University College of London

M. Arch. Architecture

The Bartlett School of Architecture

Aprilis MMXIII

Printed in London

fig.1Sanja Ivekovic. Paper Women, 197677

The writing of this thesis started much earlier than the

moment I sat down to write. It was a long journey. At times I did not even

know I was travelling a path that would bring me here. I was fortunate enough

to have the company I could wish for. I have not the slightest doubt this would

have never been black on white without their companionship. I wrote this ac-

knowledment well before I started writing the to keep myself reminding me

of them.

I want to say thank you to my parents and my sister Cris-

tina. To Javier Perez, Andre Macedo, Rama Nallamilly,Julio Camarena, Joao

Alves Marrucho, Sten Eltermaa and Pierre Forrisier.

Penelope Holorambulu who has coordinated, and whom

I have deep respect for her attitude and knowledge.

A c k n ow l e d g e m e n t s

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7 Acknowledgements

9 Index

13 PROLOGUE

17 THEHEGEMONYOFVISION

21 The Technical Image

23 Repetition and media

24 The optical space

27 TOWARDSAPROPOSITIVE PHOTOGRAPHYINARCHITECTURE

30 The magical image.

31 A project for a propositive photography

37 photographicmediation

41 Parallax

51 Time collapsed

59 The circle of consussion

67 The depth of the image

75 CONCLUSION

81 BIBLIOGRAPHY

I 9 I

ind

ex

Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future and time future contained in time past

and if all time is eternally present all time is unredeemable.

T.S Eliot

Burnt Norton (first of Four Quartets).

fig.2(previous page) Cecil Beaton, T.S. Eliot, 1956.

fig.3(above) Duane Michall, I build a Pyramid, 1973.

I am a ref lection photographing other ref lections within a ref lection. To photograph realities is to photograph nothing.

(Duane Michals)

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I 12 I

Photographer Duane Michals, not being an architect, build a pyramid in Gizeh.

At a distance from the three grand pyramids, he collected and piled stones,

forming the volume of a pyramid. When it was completed he took his camera,

framed and made a photograph (fig.2). On looking at it, he concluded that his pyr-

amid was bigger than the old ones. In this action, Duane chose to legitimate his

images going through the same experience the builders of the pyramids went

through, An action that would have been redundant if his pyramid was not

larger than theirs1, if only from the cameras viewpoint. Duane constructed his

own reality, as much representationally as materially. He was never interested

in the building of the pyramid itself (it was never exhibited nor preserved). An

attitude that contrast with the care he took to preserve and exhibit the photo-

graphs. It was just that the action of building a pyramid was unavoidable if he

wanted to enter the space of representation, where his pyramid could compete

with the old pyramids.

The modern and larger physical pyramid Duane built in 1973 has vanished,

while the old ones remain after more than four thousand years. It is not diffi-

cult to read in Duanes action a paradigmatic change of our spatio-temporal un-

derstanding that came into being in the second half of the twentieth century. If

the Egyptians build the pyramids to perdure in the physical space, Duane con-

structed his pyramid to last in the space of representation.

Architect Charles Edouard Jeanneret, not being a photographer, made a photo-

graph of Villa Schwob. After the photograph was taken, he carefully doctored it.

The pergola in the forecourt vanished, all organic overgrowth removed, the ser-

vice entrance and the vestibules window modified, and references to the steep

terrain eliminated2. Even thought the realism of the image was maintained,

when looking at it, the extend of the brushing leave us the impression that the

1 Contacts 2: The Renewal of Contemporary Photography, (William Klein, 2001).

2 For a more complete description, see: Colomina, Beatriz, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, New edition (MIT Press, 1996), pp. 109-113.

PROLOGUE

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fig.4Le Corbusier. Villa Schwob, as published in Spirit Noveau 6, 1923.

fig.5Unknown author. Villa Schwob, La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1916.

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I 14 I

house is suspended in an unreferenced, platonic space (fig.3).

Villa Schwob is LeCorbusiers only work from his early La Chaux-de-Fonds pe-

riod that he would later acknowledge as his. It is a significant work as it is the

first example of purist architecture. It was a fertile project, the manipulated

photographs shows how after the physical construction of the house had fin-

ished, he continued to design and propose. He used the space of the photograph

as testing ground, after all architecture is a conceptual matter to be resolved in

the purity of the realm of ideas. In Villa Schwob, Le Corbusier build his own re-

ality, as much representationally as materially.3

We could interpret the altered photographs of Villa Schwob as a document de-

scribing an architectural proposal. It is not a proposal in the form of a drawing

or a model, but an orchestrated optical illusion, as all modifications fall within

photographic believability. The resulting image submit to the logics of optics.

Photography serves to describe an architecture has not yet being built. The ide-

alized Villa Schwob only existed in the space of representation. But if it is a pro-

posal, we could hypothesise how much a physical construction of the idealized

vision would have resembled it? Of course, no other Villa Schwob was ever built

and is questionable whether Le Corbusier would have ever been interested in

such a construction. What he wanted was to, but the propositive nature of the

altered photographs and. The publication of this modified photograph in LEs-

pirit Nouveau, long after the house was built shows a second but not least im-

portant Le Corbusier following projects. Is it possible to consider the modified

photographs of Villa Schwob an sketch of Villa Savoya?

For Le Corbusier and Duane Michals, the search for knowledge took their work

to the intersection of two realities. Phisical reality was not enough. It was the

door to enter the realm of optical representation. In photography they found an

ally, so closely resembling reality that it became reality itself.

