ordering through the logic of geometric division. This plan is assembled through technologies of reproduction, such that the elements are akin to blocks that can be placed, rotated, aggregated, clustered, copied, mirrored, and importantly, redistributed into multiple possible futures.

Blunt media A few years into a program, begun in 1965, to construct one million housing units in Sweden in ten years, the Institutionen för Byggnadsfunktionslära (Institute for Building Function Analysis) undertook to study how the standardized apart­ ment layouts were occupied by furniture.34 The goal was to document not only

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the location of objects within the domestic interior but also how people reor­ ganized their furniture over time, thereby altering their inhabitation of the space (Fig. 4.14a and b). The studies produced two types of representations. In both, generic abstraction is used to document displacements while disregarding the character of the individual furnishings.The frst renders all furniture as rectangular outlines, allowing the frequency of movements to become visible in the density of overlapping lines (Fig. 4.14a). In this set, no internal wall partitions are drawn. The second superimposes these positions as recorded in different apartments of the same type, revealing patterns of open space through the registration of solid fgures (Fig. 4.14b). In both, all domestic objects are fattened into an abstract diagram, which is not authored but found, the result of rotations, overlaps, and coagulations of furnishings over years of inhabitation. Although these representations were drawn by hand, they are nevertheless a kind of mechanical index, not a suggestive interpretation. While the archi­ tecture is drawn using the conventions of architectural plans and can be inter­ preted as such, the furniture is not. The furniture, the entourage, appears as a record of the movement of objects. Like sound recordings or digital scans, the traces attempt to capture information without pre-judging what is mean­ ingful and what is noise, and thus may have more in common with these media technologies than with traditional architectural drawing. Yet through

fig. 4.14a and B Institutionen

för Byggnadsfunktionslära, Furniture layout analysis (1968), Chalmers research group Byggnadsfunktionslära, Bertil Ols­ son and Rolf Nilsson

120 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

the superimposition onto the architectural plan, the traces of multiple move­ ments of multiple objects in multiple apartments over multiple years can be read as poché, architectural mass created here through the ephemeral displace­ ments of entourage. Although still distinct, these mediations allow architecture and entourage to exchange privilege, as the placement of furniture takes on the importance of the stability of walls. The same year of this study, two thousand kilometers south, a different set of plans were being assembled. In No-Stop City (1968–74), Archizoom uses the plan as a device for presenting the homogeneity of modernist organization as an abstract machine for reproduction. Like the documents produced by the Insti­ tutionen för Byggnadsfunktionslära, these images are not drawn in a traditional manner.They are assemblages of marks and objects distributed across a horizon­ tal feld. The idea of a plan as an assemblage of other plans can be found in the New Babylon collages by Constant Nieuwenhuys (1959–74), and the Situationist maps by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn (1956–58).These are also “plans,” built from clipped fragments of larger wholes—meditations on the world as reproduction, mediated through technologies of reproduction. In the No-Stop City plans, entou­ rage objects inscribe the variable qualities of inhabitation. The overall effect of these images is one of a loose, casual, ever-changing arrangement within a system of rational order, famously mechanized through the marks of the typewriter, such that “the dots and X’s represent the architecture of the city. Or better yet, they represent the basic condition required for a city to exist: the minimum infra­ structure for living, according to which the city reproduces itself.”35 Architecture is reduced to a gridded control system that, through its rationalized, uninfected spatial order, manages the undetermined possibilities that occupation brings with it. In the passage quoted here, Pier Vittorio Aureli is interested in the “nonfgura­ tive” systematic grid as a mechanism of order; for him, the entourage consists of “helpless arbitrary elements.”36 There are similarities between Aureli’s argument and the “typical plan” as described by Rem Koolhaas in S, M, L, XL. For Koolhaas, the abstraction of the typical offce grid allows the accumulation of furniture to be positioned and changed at will for proft: “Typical Plan is to the offce population what graph paper is to a mathematical curve. Its neutrality records performance, event, fow, change, accumulation, deduction, disappearance, mutation, fuctuation, failure, oscillation, deformation. Typical Plan is relentlessly enabling, ennobling back­ ground.”37 Both Aureli and Koolhaas are interested in the generic structure engen­ dered by the repetition of a homogenous plan. While for Aureli it is the formal and conceptual dialectic that matters, for Koolhaas, it is the insanity of variation available through the typical plan, which when stacked becomes the operating system for the modern metropolis. The city understood as a storage system for the ever-increasing accumulation of objects, of images, of wealth. In both cases, planning becomes the economic management of commodity accumulation, cat­ egorization, exchangeability, and replacement.

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fig. 4.15 Archizoom, No-Stop City (1968–74), Furniture Layout © 2020 Artists Rights

Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

Let us return to No-Stop City to examine a particular image (Fig. 4.15). This plan can be read in three ways: as twelve versions of a single space with different furniture layouts, as a single gridded space for collective inhabitation of variable intensities, or as a series of flm clips recording the delivery, extraction, and rear­ rangement of domestic objects. The fact that the plan can be read variously is part of its argument, and it uses the informal displacement of entourage against the grid to activate the spatial dynamic.To create the possibility of these different interpretations, the elements in plan are not drawn but instead cut out, sampled, moved, and imaged again. As an assembly of reproduced fragments for reproduc­ tion, the image pushes against the traditional conventions of plan representations. As described by Archizoom,“The house could then become a kind of ‘furnished parking lot’ to the extent that it would be free of all topographical prefgurations and spatial installations of today’s house in order to leave room for the spontane­ ous, uncontrolled fguration of the environment.”38

122 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

No-Stop City is a project in modern media.These plans collate different object distributions on layers of acetate, like cartoon animation gels. The grid is the sta­ ble background animated by the performances of furniture. This would seem to reify the traditional hierarchy between architecture as control and everything else as ephemeral non-architecture, and it is true that the division between the two is made very clear by the representations. But similar to the Institutionen för Byg­ gnadsfunktionslära diagrams, there is an exchange proposed through the mediations of No-Stop City where the entourage becomes the carrier of interest, excitement, and the character of the environment, against the abstract, homogeneous neutrality of the grid.This is an exchange of value where the kitsch detritus of culture as com­ modity and media becomes more valuable than the traditional culture of architec­ ture.The image-objects of modern media run through all the various mediations of No-Stop City. Physical model dioramas accumulate piles of commodities endlessly refected between mirrors. Childlike surrealist perspectives of machines, plants, beds, and busts ignore each other in generic interiors. And there are these storyboard plan sequences of furniture collaged, copied, and collaged again.There is a joy and irreverence in this, but also a menacing intensifcation of abstract systems of control. To focus on only one side is both to misunderstand the project and to overlook its challenge to traditional conventions—a challenge to the production and interpreta­ tion of architectural images that is still alive ffty years later.

sample and sequence Brewing in the background of this argument is an attempt to understand how technologies of mediation are entwined with conventions of representation.The École des Beaux-Arts allowed a greater freedom for the rendering of entourage than the more tightly regulated expressions of architectural elements.Where the architectural plan and its poché were tied to compositional logics in the ordering of the parti, the rendering of entourage could use various imaging styles from year to year, atelier to atelier.The only fear was that the entourage would merge too closely with the poché, obscuring the clarity of the plan organization.This would result in a rendering where, “the plans were melting into an often vaporous treatment of the surroundings of the actual building,”39 Architecture and entourage were to be kept separate and not equal. With the advent of photography and modern technologies of reproduction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elements from these sources became appropriated as entourage. Fragments of nature, cities, furnishings, and fgures were cut out, inserted, and arranged in relation to each other and to the architectural background; entourage was represented through exchangeable, replaceable, distributed images. Importantly, it remained aesthetically separate from the architecture which was typically rendered through drawing. The aes­ thetics of drawing made sensible disciplinary valued design labor. The aesthetics of photography, especially the reproduced image, on the other hand belonged to the extra-cultural profane realm of reality, thus perfect for entourage.

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The image fragment with its ties to technologies of reproduction plays a key role in twentieth-century art and media. Artwork of the past century has increasingly been infuenced by media created through the sampling of the environment, extracted and assembled into new expressions. Many of the effects of these techniques have come to defne contemporary cultural expressions in every media imaginable; cinema, sound and music production, videogame design, graphic design, even text.40 Xerographic assemblies and re-assemblies were also crucial for both the aesthetics of the architectural montages created in the 1960s and 1970s and for the mode of reproduction and dissemination through “little magazines.”41 Furthermore, they are also fundamental for how digital design software operates.All graphic interfaces present visual information as something that can be cut, scaled, fipped, rotated, copied, and layered. The creation of an architectural representation within this media, a plan for instance, is less a matter of drawing lines on paper than of processing and arranging image samples as discrete objects. Digital mediations, be they modeling software or graphic-layout programs (a difference that is rapidly becoming irrelevant), are also information-management systems. Digital images become accumulated information-objects. Furthermore, no digital media operates offine. All design software is integrally connected to the internet as a reservoir for source material. The images architects create, including plan drawings, consist of a sampled recycling of cultural refuse, images next to images, things next to things, objects next to objects. In the case of BIM the “objectness” of architectural elements is clear, but it should be noted that all digital media allow one to zoom, pan, rotate, cut, and paste any element as if it was an object in an assemblage. The ways these speculations operate once released into the world has a great deal to do with how these images as objects are revalued into new aggregations, a design action formally known as planning. There are those who when hearing this will lament or celebrate the loss of the plan as an architectural design drawing. But, if the conversation thus far tells us anything, it is that the convention of the architectural plan will remain, only it will be produced to operate in alternate registers. The fact that architectural design software treats the assembly of plans as an arrangement of “blocks,” be they defned by a manufacturer or appropriated from the internet, has as much to do with the discipline of architecture domesticating the software as it does with the “cut & paste” revolutions of technological reproducibility.The architectural plan is a disciplinary representation, how the discipline conceptually processes these transformations is the critical question.

the mismanagement of objects A continual aggregation of images and information is not dissimilar to the accu­ mulation of artifacts in the built environment. Our modern metropolis can be thought of as the result of a continuously increasing accumulation of capital,

124 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

energy, information, and objects.There is a sneaking suspicion that if left untended, our contemporary cities would accelerate these tendencies of their own accord, becoming denser and denser.42 Archizoom’s No-Stop City, “pushed the logic of industrial production as universal law to the limit as an ‘assembly line of social issues,’” states Jacques Lucan,“ . . . Consequently, No-Stop City ‘stops being a ‘place’ and becomes ‘a condition.’”43,44 At an extreme point, entourage can accumulate to such a density that it becomes the environment itself. No longer defned in rela­ tion to an architectural background, entourage forms the background. As Fredric Jameson noted in the writing of Raymond Chandler, the commodity objects of industrialization “are simply there, in a permanent industrial background which has come to resemble that of nature itself.”45 There are architects who have explored what an architecture of accumu­ lated objects could mean.These range from the participatory moveable machine

fig. 4.16

Common Accounts, Closer Each Day (2016), image courtesy of Common Accounts

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furniture of Andrés Jaque/Offce of Political Innovation, to the ninety-nine-cent store object mash-ups of Andrew Kovacs, from the plethora of plant objects in the images of Junya Ishigami to the plethora of medical equipment proposed by Common Accounts (Fig. 4.16), from the digital kit-bashes of Mark Foster Gage to the digital piles of raw material proposed by T+E+A+M. As differ­ ent as the agendas may be for each of these architects—and they are radically different—there is a shared relation to the status of architecture as an accumula­ tion of objects. In their own particular ways, these architects are each engaged in a social-political-ecological practice through an aesthetic associated with what was formerly known as entourage.Their attitude is strikingly different from the politi­ cal architecture of a previous generation, concerned primarily with identifying policy and exposing it through critique. It is also different from the speculative projects of the 1960s that held formal system and entourage in completely different realms in order to accelerate their absurdity. For this group of architects in the frst decades of the twentieth-frst century, the organization of architecture, the organization of objects, and the organization of the environment are equivalent. Their most heated disagreements would likely be about the aesthetics of the images they produce, for it is precisely through these differences that the politics of each project is made sensible.

a Wilderness of objects Entourage has always consisted of an unruly detritus of natural-cultural assemblies held together for relatively short periods of time. Its mode of appearance is domes­ ticated and managed by conventions of representation, an oikos both ecological and economic which maintains the problematic distinctions between “nature” and “culture,” or as substituted by Boris Groys, the “profane” and the “sacred.” The profane realm is constantly renewed, because it is constantly flled with the refuse and waste products of valorized culture.The distinction between this refuse and the original, ‘virgin,’ natural profane that is allegedly being destroyed by the infux of this refuse is arbitrary and purely ideological. A rubbish dump manifests the profane, reality, and life not less, but more than Amazonia’s virgin nature. It is no accident that ecological discourse stubbornly focuses on the problem of refuse when one might well expect that it would prefer to concern itself with untouched nature. Only with the emergence of ecology has cultural refuse acquired so important a place in the public mind.46 The divisions that architecture maintains between culture and nature places humans in the position of managers of the wilderness, protectors of the environ­ ment from the cultural waste objects of human activity.To say that we can protect the environment is to suggest that we can circumscribe what is always already

126 Part II Entourage and the Politics of Objects

around us and within us, that we can determine and defne what is other, profane, real, natural. To “protect” this is not only impossible but absurd and reveals just how culturally constructed and problematic these terms are. Waste is a byprod­ uct of all exchanges. It can be the accumulation of exploited natural resources creating wastelands of toxic landflls, or the aggregation of discarded domestic products into massive plastic gyres in the Pacifc Ocean. It can be the internet image deluge, with its accrual of spam clogging hard drives and servers.47 It can also be the pile of discarded concepts produced when facts become fetishes due to changing sociopolitical and epistemological structures.48 All of this is refuse consisting of devalued objects, images, and concepts. Culture produces and polices the borders protecting us from these accumulations. But these borders also shift, and these shifts can occur through the processes of an innovative exchange, a reconfguration that is initially a question of aesthetics that devalue or revalue an idea or object.49 In order to deal with ecology differently, an aesthetic revaluation might be one that devalues the human/cultural as the single force dividing within from without and speculates on a possible exchange where all objects, human and nonhuman, equally interact. The philosophical investigations of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton offer signifcant ways of thinking about these collections of objects in a fattened hierarchy. Morton “argue[s] that ecological awareness consists precisely in con­ cepts such as world and place evaporating, leaving behind real entities.”50 Terms like world, place, and nature serve to demarcate zones that privilege certain biases. The conventions determining the difference between architecture and entourage are similar in this regard—they blind architects to the fact that their designs are entangled in much larger and smaller relations than what is traditionally defned. For Morton, ecological awareness requires that we acknowledge both objects and their interactions.Things are related and separate at the same time.“It is thus time to question the very term ecology, since ecology is the thinking of home, and hence world (oikos plus logos). In a reality without a home, without world, what this study calls objects constitutes reality.”51 The point Morton makes is that the whole system is not more real than the parts, nor are the parts more real than the whole.52 The objects that comprise our notions of reality are not less real or important than the system that “houses” their organizations. Too much effort goes into how architectural representations differentiate architecture from both the larger environment and the smaller enti­ ties that exist within it. As architecture attempts to manage objects and lifeforms through the projection of a stable order, it participates in the construction of arti­ fcial divisions that exacerbate our climate crisis.As discussed above, this typically manifests as holding all that is architectural and all that is natural in two mutually exclusive categories. But there is also a danger in considering objects as less real than the system of relations. If ecology is only understood and imaged as a massive web of interconnected infuence, it positions all individual entities as potentially meaningless in the overall scheme and gives a false sense of robustness to the larger conceptual category. It denies the importance, and reality of objects and

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their local moment-by-moment episodic interactions.The fragility and precarity of environmental relations are often only registered as the effects on the entities entangled in the system. An object is not autonomous, it exists in relations with other objects, yet it also exists in excess of those relations, and strangely, this is also an aesthetic question. How things exist is mashed together with how they appear for other things. A tree isn’t connected to the forest it’s in just because it’s measurably ‘inside’ the forest. The tree has to do with the forest. Being-part-of-a-forest is one of the ways in which it appears: it sucks nutrients from the forest foor; it communicates with the trees in its neighborhood; it provides a home for squirrels . . . Things are entangled with interpretations of things, yet differ­ ent from them.53 Culture is transformed through revaluations of the overlooked and devaluations of the esteemed. Many of the representational conventions structuring archi­ tectural discourse in the Western tradition are values that can no longer be sus­ tained. But it is not enough to call out bias and identify oppression—that is only the start. We must also propose an aesthetics that can redistribute assumptions about what is and what is not valued, opening a space for alternative expres­ sions. It seems that there will be better possibilities for these revaluations if we can grant all entities equivalency. Harman proposes that “all such objects must be accounted for by ontology, not merely denounced or reduced to despicable nullities . . . [The] point is not that all objects are equally real, but that they are equally objects.”54 An ecological revaluation of architecture as a precarious assemblage of mul­ tiple entities, human and non-human, is akin to treating all objects at all scales as entourage. This redistribution has ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic implica­ tions as it no longer defnes architecture as other than nature or as other than the objects of daily life. In this, architecture can no longer remain a neutral stage set in the background, it can no longer set itself apart from the waste it produces and is produced out of. Potentially, this exchange could redraw boundaries between architecture and ecology, a necessary and urgent redistribution given the stakes of our current climate emergencies. The division between the human and nonhu­ man is a cultural creation, and the demarcation between them blocks engagement with the environment in terms outside human sustenance or proft.To challenge this condition, we need images that provoke alternate aesthetic entanglements constituting innovative potential realities. These images may end up being the most critical, as they redefne the arbitrary, problematic borders between human and non-human, culture and nature, architecture and entourage. Note: Portions of this chapter were initially developed in the essay “The Aesthetic Recycling of Cultural Refuse” published in Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches, ed. Hélène Frichot and Naomi Stead (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

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notes 1 Raymond Chandler, introduction to the 1950 edition of Trouble Is My Business (New York:Vintage, 1988). 2 Fredric Jameson, The Detections of Totality (London:Verso, 2016), 11. 3 Jameson, Detections of Totality, 11. 4 Jameson, 28. 5 My arguments in this chapter are indebted to those of Graham Harman—in particular his call to treat all entities as objects that enter into relations with each other. While such relations defne what an object is to the other, they do not exhaust the reality of any entity. See Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011). 6 Jameson, Detections of Totality, 19. 7 “The Black Mask: A History of Black Mask Magazine,” Black Mask, September 8, 2017, https://blackmaskmagazine.com/blog/the-black-mask-a-history-of-black-mask­ magazine. 8 Jacques Lucan, Composition, Non-Composition: Architecture and Theory in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Lausanne: EPFL Press, 2012), 226. 9 Sylvia Lavin,“Trees Move In,” LOG 49 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press / Anyone Corp. 2020), 46. 10 Olivier Meystre, Pictures of the Floating Microcosm: New Representations of Japanese Archi­ tecture (Zurich: Park Books, 2017), 144. 11 Meystre, Pictures of the Floating Microcosm, 146. 12 Meystre, 148. 13 Milica Topalovic,“The New Naïve,” San Rocco 00 (Summer 2010): 95–96. 14 Topalovic,“The New Naïve,” 94–100. 15 This dualism, where one side is singular and the other is everything else, is related to Timothy Morton’s extension of Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology. See Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 16 Dora Epstein Jones, “That Guy There: The New Convention of the Populated Plan,” from the ACSA National Conference Proceedings, 2018. 17 Jacques Lucan, Composition, Non-Composition, 466. 18 Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? (Stuttgart: Karl Kramer Verlag, 1966), 68. 19 Banham, The New Brutalism, 68. 20 Fumihiko Maki and Masato Ohtaka, “Collective Form – Three Paradigms,” in Inves­ tigations in Collective Form (St. Louis: Washington University School of Architecture, 1964). 21 Maki and Ohtaka,“Collective Form,” 19. 22 Maki and Ohtaka, 14. 23 Maki and Ohtaka, 19. 24 Stan Allen, Field Conditions Revisited (Stan Allen Architect, 2010), 24. 25 One of the important infuences on these organizations is Piranesi’s Campo Marzio Ichnographia, a plan analyzed by Stan Allen in his “Piranesi’s Campo Marzio:An Experi­ mental Design,” Assemblage 10 (1989): 71–109. 26 Stan Allen, Field Conditions Revisited (Stan Allen Architect, 2010), 43. 27 Stan Allen,“Field Conditions,” in Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 97. 28 Allen,“Field Conditions,” 102. 29 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 209. 30 Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, 210. 31 John Hejduk, introduction to Victims (London: Architectural Association, 1986). 32 Boris Groys, On the New (London:Verso, 2014). 33 Groys, On the New, 139.

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34 Bertil Olsson and Rolf Nilsson, Institutionen för Byggnadsfunktionslara Arbetsrap­ port 5, 1968. 35 Pier Vittorio Aureli,“More and More about Less and Less: Notes Toward a History of Nonfgurative Architecture,” Log 16 (2009): 8. 36 Aureli,“More and More about Less and Less,” 15. 37 Rem Koolhaas,“Typical Plan,” in S, M, L, XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 341. 38 Introduction to Archizoom, Clino Trini Castelli, Ettore Sottsass Jr., Georges Swoden, Superstudio, “L’Invenzione della superfcie neutral,” Elementi: Quaderni di studi-notizie ricerche/Cahiers d’etudes-Nouvelles recherches,Year IX, No. 2 (1972), p. 7 as translated and quoted by Lucan, Composition, Non-Composition, 462. 39 Lucan, Composition, Non-Composition, 199. 40 Just a short list: the jump-cut of Jean-Luc Godard, the textual cut-up of William Bur­ roughs, the clipped and looped ambient noise of Musique Concrète, the fnely sliced sample density of Public Enemy, the appropriated low-res JPEG blow-ups of Thomas Ruff, the green-screen time-loop videos of Hito Steyerl, the copy machine vomit of Wade Guyton . . . 41 See Clip, Stamp, Fold:The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X to 197X, ed. Bea­ triz Colomina and Craig Buckley (Madrid:Actar 2011). 42 Peter Trummer, “Zero Architecture: A Neo-Realist Approach to the Architecture of the City,” SAC Journal 5,“Zero Piranesi” (2020): 15. 43 Lucan, Composition, Non-Composition, 461. 44 Lucan, 199. 45 Jameson, Detections of Totality, 19. 46 Groys, On the New, 128. 47 Hito Steyerl, “The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation,” in The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012). 48 Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 61–66. 49 Groys, On the New, 74–75. 50 Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2013), 68. 51 Timothy Morton,“Architecture without Nature,” in Tarp: Not Nature (Brooklyn: Pratt Institute of Graduate Architecture and Urban Design, 2012), 25. 52 Timothy Morton, Being Ecological (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 64. 53 Morton, Being Ecological, 50. 54 Harman, The Quadruple Object, 9.

