Reality Modeled After Images

Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image

Michael Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000402100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

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 fields, this book shows how design is impacted and changed by shifts in image culture, representational conventions and technologies.

PART I
POCHÉ AND THE RENDERING OF LABOR

1
THE LABOR HIDDEN IN THE POCHÉ

DOI: 10.4324/9781003149682-3

FIg. 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

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-five 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 figure (Fig. 1.2a). Decisions to image the solidity of architecture in this manner have little to do with communicating the construction of the building; in this case masonry walls hidden inside stone and stucco surface finishes. The aesthetic is deployed purely to render volume as a coherent and compelling figure, a spatial concept, all indications of material labor removed. What hides in the cavities of these walls is a reality withdrawn from perception; an internal shadow behind surfaces, sensible only through the abstractions of a notational image, labored through the conventions of architectural representation, and evaluated through the trained intellect of the architect.

FIg. 1.2A Francesco Bor r omini, Sant’Ivo della Sapienza (1642), plan rendering, Archivio di Stato di Roma, Cimeli, 77, photo by the author

FIg. 1.2B SANAA, Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion (2006), plan diagram, image courtesy SANAA

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 distinguished 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 filled 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 reflections of the exterior on the interior, the interior on the exterior, the exterior-interior on the interior-exterior; compounding, layering, distorting the environment into a collection of volumes within volumes, floating alone together (Fig. 1.3a).

FIg. 1.3A SANAA, Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion (2006), photo © Iwaan Baan

FIg. 1.3B SANAA, Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion (2006), section, image courtesy SANAA

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 fixed in academic traditions, but on closer inspection a sequence of episodic reinventions 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 influence and haunt the Western traditions of the discipline of architecture, the initial problems are laid out in the Italian Renaissance. Thus the first 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).

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 figure of the building with a horizontal plane elevated and parallel to the ground. This aspect is so ingrained in architectural thought that it is difficult to realize how novel it initially was. “Plan” drawings up to this point in time were primarily considered 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. “Ichnography,” 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 parchment plan, however, is not an inscription on the ground; its cut floats 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, conflating 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.

Defining poché will require several attempts, none of which will succeed in pinning it down in all its specificity. Among its cognates we find 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 between the outside and the inside. This “between-ness” of poché is modulated by other definitions, 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 fill a given area graphically on a page.⁶ It was a typical practice in the École des Beaux-Arts to “have the precise profile of the plan inked by the designer, while the rougher work of filling in the outlined area could be done by beginning students.”⁷ This lends poché its affiliation 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 find 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, figure/ ground, and through this, assists in the conceptual development of space as differentiated 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’ stereotomy. It allowed the architect to fix, to ‘make up for’ irregularities in order to create enfilades of symmetrical suites.”⁹ The mass of walls and piers in the parchment 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 significant conceptual developments of Renaissance architecture.

As with all paradigmatic examples, there are precedents and appropriations. Several related representational practices existed in the late fifteenth century, allowing us to speculate on how Bramante’s parchment plan developed its mutations. 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 fit 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 flat 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, specifically the Colosseum in Rome).¹⁰ Other influences came from fields 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 of the sixteenth century. Da Vinci’s technique did not attempt to pull the elements 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 significant for poché may be found in the drawings and templates of stonemasons.

Stonemasons used mold drawings, m...