3 The quotation can be found in: Colomina, Beatriz, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, New edition (MIT Press, 1996), pp. 107-118.

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tT H E H E G E M O N Y O F V I S I O N

1/4

First ACT

We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.

(Walter Benjamin)

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Historian Adrian Forty in his article History: Things Themselves 1, points out how over the past century the focus of architectural criticism has been outside the physical reality of architecture, but rather has focused in the sourc-

es documenting it. The representation of the object took the place of the object.

Forty suggests that it might be now time for a return to the sources, the build-

ings themselves, through direct experience. He cites nineteen-century writers

Violet LeDuc and John Ruskin, as examples of a breed of writers that drew their

knowledge of architecture through direct contact with the architectural object.

But, can we now, as LeDuc and Ruskin did experience architecture unmediated?

But, Is it possible as Adrian Forty suggest a return? Ignasi Sola Morales dismiss-

es that possibility. The degree of mediation in the past century has been such

that not even with the direct experience of the built object may we elude theFF

mediation 2. It is well documented LeDucs enthusiasm for photography, a me-

dium that at the time was just started to be used. only recently had been discov-

ered the camera enthusiastically [..] no longer carries pencils 3. Maybe, when

Violet started to photograph those buildings he was also starting to built the op-

tical mediation which has render impossible for us to experience them as he did.

It is difficult to ascertain the technological and cultural changes brought forth

by optical media over the past one and a half century, but we know that tech-

nology induces evolution as much as evolution facilitates technological break-

throughs 4, and that new sensory inputs require the adaptation of the nervous

system. Our brains have [...] internalized some of the laws of optics via the pro-

cess of evolution 5. We also know that bio-cultural systems have gone through

1 Forty, Adrian. History: Things Themselves, Architecture Today, September 2012, http://www.architecturetoday.co.uk/?p=25113. (accessed 21 January 2013)

2 Sola Morales, Terrain Vague, in Territories. Published in: Davidson, Cynthia C., and Anyone Corporation, Anyplace (Anyone Corporation/MIT Press, 1995), p.119.

3 Robert Elwall, Building With Light: An International History of Architectural Photography (Merrell Publishers, 2004), p. 12.

4 We are, and long have been, bio-technological symbionts: reasoning and thinking systems spread across biological matter and the delicately codetermined gossamers of our socio-technological nest. Andy Clark on, Gorayska, Barbara, and Jacob L. Mey, Cognition and Technology: Co-Existence, Convergence, and Co-Evolution, John Benjamins Publishing, 2004, p.25.

5 Shepard, Roger N., and Lynn A. Cooper. Mental Images and Their Transformations. Mit Press, 1982.

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fig.6Motion Efficiency Study, c. 1914. National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Division of Work and Industry Collection

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profound changes. We have been transformed by visual technologies. Optics is

therefore a pressing issue in cultural theory and, for that matter, life itself.

The sharing of images and memories has affected us individually. Perceptions

blend with preceding perceptions, imaginary visions collapse into memories. All

of those collisions are articulated around bio-cultural systems without which

perception could not operate. Our knowledge of the world is mediated and man-

ufactured through sets of complex bio-cultural systems in which vision plays a

crucial role. The eye does not capture truth but rather the brain constructs be-

lievable scenarios providing the necessary stability for life to exist 6. This total

mediation was described by Heidegger in his proclamation of the age of the

world picture 7, by which he meant the modern age where the world has become

a picture, a systematic representation of the technological and scientific ration-

ality: World picture does not mean a picture of the world but the world con-

ceived and grasped as picture 8.

The Technical Image

In line with Heidegger, if holding a more optimistic position, philosopher Vilem

Flusser proposes in the introduction of his book Towards a Philosophy of Pho-

tography, that human culture has seen two turning points. The first took place

with the invention of linear writing, about the second millennium BC. The sec-

ond, one which we are currently undergoing, he defines as the invention of tech-

nical images 9.

Flussers radical proposition leaves no room for interpretation, and if verified it

will imply a total change in the structure of culture, and in consequence of life

itself. It foresee the technical image as a common denominator to create knowl-

6 DFDF

7 Young, Julian, and Kenneth Haynes, eds., Heidegger: Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 67.

8 ibid., p. 67.

9 Flusser, Vilm, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Reaktion Books, 2000), p.14.

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edge and

Vilem flusser defines the technical image as A technological or mechanical

image, created by apparatus 10

Decoding technical images requires a reading of their position 11, as they are

the product of

Technical images derive from technical texts, they are not the product of a neu-

tral

Technical images can be traced back to the renaissance, when the production of

art began to be mechanized,

Technical images are mechanized ways of perception, in contrast mental im-

ages, While the optical image is constrained by the laws of physics, the mental

image its unconstrained and remains largely a free agent for transformations.

Only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is ca-

pable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for the object something

more out of one eye and then the other.

Repetition and media

Technical images facilitated the formation of media, as the mechanization of

the image took picture making beyond expression to become media. The repro-

ducibility of the image, its capacity to copy exponentially (and here I am refer-

ring to both, the possibility of reproducing multiples copies of an original as well

as the ability of photography to copy reality) showed a power unseen in the

history of publishing and divulgation.

It sufficed just over half a century to map a whole new network of relations

10 Flusser, Vilm, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Reaktion Books, 2000), p.15.

11 Flusser, Vilm, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Reaktion Books, 2000), p.15.

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fig.7Tonk Spin,

where the participants in the production of architecture would come to coa-

lesce. Most crucially, it also exposed architecture to a wider and uneducated

public. All this changes irreversibly altered the feedback mechanisms in which

any mode of production functions.