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PART III

Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality

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Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfra ncis.com

5 FLUCTUATIONS OF ATTENTION

The relationship between the appearance of a surface and the surfaces of appear­ ance is not only a fundamental disciplinary question—an architectural project at some level must express its visual qualities, its image—it is also a philosophical question regarding what consciousness attends to. While discussions of material­ ity, tectonics, cladding, graphics, signifcation, color, pattern, and texture have been common in architectural design discourse over the past century, the two words that traditionally captured all these issues—ornament and decoration— have appeared less frequently after modernism. When they do occur, it is typi­ cally through a historical lens where style, signifcation, and labor are deployed to aid in the interpretation of contemporary surface articulation. Although these discussions can offer important insights, they also tend to confate the two terms, obscuring one of their fundamental differences. In the simplest expression, orna­ ment attracts attention while decoration diffuses it. How attention is manipulated conditions how we engage the world and understand ourselves in it. This involves the surfaces of architecture no less than the surfaces of media. Furthermore, digital images have never been merely visual phenomena but are complex negotiations of information exchange. Rendering might be seen as a process of transforming an idea into an image, but as Shoshana Zuboff argues, digital images also render us into data to be collected, collated, and consumed.1 This exchange of information is “the attention economy” that we all complain about, yet are all participant in. Machine vision developed through neural networks trains a computer to “see”—to identify edges, determine objects from backgrounds, and classify content. This is, of course, not “vision” per se; it is image analysis, developed out of Cold War pattern-recognition algorithms used to statistically sort and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003149682-9

134 Part III Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality

classify large datasets, now used for facial recognition and driverless cars.2 These processes not only analyze information collected from images, they also pro­ duce new images, challenging how we think about authorship and appropria­ tion. Furthermore, the phrase “neural network” is taken from biological and psychological studies of human perception that seek to understand how atten­ tion is focused and distracted. The human perceptual apparatus is trained by the environments it develops within, and the design of the environment is in turn based on how our senses mediate the world. Something similar is underway with machine vision. As we train these algorithms to decipher images, to pay more attention to certain pattern sequences and less to others, they begin to produce images of a world based on these classifcations. The results are not exactly what we expected (Fig. 5.1). How the environment is imaged by architects has taken many different expres­ sions throughout history. Contained in all of them is a question of the relation between reality and its representation. Within the École des Beaux-Arts of the nineteenth century, this discussion revolved around techniques known as the mosaïque. These graphic conventions, now part of a bygone set of representational practices, were primarily aimed at modulating attention through the rendered image of architectural surfaces—a concern that is still very much alive in our cur­ rent technologies of mediation.

FIG. 5.1 Style

Transfer Neural Network Study (Baptistery of Saint John in the style of Wat Phra Kaew). Tucker van Leuwen-Hall in David Ruy’s Cyborg Mis­ prision, Vertical Design Studio at SCI-Arc (Spring, 2020), image courtesy of David Ruy

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Distractions Distraction has long been part of human culture, typically registered alongside the disruptive acceleration of media technologies.3 Being distracted is a problem that we all share today, given the frequency of our online interactions. Numerous concerns have been voiced about how new media alters our sensorial attention within the environment, monetizing our gaze, and potentially dissipating our ability to recognize signifcant details in the appearance of reality. These issues have been raised with each new technological mediation, from social media to video games, television, cinema, radio, and print. Each was considered a threat to our capacity for attention. Furthermore, as Jonathan Crary explains, part of the cultural logic of capitalism demands that we accept as natu­ ral switching our attention rapidly from one thing to another. Capital, as accelerated exchange and circulation necessarily produced this kind of human perceptual adaptability and became a regime of reciprocal attentive­ ness and distraction.4 Distraction is often treated as unfocused but can also describe to a state of hyperattention created through the accelerated information of media technologies. Beatriz Colomina describes Charles and Ray Eames’s multimedia immersions as experiments that desired just such a state of attention. An early example was a project titled Rough Sketch for a Sample Lesson developed with George Nelson and Alexander Girard at the University of Georgia in 1952.5 According to Colomina, the idea was, as with the ‘Sample Lesson,’ to produce sensory overload. As the Eameses suggested to Vogue, Sample Lesson tried to provide many forms of ‘distraction,’ instead of asking students to concentrate on a singular mes­ sage. The audience drifts through a multimedia space that exceeds their capacity to absorb it.6 This overload continues in the flm Think, produced by the Eameses for the IBM Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. Colomina writes, The eye cannot escape the screens and each screen is bordered by other screens. The eye has to jump around from image to image and can never fully catch up with all of them and their diverse contents. Fragments are presented to be momentarily linked together. The flm is organized by the same logic of compression. Each momentary connection is replaced with another. The speed of the flm is meant to be the speed of the mind.7 Media can create cognitive states that outstrip the human ability to focus one’s attention, and this can be a desired outcome. The fragmentation of montage is

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expanded into a simultaneity of multiple screens with multiple montages—a bom­ bardment that allowed connections to be formed in the mind of the observer that exceeded the original intent of the authors. These projects sit at the crossing of image, computation, perception, and environment, echoing what has become our daily experience of immersion into multiple screens of fragmentary digital images. Michael Marder fnds another possible interpretation of distraction in the writ­ ings of Martin Heidegger. “Distraction entails a fascination with phenomenality, a thorough ‘immersion’ and ‘absorption’ in the shallowness of ever-changing perceptions concerned with the possibilities of seeing the ‘world’ merely as it looks.”8 This shallowness is often associated with contemporary digital media, a world that presents only a superfciality of appearance. But Marder offers fur­ ther claims that ought to give us pause. “Distraction—always straining toward more than a simple consciousness of something can encompass—glimpses the impossible attention,” he writes. “It catches sight of the hyper-attention that slips away from the closed circuit of intentionality.”9 In Marder’s reading, Hei­ degger treats distraction as “the very ground from which psychic life rises and to which it falls.”10 This interpretation positions distraction as the base state of atten­ tion, always operating in the background. Consciousness and focused attention become special states of engagement, not its defning default. Other writers have argued that continuously sustained attention is not only not feasible but also not even necessarily desirable. Distraction is found in various forms of reverie and creative states of consciousness where the mind wanders in non-linear fashion, allowing mental operations to “refresh.” To quote Marina van Zuylen, from her book The Plentitude of Distraction, Focus is useless without distraction, and distraction, without motivation and a pinch of single-mindedness dwindles into listless lethargy. Consider with the philosopher Jacques Rancière this to-and-fro, the openness that emerges when ‘words and discourses freely circulate, without a master, and divert bodies from their destinations’ engaging them in movements, in the neighborhood of certain words: people, liberty, equality, etc. This free­ foating world of words and ideas is not distracting in the way our devices are; yes, it engages us indeed in multiple directions, each one requiring refectivity, forcing us to fnd meaning without instant gratifcation. The key to this positive distraction lies precisely in the delay, a delay that ener­ gizes and creates the free circulation of ideas and affects.11 We exist in a world of decontextualized fragments, a brew of fact and fction pre­ sented evenly as a hum of constantly churning imagery. How we are able to navi­ gate this environment is a question that concerns our ability to operate in multiple modes of attention. In these few short paragraphs, distraction has been described in positive and negative terms; it has been seen as psychological, technological, and philosophical. Distraction can be created when there is too much clamoring

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for our attention, but it can also be understood as a calm moment where atten­ tion is diffused into the background. Close and diffused attention are reciprocal. Maximum attention requires a diffusion of all peripheral stimuli, where maximum diffusion can allow attention to drift toward aspects that would typically be passed over. Architecture knows this, as it modulates and manipulates attention within the environment through aesthetics, beginning with its rendering of images.

The Rendered Mosaïque Like the word poché, the word mosaic, in the paper representation of archi­ tecture, has a special application and meaning quite different from that given in the dictionary. In the vernacular of the atelier, mosaic means rather the decoration of the plan by a conventional system of lines and patterns usu­ ally drawn in watered ink. Thus the plan acquires a pleasing combination of values in black, grey and white even before the application of washes.12 In the context of the École des Beaux-Arts, the graphic rendering of surfaces in an architectural drawing was known as the mosaïque, “mosaic” in English. Although related to surfaces covered with tile patterns of small stone fragments, the term took on a host of other meanings related to Beaux-Arts conventions of representa­ tion, as described above by Nathaniel Cortlandt Curtis. I would like to consider this quote alongside the following passage from an essay by Jean Paul Carlhian: . . . such was the role assigned to the mosaïque. Tracing its origins to 18th century plans with their simple indication of cornice lines, followed later on by more elaborate examples displaying complete refected ceiling plans, and fnding inspiration in the elaborate indication of marble foor patterns, this process consisted of covering certain areas of the plan with such sugges­ tive patterns deemed susceptible of attracting attention to its main features.13 Figure 5.2 shows a plan from a turn-of-the-century submission to the Prix de Rome competition. It is a good example of how poché, mosaïque, and entourage worked together to render the architectural project. The viewer’s attention is guided through the plan, lingering in highly articulated areas, focusing on the fgures of poché and “speeding” though the white areas of circulation. The pro­ gram is a thermal bath and casino (then more of a pleasure house than a gambling institution), and so the mosaïque emphasizes a fuid relation between inside and outside, landscape and building, and communicates an overall sense of luxury, pleasure, and extravagance. The primary function of the mosaïque is the manipulation of attention. This is done in service of clarifying the organizational idea, the parti, and communicates the architect’s interpretation of the program through the evocation of character. Important to note is that the mosaïque is applied in relation to the poché. Since

138 Part III Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality

FIG. 5.2 Joseph

Bernard, “Concours du Grand Prix de Rome, Un Établissement D’Eaux Thermales et Casino” (1900), from L. Farge, Les Concours D’Ecole, 1re Année

poché was a graphic technique developed through the abstraction of the plan and section cut, the mosaïque should also be considered as a representational conven­ tion, one operating at the surface of the drawing and requiring training to inter­ pret. It is thus not literally the representation of the surface material as a pattern of tiles but rather an aesthetic affect rendered to clarify, intensify, and elaborate the project’s architectural concept.

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Yet unlike the poché, which is clearly a representational abstraction, the mosa­ ïque does also describe visible surfaces. These rendered articulations must at some level relate to the architectural character as it is to be built, to the material surfaces as ornament and decoration. The representation may speak its own code as a sys­ tem detached from reality, but the ideas, feelings, tone, mood, and atmosphere of this representation must also be in some way borne out in the built experience. If this confict trips up both Curtis and Carlhian, we should consider their attempts to explicate it valiant, for the same friction between reality and representation in rendering continues to this day. Nathaniel Cortlandt Curtis and Jean Paul Carl­ hian are of different generations yet both are writing to explain Beaux-Arts tech­ niques to an American audience. Curtis is writing in early 1920s to explain the “secrets” of architectural composition. His writing predates the transformations of modernism. Carlhian is writing in the late 1970s to explain his experience as a student at the École, he is part of a generation that is looking back with a renewed interest from American academics and the transformations of postmodernism. In Carlhian’s description, the mosaïque “consisted of covering certain areas of the plan with such suggestive patterns deemed susceptible of attracting attention to its main features.” In other areas, “trivial elements were drowned in a general grey tone, intended to make them disappear and, therefore, emphasize the clar­ ity of the circulation network, treated, in such cases, in light values.”14 Thus, sometimes the collection of lines, washes, colors, and details presents a kind of pattern such that even if not literally the layout for construction, suggests the desired appearance. In other locations, articulations are suppressed, for instance, to allow the idea of the circulation to become more legible in the drawing. The white, brighter areas of the representational surface attracts the attention of the eye and contrasts with the dark fll of the poché. This was an effect created in the drawing only. Carlhian concludes that “recourse to such devices soon lost touch with reality. The plan ended literally painted.”15 Curtis struggles with the same dilemma in a slightly different way. For Cur­ tis, mosaïque “is a form and means of expression, a vehicle for stating facts more clearly and at the same time in an artistic manner.”16 He acknowledges the fact that these representations are not literally representing the reality of the project but are aesthetic expressions of its driving ideas. But he also cautions against mis­ taking the rendering itself as the end goal: It is not to be denied that the highly decorative possibilities of the vehicle tend to focus the attention upon the paper representation—the rendering—as an end in itself, rather than upon the potential actuality— the building. But this is a danger which is latent in every indirect artistic method and is to be guarded against.17 While Curtis fnds it more important that the representation clearly communi­ cates the idea through the language of architectural representation than depict

140 Part III Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality

reality, he also acknowledges the danger of placing too much emphasis on the rendering at the expense of a relation to the “potential actuality.” There must be some realism to connect the imaging with the building. Curtis uses the term “decoration” in two slightly different senses. “Mosaic means rather the decoration of the plan by a conventional system of lines and pat­ terns usually drawn in watered ink.”18 Mosaïque included all decorative rendering of surfaces in the background—everything that is not cut by the horizontal plane of the plan. These marks, lines, patterns, and washes seem not to be the unique creations of the architect. They are applied as conventions to focus and diffuse the viewer’s attention. The danger for Curtis seems to be that they may become too “highly decorative,” that the representation would become the object of attention, displacing the project’s organizational concept. One way to resist this is to stress the conventional, abstract modes of disciplinary communication in the delineation of surfaces. This produces a distance, a gap between reality and its representation that allows the architectural concept to become the primary object for judgment and valuation. “The whole process was summed up in such expressions as les blancs flent et les gris se retournent (the whites speed through [the plan] while the grays turn the corners).”19 Mosaïque is not a literal image of the built construction but an aesthetic argu­ ment carried out through imaging. Architectural rendering today still largely holds to this stance, even if the conventions of the École des Beaux-Arts are no longer practiced, thus no longer legible. An architectural image is still evaluated for its ability to convey an architectural idea. The introduction of a gap, an abstrac­ tion that prevents the representation from looking too realistic, is still required. Overly stylized “rendering and mosaicking . . . ‘tricks’ (that) catch the eye and make a poor plan look better than its neighbors” are still frowned upon.20 Of course, all rendering styles are abstractions that construct narratives and propose alternate realities. What the Beaux-Arts mosaïque reminds us, is that the rendered image has been understood as simultaneously realistic and abstract throughout its history and that it was through this aesthetic tension that an architectural project could be argued for and interpreted. Architecture continues to produce images that explore the (mis)alignments of reality and representation by manipulating the viewer’s attention. Let us consider a more recent set of renderings. At frst glance, these images of the PS1 Dolmen (2016) by First Offce (Anna Neimark and Andrew Atwood) seem rather mundane (Figs. 5.3 and 5.4). Rectan­ gular gray masses supporting a long rectangular gray mass. But look closer. These boxes shift attention between the visual and the haptic, between abstraction and realism. The boxes are simply boxes—plywood cladding over a wood frame. But they are decorated to look like concrete with joint reveals between casts and further articulated to appear weathered, rusticated. This effect is achieved by applying layers of paint with slight differences in color and clusters of points that hover around the corners and edges, creating the appearance of wear and tear. The surfaces are so fat that attention is drawn to these clusters of irregular points.

Fluctuations of Attention

FIG. 5.3

141

First Offce, PS1 Dolmen (2016), photograph of model, image courtesy of Anna Neimark and Andrew Atwood

Offce, PS1 Dolmen (2016), rendering of elevation, image courtesy of Anna Neimark and Andrew Atwood

FIG. 5.4 First

It is then that one realizes the points are in fact the heads of nails, that they express the real material assembly of plywood nailed to the frame. The effect, however, is to make the fat abstraction of the painted sheets look like a completely differ­ ent material—concrete—undergoing a process of decomposition. Thus, the nails are a kind of rendered mark for the manipulation of attention; digitally as pixels,

142 Part III Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality

modeled as dots, built as heads. The differences between the drawing and the model are telling. Both are renderings, both images made of colored marks. Pre­ sented together, they ask the viewer to shuffe attention back and forth between them, where slight differences begin to raise questions about how a mark is made on a screen, a print, a sheet; through a pixel, a brush, or a nail head. The result is an architecture in which the visual image and the tactile material somehow remain physically fused while also held in a tension that produces an aesthetic quality in excess of their materiality. The subdued tone of the rendered image is important, for it elicits an elongation and intensifcation of attention. The PS1 Dolmen is an image that alludes variously to materials, constructions, and histories. This could be to establish meaning through precedent—be that tectonic or typological—but it also allows a fuctuation of attention between the close and the diffused or, in Atwood’s terms, the interesting and the boring. 016—We give attention to interesting things when we want to understand them better. 017—We give attention to boring things when we want to understand ourselves better.21

Ornament and Decoration as Modes of Attention The discussion of ornament and decoration that follows is particular to the aes­ thetic discourse of nineteenth and twenty-frst century European modernism. By bracketing this period, I hope to forestall the temptation, so common in conver­ sations on ornament, to generalize aspects from particular occurrences to other times, places, and cultures—a habit perhaps owing to the fact that ornament and decoration can be found wherever humans have modifed their environment. Moreover, my discussion of ornament or decoration in this context is not as a historicist practice, but as a history of changing modes of attention as structured through imaging. My interest lies in how these two terms work in tandem, and how this dynamic may shed light on contemporary architectural aesthetics.22 Ornament operates in the foreground. It wants to be seen, studied, inter­ preted. Attention is drawn to ornament, as its bounding lines demarcate fgure from ground, forming motifs, identifable objects of signifcation. In architecture, ornament is typically three-dimensional and is placed at critical moments in the building’s articulation. Ornament is tied into the building’s tectonic and driven by a desire to communicate an intended meaning legible to a specifc audience. The most well-known example in western European architecture is the classical column capital codifed in the treatises of the Italian Renaissance. A capital draws attention to the juncture between column and beam, between the vertical and the horizontal; it is the knot that binds, the icon that resembles, the object that attracts. Ornamentalist Kent Bloomer emphasizes that “ornament is constituted by motifs that are repetitively distributed about structural and decorative elements to

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evoke natural cycles, efforescence, and transformation . . . Ornament alludes to a rhythmized presence of nature wandering through the basic physical framework of design.”23 For Bloomer, “ornament is an intensely visual phenomenon requir­ ing patience and attention.”24 In other words, ornament intensifes attention. For this to function, ornament must condition and be conditioned by its context. The column capital is one example of location specifc ornament, but this defni­ tion also applies to the frames of doors and windows, cornice lines, façade centers, corners, structure, and how a building meets the ground. Ornament determines the meaning of what it interrupts and its meaning is, in turn, determined by its particular situation. Ornament, as Bloomer suggests, can allude to nature, and the foliage, curva­ ture, and intricacy of plant life has been a recurrent motif throughout the history of architecture. But ornament can also be used to signify specifc social meanings related to class status, lifestyle aspirations, or the identifcation of constituencies. These social aspects of ornament continue today in fashion, accessory design, furni­ ture, and automobiles. “Ornament makes things special,” writes Jonathan Massey. Ornament is a relational device that differentiates and associates things and people, frequently marking social status by signaling affliations and dis­ tinctions. Ornament orders. . . . Whether on clothing, furnishings, build­ ings, or even culinary dishes, ornament has often marked membership in particular grades and segments of society. It has distinguished sacred from profane, aristocrat from commoner, male from female, tribesman from stranger, high caste from low.25 Another astute theoretician of ornament, Antoine Picon argues that, tradition­ ally, ornament negotiated between three fgures: the architect/designer, the fab­ ricator/craftsman, and the client/public.26 Ornament allowed designers to express their differences as unique creative authors and thus became an identifable trait, a marketable commodity through which they could edge out rivals. For the fab­ ricator, ornament was a chance to exhibit mastery of craft traditions of technique, in Ruskinian terms the “individual freedom with collective inspiration.”27 And lastly, for the client and the public, the audience for ornament, it announced the prestige of the building’s owner and communicated a character suitable for the building’s program and context. These relationships established the political terms through which the aesthetics of ornament traditionally operates. Bloomer, Massey, and Picon all recognize the importance of ornament as driven by a desire to communicate and attract attention. As a site on which architects and craftspeople labor to produce meaning, ornament proves a fruitful object for close reading. Decoration is different. Decoration is related to cultural conventions of decorum and is thus inti­ mately tied to how environments infuence behavior. Decoration operates in

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the background, just below consciousness, as a diffusion of attention. Its aims are not to support the legibility of a specifc signal but rather to evoke moods and atmospheres. This background operation of decoration makes it both deeply political and ostensibly meaningless. It operates at a register of reality that is not always accessible to human cognition, and this is one of the reasons it is so often neglected or trivialized by architectural discourse. Decoration flls in the space left over by ornament. It is largely “received in a state of distraction and through the collective.”28 This is how Walter Benjamin famously describes the state of attention in which the aesthetic project of archi­ tecture is carried out, one which, for him, links attention with social relations. Buildings are received in a twofold manner: by use and by perception. Or, better: tactilely and optically. Such reception cannot be understood in terms of the concentrated attention of a traveler before a famous build­ ing. On the tactile side, there is no counterpart to what contemplation is on the optical side. Tactile reception comes about not so much by way of attention as by way of habit. The latter largely determines even the opti­ cal reception of architecture, which spontaneously takes the form of casual noticing, rather than attentive observation.29 The desire to diffuse attention is often manifested through the creation of an “all-over” effect in surface expression. Joints are concealed and seams removed in the production of continuities across material difference. This is not a second­ ary concern, for architects spend an extraordinary amount of time creating large swaths of the environment that no one will pay attention to, and they do so on purpose. As an integral part of architectural aesthetics, decoration allows atten­ tion to focus on moments of meaningful impact, it forms part of a fuctuation in attention with ornament. But decoration can also be used to infuence behav­ ior and thus maintain power structures that privilege certain groups of people. Since it so often operates subliminally in the background, the effects it possesses in relation to subtle shifts in mood and atmosphere are inherently political. To ignore decoration is to avoid crucial questions about how architecture operates within economic and social structures. All architecture articulates its surfaces; this is its image. Ornament and decoration are two sides of how surface articula­ tion deploys specifc effects to create environments. The fact that ornament and decoration often occur together leads to much confusion between the two terms. The repetition of ornamental motifs can become fgures in felds of decoration.30 Some features attract attention, while others are perceived only subconsciously or experienced through habit. In a sense, there is no “undecorated” architecture. Think of two typical deco­ rative applications: paint and wallpaper. Both mask a building’s construction and modulate its aesthetic character. The Villa Savoye is a concrete-slab and column building with masonry block walls, but its dematerialized abstract appearance of

