Visual Research Methods in Architecture

Igea Troiani, Suzanne Ewing, Igea Troiani, Suzanne Ewing

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781789381863
• eBook ISBN: 9781789381887
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book offers a distinctive approach to the use of visual methodologies for qualitative architectural research. It presents a diverse selection of ways for the architect or architectural researcher to use their gaze as part of their research practice for the purpose of visual literacy. Its contributors explore and use 'critical visualizations', which employ observation and sociocultural critique through visual creations – texts, drawings, diagrams, paintings, visual texts, photography, film and their hybrid forms – in order to research architecture, landscape design and interior architecture. The visual methods intersect with those used in ethnography, anthropology, visual culture and media studies. In presenting a range of interdisciplinary approaches, Visual Methodologies in Architectural Research opens up territory for new forms of visual architectural scholarship.

PART I

DRAWINGS AND DIAGRAMS: DISCIPLINARY SEEING AND KNOWING

1

Is the plan dying?

Peter Blundell Jones, University of Sheffield

When did you last see a building design presented that was exciting mainly for its handling of plan? When James Stirling was still alive and his latest project appeared in Building Design, it was often the plan that one looked at first to understand the general proposition of the building, and this was also often where the innovations were made. Famously, he used axonometric or isometric projections of various kinds to throw it into three dimensions, but the plan was still there, for plan and section were primary in his thinking. But nowadays nearly all we see is perspectival or photo-like images, and whether a project is published in a newspaper or as a web image, we are compelled to judge and admire it on this basis. Of course we are no longer restricted to line drawings, and colour has become ubiquitous while the most exciting perspective angle can quickly be selected by computer. There are algorithms to add sun and shade, the weather, people walking about, trees, flowers, water and whatever else promises maximum attraction. Legions of experts sit before screens coaxing maximum excitement out of such images, often not the building’s designers. So realistic are these images that it can be difficult to be sure whether or not the building has actually been built, and as a corollary, whether it is worth building at all, since a full enough presentation on page or screen has already completed the cycle of dissemination. But it actually leaves less to the imagination, for although lazy onlookers are saved the work of projecting themselves into the putative space, they are also prevented from doing so because most of the information is simply not there.

It was not always so. Le Corbusier famously declared that ‘the plan is the generator’ (cited by Conrads 1971: 60). Augustus Pugin (1853: 52) complained that the degraded architecture of his time was due to concentration on the elevations at the expense of the plan. And it is the plan we need to look at to understand social complexes like the medieval monastery, reflected in the famous ‘Plan of St Gall’, which was discovered by accident on the back of a parchment reused as a legal document (Figure 1). Dating from around 820 AD, it is of interest for revealing ‘the plan of an abbey of that period’, as Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-duc remarks in his Dictionnaire Raisonné de l’architecture Française du XI au XVI Siècle (Rational Dictionary of French Architecture from the XI to the XVI Century) (1878: 241), which features a whole page of description beginning with the church and its various altars, going on through the cloister, refectory, dormitory and monks’ quarters, the cellars, baths and latrines, then the novitiate, infirmary and the house of the physician, and all the quarters of lay brothers engaged in farming and production, including workshops for shoe-makers and coopers. It was possible to deduce from this plan the full hierarchical complexity of the monastic way of life with all its social relationships, and the drawing seems to have been made for this purpose and sent to spread the word for the building of new monasteries.

Figure 1: Plan of St Gall, ca. 820 AD.

In the late twentieth century, Walter Horn and Ernest Born (1979) wrote a huge monograph based on the St Gall plan, and constructed a scale model detailing all its various elements, labelling it up with all 26 letters of the alphabet as well as 40 numbers. With all this detail it was possible to deduce from the plan the purposes, sizes, shapes of rooms and the relationships between them, for example the progressive linearity of the church or the centrality of the cloister. The plan was recognized as essential for defining a type, and we know from surviving monastic buildings how impossible it would be to sum them up in a photograph of one side: books usually resort to a bird’s eye view, essentially an upward projection of the plan. St Gall provides a clear example of the plan as key figure, but it is far from singular in architectural history. Andrea Palladio’s work is attractive in elevation, but his I Quattro Libri dell’ Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture) ([1570] 1965) would never have made its international impact without the plan, spaces and relationships depicted. Much of the discussion at the Beaux-Arts was about the plan, about the choice of parti and the experience of the marche of a building: i.e. how you moved through it (Drexler 1977: 163, 185). To add a non-western example, Chinese complexes like the Forbidden City are even more plan-dependent for understanding, as their carpet-like organization makes them more space than object, leaving little to be seen in external elevations. And during the early modern movement work on the ground plan reached a kind of extreme, as part of the effort to redefine dwelling and to discover what the new kind of building should be like. In 1928 the Berlin critic Adolf Behne wrote:

Architecture is most richly concentrated in the creation of the ground plan, where the architect is led most decisively beyond the limits of personal work to the development of the created object. Each ground plan requires its own type of solution, for when it is developed in full seriousness, it is part of the task of the ground plan to order our life on the ground, on this earth.¹