Today, photography is the medium of choice to portray and disseminate archi-

tecture. It is through imagery that architecture reaches the vast majority of its

public. Books, magazines, the web and other forms of publishing, all maximize

the use of photography or photorealistic imagery to convey architecture. Specif-

ic architectural methods of representation, such as plans, elevations or sections,

are often marginalized if not disregarded altogether. Text is kept to a minimum

and frequently is of descriptive nature, sometimes not even captions resist the

predominance of the image

The image saturation produces no knowledge 12

The optical space

[...] a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye, if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a

space consciously explored by man

(Walter Benjamin)

Walter Benjamin in his text A Short History of Photography is possibly one of the

first that saw into the prophetic qualities of photography. His theory of the op-

tical unconscious recognizes in the photographic image an otherness invisible

to human perception. If Freud made use of dreams as gateways to penetrate and

decipher the unconscious psyche, Benjamin saw in the imagery produced by op-

tical devices an expanded field of reality. He was acknowledging the limitations

of human perception and announcing the emergence of a new field of opera-

tions. Through optically generated imagery, it was possible to isolate and ana-

lyze phenomena that otherwise would pass unnoticed to the human eye. In im-

12 Leach, Neil. The Anaesthetics of Architecture. MIT Press, 1999

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ages Benjamin saw the evidence that a different nature opens itself to the camera

than opens to the naked eye if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is

substituted for a space consciously explored by man 13

The explicit parallels to Freuds theory of the unconscious against which Ben-

jamin referenced his theory, situates the optical unconscious in the ontologi-

cal displacement in which modernity was to operate. If the division between

conciousness-unconciousness accept two realties, linked but discontinuous, the

separation between human perception and optical perception reveals two spac-

es of action, also linked but discontinuous. Therefore, the linear time of the nine-

teen century, made up of a countable infinity of fragments, was surpassed. For

Benjamin , images produced by optical devices bring forth new spaces of pro-

duction, which would be unreachable without its assistance. It is what I want to

call the optical space.

Acknowledging the simplification, as the number of parallel spaces are yet to be

uncovered, the physical space in with reality operates engages a wider number

of senses in the production of architecture. Both of them are spaces where ar-

chitecture is produced.

13 Walter Benjamin, Michael William Jennings and Brigid Doherty, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,and Other Writings on Media (Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 27.

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tI 27 I

TOWAR DS A PRO P OS IT IVE PH OTOG R APH Y I N ARCH ITEC TU R E

2/4

Second ACT

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Photography is less about representing than constructing its objects

(Thomas Demand)

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The construction of photography is possible through a mediation. A medi-ation conducted by a mechanical apparatus. The procedure is apparently simple, from the arrangement of the objects out there, to the arrangement of

the objects in the surface of the image, made possible by light. This broad defini-

tion of the photographic closely resembles Le Corbusiers definition of architec-

ture, the masterful, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in

light 14. Under light space becomes. The physics of light that flesh out space also

bring the photographic film to life, surfacing the image out of the optical space.

The relationship between photography and architecture emerged in the early

days of photography, when buildings proved to be the ideal subject of a pho-

tographic technique still requiring very long exposures, but the origins can be

traced back much earlier, as photography, to a large degree, is an offspring of

western space sciences 15. Nineteen-century saw the invention of photography,

among a positivist and rationalist spirit that took hold of the epoch. This cultur-

al plateau proved to be an efficient engine in putting together many of the sci-

entific advances accrued since the renaissance. The geometrical spirit 16, as it

has been denominated, pursued clarity, precision and order. Cameras automat-

ed processes previously done by hand, a direct descendant of the tools of Renais-

sance, it related photography to classical the modes of representation.

As direct as this relationship is, when looking closer, it is difficult to find cases where

photography has been fully embraced in the process of making architecture, with

direct links between photography and architectural propositions. In architecture,

photography continuous to be used mainly as source of inspiration or a tool for doc-

umenting. Even if those roles are often exceeded in practice, as we saw in Villa

Schwob, there have been no serious attempts to develop methodologies in which

photography could be used more actively and propositionally. This is partly due

14 Corbusier, Le, Toward An Architecture, Frances Lincoln Ltd., 2008, p.246.

15 Photography cannot be accounted for if the transformations implied in geometry and its associated concepts of space and time are not fully considered Alberto Perez-Gomez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge, 1st edn (The MIT Press, 2000), p. 84

16 Tore Frngsmyr, J. L. Heilbron and Robin E. Rider, The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th Century (University of California Press, 1990), pp. 123.

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to the architectural professions regard of photography as a subsidiary disci-

pline, when not stigmatized, accused of distorting the true essence of the disci-

pline and fermenting a photogenic, false architecture. Needless to say, many of

the architects, who disregard the use of images, will use them to further their

own agendas. Conspicuously Le Corbusier, whose influence and development

was inextricably connected to photography, attacked the camera as a lazy in-

strument 17, and ultimately abandoned it, leaving uncompleted a project that

could have set the bases for a propositive photography.

In a world dominated by mediated sources of knowledge, architects can no

longer operate outside the visual imaginary of media representation. Photogra-

phy brought a change in the structure of culture and life and architecture can

but benefit from the embracing of image as a source of propositions. The techni-

cal image should be use to create and convery spatial meaning, and the optical

space accepted as a site of production.