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levitation is enhanced by white, peach, teal, and forest green paint. The green paint on the exterior ground-level walls allow them to blend into the back­ ground, while the pilotis, painted white, stand out against them. Other colors are used on the villa’s interior to shift mood between spaces of the villa. Importantly, the paint is applied uniformly to an entire expanse of wall, emphasizing the pla­ narity of volumetric enclosures, rather than the material assembly of parts. Decoration can be used to dematerialize a surface, to undermine its reality as matter, and to accentuate its appearance as an abstract image. It can also be used to emphasize materiality, as in Le Corbusier’s later works that articulate concrete surfaces as béton brut. This effect is often celebrated as a true expression of material and construction “as found.”31 And yet, after almost a century of board-formed concrete buildings, we have come to see that the best examples of brutalism are much more complex than any humble expression of material and construction. The traces of formwork—whether refned, rough, soft, technical, elegant, or raw—diffuse attention across surfaces, functioning for all essential purposes as decoration. Imperfections can be highlighted or suppressed, the aggregate hid­ den or exposed, the grain of the formwork appearing natural or artifcial, but all these surface choices are made by the designer to provoke a feeling in the viewer; they are not the default outcome of simply being “true to material” or “true to construction.” Many architects might protest the use of the words ornament and decoration in this context of material tectonics. This attitude is the legacy of a modernist ideology that viewed ornament as a decadent expression of bourgeois class aspi­ rations and thus inappropriate for the modern world of technology and prag­ matism. The denigration of ornament and decoration also refects a contempt for related disciplines such as interior decoration and product design and per­ haps even deeply problematic beliefs about race, class, and gender.32 The bias that associates “undecorated” architecture with permanence, necessity, refne­ ment, and honesty, and “decorated” architecture with ephemerality, superfuity, kitsch, and deceit is latent in many architectural arguments, only proving how politically charged these issues are. Ornament and decoration are the material manifestations of the mosaïque— how the image of architecture becomes the architectural image. This has never been a simple translation. Consider the differences between how architects rep­ resent ornament and decoration. Ornament is traditionally drawn and mod­ eled. A silhouette delimits a fgure from a ground, which is then developed through maquettes and models before a full-scale mock-up is created. The threedimensional resolution of an ornamental object has long been where architec­ ture and sculpture meet. Decoration is typically not drawn; it is selected. It is sampled and applied, extracted from a catalog or list, and then specifed through text. In other words, ornament is drawn and decoration is imaged. Ornament is addressed by architectural design methodology and its modes of representation, while decoration is multimedia and multidisciplinary. Decoration is added in, on,

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and to the drawing; rarely does it emerge from drawing. This distinction still holds today, even though design is primarily imaged through computational models. The form, fgure, and shape of the architectural object are drawn and modeled. When surfaces are rendered, their visual qualities are sampled, mapped, simu­ lated; decor is extracted from other images and montaged together. At its most base level, decoration is pattern; order and repetition operating below or prior to cognition. This “meaninglessness” is partly why decoration receives so much suspicion from design discourse, even though every designer knows that at some point in the design of the project the surface will be decorated, and it will be decorated to conceal the “real” material construction and to present the image of the project. Decoration is indeed a touchy question, for in this sub­ conscious meaninglessness lies not only a great deal of power to infuence society through the management of distraction but also a host of assumptions about how the world should appear and to whom these appearances are addressed.

The Return of Ornament? Architecture is currently processing the impact of an intense few decades of exper­ imentation in techniques of digital design and fabrication and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. One way these technologies have been explored in building design is through the articulation of surfaces with intricate and complex patterns that test the limits of material construction through numerically controlled fabrication machines. Coinciding with this work, there have been numerous essays and books theorizing digital fabrication as the reemergence of ornament.33 These publications often echo arguments made in the nineteenth century, when the term was still used favorably, before its rejection by modernists in the early twentieth century. The work of John Ruskin, Owen Jones, Louis Sullivan, and Gottfried Semper, as well as the Arts and Crafts and art nouveau movements, have all been invoked in attempts to build a historical lineage for digital fabrication. Antoine Picon notes three characteristics that distinguish the digital ornament of today. “First, architectural ornament was generally restricted to specifc areas in the past, concentrated at key points of a building. In many contemporary projects by contrast, it covers the entire façade, applied as an overall element, a feature of the skin of the building as a whole.”34 Second, contemporary ornament is “no longer removable either from the façade or from the building itself.”35 And fnally, it is seen as possessing “no extrinsic meaning,” vacant of iconic or symbolic signifcation.36 Vittoria Di Palma identifes a very similar set of features: Contemporary incarnations of ornament tend to be united by four char­ acteristic qualities. First, contemporary architectural ornament is almost always integrated with the building surface . . . Second, contemporary ornament tends to exhibit an all-over quality . . . The third commonality is a resistance to interpretation . . . The fourth and last tendency is manifested

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on a theoretical level, present in the connections frequently drawn between contemporary ornament and theories of affect deriving from the philoso­ phy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.37 What I take issue with in Picon’s and Di Palma’s observations is not the accuracy of their accounts, they are correct (even if the infuence of Deleuze and Guattari has largely passed); rather, it is that they frame these contemporary developments solely within the history of ornament while neglecting to consider the history of decoration. This may seem just a matter of semantics, but what I am arguing is that the tools of critical discourse used to discuss ornament tend to fall apart when addressing contemporary surface articulation, and this is in part because most of the projects that deploy digital fabrication seek to create all-over effects of mood or atmosphere, disturb seams and joints, and avoid specifc symbolic meaning; all aspects that are more in line with the diffused attention of decoration than the focused attraction of ornament. The issue at stake is discursive. To explain digital fabrication in the terms of nineteenth-century ornament extends lines of argument from Ruskinian labor politics. Gothic ornament was not valued for a single authorial expression, but as the work of a collective of individuals. The analogy to contemporary digital mediations, is that the author is at best a hybrid of human, algorithm, and CNC machine, a new manifestation of collective labor. The problem is that this simpli­ fes what qualifes as labor in these situations. Contemporary digital articulation is of course related to software programmers and robotic manufacturers, but it is also the result of machine-vision neural networks, and the millions of hours logged by humans who label images on the internet; its material consists of pho­ tons captured by a tourist’s electronic device, stored as information statistically fltered by a Google image search and then converted into a bitmap of graphic pixels, laid as a tile pattern in a Las Vegas hotel bathroom, captured again as back­ ground for a selfe video posted to Instagram to sell eyeliner. I’m not being cyni­ cal; this is the reality of the production and consumption of architecture today. This lineage is much closer to the concerns of the Beaux-Arts mosaïque, much closer to the manipulation of attention, than it is to the valuations of Ruskinian craft. It operates in the background like decoration. If architecture continues to discuss contemporary expressions only within the terms of ornament, we will fail to attend to its function as a diffuser of attention. Architectural surfaces are entan­ gled with the production and consumption of images as an exchange between human and non-human valuations. The articulation of these surfaces is somehow “control gone out of control,” what Jeffrey Kipnis distinguishes as “cosmetic”: Ornaments attach as discrete entities to the body like jewelry, reinforcing the structure and integrity of the body as such. Cosmetics are indiscreet, with no relation to the body other than to take it for granted. Cosmetics are erotic camoufage; they relate always and only to skin, to particular

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regions of skin. Deeply, intricately material, cosmetics nevertheless exceed materiality to become modern alchemicals as they trans-substantiate skin into image, desirous or disgusting. Where ornaments retain their identity as entities, cosmetics work as felds, as blush or shadow or highlight, as aura or air. Thinness, adherence and diffuse extent are crucial to the cosmetic effect, which is more visceral than intellectual, more atmospheric than aes­ thetic. Virtuosity at ornamentation requires balance, proportion, precision; virtuosity at cosmetics requires something else, something menacing: para­ noid control, control gone out of control, schizo-control. That “cosmetics” contains an etymological tie to “cosmos” is a fact that many historians of ornament have noted.38 The distinction that Kipnis makes is that the cosmetic behaves very differently than traditional ornament. Several aspects of his defnition of cosmetics are especially suggestive: material in excess of materiality, diffuse extents, skin as image, paranoid control. These qualities have to do with optical sensation, attention, and media. These issues were also explored by several mid-twentieth-century art movements, two of which are particularly relevant for contemporary digital fabrication and surface articulation: Op art and Pop art.

Pop–Op Beginning in the late 1950s, artists who would later be known as Pop artists, Op artists, Kinetic artists, and Minimalist artists simultaneously abandoned the antique tradition of ‘mark-making,’ and set about replacing the Euro­ pean narratives of Freud and Marx with a new American brand of literalism. These artists would propose the literal object, the literal image, the literal motion, and the literal act of seeing. Of all these revolutionary ‘literalisms,’ Op Art would prove the most radically resistant to domestication. Mini­ mal art retained, at least, the literal, material object and was consequently responsive to Marxist narratives. Pop art retained the literal image and left a door open to pictorial interpretation. Kinetic art in its literal motion retained the kernel of narrative. Op Art, however, concerned itself with the literal diffculty of our efforts to see the world. In doing so, it daunted all criticism that presumed to interpret the object ‘as properly seen.’ Con­ sequently, the aesthetic subtext of Op Art was equally transgressive. It proposed that our pleasure in art derives less from knowing what we are looking at than from the anxiety of not-knowing just this. So we take plea­ sure from the object’s singular self-possession, from its resistance to being internalized as a legible, conceptual entity.39 The procedural manipulation of discrete colored marks, the graphic nature of technological reproduction, the exchange of popular design for “fne art”

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histories, and the “literalisms” that Dave Hickey speaks of in the passage above are concerns shared by both Op and Pop art. They are aesthetic responses to the technologically mediated world. Both challenged the dominant art narratives of authorship, craft, and materiality. Though the primary difference between Op and Pop is thought to occur at the level of content—one is abstract, the other representational—I would argue that both art movements were less concerned with these terms than with how to challenge traditional conventions of art pro­ duction and interpretation. When they emerged, both were criticized as decora­ tive, and thus dismissed in favor of what was seen as more substantial; abstract expressionism and color feld painting.40 It was this association with decoration, however, that also allowed Op and Pop art to be taken up by architecture so effectively in the articulation of surfaces. Op and Pop art are both about attention, and in their different ways seek to disturb the aesthetics of the background. They make reality strange. Op art at its best produces an intensely rhythmic and hypnotic physical response, a kind of glitch in one’s own perceptual apparatus—a response that occurs prior to the critical categorization of genre, technique, or reference.41 Pop art at its best takes the assumed values of high culture and exchanges them with those of the popular, the kitsch, and in the process directs attention to the overlooked background of commercial culture.42 Many of the effects of digital fabrication in architecture have been compared to the work of Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely, and other Op artists of the 1960s.43 In these works, the observer’s sensation is stimulated by constantly shifting, shim­ mering, vibratory effects, whose apparently continuous variation is created by the manipulation of aggregations of small pieces (Fig. 5.5 a and b). Architecture that resembles Op art, both superfcially and at deeper psychological levels, was espe­ cially prominent in the frst wave of experiments in digital fabrication and archi­ tecture, from the last decade of the twentieth century to the frst decade of the twenty-frst. (Architects include but are not limited to; Offce dA, SHoP, Ber­ nard Cache, Gramazio & Kohler, Zaha Hadid, Aranda/Lasch, Iwamoto Scott, Ball Nogues . . .) From Op art, architecture gleaned techniques for distracting the eye across the entirety of a form, concealing seams, blurring edges, disturbing material­ ity, and intensifying optical sensation. Many of these effects come from the gradient variations of repetitive elements, which design software can control with precision and ease—moiré and diffraction patterns literally manifested as building cladding. Early 1960s computational aesthetics were directly engaged in the visual effects of Op art through algorithmic procedures and computer-controlled output. A. Michael Noll’s Ninety Parallel Sinusoids with Linearly Increasing Period (1965) (Fig. 5.6b) experimented with recreating the effects of Bridget Riley’s painting Current (1964) (Fig. 5.6a).44 Noll worked at Bell Laboratories—home to Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver—which as the research wing of a communica­ tions company, had a vested interest in how information could be transmitted, processed, and displayed. Works of Op art were interesting for computational

150 Part III Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality

Riley, Shift (1963), emulsion on hardboard, 30 × 30 in (76.2 × 76.2 cm) © Bridget Riley 2020. All rights reserved.

FIG. 5.5A Bridget

Riley, Current (1964), emulsion on board, 58 3/8 × 58 7/8 in, 148.3 × 149.5 cm, The Museum of Mod­ ern Art, New York. Philip Johnson Fund 576.1964 © Bridget Riley 2020. All rights reserved.

FIG. 5.6A Bridget

Hadid Architects, Zaragoza Bridge Pavilion (2008), Expo Zaragoza, Zara­ goza, Spain (2008) © Luke Hayes/ VIEW

FIG. 5.5B Zaha

Michael Noll, Ninety Parallel Sinusoids With Linearly Increasing Period (1965) © 1965 A. Michael Noll

FIG. 5.6B A.

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experiments because they could be described through the mathematical discrete operations of procedural algorithms; the visual image was but a momentary mani­ festation, a performance of coded information. Noll conceived and programmed his image in 1964 and exhibited it at the Howard Wise Gallery in April 1965 in what is considered the frst Computer Art exhibition in North America.45 Exhib­ iting alongside Noll was his colleague at Bell Labs, Béla Julesz, who showed his random dot stereograms. Julesz is interesting for our discussion for a multitude of reasons. As Orit Halpern describes, In his studies, Julesz postulated that vision was a matter of fnding repetitive patterns out of stimuli received by the eyes. The experiments involved show­ ing test subjects abstract patterns, randomly generated through computers (in fact necessitating the machines in order to generate such levels of patterned complexity without indexicality), and incredibly dense data points.46 We will return in the next chapter to Julesz and the perception of depth, but for now, Halpern further explicates the most salient point, Perception became a probabilistic channel whose capacities were variable, and capable of being engineered, enhanced, and modifed. This is vision that stretches into the nervous system and out to the computationally gen­ erated blocks. As a result the process of seeing could be simulated, making human vision amenable to computation, and in reverse making computers, perhaps, see, as vision became an increasingly algorithmic process whose complex operations could be broken down into discrete elements, and reproduced, materialized, and circulated as technology.47 Noll would also publish essays on his work in the late 1960s publication Bit Inter­ national founded in Zagreb by the New Tendencies art movement as a forum for computational art and discourse.48 Published from 1968 to 1972, Bit was dedi­ cated to experiments in information theory, media, and aesthetics and featured experiments in randomness and generative art alongside debates over percep­ tion and computation—work that would prove infuential for both the technical software and aesthetic agendas that would manifest as parametrically controlled variation in the architecture of the 1990s.49 Studies of optical patterns and subconscious sensory response were also a fun­ damental part of the emergence of perceptual psychology in the nineteenth cen­ tury, led by the experimental research of fgures such as Herbert von Helmholtz and Robert Vischer. Jonathan Crary summarizes Helmholtz’s transformations of the understanding of optical perception as follows: It invokes the body not as a unifed receiver of orderly representations but as a composite apparatus on which external stimuli are able provisionally to

152 Part III Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality

produce luminous and chromatic effects . . . Helmholtz’s drawing makes clear that the passage of light into the eye is anything but unmediated. When light enters this opaque ‘apparatus,’ it is no longer as part of a geometrical optics, as rectilinear rays traveling from point to point, but as a form of lumi­ nous energy that strikes a dense mosaic of receptors, setting off a complex of processes in this compound organ that culminate in visual perceptions.50 Within these studies, the viewer’s optical apparatus is revealed to be active in the work of perception; there is no neutral state, as the eye is constantly moving, gathering, scanning—it is always distracted and discrete. The linking of the psy­ chology of optical perception to computational processes is not a recent devel­ opment within the “attention economy” of the internet; these associations have been part of modern media for the past two centuries. Pop art needs less of an introduction than Op due to the massive infuence it has had over the second half of twentieth-century culture. There have been numerous conversations about the relations between Pop art and postmodern architecture, typically discussed in terms of referenced content, kitsch culture, and the effects of irony as critical commentary on the cultural construction of meaning. The aspects of Pop art that need to be raised here are of a slightly dif­ ferent order. Contemporary digital images and surface articulation that engage Pop art have less to do with the symbolic motifs associated with ornamental fg­ ures and more to do with the ways in which Pop art functions as surface media. Qualities such as high color contrast, thick graphic outlines, exaggerated scale jumps, resolution blow-ups, and thinly expressed fake surface textures all have relations to the aesthetics of Pop art, and importantly, are also tied to the devel­ opment of raster graphic software such as Photoshop. It is interesting to see how dismissive the discipline of architecture is of Photoshop, while it has become a completely indispensable platform for contemporary practice. A. Michael Noll is also credited with developing the frst raster display screen, and it is best not to forget just how integral the manifestation of visual images as an electro-material problem has been with the development of the computational code now operat­ ing continually in the background of all media. As an oversimplifcation, it could be stated that during the 2010s, the Op art gradient fow patterns of the early 2000s were rejected in favor of a Pop art graphic surface treatment. (Examples include: Zago Architecture, Jennifer Bonner/MALL, MOS, T+E+A+M, Pita & Bloom, Bureau Spectacular . . .) This manifested as a renewed interest in applied color and textures, faux material, scale shifts, and mismatched or slipped surface decals; and a decreased interest in gra­ dients, complexity, intricacy, and optical patterns. Although the differences in these expressions has been viewed as a decisive change, there are a myriad of similarities between these two generations of digital surface expressions. Specif­ cally, both tendencies are responses to the nature of digital image manipulation as media process. Where one approach turns discrete data into continuous variations

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of elements as tectonic assemblies, the other manipulates image information and inscribes it as a graphic print onto the building’s surfaces. Where one group seeks complexity in the gradual manipulations of small pieces, the other seeks ambiguity in the awkward wrapping of surfaces. One attempts to animate an object as if it were an image; the other attempts to use an image to disturb the physical stability of an object. In both cases, fabrication is transformed through manipulations of the digital image. In terms of digital mediation however, the two tendencies are not that far apart. Digital images can be scaled, shifted, sheared, pixelated, saturated, and scrambled using graphic software to produce both Op and Pop effects. Mosaïque takes on new meanings in these Op- and Pop art-infuenced surface articulations. The rendering and the fabrication of the building play off each other, complicating what is real decoration and what is fake construction. Build­ ing materials are recognized as surfaces that are always manipulated by industrial processes. Digital images produced by manipulating scale, color, or resolution are printed, scored, screened, or carved into cladding, inviting a misreading of scale, materiality, and assembly. Jennifer Bonner’s interest in faux materiality or T+E+A+M’s printed marbleized mountain screens are two examples (Figs. 5.7 and 5.8). Both projects create a tension between what is real material, real site, real assembly, and what is the intensifed, exaggerated, tinted image. There is an important political aspect to recognize in these decisions. The off-the-shelf American building market is full of fake material and surface applications that

FIG. 5.7

Jennifer Bonner/Mall Architecture, Haus Gables (2018), image courtesy of Jennifer Bonner

154 Part III Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality

appear to be other than what they are made of. With several of these Pop infu­ enced projects, the customized extravagance of digital complexity is exchanged for the more readily manipulable effects of Home Depot fltered through printing technologies. These projects are engaged in questions of a digital materiality pres­ ent in the background of the everyday. Another project that takes on digital screen printing is the Glass Farm by MVRDV (Fig. 5.9). In this building, brick walls and slate roof shingles are digi­ tally printed onto a glass building enclosure shaped like a vernacular barn. The building looks like a real barn built out of real material, but the scale is slightly off, and the play of refections betray the true materiality of the glass. The strang­ est moments occur in Glass Farm’s “fenestration.” On the façade, right next to a printed image of a window is a transparent zone of glass with no brick pattern, the fade of the digital eraser tool left as ornamental frame. This digital erasure creates the “real” aperture for views into and out of the building, but the trace of digital artifce causes it to look less real than the printed “normal” window just next to it. This is a confounding effect: a fake window becomes an ornamental opacity, and a real window is transparency created by digitally erasing decoration. These digitally mediated and fabricated surfaces make reality look strange, fickering between the real and the virtual, as if pulsating, animate, glitched, vibratory, mismatched, montaged. Contemporary architectural ornament and decoration materialize the digital image. Fields of animate gradient fows, lay­ ers of Photoshop diffractions, plywood grain carved into plywood, marble veins created by digitally crinkling a surface, and chunked errors of mismatched image

FIG. 5.8

T+E+A+M, A Range Life (2018), image courtesy of T+E+A+M

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FIG. 5.9

155

MVRDV, Glass Farm (2013), image courtesy of MVRDV

maps. The surface is thin, “cosmetic.” It doesn’t quite match the object, creating a tension between the image of reality and reality as built image. What matters in this work is less the terms ornament or decoration than the fuctuations of atten­ tion they create.