Perhaps there really is less to look at in the plans of most contemporary buildings. In the case of offices, for example, general purpose structures with open plans and deep floors have taken over, and the developer wants maximum lettable floor area for the sake of profit while the shared parts of the plan used for circulation and services are driven by regulations that prescribe a minimum dimension, which for the sake of economy soon also becomes a maximum. One square metre of floor space is supposedly as good as the next, and people working in the building have little or no say in the procurement process. With no voice, they lose interest, just putting up with an environment already fully prescribed, some even obliged to hot-desk, finding a fresh workplace each day. Designing such offices can be a boring process for architects also, caught within this technical and economic web and obliged to work fast, adapting generic solutions by computer. In the days of drawing by hand, it necessarily took more time and effort, but it also took far longer, allowing time for contemplation and development. This is not to say that we now altogether lack buildings that are interesting in three dimensions, or that they cannot therefore also look dramatic in plan and section, but the ordering of plan seems mostly subordinate to the pursuit of an image, and tends not to articulate social significance like St Gall. Most such modern examples are not plan-driven.

Reluctance to grapple with the plan may also reflect a growing suspicion about plans ever since Foucault ([1975] 1979: 195–228) revealed that they could be representations and even instruments of power. Then Henri Lefebvre ([1974] 1991: 361) accused architects of making their own worlds of imagined space while forgetting real socially produced space: a criticism certainly applicable with large developments of the 1960s like London’s Barbican Centre.² Thirdly there was a kind of shock-horror reaction when it was revealed that maps were not objective, but bent to particular purposes by their makers: originally military strategy, or a national mapping agency in the case of the UK’s Ordnance Survey (OS).³ Academics and students started instead to make their own amateur maps, and soon any kind of investigation yielding a graphic product was called a map, but most were lamentably thin, with nothing like the detail and range of concerns recorded by the OS. It seems surprising now that we ever took the OS as ‘objective’, for one need go no further than examining the graphic conventions of the key to see how a strict classification was shared by the drafts-persons, whose work had to be consistent and depersonalized. If they lacked a convention for something, it simply could not be depicted, and mavericks could scarcely start extending the conventions on their own. But for all their limitations, OS maps do record a rich mixture of readable information, and their biases and limitations can be taken into account. The historic ones often allow of no alternative. This scepticism about maps and plans may account to some extent for a retreat from ‘the plan as generator’ and indeed from anything that looks like master-planning or social engineering, but we can hardly stop classifying and dividing physical space and imposing meanings upon it. Thresholds and rules of use are everyday with us, while patterns of power and possession loom more strongly than ever, for example, at times even throwing the whole nature of public space into question (Sennett 1977).

Neglect of the plan may result from competition with other media. Many lay people claim to be poor at reading maps and plans, and complain that such images are not what we see. Well, photographs are not what we see either, for the frame and angle are highly selective, and the colour and light values are drastically altered. Photos give no information to the other senses, and are deprived of the depth cues of binocular vision. The effect of linear perspective tends to be exaggerated because it wins over other perceptual cues, and as with early Renaissance paintings, the chequerboard floor adds a tempting depth. Although we may be able to read spaces through photographs, especially with the help of plans and sections to put different views together, they are still appreciated through perceptual conventions we learn early in life, then take completely for granted. Video can add movement and sound to bring architecture more to life, but the continuous filmic walk-through a building generally turns out to be disappointing. On the one hand it makes the viewer feel blinkered, unable to direct what seems too narrow a gaze, while on the other there is a lack of haptic information, about how the body is moving through the space. This is a reminder of the degree to which a real body in real space encourages controlled interaction. One can start and stop, look this way and that, switch interest instantly from peripheral vision to detail, or turn around knowing from one’s semi-circular canals how far one has turned – in contrast, when watching a video, the 360° pan is totally confusing.

Since the running video shot does not work, the projected architectural space of most movies is highly contrived: not a real space at all, but a virtual one made by the montage of consecutive takes. If there is a constructed set, often only half of it is there, and there is often advantage in dishonestly pairing up the interior of one building with the exterior of another. A good film editor can link the eye movement of one shot to that of the next, and use continuity of music or sound to carry the experience across the change of scene. We respond by assembling the story in our perception, often much as the director and editor intended. Architecture can provide the backdrop, but not for what it truly is. In Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) (1987) for example, film director Wim Wenders paid homage to Hans Scharoun’s State Library in Berlin with tracking shots across its impressively unfolding spaces, but he did no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Visual research methods and ‘critical visuality’
• Part I– Drawings and Diagrams: Disciplinary Seeing and Knowing
• Part II – Photography: Presence and Positioning as a Researcher
• Part III – Film: Affinities and Appropriations for Researching Contemporary Culture
• Part IV – Miscellaneous Mixed Modes and New Media
• Notes on Contributors
• Index