The magical image.

The picture we receive through our eyes is odd. It is magical. Which is to say: It is not a picture.

(Siomon Ing)

The photographic apparatus was born out of a need for control and order,

but it would never have had the consequences it had without its transient

and magical dimension. Euclidian geometry describes the construction

of forms in an infinite, abstract space. Optics, in turn, introduces the

position of the observer in relation to the behavior of light. Photography

engages the world from an internalized and subjective vantage point

while at the same time relying in a mathematical model, referencing its

production back to universal models.

17 Piotrowski, Andrzej, and Julia W. Robinson, The Discipline of Architecture (U of Minnesota Press,

2001) p.141.

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I 30 I

As explained by Rosalind Krauss, photography does not operate semiologicaly

as an icon but as an index 18. It means that the object-out-there-signifier is not

immediately related to the forms contained in the photograph-signified. It is

not a formal analogy what facilitates the photographic message, but the physi-

cal contiguity between photograph-itself-signifier, emanating physical impuls-

es, and the mental-construction-signified, built through the memory of past ex-

periences and cultural constructs. 19. Even when we have had direct experience

of the object, the process for the creation of meaning is still altered by the sub-

jective observer and the collective unconscious. It is a process similar to magic

as described by J.G.Frazers in The Goldn Bough. Magic is produced when the

two laws of symphatetic magic are present: the law of similarity and the law of

contiguity 20. Photography as magic acts increasing our perceptual powers and

opening the doors of perception the multiplicity of interpretations.

A project for a propositive photography

The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen.

(Laszlo Moholy Nagy)

The optical apparatus has brought a new space where to produce architecture.

The technical image has ushered a radical change in our understanding of culture

and the way we generate it. Deep connections link photography and architecture

via space sciences and common models for the representation of space. It there-

fore appear as strange that both disciplines continuo to run side by side, rather

than engaging in a more fruitful and interweaved relationship. Why is there not

an operational engagement with photography in the making of architecture?

18 see. Krauss, Rosalind, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (MIT Press,

1986), p.198.

19 Sola Morales, Terrain Vague, in Territories. Published in: Davidson, Cynthia C., and Anyone

Corporation, Anyplace (Anyone Corporation/MIT Press, 1995), p.119.

20 Like produces like; objects which have been in contact, but since ceased to be so, continue

to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.Cited by Mauss,

Marcel, A General Theory of Magic (Routledge, 2001), p.13.

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fig.8Le Corbusier. Villa Schob, as published in Spirit Noveau. 1923

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fig.9Le Corbusier. Villa Schob, as published in Spirit Noveau. 1923

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fig.10Laszlo Moholy Nagy. Photogram 23, 1923

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I 34 I

There are numerous answers to that question, but possibly the simplest and

most persuasive relates to the view on photography as a transparent medium,

inexorably linked to the represented object that precedes it, and as such inca-

pacitated to offer any glimpses of a future. This view typically holds that archi-

tecture operates in the proposition, in what might become but still is not, while

photography is anchored to what already is. The ontology thus presupposed is a

formidable barrier that held back any progress. But it was not always like that.

Laszlo Moholy Nagy incarnates the enthusiasms with which photography was

adopted in the first quarter of the twentieth century. His experiments with pho-

tograms remain a key reference to

A project for a propositive photography will have to write a new ontology of the

medium to establish what its generative functions might be. The starting point

of this work will be in cracks of the currently accepted ontologies, that already

contain the seeds for this project. It is the case of Andre Bazins ontology, in

which despite the emphasis in photographic realism, he sees in every image an

ideal, For Bazin, the photographic image is not just an ersatz representation. It

reproduces the environment, the thing itself, and becomes an ideal (or virtual)

reality for the viewer 21. Bazin hints at the utopian traits that any image contain,

as yet, unrealized futures.

Schools of architecture offer a particular fertile ground for the practice of prop-

ositional photography , as their production remains representational and opti-

cal. Currently, they reflect in their curriculums the conventional view on pho-

tography. Thats it, photography is not included or when it does, it is solely for

the purposes of documentation. It is not integrated openly in design processes

21 Hossaini, Ali. Vision of the Gods. An inquiry into the meaning of photography,(Logos Journal.

Summer 2003), p.11.

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tP H O T O G R A P H I C M E D I A T I O N

3/4

Third ACT

Thus images arise that allude to modernist architecture and city landscapes, or to arrangements and patterns that border on abstraction.These, via the composition,

utilize the mediums own effects, such as depth of field and the loss of real dimensions. The perspectivally arranged objects together conform to one plane.Which objects

and arrangements are represented behind the images is no longer discernible to the eyes of the beholder. It is in the photograph itself that a meaningful dimension of the

installation first gets composed into something new. 1

1 Friedrich Meschede on the work of Bernard Voita. Originally published in the exhibition catalogue

1+1+1=3. Bernard Vita, Hermann Pitz, Michael Snow. Culturgest, Lisbon, 2013.

In practice, photographic mediation is not a passive action where the camera takes charge of the process of capturing. The apparatus is not a black box, its intricacies are open to the initiated. As I have discussed its functioning derives

from mathematical constructs, applied through geometry and optics.

The optical mediation is not limited to the moment of capture. The also to the

decisions that precedes and follows the decisive moment. In order to capture

preceding are a constant negotiation of the architect-operator with the specific

and concrete reality of the environment where capturing takes place. but the ac-

tion preceding it, which involve the engagement and orchestration of the archi-

tect with he physical reality.