Attentive Machines The process of perception and pattern recognition that operate on the subcon­ scious was a crucial subject for the development of nineteenth-century aesthetic theories and the emergence of the psychology of perception as well as Op art and 1960s computational aesthetics. The ability to extract information about human attention from these patterns and translate this information for non-human com­ putation emerged during the Cold War and led to the frst experiments in what would become computational neural networks, such as Frank Rosenblatt’s Per­ ceptron.51 These are also present in the processes of data mining as described by technology theorist Adrian Mackenzie. Whether we designate them as pattern recognition, data mining or machine learning (all terms that frst came into play during the 1950s), the standard account enunciated by proponents (and opponents) of these techniques is that they uncover patterns in data that cannot appear directly to the human eye, either because there are too many items for anyone to look at, or because the patterns are too subtly woven through in the data.52

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Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs), also known as artifcial intelligence (AI) “machine learning,” were developed for machine vision analysis. These algorithms are designed to evalu­ ate digital images as information and to identify their “content” regardless of distortions introduced by viewing angle, distance, occlusion, or other contingent factors like light or atmosphere. What the image-processing algorithms are try­ ing to do is determine which patterns are important, where attention should be focused for specifc tasks, and what information can be culled as less important. Although both focused and diffused attention are monitored, it is the information gathered about human behavior in a habitual state of distraction that has become the most valuable product in the commodifcation of attention. A convolutional neural network does not interpret meaning; it flters and classifes massive sets of data. These classifcations refect the biases and judgments of multitudes. This is important because the decisions made through automation have real effects on the environment and human interactions with it. We train the algorithms with our biases, and then they train us. A report fled with Air University Press, the academic publishing wing of the United States Air Force, notes the following “strengths” of AI technology: First, one really huge new improvement in AI capabilities relates primarily to ‘perception,’ such as perceiving images or speech, or patterns in some types of big data that humans may not be able to perceive. Thus, now local devices such as smartphones, digital assistants, or cheap cameras in offce lobbies can effectively monitor speech or faces—and indeed such technology is already widespread in the West and China. One can see why this is particularly good for surveillance. Moreover, being able to learn to perceive well also means that if you reverse those models you can be very good at producing images or audio. In a stra­ tegic context that may be useful for fooling others (e.g., ‘deepfakes’). Databases of data, much of which may have originally been collected for other purposes, can also be examined for patterns—adding value to the ‘big data’ that may just have been sitting there.53 The source and its glibness should scare us into what we already know. CNNs, GANs, and other AI machine-vision algorithms are fundamental to how reality is currently surveilled, monetized, interpreted, and created. How information is used across multiple disciplines, institutions, and governing bodies has been, and continues to be, a crucial concern regarding the ethical use of data for identifying individuals and manipulating their attention for proft or control. Before addressing the implications for architecture, let’s consider just a few of the ways neural networks are currently deployed: internet image searches,

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autonomous vehicle navigation, sea fog visibility, neurological object recogni­ tion, drone missile targeting, macroalgae analysis, facial recognition, shipping route planning, thermal insulation performance, urban demographic mapping, agricultural vulnerability assessment, social energy harvesting, petroleum min­ ing detection, human attention mapping . . . the list could go on. Digital images are information and are thus exchanged between machines in ways that humans have little access to. And yet, in the realm of machine vision, one of the most important questions is how to train machines to “see” like humans. This project is sometimes misunderstood as setting out to make machines more like people, placing between life and artifce. To be sure, the images produced by CNNs and GANs are uncanny. The goal of machine vision, however, is not to make machines more like people but rather to analytically map the ways human atten­ tion is focused and diffused. If a computational system can manipulate these, sur­ veillance and economic exploitation can be hidden in the surfaces and interfaces of the world, below our thresholds of consciousness, similar in many ways to the diffused attention of decoration. The phrase neural network originated with psychological studies of biological vision. It refers to the “hierarchical system of neurons in the brain that creates representations of images, starting with simple elements like edges and building up to complex features such as individual human faces.”54 On capture, a digital image is stored as a sequence of RGB data. A neural network analyzes this infor­ mation by fltering it into subsequent iterations (layers) of analysis at various levels of resolution. These patterns are compared to patterns from images that have been analyzed previously and are recursively processed at increasingly higher lay­ ers of resolution. “Is it an edge?” eventually becomes “Is it a dog?” Neural net­ works must be trained on huge datasets of images to be able to determine what an image represents, a process that requires humans to label millions of digital images. As much as we are training these algorithms to labor at fltering and clas­ sifying, they are employing us in the labor of recording what we see and how we describe it. Though the iterative processing of these images is often called “learning,” it is not knowledge that the machine is gaining. As Mackenzie points out, these algorithms perform statistical optimizations, not cognitive processes.55 The machine vision of neural networks does not deal with resemblance but with difference, with distraction—“at least in the Latin sense of distraction mean­ ing ‘disunion,’ ‘separation,’ or ‘pulling apart.’”56 At each layer of resolution, a difference is identifed, and a decision is made. The digital image becomes an assemblage of differences, termed “feature maps.” Through these features, the neural network can identify patterns that are further differentiated as either “con­ tent representations” or “style representations.” A “dog” viewed from different positions or in different lighting conditions presents very different sets of refected energy, and thus very different patterns of pixel adjacencies. If we want an algorithm to be able to identify a human face or interpret the markings on a roadway or decipher the direction and velocity of

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a moving target, the neural network needs to be able to distinguish fgure from ground, to identify edges and “features” within certain ranges, and to classify some information as irrelevant. These issues are affected by the resolution of the initial image capture, but they are also bound up with questions of how attention is focused and diffused. For a human observer, another human face attracts atten­ tion, almost in the same way as an ornamental motif does in architecture (sym­ metry, axis, proportion). As the reciprocal, the effects created by the dispersed repetitive patterns of the surrounding environment can be compared to the ways decoration diffuses attention, they are akin to “noise.” Our human perceptual apparatus developed in an environment where faces provided information of greater immediate impact than the informality of plant foliage in the surround. Yet, it was also these surrounds, these backgrounds, that trained human percep­ tion to know when to relax and when to be attentive. Within machine vision, this difference is distinguished as “content,” vs. “style.” Figure 5.10 illustrates how CNNs analyze, flter, and categorize differ­ ent kinds of image information. The vocabulary of machine vision disturbingly echoes art and architectural terminology. The content image could be under­ stood as the form of a building, the style its decoration. Any digital image is liter­ ally a mosaic of energetic pulses whose “style” can be transferred onto a different formal confguration (Fig. 5.1). In general, our method of synthesizing images that mix content and style from different sources, provides a new, fascinating tool to study the percep­ tion and neural representation of art, style and content-independent image appearance in general. We can design novel stimuli that introduce two independent, perceptually meaningful sources of variation: the appearance and the content of an image . . . In fact, our work offers an algorithmic understanding of how neural representations can independently capture the content of an image and the style in which it is presented.57

FIG. 5.10 “Convolutional

Neural Network Image Generation” from Convolutional Neural Network class, www.deeplearning.ai/generative-adversarial-net works-specialization/

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If the passage above was presented in an art historical context, there would be a long debate about the relation between the “appearance” and the “content” of an image. But this quote instead comes from a team of neural network programmers writing for the scientifc Journal of Vision, and in this context, the startling claim is that the algorithm can dissociate style from content within any given image, and if this is the case, a neural network can also create new combinations, new images. Images created from CNNs and GANs have gained popularity as digital art over the past few years. They are typically surreal, distributing a “style feature” across an image to strange, humorous, or grotesque results. However, neural networks are not typically concerned with developing artistic genres but instead about clas­ sifying the differences that make a difference for human attention. In these image montages the algorithm is part author, but it is the human that reacts with amuse­ ment, surprise, or disgust; neural networks have no aesthetic responses. These algorithms are being trained to evaluate interactions between images and people on the internet. (This is part of the “rendering of persons into data” that Shoshana Zuboff warns us of in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.)58 There is a side-effect of this exchange that deserves consideration, for as we are transformed into data to be monetized by corporations, our engagement with online images also shifts the aesthetics that these images produce. When we consider micro-constituencies that form around specifc aesthetic traits, it is important to note that it is not only the line between producer and consumer of art that is blurred, but also the status of the producer-consumer as a human being. The aesthetic possibilities of CNNs and GANs have been explored by artists like Mario Klingemann, Helena Sarin, and Heiko Müller, as well as by archi­ tects like Ruy Klein, LAMAS, A/P Practice and M. Casey Rehm. The neural network may aid in the production of the work by providing a set of rules and outcomes outside of any strictly “human” decision-making process, yet because of the training sets that the algorithms are built on, they still refect processes of attention distribution. These artists and architects manipulate photoreal images and use CNNs to create almost seamless montages, challenging assumptions about what is real, what is artifce, and what is manipulated. The distortion of realism is one of the most powerful and disturbing aspects of this work. In architecture, the results of experiments with CNNs and GANs exhibit uncanny mixtures that blur familiar categories, posing a challenge to disciplinary discourse. The com­ binations are based on existing images, but they are not analyzed through the disciplinary knowledge of formal hierarchies, nor is this a disjunctive montage in the lineage of Dada provocations. The “fnal” image seems to simply present a reality—a “deep fake”—without signaling to the viewer if the project is to be read as a critique or a seduction. And this deadpan affect is its power—it is just a new real—blunt and decorated. Since neural networks were developed to analyze images, they are used in architectural design primarily in relation to surfaces. Images from the internet are appropriated as found material and used to generate “content” and “style”

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FIG. 5.11 Notre

Dame de La Tourette, Ruy Klein (2019,) image courtesy of David Ruy and Karel Klein

features for a project. Figure 5.11 is an image created by the architects David Ruy and Karel Klein. The “content” is Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, and the “style” is the cathedral of Notre Dame. The two architectures are merged as a single building, rendered photorealistically. It is not a combination of translu­ cent layers, nor a collage of cut-up photographs, nor a deliberate combination of ornamental styles that calls out for close reading. This image cannot be reduced through the representational conventions of drawing traditionally used to analyze architecture. There is nothing to learn from analyzing this image other than the data thresholds used for the style transfer. To design in this manner is to treat media as found objects that can be sampled and reshuffed. This is a montage of pixel patterns evaluated statistically and recombined to meet a certain set of criteria. The fneness, grain, and placement of these electronic signal mosaics are determined in part by the algorithms, but the images are also the result of selec­ tion and rejection by a human co-author. This work can be evaluated by both designer and critic through style, charac­ ter, signifcation: the history of ornament. But this can only go so far. Traditional close readings falter when attempting to establish an argument for or against this aesthetic redistribution of reality. The other possibility, as laid out in this chapter, is to consider it as a mosaïque—an experiment in distributed attention. Neural network images do not symbolically reference anything that exists in reality. They are abstract assemblages of discrete color pulses. The pattern of their assemblage, however, models an image of reality as mediated by a digital “cam­ era”.59 Given that the structure of these images comes from an AI statisical analysis

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trained on artifacts of human attention, it would seem that our inability to deter­ mine fact from fction in digital imagery is in part due to our failure to recognize how our own optical perception operates. This should make us anxious, as an ever increasing amount of our environment is determined by digital images. But conscious awareness of these processes will not change their infuence over us. What may be more important is to understand why we are interested in images that challenge our assumptions about the appearance of reality. There is an innate human desire to understand these thresholds, as Dave Hickey says, “pleasure in art derives less from knowing what we are looking at than from the anxiety of not-knowing just this.”60 Whether this interest is based on fears about the precari­ ousness of our relations to the environment, or from a desire to believe the world can look different from our expectations, is of less importance than identifying the qualities that emerge when relations become unstable. These are questions of the mosaïque—questions about the reality of images and images of reality. Note: Portions of this chapter were initially developed in the essay “The Aesthet­ ics of the Background” published in Kent Bloomer: Nature as Ornament, ed. Sunil Bald and Gary Huafan He (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).

Notes 1 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), 151. 2 Adrian Mackenzie, “Simulate, Optimise, Partition: Algorithmic Diagrams of Pattern Recognition from 1953 Onwards,” in Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics, ed. John Beck and Ryan Bishop (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 52. 3 Joshua Cohen, Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction (New York: Random House, 2018), 3–4. 4 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 29–30. 5 Beatriz Colomina, “Enclosed by Images: The Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture,” Grey Room 2 (Winter 2001): 19. 6 Colomina, “Enclosed by Images,” 19. 7 Colomina, “Enclosed by Images,” 20. 8 Michael Marder “Phenomenology of Distraction; or, Attention in the Fissuring of Time and Space,” Research in Phenomenology 41, no. 3 (2011): 399. 9 Marder, “Phenomenology of Distraction,” 397. 10 Marder, “Phenomenology of Distraction,” 396. 11 Marina Van Zuylen, The Plenitude of Distraction (New York: Sequence Press, 2017), 16–17. 12 Nathaniel Cortlandt Curtis, The Secrets of Architectural Composition (Cleveland: J. H. Jansen, 1923), 114. 13 Jean Paul Carlhian, “The Ecole des Beaux-Arts: Modes and Manners,” Journal of Archi­ tectural Education 33, no. 2 (November 1979): 13. 14 Carlhian, “The Ecole des Beaux-Arts,” 13. 15 Carlhian, 13. 16 Curtis, Architectural Composition, 114. 17 Curtis, 114. 18 Curtis, 114.

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19 Jean Paul Carlhian, “The Ecole des Beaux-Arts,” 13. 20 John Vredenburgh Van Pelt, A Discussion of Composition, Especially as Applied to Archi­ tecture (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 222. 21 Andrew Atwood, Not Interesting: On the Limits of Criticism in Architecture (Novato, CA: Applied Research and Design Publishing, 2018), 77. 22 The issue of attention has been a topic of interest in recent architectural discussions. Andrew Atwood, for example, proposes a “feld of attention” as for understanding the pull between the four categories of different, same, ambiguous, and discernible, which manifests as confusing, interesting, boring, and comforting. These categories relate to Jeffery Kipnis’s distinctions between “close reading” and “close attention.” The argu­ ments throughout this chapter regarding attention owe a debt to these discussions. See Atwood, Not Interesting, 18–23. 23 Kent Bloomer, “A Critical Distinction Between Decoration and Ornament,” 306090 10, “Decoration” (New York: 306090 Inc., 2006), 49. 24 Bloomer, “A Critical Distinction,” 56. 25 Jonathan Massey, “Ornament and Decoration,” in Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design, ed. Graeme Brooker and Lois Weinthal (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 497–498. 26 Antoine Picon, “Ornament and Its Users: From the Vitruvian Tradition to the Digital Age,” in Histories of Ornament: From Global and Local, ed. Gülru Necipog˘ lu and Alina Payne (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 27 Picon, “Ornament and Its Users,” 12–14. 28 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (1936), in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writ­ ings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 40. 29 Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 40. 30 Bloomer, “A Critical Distinction,” 49. 31 Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism”, in A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 11. 32 Juan Jose Lahuerta, On Loos, Ornament and Crime (Barcelona: TENOV, 2015), 40–41, 45. 33 A partial list of published books includes: Farshid Moussavi and Michael Kubo, The Function of Ornament (Barcelona: Actar; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, 2006). Antoine Picon, Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (Chichester: Wiley & Sons, 2014). Ben Pell, The Articulate Surface (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2010). Mario Carpo, The Second Digital Turn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). Lisa Iwamoto, Digital Fabrications: Architectural and Material Techniques (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009). Branko Kolarevic, Architecture in the Digital Age: Design and Manufacturing (New York; London: Taylor & Francis, 2005). Lars Spuybroek, The Architecture of Variation (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009). Lars Spuybroek, Textile Tectonics (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2011). Philip Yuan, Digital Fabrication (Shanghai, China: Tongji University Press, 2017). Nick Dunn, Digital Fabrication in Architecture (London: Laurence King Publish­ ing, 2012). MOS, From Control to Design: Parametric/Algorithmic Architecture (Barcelona; New York: Actar-D, 2008). 34 Picon, “Ornament and Its Users,” 10.

35 Picon, 10.

36 Picon, 10.

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37 Vittoria Di Palma, “A Natural History of Ornament,” in Histories of Ornament, 20. 38 “Ornament was previously viewed as ‘supplementary’ in a particular sense; it was expected to be superfcial, an appendage tacked on to the real substance of the build­ ing, yet at the same time essential, all the more so because it was possible to imagine it not being there. Ornament was cosmetic, in both senses of the term: it was as slight a surface detail as hairstyle or makeup, but it also revealed an underlying structure. The words ‘cosmic’ and ‘cosmetic’ derive from the same Greek root, meaning arrangement or order.” Picon, “Ornament and Its Users,” 10. 39 Dave Hickey, “Trying to See What We Can Never Know,” in Optic Nerve (London: Merrell, 2007), 11. 40 Pamela M. Lee, “Bridget Riley’s Eye/Body Problem,” in Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004): 171, 178, 189–190. 41 Hickey, “Trying to See What We Can Never Know,” 10. 42 Boris Groys, On the New (London: Verso, 2014), 105. 43 Picon, “Ornament and Its Users,” 16. 44 Esteban Garcia Bravo, Cybernethisms: Aldo Giorgini’s Computer Art Legacy (West Lafay­ ette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2015), 43. 45 See http://dada.compart-bremen.de/item/exhibition/172#:~:text=Michael%20Noll %20and%20B%C3%A9la%20Julesz,exhibition%20in%20Stuttgart%20(Germany). 46 Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 62. 47 Halpern, Beautiful Data, 64. 48 A. Michael Noll, “The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium” (1967) see A LittleKnown Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973, ed. Margit Rosen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 313–325. 49 See Bozo Bek, ed., Bit International 7, “Dialogue with the Machine” (1971). See Rosen, A Little-Known Story about a Movement. 50 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 29–30. 51 See Evan Harris Walker, “Toward a New Basis for Aesthetic Theory,” Bit 7 (1971): 51–52. 52 Mackenzie, “Simulate, Optimise, Partition,” 50. 53 Nicholas D. Wright, ed., “The Technologies: What Specifcally is New?” in Artif­ cial Intelligence, China, Russia, and the Global Order (Montgomery, AL: Air University Press, 2019), 6. 54 John Bohannon, “Helping Robots See the Big Picture,” Science 346, no. 6206 (2014): 186. 55 Mackenzie “Simulate, Optimise, Partition,” 50. 56 Marder, “Phenomenology of Distraction,” 397. 57 Leon Gatys, Alexander Ecker, and Matthias Bethge, “A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style,” Journal of Vision (August 2015): 8. 58 Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 151. 59 John May, “Everything Is Already an Image,” Log 40 (Spring/Summer 2017): 12. 60 Hickey, Optic Nerve, 10.

6 THE SHALLOWNESS OF DEPTH

Given that most visual media are fat, there is an obvious concern that occurs regarding the representation of depth.While the simulation of optical experience can give a sensation of depth as modeled by light, planar measurement attempts to accurately record depth as indices, as lines, as geometry.That optics and metrics often diverge is deeply entangled in Western ethics, epistemology, and aesthet­ ics, the decision to value one side or the other refecting philosophical positions on the status of images at specifc historical junctures. For instance, this tension regarding the representation of depth on the plane became a central concern within the emergence of modernist aesthetic theory. It is there in the distinctions that Heinrich Wölffin made between the linear and the painterly, used by him to distinguish the Renaissance from the Baroque; it is in Adolf Hildebrand’s distant view vs. near view and the empathetic projection of bodily sensation; it is also an underlying concern of Clement Greenberg’s desires for medium specifcity, which by extension becomes involved in distinctions between realism and abstraction within the art of the past century. Although aspects of arguments from Wölffin, Hildebrand, and Greenberg will return towards the end of this chapter, what follows is not primarily a discussion of what art history would term “formalism.” More apt is what Caroline Jones refers to as the “bureaucratization of the senses.”1 Jones argues that the primacy of optical experience within Greenberg’s criticism should be understood as more than simply formal, she views it as part of the modern compartmentalization of the senses created by and serving the beneft of certain institutions desiring cultural control.2 This includes a disciplining of the perception of depth and can be described in Greenbergian terms as an exchange of the “pictorial” for the “optical.”The implications of this argument for art history have been thoroughly studied for generations, but the problem presented by the visual illusion versus the DOI: 10.4324/9781003149682-10

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tactile measurement of depth has its own parallel entanglement within the history of architectural representation. The question of depth is fundamental for architectural representation, its con­ cern being how architecture claims expertise over the fully three-dimensional world of built material through a handful of lines drawn on fat pieces of paper. The representation of depth is regulated by disciplinary values that seek to estab­ lish and maintain the legitimacy of architectural practice; it has always been bureaucratic. In this, the accurate, technical, measurement of space became syn­ onymous with architectural drafting. The problem was that these drawings did not do a good job at showing what the design would look like once built.This confict was handled by distinguishing between two different sets of conven­ tions: orthographic drawings handled metrics while perspectival images rendered appearances. What is of interest in this chapter is not a rehearsal of this separa­ tion, but how aspects of the two sides are continually combined, pulled apart, and recombined in efforts to either expand the illusions of depth within a fat drawing, or domesticate spatial ambiguity towards the appearance of abstract precision on the plane. For architectural representation, depth is a much stranger question than one that can be reduced and resolved by a simple dichotomy. It refects conceptual and aesthetic provocations that continually negotiate dis­ ciplinary boundaries. Depth in an architectural drawing is regulated through techniques of projec­ tion. This term however, is historically, philosophically, technologically, and aes­ thetically contingent. Projection could mean light, shadow, vision, geometry, or empathy. It could be the scanning of the environment as an invisible ray of sight shooting out from an embodied eye, like a lidar laser pulse. Or it could be lumi­ nosity refecting off the world and projecting into the retina, akin to the lens of a photographic camera. At other times projection is physically modeled as threads, as “pencils” binding points to points in spatial armatures, a tactile-mechanical translation of objects in space into lines on paper. Light in all of its manifestations from sun to lamp to candle to cinema is also considered projection, and this is to say nothing about the “eye of the sun” with its parallel projections suggesting that the “viewer” is infnitely far away and able to see the world unobscured by shadows.3 Many of the qualities that the discipline of architecture has valued or devalued, argued for and against, taught in schools, and formulated through written treatises are the results of shifting interpretations around the questions of how depth is made sensible through representations.An example to begin. The representation shown in Figure 6.1 is a refected ceiling plan for the foyer of the Paris Opera designed by Charles Garnier. Though it may appear com­ pletely ordinary to architects, this is a very odd representation. First, it is a “plan,” rendered to show the vertical walls as if cut by a horizontal plane. Everything cut is rendered solid, as material, as poché; everything not cut is rendered as a visible surface beyond. As discussed at length in the frst chapter of this book, this plan

