of human figures Persuasive human figures Performing human figures

The architectural image: space, movement and myth

Oil on Canvas

Echo and Narcissus

Sound and silence

Van Gogh, Vincent

The Big Combo

One hallmark of humanities inquiry is its motivation by normative concerns: a critical view of how things are and a corresponding vision of how things could be. Architects used to adeptly deploy the rhetorical approaches of humanities inquiry in the promotion of architectural visions. Today architecture seems to be dominated by technical and instrumental concerns and where a vision is articulated it is usually of transformed individual living rather than of a different society. Imaginative text and image based signifying strategies have largely given way to the ubiquity of computer generated plans, elevations, walk-throughs and unconvincing images of contrived and unlikely sociality.

https://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/2061/1/Normative_Drawing.pdf

Whatever happened to normative drawing

I first encountered the images in my neighborhood in North Brooklyn, on billboards posted next to construction sites or in the windows of pop-up realty storefronts. This imagery is ubiquitous in “up-and-coming” urban neighborhoods. Empty lots are digitally metamorphosed into gleaming glass condos and retail arcades. These virtual constructs are often populated by uncanny figures, pixelated people engaged in a range of activities (talking on cell phones, carting small children or armloads of shopping bags). The pictured environments are eerily sterile, presenting a stark model of the future “developed” city, and of its inhabitants. I’ve found myself haunted by these visualizations, in particular by their deployment of these tiny “cut out people.” What follows is my attempt to think through the embodied implications of this disembodied aesthetic, one that has connections to digital cinema and video game technology, but that extends this imagery into often undertheorized realms. Architectural representations draw on digital media to map new structures at the same time that they imagine the new social contexts into which they will be built. While

The architectural image: space, movement and myth

Citations

Oil on Canvas

Echo and Narcissus

Sound and silence

Van Gogh, Vincent

The Big Combo

References

Whatever happened to normative drawing

Architectural Fictions: Renderings, Rats, and the Virtualization of Urban Space

Related Papers (4)

The Architecture of Excess: Image Fabrication between Spectacle and Anaesthesia

Social Ritual and Architectural Space

(Un)canny Spaces: The Unbecoming of Everyday Architecture

Architecture, Patterns, and Mathematics