Drawing is a way of seeing and selectively interpreting. As in any visual lan-

guage but a technical.

Vastly, the separation has been operated by an increasing mediation and separa-

tion from the object.

The following sections will analyze four aspects of the photographic mediation.

The study does not pretend to be an exhaustive analysis of the medium neither

presents direct links from photography to material propositions. It is a first at-

tempt to outline the idiosyncrasy of photography as applied to the understand-

ing of space an, but an outline of the larger body of work that needs to be under-

taking if a propositional photography of the camera It does not intend to be an

exhaustive. It is partly an ontological study of photography

The position of the observer in relation to the space is most noticeable in the

effect of parallax, not only the geometrical relationships are altered, but when

The case studies also seek to give a view of the current relationship of architects

with

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fig.11Liz Deschenes. Moir #25. 2009..

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Reality can be as deep as it wants. I make my pictures on the surface.

Thomas Ruff

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A constant flickering fascinates us. We fall hypnotized under stroboscopic lights. Partly, we perceive space due to parallax, the shifting relationship of objects de-

pending on the position of the observer. Parallax is crucial to generate spatial

depth via the stereoscopy, the eyes separated by gives us a clue to spatial depth.

In our personal construction of space parallax plays a key role, the effect it is

perhaps best expemplified thorugh the moire effect, where two patterns on top

will interfere with each other. The points where the two patterns cross becomes

the visually dominant pattern.This interference, shifts position shift in position

with the original patterns. If the two original patterns are even slightly sepa-

rated spatially, and the viewer moves, the moire is activated through parallax.

Both the moire and parallax experiences are common in our visual everyday.

When driving under a bridge, the bridge railings often create a moving moire

pattern.

In the series Moir, American artist Liz Deschens plays with the effect of moire.

To execute the works placed a perforated sheet of paper against a window, and

made two photographs with different exposure values at the backlit surface.

She then superimposes the two negatives slightly off-centered in an enlarger.

A reviewer of Deschenes exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery (New York) de-

scribes how the works come alive in a series of visual experiences with the po-

sition of the viewer in the space of the gallery. Reminiscent of the Op Art from

the sixties and seventiesBut Deschenes arrives at those effects through a photo-

graphic process. To achieve those visual effects is crucial that the superimposed

photographs have different exposure values.The print themselves also interact

with the space of the gallery As one moves toward the work, the monochromes

begin to separate into black and white dots 22

Saccades

22 The Brooklyn Rail, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/05/artseen/liz-deschenes-registration

(accessed 13 March 2013)

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Persistence of vision is the ability of our sensory apparatus to retain visual in-

formation after the original stimulus has disappeared from view. This sensory

memory is extremely short-lived (usually no more than two seconds) and occurs

beyond human control. 23

Difference in viewing angle created by having two eyes looking at the same

scene from slightly different positions, which creates a depth cue, and can cre-

ate apparent movement of object arising from the change in position of observer.

Space has been increasingly defined as a product of subjective projection and in-

trojection. From the beginning of the century, the apparently fixed laws of per-

spective has been transformed 24, transgressed and ignored in search to repre-

sent the space of the modern identity.

23 Brgger, Andreas, and Omar Kholeif, Vision, Memory and Media (Liverpool University Press, 2010)

24 Vidler, Anthony, Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture, New Ed (MIT Press, 2002), p. 10.

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fig.12Michael Wesely, 29 July 1996-29 July 1997, Office of Hel-mut Friedel.

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I love collecting time

(Michael Wesely)

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In the fixation of the photograph time is abolished. Photographs seduce as we are deceived into believing that the abolition of time is also the abolition of death. Commonly, photographic exposures are aggressive gestures, the abrupt

click of a trigger resolved in a split of a second, tearing time out of its continuous

flow. But in any photograph, no matter how quick and aggressive, duration is re-

quired for it to become.

German photographer Michael Weselys is notorious for his extremely long

exposure photographs. Camouflaged, his cameras witness the flow of time as

it subtly unfolds. Aided by pinhole cameras and neutral density filters he has

achieved exposures of over three years, and claims they could be as long as

forty. The science of photography is put to the limit and Wesely can only oper-

ate his cameras after experimental tests have been carried out. The apparatus

shows itself unpredictable due to its congenital reciprocity failure, time refuses

to be measured.

In his series Postdamer Platz (1999-1999), he carefull chose the positon of the

cameras atempting to foresse the changes that would take place in the square.

The images do not depict the building and the public space, but draw the trans-

formative process of the city. Berlin undergoes demolition and construction, as-

piring to reinvent itself through a radically new archiecture. 25 The images are

the spatialization of that transformative process and to attain it time needs to be

collapsed, compressed, aggregated into the surface of the image.

Long exposure often portray fluid, inapprehensible realities, yet for Weseley the

most critical element when making the photographs is the physical stability of

the camera during the long stretches of time it needs to remain on site. We-

sely usually embeds his cameras into the fabric of the building and constructs

bespoke structures that will hold the camera. The tripod isnt a tripod as you

know. Think more of a steel construction, really rigid and heavy, attached to a lo-

cation in the building 26

25 Mah, Sergio, Between Times: Instants, Intervals, Durations (La Fbrica Editorial, 2010), p.164.

26 Momenta, Interview with Michael Wesley, http://territorialboundaries.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/

momenta-michael-wesley.html (accesed 17 April 2013)

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fig.13Author. Corridor III

The photograph 29 July 1996-29 July 1997, Office of Helmut Friedel, as the tit-

tle indicates, is a one year long exposure of Helmut Friedels office. The room

shape is slightly trapezoidal, capping towards the end. 27 Depicting an interior,

Weselys photograph attract the architect not only because they depict the life

of an space in a single image, making it visible to a single glance. They are also

appealing because the level of abstraction achieved facilitates the thinking of

space. The graphic expression situates them close to diagrams, a crucial tool in

the understanding and designing of architecture since late twentieth century.