166 Part III Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality

Garnier, Place de l’Opéra, Paris, detail of the foyer ceiling (1862) © RIBA Collections

FIG. 6.1 Charles

cut is considered congruent with the drawing paper, the coincidence of the fat­ ness of abstraction with the fatness of the medium allowing for measurement on the plane. Everything that is not cut exists in depth. The representation of these visible surfaces is done by orthographically projecting points to the draw­ ing plane and representing edges as lines. However, as soon as this information is geometrically projected up, it is optically rendered to recede back down into depth.This struggle relates to two very different senses of projection, one tactile, the other optical—what Robin Evans describes as the “futter between the real and the imaginary.”4 The conventions of a plan dictate that it is cut to “look” down, directing the view perpendicular to the ground. A refected ceiling plan does not, however, show the foor; rather, it shows the ceiling as if seen refected in a mirror on the foor. This representation looks down to see up. The visible surfaces of the ceil­ ing are rendered in three ways. First, the three-dimensional ornamental motifs are modeled with highlights and shadows cast at forty-fve degrees to the draw­ ing frame, as if lit from the upper left corner of the drawing. The shadow lines are all parallel to each other and oblique to the drawing plane. These bands of ornament are the brightest elements on the page, calling attention to themselves through contrast and fnely detailed linework. Second, the infll panel paintings are rendered to fatten their three-dimensionality by diluting their tonal range to

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a middle sepia.These panels are not meant to depict the actual compositions but to act as decoration, indicating the genre of panting that is to fll the background with a desired character. Lastly, the curvature of the arches and vaulting is shaded with a gradient ink wash.This rendering effect also suggests a light source some­ where towards the top of the page, but in a more subdued manner than the shad­ ows cast by the modeled ornament. Great care is taken in modulating these tones to prevent details from being obscured.This tonal wash is more of a shading than a directional shadow, a suggestion of depth giving the drawing the appearance of a shallow curvature.The overall effect of this representation is to indicate the decorum and character of the foyer ceiling through surface articulation. Orna­ ment and decoration are not simply the delineation of shape and pattern, but also an optical fuctuation between the spatial and the fat as revealed through the modeling of light. That this representation is in no way indicative of how this space, as built, would be experienced, is obvious.The fgure of the plan cut throws shadows up on the ceiling as if sunlight were coming from below.The combination of the fat projection of surface detail with the graduated shading is unnatural in its mobili­ zation of shadows of illumination while at the same time denying the perspectival recession of space.The ostensible reason for this is to maintain a scaled, measurable orthographic projection. But this image is not intended for use in construction; the orthographic abstractions are just as much an aesthetic choice as the illusion of shallow depth.The result of bringing these techniques together is an assemblage of different depth cues that range from the highly abstract to the deceptively real, from learned disciplinary conventions to the optical unconscious.The important questions to ask are how did these combinations develop, and why are they still operative in contemporary representation? At the École des Beaux-Arts, this technique of rendering, of imaging archi­ tectural surfaces, was an aspect of the effects known as the mosaïque. As discussed in the previous chapter, the mosaïque rendered an architectural concept legible by focusing and diffusing attention across the surface of the representation. Per­ ceptual depth is another aspect of how attention is manipulated, into rather than across the representational plane.The mosaïque can be found in plan, section, and elevation renderings and is universally orthographic, frontally facing the primary surfaces as an elevation, even if that surface is on the foor or ceiling. Depth is held in a tightly bounded range, its appearance shuffing between planes of modeled surfaces rather than pulling perception into a deep recession.The term mosaïque is not used in conjunction with perspectival representations, yet many of its techniques are tied to issues that developed within painting. Furthermore, the depth it renders is often tactile, as fuctuations in shallow sculptural space, similar to a bas-relief. Figure 6.2 is a photogrammetric scan of the ceiling of Santa Maria del Prio­ rato, designed by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. This digital image consists of mul­ tiple points located in three-dimensional space, a spatial model where depth is

168 Part III Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality

Battista Piranesi, Santa Maria del Priorato (1764), ceiling photogram­ metry scan and image by the author (2019)

FIG. 6.2 Giovanni

calculated through images, each point a luminous pixel defned by numbers speci­ fying a mixture of red, green, and blue light.The assumption is that each of these points acts as the representation of a real point in the world as captured by an array of photon collecting diodes (i.e., a camera). In photogrammetry, space is metrically resolved in the digital model, but the image shown here also presents an optical depth, a low relief of the intertwined sculptural motifs with shade and shadow at the edges. The shade and shadow are assumed to come from the light in the environment as captured, but there is a problem with this assumption. Light on a surface depends on the energy refected from that surface toward the eye/camera/scanner.As depth is computed through the aligned triangulation of multiple projections, each spatial point’s hue and brightness become a combination of multiple captures of different luminous data. Thus the shade and shadow are really RGB hue mixtures as a graduation of tonal values receding from the surfaces closest the camera, rendered as an average of multiple luminous captures. These mixtures account for the strange optical effects of shallow depth, similar in many ways to the aesthetic qualities of the mosaïque. The fact photogrammetry has supplanted the computation of depth by using images and only images, and furthermore represents the measurement of space through colored pixels would seem to fnally resolve the conficts between the metric and the optic.The desire to maintain these distinctions continues how­ ever, and to understand why will require a little more prodding for what is at

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stake has never been simply about the accuracy of spatial measurement. Let’s look at another episode.

“To First Know Them as They Actually Exist” . . . since it is impossible to reproduce objects as they appear without frst knowing them as they actually exist, the science of geometry must precede that of perspective. How can the draftsman give us the idea of the lamp or a hat, if he does not have a clear idea himself of the lamp or the hat, if he does not know the exact proportions—height, width, weight, geometric form—that is to say, its real construction. If reality is only a visual distortion, independent of the object itself, the student will not know how to handle this distortion, or how to make others see it, unless he has an exact notion of the undistorted object . . . (I say science and not art).5 Quoted here is Charles Blanc, history professor from 1865 to 1867 and director from 1870 to 1873 of the École des Beaux-Arts. In this statement lies a conun­ drum.While the architect is interested in the design of visual experience, called dessin perspectif within the Beaux-Arts, this perspective image was understood to be a “visual distortion” that was not true to how objects “actually exist.” To correct this problem of perspective, artists and architects required a different system of representation known as la correction, which used the principles of dessin géométral.6 Dessin géométral focused on the bounding outline of a fgure.This allowed the designer to avoid perspective effects, to, in Richard Moore’s words, “see objec­ tively in undistorted sections and elevations based on a grid of horizontals and verticals.”7 Moore makes clear that dessin géométral was enmeshed in a larger apparatus of techniques that extended beyond the act of drawing. One of these was descriptive geometry, the set of procedures for describing volumetric bodies through interrelated orthographic projections.8 Once on the plane, these media­ tions allowed three dimensions to be manipulated through older technologies such as Euclidian plane geometry and Cartesian analytical geometry.As powerful as descriptive geometry was—Mongean descriptive geometry was classifed as a military secret after all—there is something beyond the pragmatics of technique driving the Beaux-Arts privileging of dessin géométral over dessin perspectif.9 As John Vredenburgh Van Pelt wrote, “The power of seeing a completed fgure in the mind’s eye is acquired by a thorough training in descriptive geometry.”10 This is seeing with the intellect, without the distortions of vision, without eyes. This belief in the conceptual abstraction of vision underlies the representational con­ ventions of plans, sections, and elevations—codifed notations that architects are trained to produce and read. Central to architectural pedagogy to this day, these modes of representation are valued by the discipline for how they legitimize architectural knowledge and maintain professional status.

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The distinction between dessin géométral and dessin perspectif is one manifesta­ tion of the longstanding problem of depth on the fat plane.Where dessin géométral is said to be true or more real because it does not simulate the visual appearance of depth, dessin perspectif is said to be deceptive or fake because it appears closer to our visual perception.These terms may belong to the École des Beaux-Arts of the nineteenth century, but the values they describe extend back to the transcendent ideals of Platonic philosophy and are still alive and well in the early part of the twenty-frst century.

Up Close and Far Away Used by stonemasons, carpenters, shipwrights, tailors, metalworkers, and mosaic tilers, templates store and replicate shapes across different materials, times, and locations. Templates transfer material edge into line and then line into material edge. Three-dimensional depth is fattened into a fgure on a plane—an abstract substitution indexing a tangible reality. With templates, trust in the mediation is verifed by congruence between the tactile and optical. William Ivins, the frst curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, notes that the origins of Greek geometry “in tactile-muscular intuition” are revealed in “its nearly com­ plete preoccupation with metrical problems and its essential dependence upon congruence.”11 Congruence is based on touch, and the template is in a sense a representation that touches reality.The template is also the basis of a geometry in which measure (metrics) is the primary concern for mediation. There are only three transformational processes that can be performed with a template: move, rotate, fip. These are the three allowable transformations in a metric geometry: translation, rotation, refection. As the historian of engineering drawing Peter Jeffrey Booker writes,“The draw­ ing of a triangle and the cutting out of a triangle from a sheet of card are geometri­ cally speaking, the same.”12 As discussed in Chapter 1, the stonemason’s template was a key technological precedent for the introduction of the rendering concept that became known as poché. The modani drawing would be literally cut out as a profle template, and it was this drawing/model that often served as the contract docu­ ment binding architect and builder.13 The question of how to accurately measure spatial relations that resist fattening into the plane requires another technology of mediation: projective geometry. Because projection has to do with perspective and the simulation of vision, as opposed to the physical touch of the template, it is often considered to belong to a completely different ontological category—dessin perspectif as opposed to dessin géométral—but as we will soon see, there is less difference than commonly assumed. Consider that the term for the shaded profle drawings of the stonemason was skiagraphia, shadow drawing. Skiagraphia connects astronomy to sundialing to stereotomy to conic sections to optics to perspective to cinematic projection to the perception of depth created by the play of light on, in, and through surfaces.14 The projection of shadows is in a word—media.

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At the mythological origins of Western geometry lies the story of Thales and the shadow of a pyramid.Thales discovered that the height of the pyramid could be calculated by comparing its shadow to one cast by a vertical stick (gnomon) at the same moment. This procedure creates two similar triangles, provided by the angle of the sun’s light, which modern notation would express as the proportional relation of a small ratio to a large ratio: a/b = C/D.There are three extensions of this idea to highlight here. First, the operations of similarity and proportion are fundamental to the concept of measurement within Euclidian geometry and thus for all sciences based on processes of rationalization.15 Second, regulating scalar transformations is an obvious necessity if an architect wants to draw a small shape on a piece of paper and have it scale up to the size of a building. Without pro­ portional regulation, the practice of architecture would not exist as we know it. Third, proportion along with symmetry would serve as foundational concepts for connections between aesthetics and epistemology from the Renaissance onward. It was one of the devices that linked art and architecture to the quadrivium and thus to humanist discourse.16 These are three massive issues, each receiving centu­ ries of examination and discussion, Michel Serres suggests however, that there is another implication as well. Thales invents the notion of model, of module, but he also brings the vis­ ible to the tangible.To measure is, supposedly, to relate.True, but the relation implies a transporting: of the ruler, of the point of view, of the things lined up, and so on. In the realm of the accessible, the transporting is always pos­ sible: in the realm of the inaccessible, vision must take care of displacements: hence the angle of sight, hence the cast shadow; in any case, the essential element is the transporting.17 What is measured is not the thing itself but the shadow, the image. For Serres, the story of Thales and the pyramid is also the origin of projection as action at a distance, the “transporting” of the module of measure. Reality is interfaced, in terms of all the bits of information that have been gathered at the relevant levels: the secrets of the object’s shaded surfaces and its cast shadow. I know nothing about the volume except what its planar projections tell me.18 This is a philosophical stance on representation; reality becomes known through its shadows, its projections. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” immediately comes to mind, but there is something very different implied by Serres in his reading of Thales. Geometry is a ruse; it takes a detour, an indirect route, to reach that which lies outside immediate experience. In this case the ruse is the model: the construction of the summary, the skeleton of a pyramid in reduced form

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but of equivalent proportions. In fact, Thales has discovered nothing but the possibility of reduction, the idea of a module, the notion of model.The pyramid itself is inaccessible; he invents a scale, a type of ladder.19 Serres emphasizes the two-way exchange in the story of Thales.This is not a pas­ sive theory of representation but rather one where action on the image as model has very real effects in the world. This stance is fundamental to the practice of architecture insofar as it “projects” the templates of tactile congruence into the conceptual realm of representation and the perceptual realm of vision, a conjunc­ tion that allows architects to make aesthetic judgments at a distance through an image as opposed to the physical experience of material construction. In a projection, the line of sight is confated with the ray of light.20 Light travels in a straight line from a source to the eye of the viewer.Vision travels in a straight line from the eye of the viewer to the objects of the world. In a projection-based representation, these lines are captured as points intersecting a surface. This sur­ face has taken on different metaphors throughout history: windows, screens, veils, sheets, flms, retinas, diodes—the intersecting traces rendered as points, marks, blots, or pixels.There are signifcant differences between the technologies of lin­ ear perspective, descriptive geometry, photography, cinema, photogrammetry, and lidar, but as mediations they all image the environment as indexical traces of lines sectioned by surfaces, which means they are ultimately concerned with points. We tend to treat projection primarily as the simulation of vision, but as a technol­ ogy of mediation it is very tactile. A point is the template of a line that is cut by a surface. It was not until Gaspard Monge fully resolved a method of descriptive geom­ etry at the very end of the eighteenth century that a truly interrelated set of orthographic projections was worked out both theoretically and practically.21 (Indeed, it should not be surprising that the most rigorous use of these prin­ ciples prior to Monge can be found in drawings for shipbuilding, a practice that required scaled translations of lines to produce templates for construction.)22 Descriptive geometry, as discussed above in relation to dessin géométral, is often thought of as an aid to seeing with “the mind’s eye,” but Monge did not value it as a technique of visualization, for the intent was to resolve the computation of spatial problems through their projections. Many of his drawings are visually unintelligible to those not trained in their methods. Figure 6.3a is from the frst publication of Monge’s Géométrie Descriptive in 1795. It shows a line in space, FE, as represented by the points F and E intersected by two perpendicular planes, plane LM and plane AC.These points allow the orthographic projections, the top and side “views” to be constructed.The diagram in Figure 6.3b is a pictorial rep­ resentation of the same information. It is the spatial determination of one point through two projections that underlies descriptive geometry.As Monge explains, “If on two planes of known position in space one is given on each the projec­ tion of a point one wishes to defne, this point will be perfectly determined.”23

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FIG. 6.3A

Drawing from Gaspard Monge, Géométrie Descriptive (1795)

FIG. 6.3B

Axonometric diagram by author (2020)

173

FIG. 6.4

Girard Desargues, etchings by Abraham Bosse, published in La Maniere universelle de M. des Argues Lyonnois (a) Stonecutting (1643), (b) Sundialling (1643), (c) Perspective (1648)

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In principle, if not technique, this describes photogrammetry, a single point in space defned through two projections, two images. In projective geometry, the relations between the observer, the screen, and the object are interchangeable: objects are images, images are objects, and each can be transformed into the other. As formulated by Girard Desargues, projec­ tive geometry is a system of collinearity and coincidence that can account for the translation of any confguration in space from one location to another.24 Desargues’ theorem is the general theory of all projections.Any of the ten points in the confguration can be an “eye” capturing a pair of triangles as projections (Fig. 6.5).This holds true in two or three dimensions.Any fgure can be an image or an object. When a point of projection is moved to infnity it creates parallel projections as a limit case (Fig. 6.6). If the parallel projections are perpendicular to the “picture plane,” the projection is orthographic. In order to explain his system, Desargues applied it to problems of stereotomy (stonecutting), sundials (time), and perspective (vision).25 Much of what we know about Desargues’ work comes from a series of publications engraved and written by Abraham Bosse between 1643 and 1653 (Fig. 6.4 a, b and c). Bosse was a master printmaker— his business was technological reproduction—and what he found in Desargues’ projective geometry was a universal system for the storage, transmission, and processing of images.

FIG. 6.5 Desargues’

Theorem, ten projective relations diagrammed by the author (2020). Pictorial representation, bottom right, based on a diagram from Peter Jeffrey Booker, A History of Engineering Drawing (1963). The multiplicity of projections was frst introduced to me by Miles Ritter

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FIG. 6.6 Desargues’

Theorem, Projective confgurations from point perspectival projection towards oblique parallel projection (2020), image by the author

Dessin géométral and dessin perspectif, it was argued within the Beaux-Arts, were antithetical approaches to knowing the world through representation. The break was ontological and epistemological. One was true to how objects exist, and the other was a distortion, a simulation, an illusion. But within projective geometry, the difference between dessin géométral and dessin perspectif is only one of degree, not kind.The tactile measure and the visual projection of form are not ontologically dif­ ferent from an epistemological stance, meaning simply that if you have knowledge of projective geometry the two can be transformed into each other, which further means that the metric mediation of depth was resolved almost four centuries ago, but this, of course, did not put the question of rendering optical depth to rest.

Double Projections Within the École des Beaux-Arts, the mosaïque was used for the presentation and evaluation of fnal design proposals. But there are other factors that contributed to its development as well—the reproduction of images within architectural treatises, for instance. Prior to photographic reproduction, etching and engraving required a choice to be made between the clarity and precision of single-line outlines and the visual simulation of depth, material, and light through hatching. Research­ ing the use of outline, shadow, and shading in architectural treatises from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Nicholas Savage notes that the valuation of imaging styles underwent several fuctuations over the course of these two centuries.26 Should the outlines of form be stressed to emphasize the ordering of geometric proportions? Or are the visual effects of shade and shadow important insofar as they are empirically verifable and thus closer to how one would per­ ceive a building? This debate shows the fraught history of establishing discursive arguments through images.

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Savage calls attention to a particular kind of representation in which depth is rendered as shadow while elevation is articulated with orthographic linework: The capacity of ‘rendered’ geometrical elevations to convey the chiaroscuro of a perspective view and yet avoid dimensional distortion enabled such representations to operate in at least three other possible ways. Firstly, it gave them the authority of something observed (that is, actually perceived), instead of only imagined; secondly, it made elevations (and more especially sections, which are really a particular type of elevation) easier to ‘read’ and therefore better suited for publication and consumption in a variety of con­ texts over a period of time; and thirdly, it enabled them to offer the calcu­ lated effects of a building (rather than Alberti’s ‘calculated standards’) as the basis upon which architectural forms can be interpreted and judged, rather than merely stated or proposed.27 Savage identifes several aesthetic issues here: the tension between the experien­ tial and the ideal, the construction of an audience through representation, and the visual basis for theoretically formulating the judgment and evaluation of an architectural design. In his Parallel de l’architecture antique et de la moderne (1650), Roland Fréart de Chambray uses single-line outlines to depict ideal, theoreti­ cal architectural designs; for representations of the physical ruins of antique architectural precedents, however, shade and shadow are introduced to indicate the effects of light on a real material object.28 (Savage points out that Andrea Palladio, in his Quattro libri dell’architettura, also uses this division, though less systematically, to differentiate between his design proposals and the architectural precedents from antiquity that he references (Fig. 6.7).)29 The questions of what is real and what is ideal, what is model and what is proposal, what is sensible and what is conceptual, are all tied to these methods of architectural imaging. Where the suppression of shade and shadow could be used to focus attention on the abstract geometric outline, the rendering of perceptual depth could serve “the cultivation of a critical sensibility more concerned with the visual effects of architecture.”30 By the time we reach Paul Letarouilly’s Edifces de Rome Moderne (1840), we have a portfolio presenting architectural precedents of Renaissance Rome, all captured uniformly in single-line outlines, from decorative details to bounding silhouettes. Letarouilly’s engravings aimed for precision, clarity, and neutrality through linear rendering. The goal was a defnitive document whose authority is summoned not only through measurement but also through an appearance of a detached objectivity. The architectural precedent was verifed by an aesthetics of abstract lines on planes, which in turn provided the geometric under-drawing used to train architectural students in the compositional methods of the École des Beaux-Arts.31

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Palladio, I quattro libri dell’architettura (1570).The line engraving (left) represents Palladio’s theoretical ideal of the Corinthian Column; the shaded engraving (right) is the precedent from the “Temple of Castor and Pollux,” Temple of Dioscuri, Naples (frst century BCE)

FIG. 6.7 Andrea

However, this should not be considered as the fnal statement on the debate, in fact it should be considered primarily as the apotheosis of a specifc technol­ ogy of mechanical reproduction. Once in the academies, plates such as those from Letarouilly’s Edifces de Rome Moderne, also provided background compositions for the rehearsal of rendering with washed tones and graduated shadows, a training in the mosaïque.32 One of the main rendering techniques to be learned by the student was the modeling of light to create sensations of depth. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the shading of the mosaïque was brought into plans, sections, and elevations. This was not about mimicking the appearance of the world but about transforming the drawing surface into a low relief with allusions to depth modeled by light.As noted above by Savage, the rendering of shade and shadow in an orthographic drawing was built out of the contradictory desires of measurable precision on the plane and the optical depth of visual experience, a potent mix that continues to fascinate. The study shown here by Henri Labrouste is exemplary (Fig. 6.8). These effects of light were what was meant by the term “modeling.” It was a simulation,

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a visualization of the real through the abstractions of shadow projection—ski­ agraphia. The light of the sun is approximated as lines of projection parallel to each other and oblique to the planes that intersect them, casting shadows on the vertical or horizontal surfaces. (This combination of different projection systems, one for vision and one for light, was typical of the traditions of painting descended from the Italian Renaissance.)33 As Robin Evans describes this mix­ ture, the orthographic drawing removes the perception of depth to gain a clarity of geometric description, but following this, the painterly effects of shadows are brought back obscuring and disorienting, taking “their revenge” on the stable clarity of linework.34 Regardless of this confict, or perhaps exactly because of its combination of abstract objectivity and sensory subjectivity, the double projec­ tion of orthographic elevation and oblique shadow has been in consistent use within the architectural elevation from the nineteenth to twenty-frst centuries. Shown here are six elevations that span roughly a century and a half, from Charles Garnier (Fig 6.9) to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (Fig 6.10), Michael Webb (Fig 6.11) to Luigi Moretti (Fig 6.12), Neil Denari (Fig 6.13) to Bureau Spec­ tacular (Fig 6.14). The standard angle for drawing shadows at the École des Beaux-Arts was set at forty-fve degrees.35 This was an effcient choice, given the forty-fve-degree

FIG. 6.8

Henri Labrouste, Pantheon Capital Study (1830), image courtesy of Académie d’Architecture, Paris

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FIG. 6.9

Charles Garnier, Paris Opera House Façade (1862)

Mies van der Rohe, Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper, Berlin-Mitte, Germany (1921), elevation study, charcoal and graphite on brown paper mounted on board, 21 3/4 × 34 1/2 in, Mies van der Rohe Archive, gift of Mary Cal­ lery, digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

FIG. 6.10 Ludwig

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Webb, Furniture Manufacturers Association Headquarters (1957–58) High Wycombe, England (Furniture factory), elevation, Michael Webb © Archigram 1957–58

FIG. 6.11 Michael

FIG. 6.12

Luigi Moretti, “Il Girasole” house, Rome (1949) © Prospectus on viale Bruno Buozzi (Central State Archive, Luigi Moretti Fund)

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FIG. 6.13

Neil Denari, Prototype School (1991), courtesy of Neil M. Denari

FIG. 6.14

Bureau Spectacular, Queen Anne House (2018), all rights Bureau Spectacular

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triangle used for drafting (descended from the set-square templates of masons and carpenters), but it also standardized a technique related to the production of oblique drawings often referred to as “axonometric.” Although these are mea­ surable about their axis (axo¯ n – axis, metric – measure), they are fundamentally different from isometric, dimetric, trimetric, and auxiliary projections, which are all species of orthographic projection. Oblique drawings combine “true shape” orthographic drawing with an oblique projection in order to image adjacent sides and simulate depth. As commonly practiced in manual drafting, an orthographic drawing is rotated, and then the sides are drawn up to maintain parallelism. The oblique drawing became popular within architecture for the effciency of using an already completed plan or elevation and the effect of rendering depth into a single image. But it is also clearly an artifcial combination of two projection systems (which is why digital modeling software does not produce oblique representa­ tions without a shearing operation). Even though the oblique drawing was not a primary part of the Beaux-Arts representational system, its conceptual forma­ tion, aesthetic appeal, and technique of construction are all found in the mosaïque, where the orthographic projection situates a frontal view and the oblique shadow renders depth. Oblique drawing is of course much older than the nineteenth century, and parallel projection existed before it was systematized by Monge. The historical development of oblique drawing includes the interior wall paintings of ancient Rome, early Renaissance machine drawings, military perspective, and the sym­ bolic “eye of the sun” of Plotinus able to represent real measurements without shadows.36 It is also a representational convention still in practice today, even when the visualization of depth can be achieved more easily through other com­ putationally resolved views.The image shown here from BairBalliet is instructive in these desires.The aesthetics of this image combine a desire for fat cut sections as elevations with complex three-dimensionally revolved volumes (Fig. 6.15). This oblique is of a particular species known as the 0–90. As famously devel­ oped by John Hejduk, it has the unique quality of optically presenting depth by placing two fat projections, the elevation and plan, adjacent to each other. This means that there is no depth in the representation, literally. But this is not how the image is perceived, for the eye scans back and forth between the planes and begins to produce a “perception” of depth by attempting to resolve the contradictions. To this, BairBalliet have added other depth cues through shade, shadow, color gradients, and importantly, contour lines which are essentially a vertically staggered series of sectional cuts. The continued relevance of the oblique seems to stem from the aesthetic tension that it puts into play, it is fat yet simultaneously conveys depth, a combination of optics and metrics that eludes other representations. The desire to have the representation of a surface addressed frontally, fattened to the drawing page, and at the same time rendered to optically produce depth,

184 Part III Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality

The Corner – The Next Port of Call (2016), courtesy Kelly Bair and Kristy Balliet

FIG. 6.15 BairBalliet,

pushing and pulling the picture plane, is of course not only found in architec­ ture. As mentioned at the opening of this chapter, this tense combination of the fat surface with optical depth was a central discussion linking nineteenthand twentieth-century aesthetic arguments regarding empathy, abstraction, and realism—arguments that would condition the discourse around many modern art movements from post-impressionism to cubism to abstract expressionism to color feld painting to minimalism. Consider two quotes: the frst from the art critic Clement Greenberg writing on Cézanne: A new and powerful kind of pictorial tension was set up such as had not been seen in the West since the mosaic murals of fourth and ffth century

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Rome.The little overlapping rectangles of paint, laid on with no attempt to fuse their dividing edges, drew the depicted forms toward the surface while, at the same time, the modeling and contouring of these forms, as achieved by the paint dabs, pulled them back again into illusionist depth.The result was a never-ending vibration from front to back and back to front.37 The second from the architectural historian Colin Rowe and artist Robert Slutsky on cubism: Frontality, suppression of depth, contracting of space, defnition of light sources, tipping forward of objects, restricted palette, oblique and rectilinear grids . . . both systems of coordinates provide the orientation of the fgures simultaneously in an extended space and on a painted surface; while their intersection, their overlapping, their interlocking, and their building up into larger and fuctuating confgurations permits the genesis of the typically ambiguous cubist motif.38 The two quotes were written at a similar historical moment during the 1950s and are typically considered within a larger movement of mid-century Ameri­ can “formalist” discourse.What I would like to point out however, is how many similarities run through both passages that highlight the double move of fatness to the plane and recession into depth.“A never-ending vibration,”“overlapping,” “interlocking,”“fuctuating,” these are attempts to express the ambiguity of an art­ work that was simultaneously fat and perceptibly in excess of that fatness. Rowe and Slutsky call out “frontality, suppression of depth” and “oblique and rectilinear grids,” Greenberg makes the connection to the mosaic foors of Roman architec­ ture, a relation that links us literally to the mosaïque in Beaux-Arts rendering, and to the discretization of surfaces into patches, modules, points—marks in a matrix. Also of importance is an interest in depth that is not deep but near the surface, an aesthetic experience held right at the threshold of its antithesis, the fat. For all intents and purposes, we are discussing bas-relief sculpture, and that seems a rather odd basis for explicating modern art—maybe. These arguments are now canonical texts positioning early twentieth-century abstraction against the academic traditions of perspectival naturalistic illusion. However, this “suppression of depth” and “emphasis on the fat plane”39 is tied to a larger modernist project of disciplining the human sensorium which Caroline Jones terms as the “bureaucratization of the senses.”40 The history of architec­ tural representation often refects similar desires to regulate the production and evaluation of design through compartmentalization and convention.The passages quoted above from by Greenberg, Rowe, and Slutsky attest to a struggle to come to terms with, to explain, to conceptualize the residual sensation of depth that remains, even when an artwork is clearly fat. This tension between the opti­ cal and the tactile, the far and the near, also echoed discussions that occurred

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during the nineteenth-century as the emerging felds of psychology and physiol­ ogy crossed paths with art history and aesthetics.

Excessive Relief Adolf Hildebrand’s 1893 text The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, contains a set of unique observations regarding perception, distance, and the aesthetics of depth. Hildebrand posited that art creates a clear, unifed idea of form and space that is distinct from transient impressions in nature. He identifes two categories of visual perception. The frst, which he termed “visual projection” (Fernbild, or “distance picture”), is a coherent, clear, essentially two-dimensional silhouette.The distance made the viewing closer to an orthographic projection. The second is the near view, consisting of “a succession of disconnecting shifting views.”41 This close view is “kinesthetic,” related to movements of the head, the eyes, and the muscles of the eye lens. Hildebrand privileges the clarity of the far view, fearing the confu­ sion of the near view, yet also realizes that our perception of depth is based on the kinesthetic movements involved in viewing what is near. For Hildebrand, the goal of an artwork is to integrate the sensations of depth in relation to the near with the coherent visual projection of the distant: “This unity which the artist makes of visual impression and kinesthetic idea, is the most fundamental source of our esthetic enjoyment in a work of art.”42 Hildebrand discusses painting, sculpture, and architecture, but it is in the basrelief that he fnds the crux of his argument. In this he explores two aspects of spatial perception that are particular to bas-relief. The frst concerns how the space between objects is perceived. “Now, since the volume of a single object is suggested by the outlines of its form,” Hildebrand writes, “so a certain volume of air may be indicated by several objects put together, for the boundaries of the objects also limit the volumes of air which lie between them. The problem is: so to arrange these objects that our kinesthetic ideas aroused by them shall not remain separate, but co-operate and lead from one to another.”43 In relation to bas-relief sculpture, Hildebrand imagines parallel planes of glass capturing coher­ ent volumes of space between the fgure’s foremost points and the backplane of the relief.44 A spectator views a bas-relief frontally as an elevational surface. Depth is the receding sequence of clearly defned fat fgures, layered templates, or silhouette outlines. Hildebrand’s description of a planar layering of shallow depth foreshadows several important developments within twentieth-century formalism—for example, Detlef Mertins’ remarks that Hildebrand’s “effective form” and “inherent form” show strong similarities to Rowe and Slutsky’s phe­ nomenal and literal transparency.45 The second aspect of perception as it relates to bas-relief sculpture is a bit trickier to tease out. It could be described as an experience of depth that is in excess of what is physically present. Hildebrand notes that in relief sculpture

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when bodies, limbs, or architectural elements obscured, overlapped, merged, and intersected, a discrepancy was produced between the tactile and the visual, a rupture between what is presented to sensation and what the observer knows to be reality: Form relations which give the desired effects in the visual projection do not correspond exactly with the actual measurements of the object. Differ­ ences of depth may combine, producing the effect of a single plane, and this through contrast may cause others to show their difference more forcibly. Actual and visual form are not the same, and the conception of relief is attached to the visual, not the actual form. For it is with visual effects that we are concerned. Accordingly, the relief is independent of all actual depth measurements.46 Hildebrand’s arguments are part of a much larger conversation in the late nine­ teenth century around the relations between psychology, aesthetics, and empa­ thy theory.47 As Adrian Forty has pointed out, the year 1893 saw, in addition to Hildebrand’s text, the publication of August Schmarsow’s essay “The Essence of Architectural Creation” and Theodor Lipps’s “Spatial Aesthetics and Optical Illusion.”48 For these and other theorists at the time empathy theory offered the idea “that in perceiving things the mind projects into them its knowl­ edge of bodily sensations.”49 Much of the discourse around these questions concerned how empathetic projections underlie aesthetic responses to form and space outside of the traditional conventions of signifcation and mimetic resemblance. For Hildebrand, sensation coalesced around the tactile, physical movements of the eyeball—in the muscular tension caused by shifting focus, the saccadic jumps and starts stimulated by close proximity, and the stereoscopic doubling of vision into two different positions, each presenting a slightly dif­ ferent projection. To explore these ideas, the Ludovisi Sarcophagus, a Roman work from the third century CE, presents an intriguing test case (Fig. 6.16).The density of inter­ locking fgures in the bas-relief carving obscures the background plane, but the viewer senses its presence, nonetheless. In other words, the viewer does not per­ ceive an infnitely receding space; its depth is clearly bounded by a virtual plane in front of and behind the fgures.And yet the entanglement of limbs, heads, horses, and torsos creates a sensation of depth in excess of what can be physically mea­ sured in the carved stone, demonstrating Hildebrand’s second point. This perception of excess depth results from a mismatch between the empa­ thetic projection of bodily sensation and the objective facts of the object’s physical existence. The effect is not one of space as a clearly defned negative area, as in fgure-ground perception, nor is it the layered planarity of spatial interpenetration, and nor is it an ambiguous fuctuation between contradictory readings discussed

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FIG. 6.16

Ludovisi Sarcophagus (CE 250–260), photo by the author

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189

by perceptual psychologists.50 Moreover, and contrary to Hildebrand’s inclina­ tion to neutralize the discrepancies between near and far perceptions, the Ludo­ visi Sarcophagus seems to intensify them.Viewing the work consists of multiple moments of disconnected events, an experience much closer to the kinesthetic near view than the clarity of the distant silhouette. Engaged frontally as an eleva­ tion, the perception of depth is not experienced in the movement of the viewer’s body around a fgure but instead through discrete jumps of the eyes across the surface. The sarcophagus produces a friction between tactile and optical sensation, near and distant views. Architectural historian Alina Payne points out relations in the nineteenth cen­ tury between the ideas of malerisch (painterly) effects and relief sculpture.51 The term malerisch was initially used as a derogatory term by Jacob Burckhardt to describe the decline of Roman art during the Baroque period.52 Relief sculp­ ture was a problem for many art historians precisely because it hovered between sculpture, painting, and architecture. Part of what creates the aesthetic tensions noted by Hildebrand is that bas-reliefs combine the “real” material depth of sculp­ ture, the illusory depth of painterly effects, and the dynamic repetition of motifs that animate an architectural surface through decoration. Malerisch as a term was used to describe the tactile quality that certain techniques of shade and shadow could produce in painting. “Burckhardt,” Payne explains, “used malerisch as an overarching category to describe the ‘strong relief and therefore powerful light/ shadow effects,’ restlessness, movement, piling up of forms, and illusion of depth in baroque architecture.”53 For Hildebrand, however, the “relief effect” was the basis of aesthetic experi­ ence for all the arts—painting, sculpture, and architecture.54 The picture plane was the key component in a confguration able to collect, unify, and struc­ ture the unruly behaviors of depth and the restless near view.What Hildebrand feared—and thus what he wanted to tame with the contour lines of fat silhou­ ettes—was the potential confusion created by the incessant movement of the eyes, a shuffing motion reminiscent of unconscious distraction.This aggregation of discrete, fragmented, close views can also be described by a different term: scanning.

The Mark and the Pulse The alignment between the fragmented kinesthetic near views of Adolf Hil­ debrand and the discrete sampling sequences of scanning is the hinge point in Zeynep Çelik Alexander’s essay “Scanning: A Technical History of Form.”55 In the late nineteenth century, the conversations between the emerging felds of the psychology and physiology of perception laid the groundwork not only for Gestalt formalism, which would infuence so many early modernist aesthetic stances, but also developments in the scientifc understanding of connections

190 Part III Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality

between stimulus and sensation (such as the work of Hermann von Helmholtz).56 The conundrum is that movement creates discrete fragments of sensation, and yet perception is whole and continuous.This is where the analogy to “scanning” offered by Çelik Alexander becomes interesting.The modern eye is not a human eye, and maybe the human eye was never as “human” as believed.The eye is like a scanner, sampling data remotely, unconsciously; integration, “depth,” happens elsewhere.57 Çelik Alexander also ties the fragmentary scan to the machines of discrete analysis developed during the nineteenth century to study human perception. Jonathan Crary’s research into the techniques of nineteenth-century perceptual psychology has shown how “philosophical, scientifc, and aesthetic discourses overlap with mechanical techniques, institutional requirements, and socioeco­ nomic forces,” together altering how perception was understood.58 Realistic effects were produced “based on a radical abstraction and reconstruction of opti­ cal experience.”59 Devices such as the phenakistoscope and the stereoscope were invented to study perception and attention, only later to become instruments for a mass culture of visual entertainment. Furthermore, Crary writes, “these appa­ ratuses are the outcome of a complex remaking of the individual as an observer into something calculable and regularizable and of human vision into something measurable and exchangeable.”60 When perception becomes a discrete unit, a thing that is measured, it enters into new relations with technologies of media­ tion. Friedrich Kittler argues that “the computer . . . is the only medium that combines these three functions—storage, transmission, and processing—fully automatically.”61 Sound, image, and text—Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, become fused in computational mediation, an exchange that requires discretiza­ tion. “Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay, storage, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping—a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium.”62 The discretization of vision, which began in nineteenth century experimen­ tal psychology as Crary explicates, undergoes several transformations in the twentieth century. In the previous chapter, we briefy introduced the Bell Labs research of Béla Julesz on depth perception in relation to computer-generated random dot stereograms. When shown these images of random visual noise, the viewer would begin to perceive depth only after a temporal delay in which the viewer “learned” how to parse the dense patterns of information. As Orit Halpern explains, The temporal delay in producing visual experience, and the bifurcation of vision into depth and form perception, made vision a process amenable to simulation and computational modeling in both humans and machines. Vision no longer had a stable referent in the world but rather was a selfgenerated process from within a system.63

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In these studies, depth is not considered within conventions descended from art history.There is no discussion of occlusion, perspectival foreshortening, or geometric projection.There are only marks in a matrix and the eye’s muscular effort to resolve the stereogram patterns. Although they were made to study human depth perception, Halpern notes that at a certain level, the computa­ tional generation of the patterns and the perception of depth become insepa­ rable.64 The optical sensation of depth is no longer only within biological vision. As discussed in Chapter 5, machine-image analysis requires the correct iden­ tifcation of the content of a digital image (i.e., a dog must be identifed as not a car).The problem is that the form of an object changes as it is seen from dif­ ferent angles, distances, and lighting conditions. These variations are especially diverse if the object is near. Computational analysis must “learn” how shape changes in depth for the same entity.The experiments of Julesz would become a key step in the development of machine vision as the statistical analysis of patterns of discrete visual data. Physiologically, Julesz’s random dot stereograms are related to the muscular kinesthetic near views feared by Hildebrand, but they are also tied to another technology for the measurement of depth that has already been touched on. The stereoscope requires two eyes, two slightly different images, or in other words, two projections. And it is the computation of a point in space through two images of that point that brings us back to photogrammetry. Lucia Allais notes that, photogrammetry “de-skilled” the construction of depth as a representational practice and shifted it to the locating of a point in space as identifed by a human/mechanical apparatus that constituted a “resti­ tutor of reality.”65 Continuing her description of photogrammetry as a tactile technology,Allais notes that “Maurice Carbonnel, one of the most famous archi­ tectural photogrammetrists of the twentieth century, vaunted he could ‘touch the image’ and thus produce ‘threads of stone.’”66 These comments tie photo­ grammetry to the “point” as contact, an instance of touch, a tactile location of depth.This touch is discrete and unconscious, similar to Hildebrand’s near view and Çelik Alexander’s arguments regarding scanning.With photogrammetry we have a computation of depth through images associated with the detached tactil­ ity of a template. Reality restituted.

Depth Calculated through Energy Since a digital image is simply an array of scanned electromagnetic energy, any point in the environment scanned twice from slightly different positions can be assigned a three-dimensional location in space. Photogrammetry is as old as pho­ tography. In the nineteenth century, the surveying of distance in military and engineering operations used photographs from two slightly different origins to

192 Part III Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality

compute depth.The stereoscope as a form of popular entertainment used double photographs to simulate depth perception as well. Prior to photography, mea­ surements of depth were done through projective geometry and the surveying techniques of triangulation.The difference between contemporary computational methods and these earlier technologies is not so signifcant conceptually; the dif­ ference lies in the accelerated speed and mathematics of digital processing.Armed with a camera and software, a person today can use (almost) any set of “photos” to build a digital model of the environment, in real time with the scanning devices we carry in our pockets. A photogrammetric model consists of discrete points, extracted from the pixel data in a set of digital images captured by a moving digital camera. In this situation, a “photographer” is one who collects photons from the environment in a con­ strained sequence, where height, frame, and focus are systematically maintained for the sequence of photos as the overlap between pairs of images is regulated in accordance with the desired detail of the fnal model. The resulting model is best when the photos are taken frontally, like a bas-relief.The camera is a scanner and its operator, a component in the assemblage.The translation of this scanned information into a spatial geometry happens later, using software that aligns asso­ ciated frames. What is processed may be information, but what is visualized is a luminous dot of a specifc hue, saturation, and brightness distributed according to a certain spatial density—and it is here that a host of problems arise. Architect Andrew Saunders states, The point cloud as a three-dimensional model composed of millions of light points is in itself a painterly form of describing space. The heteroge­ neous feld of points produce gradients, quite opposite of a linear represen­ tation of space that is reliant on enforcing clear profles and crisp contours. Through non-uniform distribution of points and relative spacing based on proximity to point of view, the point cloud adds to the modes of architec­ tural representation by generating an advanced type of transparency with varying depth and resolution.67 How does one work with millions of individual points? Most architectural representations store and manipulate lines to control the edges of surfaces. As discussed in relation to plane and projective geometry, the abstract substitution of the line is an effcient mode of mediation for the con­ trol of form. Move a few lines and you can regulate incredibly complex formal compositions. Lines are also part of the medium of drawing, very different from a spatial cluster of points. Point-clouds are typically turned into meshes for design­ ers to more easily manipulate geometry, but this substitution only sidesteps the provocations of point-based representations. One medium that does work with large aggregations of colored marks, as Saunders identifes above, is painting. In his discussion, Saunders invokes Heinrich Wölffin’s categories of the linear and the painterly (the malerisch discussed earlier), which Wölffin used to theorize

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193

the difference between Renaissance and baroque art and architecture.68 Linear qualities are those that emphasize the bounding contours of a form, demarcat­ ing fgure from ground. Painterly qualities multiply the mark, loosening the edge and blurring distinctions between fgures and background. Point-cloud models, which consist of gradient color densities, are in many ways closer to the painterly than to linear drawing, with its sharp edges. Edges and corners in a photogram­ metric model scumble and fray, holding no special importance in the feld of scanned information. This equivalency between all point information is part of what makes these models so diffcult for architects to work with.