Architects resort to diagrams is turn for the abstract in the production of archi-

tecture. Reality is far too complex to comprehend directly. Similarly Office of

Helmut Friedel, the space constructed by Helmut Friedels body is shown bare

and decipherable. It is as if an abstraction had become real.

Long exposure photographs never fail to seduce us, they reveal what our eyes

can not see, showing us a mesmerizing world full of ghostly appearances. A

seeming chaos unfolds in front of the lenses but the film is able to excruciating-

ly record. We know that every line, every patch of colour has a reason to exist.

The table has been moved a few times and every position is recorded. An eva-

nescence face, possibly Helmut Friedel himself appears towards the end of the

room.

We associate long exposure to dynamism, photographs of metropolis with

speeding cars and rotating cranes leaving trails of light, but for Wesely they are

proof of the suspension of time as [..] photography is a tool that makes every de-

tail accessible for an unlimited amount of time. 28. The goshtly look of the pho-

tographs suggests time merely as byproduct of change. All is left in the photo-

graph is the change that took place, time itsef cannot be seen anywhere. It is

27 William Firebrace. Slow Spaces on Camera Constructs. Photography, Architecture and the

Modern City. Edited by Andrew Higgott and Timothy Wray

28 Momenta, Interview with Michael Wesley, http://territorialboundaries.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/

momenta-michael-wesley.html (accesed 17 April 2013)

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collapsed throught the continuous destruction of the film, as light continue to

be imprinted day after day, aggregating new changes, new lights, new layers of

information.

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fig.14Hiroshi Sugimoto,-Casa Batll II, in Sugimoto: Architec-tures.

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[...] we realize that those buildings or ghost structures will never belong to the real world. We will never be able to focus on them because they represent the real meaning

of modernity: the acceleration of time and the dispersal of places 1

Hiroshi Sugimoto

1 Bonami,Francesco. My Dear Sugimoto. In Sugimoto: Architecture. Chicago, Ill.Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003.p.10.

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In photography the circle of confusion relates to the finite ability of the eye to resolve detail. Human vision has a limited resolution, beyond which we are unable to differentiate. Only one percent of what we see in is focus 29, which

leaves most of our vision in the periphery, leaving the environment that sur-

rounds us unfocused. The perception of reality is shrouded in confusion.

As if addressing this visual trait, over the past ten years, out of focus photo-

graphs have covered the walls of galleries and museums in a short of global phe-

nomenon. Renowned photographers, the likes of Olivio Barbieri, Marc Rader,

Bill Jacobson, Frank Van der Salm or Thomas Ruff, have dispossessed of reality,

focusing their lenses in the unknown. The images acknowledge the impossibili-

ty of documenting, signaling a turn to the pictorial aesthetics of early photogra-

phy, rejecting the ultra sharp images that marked the largest part of the twen-

tieth century photographic production, as represented by Ansel Adams Group

f64. The escape from what photography made us to believe was reality, has also

spread to imagery produced in architecture practices. Almost any architectural

visualization has a certain degree of blur. The explanation is twofold and contra-

dictory: in the one hand the blur collaborates in hiding the artificiality of digital

images, conferring them with believability, while in the other they represents a

fear of commitment, of giving up in the design of the building. After all, blurred

images are pure potentiality, able to become whatever the consciousness of the

viewer might bestow on them.

In 1997, Hiroshi Sugimoto started a series of works entitled Architectures. The

series consists of heavily out of focus photographs of paradigmatic buildings

from the modernist movement. The challenge for Sugimoto was twofold: to

avoid the redundancy of the photographed subject (as the buildings had been ex-

tensively photographed), while retaining their essence, traces that might identi-

fy them. Architectures was an exercise on abstraction, in the sense that the pho-

tographs contained a minimum of information and a maximum of readability.

Sugimoto gave up colour, scale and context in search for the essence that would

suffice to link them to rest of the images of the same buildings, already part of

29 Ings, Simon. The Eye: A Natural History. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007. p.356.

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fig.15(left)Thomas Ruff,Mies Van der Rohe.

fig.16(middle) Hiroshi Sugimoto,Ville Savoye. Sugi-moto: Architectures

fig.17(right) Hiroshi Sugimoto,Sidney Opera. Sugi-moto: Architectures

our collective unconscious, as the building are already archetypes. Therefore, if

it is an exercise in abstraction and individuation, it is also an exercise in what is

common and collective. Blurred images allow the dichotomy as it distances the

buildings from the memory we have of them. Some memory of his own mother

or father is not human 30, says Sugimoto. The inaccuracy in the construction of

the image allows for the emergence of what is not real but plausible.

Light takes a frontal significance in Sugimotos Architectures, the blur turning

the surface of the image into patches of light, abstracting reality and revealing

geometry, the form itself. It is through this operation that the Batllo House II

(fig.00) becomes a liquid architecture. Gaudis curved window frames and wavy

ceiling seems to find justification. It is the imaginative vision of Gaudi before the

building was built. Casa Batlo is back to the drawing table, back to the world of

ideas and conceptions. The articulation of masses is recomposed and the build-

ings look again like a model. If the design started as an image, an sketch, it is

now back to the realm of the imaginary, back to be potentiality of design. The

image proves to be be crucial in the thinking and making of architecture.

30 De Michelis, Marco,The Veiled Glance of the Memory in Sugimoto: Architecture .Chicago, Ill.

Museum of Contemporary Art. 2003., p. 14.

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The finalization of a buildings the is the abrupt termination to the feverish pro-

cess of construction, the moment when conventional architectural photography

enters to capture it quiet and uninhabited. It is the final reward for the architect

that sees his building as he intended, but it also For the architect that moment

signals the death of the building, the cessation of change. In Sugimotos photo-

graphs this process of design starts agin. The building has not given up in his

representation, and through the camera it becomes the starting point for a new

architecture.

In Thoughtography II, the image is composed of nine in-focus photographs, shot

at slight distance intervals, representing the ability of our sensory apparatus to

retain information after the stimulus have disappeared from view. A character-

istic of our visual system, this sensory memory is extremely short lived (usually

no more than two seconds) and occurs beyond human control. Not only we focus

in an extremely small part of the world, but image is merged over image.

Technically a blur is produced because a point in the world takes on several po-

sitions in the surface of the film. That is, a point is represented in the image by

a cloud of possible positions. Similarly to memory, we can choose what point we

will represent the object. Open to interpretation, a selective memory.

They are intended as a metaphor for an inner state, an interior way of being in

the world.

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fig.18Thomas Ruff, Detail of facade in Eber-swalde Library.

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Reality can be as deep as it wants. I make my pictures on the surface. 1

Thomas Ruff

1 Quoted by Ursprung: Visiting Thomas Ruff in Dusseldorf Herzog & de Meuron, Natural History,

p. 164

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The image result of the optical mediation need to be retained, storage. It might be in an undisclosed space of the memory or printed on a paper. Whatever the support, the mediated image is an object in its own right, free

from the circumstances that governed its production, and subjected to the

spatio-temporal conditions shared with the materiality of its support. Images

weather and change. Black and white photographs acquire a sepia tint as chem-

istry is altered by time. Mental images transform, they are collaged, edited and

selectively blurred. But if autonomous, photographs never lose the link to what

they represent. No matter of how distorted or blurred or abstract , they always

share, by virtue of its very process of becoming, the being of the model of which

it is the reproduction 31.

The photographic object is not confined to bidimensionality. How could they be

if they are subjected to time? The mediation effects a in the degree of abstrac-

tion. Rather, the optical mediation brings about change in the degree of abstrac-

tion

Herzog & de Meurons Eberswalde Library (1994-1999), is a monolithic volume

, cladded in photoengraved concrete and glass, totally covered in images select-

ed by Thomas Ruff, whom the swiss architects invited to collaborate in the pro-

ject. Ruff chose the images from his personal archive, de-contextualising them

out of the magazines where they formed meaning together with text and dislo-

cating them from the support to which they were intended. The selection con-

sisted in twelve images, roughly grouped to correspond the sections of the mag-

azines from where they were extracted (politics, history, technology, culture,

science, art and society). The selection did not follow an structured logic, they

were chosen because he simply considered them interesting; strange or absurd;

or because they form certain cliches and stereotypes; images that attracted him

at some point 32. He was interested in the image itself, the object, its aesthetic

and technical quality, not in the signification. But Ruff could see how the image

31 Bazin, Andre, What Is Cinema?, (University of California Press, 2005), p.14.

32 See r Valeria Liebermann: Reflections on a Photographic Medium, Eberswald Library: Herzog &

de Meuron, p. 56.

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fig.19Thomas Ruff, Entrance at Eberswalde Library.

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does not give up in the idealization of what they represent, when some of its im-

ages were discussed by the librarys board and one of them rejected for its asso-

ciations to Nazisim. 33

Erweshald reflect this dual nature of the images, and therefore two distinct ex-

periences take place (and an infinite gradient between them) when physical-

ly experiencing the library. Seen from afar, the architecture collapses on the

image, the building a mere support, just a plane mounted on a light structure,

but as the skin is approximated, he photographic image disintegrates into the

matter of its physicality [...] you only see single components, nothing but pal-

try screws and planks 34. The image surrenders the power to emanate meaning.

The constant oscillation between this two realities, alternative spaces, the phys-

ical and the optical, brings the monolithic block to life and becomes the recur-

rent theme and soul of the building. The architecture is pure image becoming

orbiting around the skin of the building. It is therefore not surprising that the

published monograph Eberswald Library: Herzog & de Meuron 35, sanctioned by

the Swiss studio, does not have among its sixty four pages, any image of the in-

terior.

It is surprising to read Jacques Herzog stating he is only interested in the archi-

tecture at scale one to one, directly experienced: Why do people visit the cathe-

dral in Cologne? It gives you an experience of space that you could never have in a

movie by Steven Spielberg, no matter how spectacular his special effects? 36. The

architect dismisses the experience of the image as a valid experience of space,

even thought he probably does not ignore that more people watch an Spielbers

movie in three weeks, than people visit Colognes cathedral in three years. It

33 GerhardMack:BuildingWithImages,Liebermann, Valeria, Eberswalde Library: Herzog & Meuron

(AA Publ., 2000), p.38

34 Herzog, Jacques, and Philip Ursprung. Pictures of Architecture Architecture of Pictures: A

Conversation Between Jacques Herzog and Jeff Wall, Moderated by Philip Ursprung. Springer,

2004. p.49.