FIG. 6.17

Photogrammetry scan of the Ludovisi Sarcophagus, Palazzo Altemps (2019), distant view, image by the author

FIG. 6.18

Photogrammetry scan of the Ludovisi Sarcophagus, Palazzo Altemps (2019), near view, image by the author

194 Part III Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality

FIG. 6.19

Photogrammetry scan of the Ludovisi Sarcophagus, Palazzo Altemps (2019), frontal view, image by the author

scan of the Ludovisi Sarcophagus, Palazzo Altemps (2019), oblique view, image by the author

FIG. 6.20 Photogrammetry

The images shown here are screen captures of a point-cloud model generated from a set of images of the Ludovisi Sarcophagus (Figs. 6.17–6.20). The model explores the effects of bracketing the image set to the fewest possible source images, thus reducing the amount of overlap in the depth construction. The stone surfaces become highly realistic in certain areas and more abstract in others (Figs. 6.18 and 6.20). Some parts appear weathered and rusticated, others almost

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195

like burlap or denim. It is impossible to see point-cloud models as abstract forms that will later receive surface rendering, for the models themselves are rendered images, from capture to manipulation to manifestation. But as these examples reveal, the proximity and direction when viewing the point-cloud model signif­ cantly alters appearances. Resolution is typically a question of fdelity, storage capacity, transmission speed, and aesthetic appearance. Direction of view in a scanned point-cloud model can radically change the realism of resolution.When viewed orthographi­ cally, the depth of the point-cloud model appears fairly true to the original as a mosaïque, but when the model is positioned obliquely, the frayed edges of the surface topology become apparent, fgures become unidentifable, and clarity of depth is lost (Figs. 6.19–6.20). When the line of sight (view) is shifted out of alignment with the line of light (capture), surfaces dissolve into atmospheric noise. Distance is also a factor.The further away the source, the fewer points of capture. We tend to think of the perception of distance as being a matter of focus, but in a scan the up-close is as focused as the far-away, only there are more points cap­ tured for the near surfaces and fewer for the distant, which manifests as a different distribution of resolution in depth. Leaping from late nineteenth-century German aesthetic theory to the early twentieth-century media theory it infuenced, the distinction between drawing and painting made by Walter Benjamin may prove helpful for this discussion: The graphic line is determined in opposition to the surface. This opposi­ tion has not only a visual but a metaphysical dimension.The ground situates itself in relation to the line.The graphic line designates the surface, and in so doing determines it by attaching itself to it as a ground . . . A picture has no ground. Nor does one colour ever lie on top of another, but instead at most appears in the medium of another colour. . . .There is no ground in painting, nor is there any graphic line. . . . The medium of painting is designated as the mark in the narrower sense; for painting is a medium, a mark, since it has neither ground nor graphic line.69 Though painting, photography, and energetic pulses are different technologies, Benjamin’s distinction raises an important similarity between them. All three mediums have no ground. If a “ground” exists, it is built out of color and value differences between discrete marks as a perceptual judgment (similar to the obser­ vations of Béla Julesz), not as a material substrate such as a template or contour, but as a mosaic. Digital images are like painting in that they consist of a “marked medium” rather than “lines on a ground,” only the marks are now electromag­ netic pulses.To design within this realm, architecture must develop techniques for working with electrical signals, techniques best described as fltering and sorting. This is work with thresholds, with algorithms that compute local variations in

196 Part III Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality

pixel information. At certain limits, human eyes perceive a jump, a discretization; at other limits, we see smooth gradients of seamless deformations. Filtering thresholds is image processing. Energetic data is stored numerically as information defning the hue and location of each point.These numeric abstrac­ tions can be fltered based on thresholds of local variation in their immediate pixel neighborhood, allowing differences to be increased or lowered. Sharp differ­ ences in adjacent pixels are what allow human and machine vision to “see” edges, fgures, and grounds. Depth is an optical illusion created by adjacent color and tonal differences. Blurs, fuzzes, and fades of montaged pixels are almost malerisch, even when they are also points with completely determined spatial locations and numeric assignations of RGB. The measurement of depth is resolved through technologies that scan the energetic information of the environment.This is space measured through images and represented as images. It is not fully three-dimensional and yet exceeds two­ dimensions.70 If the spatial information is left as points, the primary design meth­ ods are based on fltering them using the color or location data defning each point. It is statistical in its operation. A model consisting of scanned points is not conditioned by traditional representational conventions or disciplinary assump­ tions but instead by the processes machines use to translate energy to spatial data. This requires adjustments in how a designer understands and makes decisions with these mediations. For instance, errant points are not necessarily errors, but simply the energy of the environment captured regardless of its meaning for humans.This “noise” can be considered a kind of realism that has yet to be fully engaged.The confation of objects with environments means that in photogram­ metry there is no assumed hierarchy between architecture, furniture, vegetation, vehicles, vases, and people. Furthermore, pattern, color, and texture are equal and integral to surface capture, and just as with the mosaïque, secondary surface qualities of ornament and decoration are no longer secondary. This produces a model that appears photorealistic from the beginning. Rendering is not added to a geometry, it is the geometry. It should be obvious that the attention of an architect working with this media is necessarily directed towards a different set of relations than traditional representations. The sensorium itself should be seen as shifting, contingent, dynamic, and alive. It exists in us and through us, enhanced by our technologies and extended prosthetically, but always subject to our consciousness (with con­ sciousness itself understood to be an effect of sensory formations).71 Caroline Jones’s modernist sensorium now includes the world as modeled through scanning, the surfaces of the environment stored, transmitted, and processed as lumi­ nous energy captured through the sectioning of rays of light detected as energy on diodes.The “eye of the sun” is translated to “the mind’s eye” as discrete computable data.This is a continuation of the “bureaucratization of the senses”; data exchanges

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increasingly constituting what is counted and what counts as reality.The question to ask is, how can architectural mediations intervene in these signals to offer alternative possibilities for a reality modeled after images? And as strange as it sounds, this will likely continue to involve problems in the representation of depth. Note: Portions of this chapter were initially developed in the essay “Excessive Relief ” published in Städelschule Architecture Class (ed.), Breaking Glass. Spa­ tial Fabulations & Other Tales of Representation in Virtual Reality, SAC JOURNAL No. 6 (Baunach, Germany: Spurbuch Verlag, 2021).

Notes 1 Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 2 Jones, Eyesight Alone, 309–313. 3 Massimo Scolari, “Elements for a History of Axonometry,” in Oblique Drawing (Cam­ bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 13. 4 Robin Evans, “Seeing through Paper,” in The Projective Cast (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 116. 5 Charles Blanc, “L’Union centrale des beaux-arts appliqués à l’industrie,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 16 (1866): 211; quoted in Richard Moore, “Academic Dessin Theory in France after the Reorganization of 1863,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 36, no. 3 (October 1977): 156. 6 Moore,“Academic Dessin Theory in France,” 146.

7 Moore, 146.

8 Descriptive geometry was rigorously formulated at the end of the eighteenth century

by Gaspard Monge, who would later become the frst director of the École Polytech­ nique. See Peter Jeffrey Booker, A History of Engineering Drawing (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), 86–113. 9 Booker, History of Engineering Drawing, 92. 10 John Vredenburgh Van Pelt, A Discussion of Composition, Especially as Applied to Architec­ ture (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 212. 11 William Ivins, On the Rationalization of Sight (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1938), 7. 12 Booker, History of Engineering Drawing, 48. 13 Jonathan Foote,“Tracing Michelangelo’s Modani at San Lorenzo,” Mitteilungen des Kun­ sthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 61, no. 1 (2019): 48. 14 Thomas da Costa Kaufmann,“The Perspective of Shadows:The History of the Theory of Shadow Projection,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 38 (1975): 261–263. 15 Euclid’s Elements, trans.Thomas Heath, ed. Dana Densmore (Santa Fe, NM: Green Lion, 2002). See Book II for proportion and similarity propositions. 16 Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1971), 117. 17 Michel Serres,“Mathematics and Philosophy:What Thales Saw . . .,” in Hermes: Litera­ ture, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1982), 86. 18 Serres,“Mathematics and Philosophy,” 91–92. 19 Serres, 85. 20 Evans,“Seeing through Paper,” 108–109. 21 Booker, History of Engineering Drawing, 86–87. 22 Booker, 48–78.

198 Part III Mosaïque and the Appearance of Reality

23 Gaspard Monge, Géométrie descriptive (1795), quoted in Booker, History of Engineering Drawing, 88. 24 Mark Schneider, “Girard Desargues, the Architectural and Perspective Geometry: A Study in the Rationalization of Figure” (PhD diss.,Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1984), 132–133. 25 Booker, History of Engineering Drawing, 55–63. 26 Nicholas Savage,“Shadow, Shading, and Outline in Architectural Engraving from Fré­ art to Letarouilly,” in Dealing with the Visual:Art History,Aesthetics and Visual Culture, ed. Caroline van Eck and Edward Winters (Aldershot:Ashgate, 2005), 242. 27 Savage,“Shadow, Shading, and Outline,” 245. 28 Savage, 244. 29 Savage, 244 30 Savage, 245. 31 Hyungmin Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 54. 32 Savage, 260. 33 Thomas da Costa Kaufmann,“The Perspective of Shadows,” 281–282. 34 Robin Evans,“Architectural Projection,” in Architecture and its Image, ed. Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/CCA, 1989), 30. 35 Jean Paul Carlhian,“The Ecole des Beaux-Arts: Modes and Manners,” Journal of Archi­ tectural Education 33, no. 2 (November 1979): 16. 36 Scolari, Oblique Drawing, 16–17. 37 Clement Greenberg, “Cezanne and the Unity of Modern Art,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism,Vol.3, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chi­ cago Press, 1993), 86. 38 Colin Rowe and Robert Slutsky, Transparency (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1997), 25. 39 Greenberg,“Cezanne and the Unity of Modern Art,” 86. 40 Jones, Eyesight Alone, 390–391. 41 Adolf Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, trans. Max Meyer and Robert Morris Ogden (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1907), 31. 42 Hildebrand, The Problem of Form, 32. 43 Hildebrand, 49. 44 Hildebrand, 80–81. 45 Detlef Mertins, “Transparency: Autonomy and Relationality,” AA Files 32 (Autumn 1996): 8. 46 Hildebrand, The Problem of Form, 88. 47 See Harry Mallgrave, ed. and trans., Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aes­ thetics, 1873–189 (Los Angeles: Getty Center, 1994). 48 Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 261. 49 Forty, Words and Buildings, 260. 50 Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 40. 51 Alina Payne,“On Sculptural Relief: Malerisch, the Autonomy of Artistic Media and the Beginnings of Baroque Studies,” in Rethinking the Baroque, ed. Helen Hills (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 41. 52 Payne,“On Sculptural Relief,” 38. 53 Payne, 56. 54 Payne, 59. 55 Zeynep Çelik Alexander, “Scanning: A Technical History of Form,” in Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice, ed. Zeynep Çelik Alexander and John May (Min­ neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 127. 56 Alexander,“Scanning:A Technical History,” 121. 57 Alexander, 131–132.

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58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

199

Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 8. Crary, Techniques, 9. Crary, 17. Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 26. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 2. Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 64. Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data, 65. Lucia Allais,“Rendering: On Experience and Experiments,” in Design Technics, 59–60. Allais,“Rendering,” 60. Andrew Saunders, Baroque Topologies (Modena: Palombi Editori, 2018), 65. Heinrich Wölffin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (London: Collins, 1964), 29. Walter Benjamin, “On Painting, or Sign and Mark,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2008), 221–223. Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art (London:Verso, 2017), 197. Jones, Eyesight Alone, 390.

INDEX

abstract expressionism 183

abstraction 13, 62, 82, 93, 107, 114, 164,

182, 183; numeric 194; rendering of

25

accessibility 14n1

Ackerman, James 25

Adorno, Theodor 70, 77

aesthetic theory 164; nineteenth-century

German 193

aesthetics 7, 34, 43, 83, 177, 186,

187; architectural 142, 144; of the

background 8, 9; computational

155; defned 8; as equal to ethics and

epistemology 10; manifestations of 9;

and mediation 8; of montage 78; of

photography 122; of poché 25, 26, 32,

36; of surface articulation 12; Venturi’s

approach to 40–41

Alberti, Leon Battista 70, 177

algorithms 8, 12, 49, 195; image search

66n23; image-processing 156;

machine-vision 13, 156;

pattern-recognition 133–134

Allais, Lucia 191

Allegory of the Cave 171

Allen, Stan 112–113, 113

anatomical illustration 24

animation 6

A/P Practice 159

Aranda/Lasch 149

Archigram 83, 86, 86, 87, 89, 90

architects: politics of 1, 3; Renaissance 25;

use of colour codes by 27

architecture: “academic” 29; as

accumulation of objects 124–125;

as aesthetics of the background 8,

9; American schools of 10; Baroque

41, 193; British High-Tech 34;

conventions of 2, 106–107; digital

technologies and 3; discipline of 2; and

the École des Beaux-Arts 3; ecological

reevaluation of 127; and entourage

102–103, 105; and the image 9;

modern understandings of 12; New

Naïve 105; and politics 3, 14n1;

Renaissance 9, 23, 25, 191; rendered

views of 72; Roman 185; scattered

plans 107–108, 111–114; stone 29;

of thinness and transparency 29; use

of colour codes by 29; visionary 69;

Western European 2

Architecture Française (Mariette) 26

Architecture in the Age of Printing (Carpo)

9

Architecture of the Well-tempered

Environment, The (Bahnam) 30

Archizoom 83, 86–87, 89, 90, 120, 121,

121, 124

Aristotle 4–5

art: autonomy of 70; avant-garde 70,

76–77; Baroque 189, 193; computational

151; computer 151; generative 151; goal

Index

of 184; kinetic 148; late medieval 70;

vs. life 76, 78, 80; minimalist 148;

multimedia 13, 135; Op art 148–155;

parafctional 96; Pop art 148–155;

and the presence of the seam 78–82;

Renaissance 70, 193; Roman 189;

twentieth-century 123; value of 5–8;

Western European 2

art nouveau 146

articulation: a-tectonic 74; material 116;

ornament and 142; ornamental 75;

principles of 32; and spatial

organization 32; surface 12, 74, 133, 144,

146–148, 149, 152, 153, 167; of spatial

organization 32; suppression of 139

artifcial intelligence (AI) 114, 156, 160

Arts and Crafts 146

assemblages 2, 3, 7, 70, 76, 77, 82, 86,

94–95, 96, 99, 107, 114, 120, 123, 127,

157, 160, 167, 192

assemblies: material 43; natural-cultural

125; tectonic 153; xerographic 123

AT&T Longlines Building 33; photograph

33; tower plan, base plan, exterior wall

cable ducts 33

atmospheric noise 195

atmospheric pollution emissions 66n23 attention economy 133

attention mapping 12

Atwood, Andrew 140, 141, 142

Aureli, Pier Vittorio 60, 120

autonomous vehicles 157

axonometric diagram 173, 183

Bair, Kelly 184

BairBalliet 183, 184

Balliet, Kristy 184

ballistic targeting 61

Banham, Reyner 30, 33, 34, 108, 111,

112

Baptistery of Saint John in the style of Wat

Phra Kaew 134

Baroque church interiors 38

Baroque Topologies (Saunders) 58

bas-relief sculpture 167, 185, 186–87, 189,

192

Baudez, Basile 24, 71

Beaux-Arts system see École des Beaux-Arts Bell Laboratories 149, 151, 190

Benjamin, Walter 8, 70, 77, 144, 195

Bentham, Jeremy 55

201

Bernard, Joseph 138

Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 41

béton brut 145

BIG 107

Bildbau No. 2 (Schaerer) 94–95, 95

BIM 123

black fll 24, 27, 37, 51

blackboxing 54

Blanc, Charles 169

blind zones 49–53; see also shadows

Bloomer, Kent 142–143

Bong Joon-ho 32

Bonner, Jennifer 152, 153

Booker, Peter Jeffrey 170, 175

Border Crossing (OFFICE Kersten Geers

David Van Severen) 93–94, 93

Boretti, Luigi 38

Borromini, Francesco 19, 19, 20, 38, 41

Bosse, Abraham 174, 175

Boullée, Étienne-Louis 72

boundaries, representational 4–5

Braque, Georges 76

Brune, Emmanuel 28

brutalism 33, 35, 37

Buckley, Craig 84–85, 89

Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the

Age of Radio (Wigley) 54

building components, machine-made

29

built environment 3, 14n1, 49, 52, 123

Burckhardt, Jacob 189

Bureau Spectacular 152, 179, 183

bureaucratization of the senses 164, 185,

196

Bürger, Peter 70, 76–77, 78

Cache, Berhard 149

cameras, digital 47–48, 50

Campo Marzio 12

Capdevila, Pablo Martinez 81

capitalism 12, 90–91, 135

Carbonnel, Maurice 191

Carlhian, Jean-Paul 26, 137, 139

Carpo, Mario 9, 25

Çelik Alexander, Zeynep 189–190, 191

ceremonial buildings 14n1

Cézanne, Paul 185

Chambray, Roland Fréart de 177

Chandler, Raymond 99–100, 124

Chicago Conventional Hall 82

cinema 6, 123

citrohan 36

202 Index

City Planning According to Artistic Principles (Sitte) 60–61

cladding, panelized 29

Closer Each Day (Common Accounts) 124

Coleshill 31

collage 76, 79, 81, 85, 95–96, 102, 120,

122, 160

Collage City (Rowe and Koetter) 60–61

Colomina, Beatriz 75–76, 135

color feld painting 183

colored fll 51; see also black fll

Colosseum (Rome) 23

Colquhoun, Alan 31, 36

Common Accounts 124, 125

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

(Venturi) 40

computational analysis 191

Computer Art 151

“Concours du Grand Prix de Rome, Un

Établissement D’Eaux Thermales et Casino” (Bernard) 137–138, 138

connectivity 54, 112

Continuous Monument project 83–84,

84

contour lines 182

conventions 1–2; architectural 5, 106–107;

codifcation of 28, 29; of a plan 166;

of representation 2, 13–14, 21, 28, 64,

122, 137–138, 169

Convolutional Neural Network class 158

“Convolutional Neural Network Image

Generation” 158

convolutional neural networks (CNNs)

66n23, 156–159

Corbet, Gustave 53

Corner, The – The Next Port of Call (BairBalliet) 184

Counter-Reformation 41

Courbet, Gustave 7

Crary, Jonathan 135, 151–152, 191

critical theory 70

criticality 70, 89, 92, 94

cubism 76, 183

cultural expression 7, 43, 123

culture: commercial 149; commodity

117; contemporary 40; contemporary

image 10; defense of 90; human 135;

of the internet 7; kitsch 122, 152;

lifestyle magazine 80; low 76; mass 75,

190; vs. nature 114, 125, 127; popular

12, 89, 90; and reality 6; traditional

122; transformation of 127; twentieth-

century 152; values of 4, 149; Western

99

Current (Riley) 149, 150

Curtis, Nathaniel Cortlandt 28–29, 72,

137, 139–140

Cyborg Misprision (Ruy) 134

Dada 78–80, 90, 159

Dassin, Jules 100

data: acquisition of 55; big 156; capturing

and processing 55–57; collection of 11,

13–14, 50; discrete 6, 152, 196; ethical

use of 156; exchange of 48, 196; images

as 13; inaccessible 39; interpretation

of 49, 61; mining of 155; pixel 192;

sampling 190; scanning 47, 48, 188–191;

shadows 56, 59, 60; spatial 196; trails

64; transformation of people into 133,

159; visual 189

data points 151

David, Jacques-Louis 70–71, 71

Debord, Guy 100, 120

decoration 12, 75, 133, 140; as diffusion

of attention 144; as manifestation of

mosaïque 145–146; as mode of attention

142–146; paint and wallpaper as

144–145

Decorative Art of Today, The (Le Corbusier)

74

deep fakes 159

Della Pittura (Alberti) 70

Denari, Neil 179, 181

Dennis, Michael 36

depth: in architectural representation 165;

in bas-relief 187; calculation of through

energy 189–197; computation of 191;

construction of 191; cues of 184;

measurement of 186; near the surface

185; as optical illusion 196; optical

presentation of 183; perception of 179,

181–182, 187; in photogrammetry

168–169; rendering of 177;

representation of 50, 165, 177, 197;

suppression of 185

Desargues, Girard 174, 175

Desargues’ Theorem 175, 176

dessin géométral 169–170, 176

dessin perspectif 169–170, 176

Di Palma, Vittoria 146–147 digital cameras 47–48, 50

digital design, software for 123

digital fabrication 146–147, 149

digital images 5, 8, 13, 48–49, 91–92,

96, 133, 152–153, 157, 161, 191, 195;

manipulation of 152–154

digital media 2, 9, 123; see also media

Index

discipline(s) 1–2, 28

distraction(s) 12, 135–137

Dominican Motherhouse of St. Catherine de

Ricci 114, 115

dom-ino 36

Donato Bramante 21, 22, 23

draughtsmanship see drawing(s) drawing(s) 9; architectural 4–5, 27,

30; axonometric 183; vs. images 12;

oblique 183–184; orthographic 5, 11,

178–179; vs. paintings 193; perspectival

74; section-cut 24; wireframe 38

203

Epstein Jones, Dora 107

Ernst, Max 79–80, 80, 81–82

ethics 34; of controlling identity 64;

defned 8; as equal to epistemology and

aesthetics 10; manifestations of 9

Evans, Robin 25, 30–31, 166, 179

Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of

Architecture (Koolhaas) 93

facial recognition 12, 66n23, 134, 157

fender farms 9

feld conditions 112–113

Flaubert, Gustave 7

foreshortening 189

Eames, Charles 135

formalism 83, 164, 185; Gestalt 189

Eames, Ray 135

Fornaroli, Antonio 103

École des Beaux-Arts 2–3, 4, 9, 10, 12,

51, 169; compositional methods of 177; Forster, E.M. 32

Forty, Adrian 187

conventions of 137, 140; and dessin

Foucault, Michel 2, 5, 55, 113

perspectif 169–170, 176; and the inking

of plans 23; and mosaïque 134, 137, 167, Francesco Borromini 19, 19, 20

176; systems of representation 183; use free plan 35–37, 38, 39

of entourage 27, 72, 101; use of poche 26, Freud, Sigmund 77

Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper (Mies van der

29, 51

Rohe) 82, 180

ecological studies 61

From Ornament to Object (Payne) 74

ecology 114, 125–127 Fujomoto, Sou 105, 107, 109

economic modeling 114

Edifces de Rome Moderne (Letarouilly) 178; functionalism 29

Fundamental Acts (Superstudio) 88–90,

perspective view Palazzo Massimo 73,

88

73; perspective view Santa Maria del

furniture layout analysis 118–120, 119

Popolo 73, 73

Furniture Manufacturers Association

Eisenstein, Sergei 90

Headquarters (Webb) 181

electromagnetic energy 54, 61, 191

electromagnetic radiation 49

Gage, Mark Foster 125

empathy 165, 184

Garnier, Charles 165–166, 166, 179,

empathy theory 187

180

Endemic Architecture 43, 44

Gehring, Petra 55

English manor house 31

Gehry, Frank 114, 115, 116

entourage 3, 10–11, 13, 27, 28, 51; and

Gehry Partners 115

the accumulation of objects 124–125;

generative adversarial networks (GANs)

architectural 69–70, 72–74, 122,

66n23, 156–157, 159

126–127, 137; and audience 88–89; as

Géométrie Descriptive (Monge) 172, 173

carrier of interest 122; and familiarity

geometry 24, 25, 41, 169, 170–171, 192;