35 need to put the author here

36 Herzog, Jacques, and Pierre de Meuron, Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History, ed. by Philip

Ursprung and Canadian Centre for Architecture (Lars Muller Publishers, 2005), p.82-83.

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fig.20Author, Rock Formations II (2013). 59x42, Archival paper.

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would be difficult to justify the appointment of Thomas Ruff for a cosmetic op-

eration, which makes more Herzogs affirmation bewildering. A more plausi-

ble explanation is their acknowledgment in the power of the image to think and

produce architecture. After all architecture is a form of thinking, a process that

happens through the images that we project internally in search of a reality

Rock Formation II, belongs to a series of photographs of rocks from the col-

lection of the Natural History Museum in London. Printed in archival paper ,

59x42 cm, the series elaborates on the idea of the autonomy of the image. Digital

manipulations are applied to the photographs with the condition of not adding

any external element, but to use the captured information. The peaks and de-

pression of the rocks serve as a motive to construct an extended space, it will

open the doors to an understanding of photography, where signifier and signi-

fied part to .

In the same way as in Eberswald the distance to the image affects the reading

and the emotional engagement. As the eye approximates the pictorial abstrac-

tion increases.

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tC O N C L U S I O N

4/4

Fourth ACT

You cant hold places (things, anything) still. What you can do is meet up with them, catch up with where anothers history has got to now, and acknowledge that now

as itself constituted by that meeting up. Here, in that sense, is not a place on a map. It is that intersection of trajectories, meeting-up of stories; an encounter.

Every here is a here-and-now. 1

1 Doreen Massey, in Olafur, Eliasson, Gallery Tate, and Modern (Gallery) Tate. Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project. The Unilever Series. London: Tate Publishing, 2003, p. 111.

Why is possible and necessary a propositive photobraphy?

I started quoting T.S.Eliots Burnt Norton Quartet. The lines portray time as

ungraspable and undivided. Past, present and future, an constructed ideation.

For Eliot ultimately all time is unredeemable. Similarly, Sugimotos Casa Bat-

llo II refuses to be fixed to a marked time. The photograph hints the realized

work of Gaudi, while suggesting the liquid architecture it might become. Pho-

tography anchors those temporal tensions in the emanating surface of the pho-

tographic object. Time is unredeemable but in constant fluctuation.

The power of photography greatly resides in its multiple paradoxes. It seems

as if the scientific spirit from where it sprang, could have never predicted the

extended ramifications the apparatus would reach, many of them in clear con-

tradiction with that spirit. Once photography managed to fix the moment, the

perception of the observer became fleeting. It is perhaps not a surprise that pho-

tography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality

started to disappear 37. The spatio-temporal dislocations opened by the techni-

cal image brought new operational fields, which, to this date remain largely un-

explored in architecture.

The photographs I have discussed refuse to be easily accessible, as they con-

tradict the reality they seem to portray. They do not want to be documents but

alternatives to reality. I see them as examples of propositive photography be-

cause they border the undefined, tensioned because they are always becoming

and never being. Photographs that aims to see the invisible should be devoid of

any aspirations to freeze the time but favor a more speculative and propositive

understanding in which images exist in a multiplied time.

Mass Media provided the environment where a propositional photography finds

natural place where to operate. Optically dominated, the logic of the language

expresses itself unmediated. Unfortunately, too often, the negative effects of the

alliance between mass media and pho architecture of the alliance between mass

37 fsadf

CONCLUSION

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media and photography are often pointed, much work remains to be done ad-

dressing those inevitable relations under a positive light.

Architecture should be concerned primarily with the production of spatial

knowledge and much of that knowledge resides in conditions operating outside

physicality. A propositive photography is particularly suited to participate in

the production of architecture in those conditions.

To engage architectural production through photography is an extremely chal-

lenging endeavor, as it requires a leap of faith to break out of the mesmerizing

claim for photographic transparency and abolish time constraints. It will also

demand from the practitioner a deep understanding of the conditions where to

operate and a frontal engagement with the apparatus. To propose with a camera

we need to develop new creative procedures and methodologies. It is neverthe-

less a task that will need to be undertaken as the hegemony of vision seems ines-

capable as language that has as base technical images gradually spreads. If this

project is not undertaken, hungry media will continue to engulf architecture in

a senseless and meaningless production of imagery, media for its own consump-

tion, images devoid of knowledge.

The production of architecture is not limited to the physical. How many unbuilt

architectures have shaped the world we live now? Archigram, Abraham, Boul-

le, Branzi, Constant, Coop Himmelblau, Denari, Eisenman, Friedman, Fuller,

Natalini, Piranesi, Price, Robert, Rudolph, Site, Super Studio, Tschumi, Venturi,

Woods, Zenghelis, to name a few. Unnumerous project never left the paper, but

the influences can be felt in our bodies today.

The architectural profession will remain blind as long as its not able to operate

outside the physical. It is in any case part of the essence of architecture, to think

the utopian, to envisage ideals. Operating outside the physicality does not mean

that the physical wont be affected. The physical and the image are both part of

the larger process of devising space. Building start as images and eventually re-

turns the image. It is would only seems reasonable if they process starts again.

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tBIBLIOGRAPHY

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