83–84; functions of 73–74; imaging

descriptive 172; projective 175, 192; and

of 92–93; implications of 75; and

rendering 196

montage 82; as “not-architecture”

Gestalt formalism 189; see also formalism

101–102; and the placement of

Gilpin, William 72

furniture 118–120; and the politics

Girard, Alexander 135

of objects 11–12; refection of 84,

Glass Farm (MVRDV) 154, 155

95; as the rendering of landscape and

glass walls 20

vegetation 27, 69, 101; and scenario

Google Earth 61

85–86; see also montage-entourage

Gramazio & Kohler 149

epistemology 64; defned 8; as equal to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Kittler)

ethics and aesthetics 10; manifestations 191

of 9

204 Index

graphic design 6, 123

graphic shading 25; see also hatching

graphite pencil 39

Greenberg, Clement 77, 164, 184–185

group-form 111–112

Groys, Boris 6, 75, 83, 117, 125

Hadid, Zaha 149, 150

Halpern, Orit 151, 190–191 Hamilton, Richard 80–81 Hamilton, Terry 80–81 Harman, Graham 43, 126, 127

hatching 19, 25, 29, 37, 51

Haus Gables (Bonner/Mall Architecture)

153

heat maps 61

Heidegger, Martin 136

Hejduk, John 12, 114, 115, 116–118,

118, 183

Herron, Ron 86, 86

Herzog & de Meuron 107, 110

Hickey, Dave 148–149, 161

Hildebrand, Adolf 164, 186–187, 189,

191

History of Engineering Drawing, A (Booker)

175

Hollein, Hans 83, 84–85, 85, 89

Hôtel de Beauvais 31; frst foor plan 31;

ground foor plan 31

Hôtel Particulier 31

House Beautiful (Bringing the War Home) 88–89

House Before House 105

House O 111

household space 30

Housing Laboratory 106–107, 106

Huston, John 82

I quattro libri dell’architettura (Palladio) 177,

178

IBM Pavilion (1964 World’s Fair) 135

ichnographia /icnography 22, 25

Igarashi, Jun 107, 111

“Il Girasole” house (Rome; Moretti)

181

illusion, naturalistic 185

image searches 12, 66n23, 156

image-making: critical 91; digital 95–96 images 9; analysis of 133–134; architectural

10, 25, 26, 91, 140; buildings as 12;

and the concealment of knowledge 8;

vs. drawings 12; as information 47–49;

from the internet 159–160; reality of

161; rendered 140; reproduction of

176; styles of 176; see also digital images

imaging styles 176

Independent Group 83

information: digital 6; exchange of 8;

storage of 6

ink washing 24; see also washes

innovation 6, 75, 83; through cultural-

economic exchange 75, 117

Instant City (Herron) 86, 86

Institutionen för Byggnadsfunktionslära

(Institute for Building Function

Analysis) 118–120, 119

interior environment, management of 29

interior space 36, 43, 118–119

Interiors Matter: A Live Interior 51, 52, 53

internet, culture of 7

iron templates 24; see also templates

Ishigami, Junya 105, 125

Italian Renaissance 4, 9, 51, 142, 179

It’s a Psychological Fact Pleasure Helps your

Disposition (Paolozzi) 80–81, 81

Ivins, William 170

Jameson, Fredric 99, 124

Jaque, Andrés 125

Jones, Caroline 164, 185, 196

Jones, Owen 146

Jorn, Asger 100, 120

Julesz, Béla 151, 191, 195

Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes

So Different, So Appealing? (Hamilton,

Hamilton, and McHale) 81

Kahn, Louis 32–33, 34, 114, 115

Karlsson, Ulrika 51, 52

kinesthetics 186, 189, 191

Kinetic art 148

Kipnis, Jeffrey 147–148

Kittler, Friedrich 6, 190

Klein, Karel 159–160, 160

Klingemann, Mario 159

knowledge, concealment of 8

Koetter, Fred 60–61

Koolhaas, Rem 37, 39, 60–61, 91, 93, 120

Kovacs, Andrew 125

La Femme 100 têtes (Ernst) 79–80, 80

La Maniere universelle de M. des Argues

Lyonnois 174

labor: concealment of 20; division of 32;

human and non-human 29–32

Labrouste, Henri 178–179, 179

Index

LAMAS 159

Lambert-Beatty, Carrie 96

landscapes, interior 101

Larkin Administration Building 32–33 Lavin, Sylvia 28, 101

Le Corbusier 35, 36, 39, 40, 74, 145, 160

Le Pautre, Antoine 31

Le Va, Barry 113

Leonardo da Vinci 23–24 Leonidov, Ivan 78

Letarouilly, Paul 73, 73, 178

Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons,

The (David) 70–71, 71

lidar (light detection and ranging) 50–51,

53, 55–57; aerial view of Snoopy

Highway Mapper 56

LiDAR scan of San Lorenzo (Saunders) 59

Lipps, Theodor 187

literalism 148–149 Lucan, Jacques 23, 108, 124

Ludovisi Sarcophagus 187, 188, 189;

photogrammetry scan 193–194,

194–195

Lueder, Christoph 38

Lundbäck, Cecilia 51, 52

machine learning 155, 156; see also

artifcial intelligence (AI)

machine vision 12, 13, 66n23, 133–134,

156–157, 191

machine-image analysis 191

Mackenzie, Adrian 155, 157

Main staircase of the palace of a sovereign 28,

28

Maison de M.X. (Brussels) 36

Maki, Fumihiko 111–112 Malevich, Kazimir 7

Mall Architecture 152, 153

Mansilla & Tuñón 107, 108

Marder, Michael 136

Mariette, Jean 26

mark-making 148

Marshall, David 72

Marxism 148

Massey, Jonathan 143

material honesty 34

material tectonics 145

materiality 25, 91, 133, 142, 145, 148,

149. 153; digital 154; faux 153

Mattern, Shannon 62

Maughan, Tim 50

May, John 9, 13, 48

McHale, John 80–81

205

mechanical plants 29

media: digital 2, 9, 123; and the

fragmentation of attention 135–136;

infuence on artwork 123; wireless 54

media immersion 10

media theory 6, 70, 195

mediation(s): and aesthetics 8; digital 8,

12, 50–51, 123, 147; fuctuating 86; for

image making 6; as model of reality 62;

of montage-entourage 89; technologies

of 6, 7, 13, 47, 48–49, 53, 64, 117, 122,

134; through scanning 51, 53

Melun Senart 60–61 memorials 14n1 Mertins, Detlef 186

metrics 164, 182

Meystre, Olivier 105

Michelangelo Buonarroti 24

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 78, 82, 90,

179, 180

minimalism 148, 184

Mirabor Museum of Contemporary Art

112

modani 24

modano for the Laurential Library

(Michelangelo) 24

modeling 178–179, 183; computational 190; digital 6, 57–60; economic 114; photogrammetric 58–59, 62, 192–93, 195–196 modernism 2, 11, 29, 30, 43, 74, 91, 120,

139, 142, 145, 184, 194; use of poché

within 34

Modernisms’s Visible Hand (Osman) 29

modernity 12, 78

moisture models 61

mold drawings 24

Monge, Gaspard 172, 173, 181

montage 69–70, 76–77, 79–80, 117;

architectural 82, 91, 94, 96; critical

90–91; digital 94–97; and entourage

102; fragmentation of 135–136; by Mies

van der Rohe 82–83, 90; pop 81–82, 83

montage-entourage 12, 69, 82–90, 86, 117

monuments 14n1 Moore, Richard 10

Moretti, Luigi 179, 181

Moriyama House 102–103, 104, 105

Morton, Timothy 126, 127

MOS 106–107, 106, 107, 152

mosaïque 3, 10–11, 13, 27, 28, 51; and

the appearance of reality 12–13; in

architectural plans 137–139, 167; and

206 Index

the Beaux-Arts system 140; in Op

and Pop art 153–154; ornament and

decoration as manifestations of 145–146;

rendered 137–142; shading of 178

Müller, Heiko 159

multimedia art 13, 135

Museo de la Vega Baja de Toledo 108

music 6

music productions 123

MVRDV 154, 155

optics 164, 183

ornament 12, 41, 74–75, 133, 165–166;

contemporary qualities of 146–147;

vs. cosmetic 147–148; digital 146; as

manifestation of mosaïque 145–146; as

mode of attention 142–146; return of

146–148

orthographia 22, 45n2 Osman, Michael 29, 32

Ozanam, Frédéric 25

Naked City, The (flm) 100

Naked City, The (map) 100

Naked City (Weegee) 100

naturalism 82; photo- 94 Neimark, Anna 140, 141

Nelson, George 135

neoclassicism 10

neural networks 133–134, 147, 155–160 New Babylon collages (Nieuwenhuys)

120

New Brutalism, The: Ethic or Aesthetic?

(Banham) 108, 111

New Naïve 105

New Tendencies art movement 151

new utopianism 90

Nieuwenhuys, Constant 120

Ninety Parallel Sinusoids with Linearly

Increasing Period (Noll) 149, 150

Nishizawa, Ryue 102–103, 104, 105, 107,

109

Nitzchke, Oscar 78

Nogues, Ball 149

Noll, A. Michael 149, 150, 151, 152

Nolli, Giovanni Battista 60

Nolli Map 60–61 Norell, Daniel 51, 52

No-Stop City I (Archizoom) 86–87, 87,

89, 120, 121–122, 121, 124

No-Stop Interior Landscape (Archizoom)

87, 87

Notre Dame de La Tourette (Klein) 160

Nuova Pianta di Roma (Nolli) 60–61

Paglen, Trevor 49

Pai, Hyungmin 9, 26–27 Palazzo Massimo 73, 73

Palladio, Andrea 177, 178

Panagia, Davide 7, 13

panopticon 55

Pantheon Capital Study (Labrouste) 179

Paolozzi, Eduardo 80, 81, 81

Parallel de l’architecture antique et de la

moderne (Chambray) 177

parchment plan 21, 22–23, 22

Paris Opera House Façade (Garnier) 180

Parrish Art Museum – First Scheme 110

parti 26

Payne, Alina 74, 187

perception: and bas-relief 184–185;

physiology of 190; psychology of 155,

187, 190; visual 184

Perceptron (Rosenblatt) 155

perspective 169–170, 175, 177; distortion

of 92; in Edifces de Rome 73, 73; and

foreshortening 191; interior 82; linear

172; military 183; photographic 84, 85;

projection 50; renderings 5; surrealist

122; vanishing 93

phenakistoscope 190

phenomenality 136

photogrammetry 50–51, 53, 55–57, 61,

167–169, 189; and modeling 190; scan

of Ludovisi Sarcophagus 193, 194; scan

of Piranesi’s altar 62, 63

photography 6, 47, 92, 100, 122; and

surveying 191–192

photomontage 12, 76, 83, 84

photon detection 11

photo-naturalism 94

photorealism 13, 62, 82, 92, 93

physiology 186; of perception 190

Picasso, Pablo 76

Picon, Antoine 143, 146–147 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 12, 62, 63, 71,

72, 167–168, 168

Pita & Bloom 152

Offce dA 149

Offce for Metropolitan Architecture

(OMA) 37, 38, 39, 39, 40, 60–61, 91,

107; see also Très Grande Bibliothèque

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van

Severen 93

Offce of Political Innovation 125

ontology 127

Op art 148–155 optical perception 151–152

Index

pixels 13, 48–49, 66n23, 92, 140–141, 168, 190, 194 Place de l’Opéra, Paris (Garnier) 165–166, 166 Plan for Wissenschaftszentrum 114, 115, 116 “plan paralyse vs. plan libre” from Precisions (Le Corbusier) 35, 36 plaster cast models 38 Plato 4–5, 171 Plenitude of Distraction, The (van Zuylen) 136 Plotinus 183 poché 3, 10–11, 13, 27, 51; aesthetics of 25, 26, 32, 36; as allegorical device 32; in architectural plans 25, 137; of Baroque architecture 41; concealment by 30–31, 43, 54–55; data shadow as 60; defned 22–23; in digital imagery 61; expression of character by 26; historical functions of 21; as imaging paradigm 43; manipulated 37; as negotiation between interior volume and exterior mass 43–44; as negotiation between internal and external pressures 40; between-ness of 23; in the Nolli Map 60–61; as non-human solid 39; open and residual 41; as randomaccess volume 40; reevaluation of 53; Renaissance 29; and the rendering of labor 11, 26; and scanning technology 64; as shaft 33–34; study of 28–29; Venturi’s use of 43; as “the virtual” 28; within modernism 34 point-cloud models 58–59, 62, 192–93, 195–196 politics 2, 44; of aesthetics 7; of algorithms 7; and architecture 1, 3, 14n1; in group-form 112; labor 147; of montage 70; of objects 11–12; and technology 7; of transmission 7 Pompidou Center 34 Ponti, Gio 102, 103 Pop art 148–155 popular culture 12, 89, 90; see also culture Portfolio and the Diagram, The (Pai) 9 post-impressionism 185 postminimalism 113 postmodernism 139 Pratt, Roger 31 Price, Uvedale 72 Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, The (Hildebrand) 186 profl 25 profle shading 24

207

projection 165, 172; double 176–184; empathetic 189; multiplicity of 175; orthographic 172, 175, 179, 183 Prototype School (Denari) 182 PS1 Dolmen 140–142, 141 psychology 186, 187; experimental 190; perceptual 155, 189, 190–191 public spaces 37 Queen Anne House (Bureau Spectacular) 43, 44, 181 Queen Elizabeth Hall (South Bank Arts Centre) 34 quilting 107 Rancière, Jacques 4, 7, 78, 89, 136 randomness 151 Range of Life, A (T+E+A+M) 154 Raphael 31 realism 7, 13, 43, 48, 53, 82, 84, 94, 164, 185; and the seam 91–94 reality: analog richness of 48; appearance of 12–13, 135; background of 49; and culture 6; and deep fakes 159; defning 58; fragments of 70, 76–78, 100; of material existence 33, 37; mediated through images 3, 8, 10, 47, 61, 70, 76, 94–95, 155, 160–161; modeling of 13, 62; of objects 126; and perception 20; possible 69; profane realm of 122, 125; relationship with representation 5, 7, 24, 53, 64, 91, 134, 139–140; and the representation of depth 50; restituted 191; tangible 170; unaltered 92 Rehm, M. Casey 159 Renaissance architecture 9, 23, 193; defning the architect 25 Renaissance church interiors 38 rendering 9, 10, 19, 133, 153; of abstraction 25; of architectural sites 72; decorative 140; of depth 177; digitally generated 38; and geometry 196; ghost 38; of hatching 25; of labor 11; of landscape and vegetation 27; of volume 20; with washed tones and graduated shadows 178; wireframe 38 representation(s) 4–5; architectural 10, 13, 51, 71, 83, 134, 165, 190; BeauxArts system 181; contemporary 167; conventions of 64, 122, 137–138; of depth 12, 164, 165, 177, 197; exclusion of people from 49; and reality 5; for the Grande Bibliothèque 37–38; processing through geometry

208 Index

Scott, Iwamoto 149

Seamless: Digital Collage and Dirty Realism

(Vassallo) 95

Semper, Gottfried 146

serialized magazines 100

serography 123

Serres, Michel 171

shadows: and architecture 47; Beaux-Arts

convention for drawing 179, 183; blind

zones as 49–53

Shannon, Claude 149

Sheffeld University 108

Shift (Riley) 150

Shklovsky, Viktor 83

SHoP 149

Signal. Image. Architecture (May) 9

signalization 13

Site Plan for Victims 114, 115, 116–118,

118

Sitte, Camillo 60–61

Situationist International 100

Situationist maps (Debord and Jorn) 120

Six Square House Plan 110

Skeppe, Veronica 51, 52

Slutsky, Robert 185, 186

Smithson, Alison 108, 112

Smithson, Peter 108, 112

S, M, L, XL (Koolhaas) 120

social activism 113

SANAA 20, 20, 21, 41, 105, 107

social equity 14n1 Santa Maria del Popolo 73, 73

social hierarchy 31, 32

Santa Maria del Priorato 167–168; ceiling

social negotiations 43

photogrammetry scan 168; scan of

sound productions 123

Piranesi’s altar 62, 63

South Bank Arts Centre, Queen Elizabeth

Santa Maria dell’Assunzione (Arricia) 41

Hall 34

Sant’Ivo della Sapienza 19, 19–20, 21, 38,

spatial demarcation 37

41

spatial differentiation 31

Sarin, Helena 159

St. Peter’s Basilica 21; parchment plan

Saunders, Andrew 58, 59, 192

22–23, 22

Savage, Nicholas 176–177, 178

scanning 189, 190, 191; digital 11, 13; edges stereograms 151, 190

in 57, 62; electromagnetic 61; mediation stereoscopes 190, 191, 192

stereotomy 23, 29

of background by 64; resolution in

48–49; and surveillance 50; technologies Steyerl, Hito 13, 59–60 Stierli, Martino 78, 82–83 of 50–52, 61; three-dimensional 58

Stirling, James 114, 115, 116

scarpellini (stonecutters) 24

stonecutters (scarpellini) 24

scattered plans 107–108, 108–111, stonemasonry 24, 27

111–114 Style Transfer Neural Network Study scenographia 22, 45n2 134

Schaerer, Philipp 94, 95, 96

Sullivan, Louis 146

Schmarsow, August 187 Superstudio 83–84, 84, 88–89, 88, 90

School Cluster Assemblies 113

surrealism 122

School No. 1 106–107, 106

surveillance 11, 47, 50; digital 64; internet

sciographia/sciographie (skiagraphia) 24, 25,

55; services of 54–55

45n2, 50, 170, 178

24; repetition in 29; of the shadow cast 25; of a surface 182–183 reproduction: by ink washing 24;

technologies of 118

Residential Parking Lot (Archizoom) 86,

86–87

Residential Treatment Center for Emotionally

Disturbed Children 109

resolution 48–49, 60, 195; as cultural-

economic negotiation 64; lowering of

50; and machine vision 157–158; in

scanning 57

Resor House 82

Richards Medical Research Laboratories

32–33, 34

Riley, Bridget 149, 150

Ritter, Miles 175

Rodhe, Einar 51, 52

Rosenblatt, Frank 155

Rosler, Martha 88–89 Rough Sketch for a Sample Lesson 135

Rowe, Colin 60–61, 185, 186

Ruskin, John 146

Ruy, David 134, 159–160, 160

Ruy Klein 159–160

Index

209

vagabondage 116

Van Pelt, John Vredenburgh 169

van Zuylen, Marina 136

Vanna Venturi house 41, 42

T+E+A+M 125, 152, 154

Vasarely, Victor 149

Tafuri, Manfredo 70, 77, 90–91

Vassallo, Jesús 92, 95–96

technology/ies: and architecture 3; digital

Vauban, Sébastien le Prestre de 27

3; internet 54–55; of linear perspective

Vedute di Roma (Piranesi) 71

172; media 135; of mediation 6, 13,

Venturi, Robert 40, 41, 42, 43

47, 48–49, 53, 64, 117, 122, 134;

Victims plan 12, 114, 115, 116–118,

and politics 7; representational 51; of

118

reproduction 76, 118, 122–123; scanning

videogame design 123

50–52, 61; three-dimensional 58–62

Vidler, Anthony 116

tectonics 34

Villa Madama 31

templates 24, 27, 170

Villa Meyer 36

Thales and the pyramid 171–172

Villa Planchart plan 102, 103

Thenhaus, Clark 43

Villa Savoye 144–145

theory of the free plan 36

virtual graphics 26–29

Think (flm) 135

Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion 20, 21, Vischer, Robert 151

Vitruvius 22, 45n2

41; photo 21; plan diagram 20; section von Helmholtz, Herbert 151–152,

21

188

Tom Wiscombe Architecture, T 41

Tomihiro Museum 109

Warnecke, John Carl 33, 33

Topalovic, Milica 105

washes 24, 25, 27, 28

topology 108, 111

Weaver, Warren 149

traffc patterns 66n23

Transformation series (Hollein) 84–85, 85 Webb, Michael 179, 181

Weizman, Eyal 49

transformations: aesthetic 9; in

Weizman, Ines 49

architectural imaging 3, 25, 30, 91,

Where the City Can’t See (flm) 50

123; causes of 6; of Dada into Pop

Wigley, Mark 54

80; in disciplinary discourse 9; of

Wilford, Michael 115

modernism/postmodernism 139; in

Winton Guest House 114, 115, 116

photogrammetry 56; of poché 11, 25,

Wissenschaftszentrum 114, 115, 116

30, 47; political 25; scalar 171; using

Wölffin, Heinrich 164, 192–193

templates 170; in technologies of

wood templates 24; see also templates

mediation 64–65; in technologies of

World’s Fair (1964), IBM Pavilion 135

reproduction 76

Wright, Frank Lloyd 32

transparency 20, 27, 29, 30, 43, 58, 154,

185, 190

Young, Liam 50

Très Grande Bibliothèque 37, 39–40, 41;

Young Projects 107, 110

digital wireframe model 39; model of

voids as solids 39; plan diagrams 38

Zago Architecture 152

triangulation 191

Zaragoza Bridge Pavilion 150

0-90 oblique 183

Unité d’Habitation (Le Corbusier) 160

Žmega, Viktor 79

Untitled (Paolozzi) 81

Zola, Emile 7, 53

urbanism 60–61

Zuboff, Shoshana 133, 159

utopianism 90

surveying 25, 43, 191–192

suspended ceilings 30