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degree project masters of architecture rhode island school of design critic: david gersten 2011
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experience:perception + orthographics
william j kimmerle
rhode island school of design
experience : perception + orthographics
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installation I : recordings orthogonal I (XX, xx) : linear circumferential orthogonal II (XY) : latitudinal (dis)orthogonal III (X’Y’) : commute orthogonal IV (x’y’) : building
installation II : projections
representation, thought, history
photography in architectural process
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experience is a process governed by sight, memory, emotion, and knowledge, all four partaking in immediate and retained impression.
immediate experience is an exchange between sensory information, retained impression, emotive state, and knowledge. spaces exist in objective, mathematically quantifiable reality. in experience, this is optically, audibly, and tangibly sensed. the sensed passes through a process of cognition, where collected impression is interwoven with memory of the concerned space, memories of spaces identified as similar, tangential emotive factors at both the time of passage and in the past, and knowledge of the orthographic and humanistic conditions that describe and pertain to the space of passage.
perception is not a process of recollection and identification of memory - perception is a process whereby memory, emotion, and knowledge mingle with the senses simultaneously and interdependently. maurice merleau-ponty :
to perceive is not to experience a host of impressions accompanied by memories capable of clinching them; it is to see, standing forth from a cluster of data, an immanent significance without which no appeal to memory is possible. to remember is not to bring into the focus of consciousness a self-subsistent picture of the past; it is to thrust deeply into the horizon of the past and take apart step by step the interlocked perspectives until the experiences which it epitomizes are as if relived in their temporal setting. to perceive is not to remember.1
spatial perception is an activity that assembles sensing, remembering, feeling, and knowing, but which does not occur as any one component element singularly. the conditions of present mind (emotion knowledge) and past mind (emotion memory knowledge) are present as ethorous molecules alongside and indistinguishable from the molecules composing physical space.
the newly experienced has a distinct phenomenology from the oft experienced. newly exposed to a space, sense is transformed by emotion and memory, both sharing tangential relation to the physically experienced. perception of the just-expereinced is not vacuous and untethered - perception is as if a door leaf, whose hinges of memory, emotion, and knowledge arrive without direct association to the experience itself, but whose presence needs no call for specification.
in spaces of long-term inhabitation, the leaf hinges mature to become partial products of the space itself. alongside the digested and retained, from previous and similar situations, perception of the immediate space is assembled into a phenomena of experiencing the oft-inhabited. our occupation, body, memory, and emotion of the known space and the unknown space commingle into experience.
1 ponty, maurice merleau. phenomenology of perception. tr. colin smith. london: routledge and keagan. 1962. 19.
we conceive the world through ninety-degree relationships : paralell, perpendicular, latitude, longitude, global positioning. at all scales and between scales, we consider space as definable or comprehendable in orthogonal terms. this is the prime foundation of the architect’s creative space in mind and worksurface. orthography is critical to communication and measurement, but the experience of space, and the fluidity of spatial experience, lie beyond the bounds of orthography alone.
this work is an assembly of the orthographic and perceptual spaces we inhabit. even in dimensional terms, we know space to relate by defined angles and distances, but we simultaneously experience space in a way that changes in form every instant.
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installation I : recordingsexperience : perception + orthography
this work takes account of
memory emotion attention inhabitation knowledge inference sensation
as critical partners to orthography in our perception of space.
oil and light have been utilized as the primary indicators of a phenomenological departure from a strict experience of space as orthographic.
this has been a study in drawing (ink, coffee, graphite, oil, light), photographic survey and projection, sound, and assembly of layered drawing/projection/sound
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even when we presume we are at rest, when we stabilize our emotive state, when we are committed to a plane of mind upon which attention orients us, when we believe we occupy a point - a moment of stable non-motion - we still undergo physical changes that illuminate our forever belonging to orthographic frameworks.
inhabitants of a planet, we undergo an everlasting axial rotation,we are always transited linearly along a circular, recurring path. knowledge of our movement lies often unrecognized, but visual and sensory cues recall our scenario, in every adaptation to varying solar conditions and energy fields. in every bulb of gas that we set to flicker by changes in ambient light - on, then off, then inevitably on again - we track the progression of our night into day, and we admit our movement as a point upon a sphere, tracing a line. this is orthographic experience at a most eternal and indomitable scale. we subjugate it only by attention, when we release this physical reality from the hold of our perception.
maurice merleau-ponty points to the phenomenon of attention:
even if what we perceive does not correspond to the objective properties of the source of the stimulus, the constancy hypothesis forces us to admit that the ‘normal sensations’ are already there. they must then be unperceived, and the function which reveals them, as a searchlight shows up objects pre-existing in the darkness, is called attention. attention, then, creates nothing, and it is a natural miracle […] which strikes up like sparks just those perceptions or ideas capable of providing an answer...1
all bodies, even those that escape our atmosphere to engage deeper orbits around our planet, move along inscribed circular paths, first at a planetary scale, and then also along successively circumscribed paths of circumferential movement about a sun and a point centered in our galaxy. we experience our progress in myriad cues that we identify as reminders of culture and practical intervention, but which also can be understood to illuminate, as a searchlight, our eternal occupation of orthographic space by linear movement.
1 ponty, maurice merleau. phenomenology of perception. tr. colin smith. london: routledge and keagan. 1962. 26.
installation I : recordingsorthogonal I (XX, xx) : linear circumferential
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orthogonal I (XX, xx) : linear circumferentiallinear experiences with the earth
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05:23:00 05/24/11 05:56:30 05/24/11
orthogonal I (XX, xx) : linear circumferentiallinear experiences with the earth
36:30 time lapse471.13 miles
18587 milesearth circumference at 41°48’50”N
12.9 milestraveled per minute
471.13 milestravel documented in 36:30
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orthogonal I (XX, xx) : linear circumferentiallinear experiences with the earth
in building we can aid the subjugation in experience of our greatest orthographic inhabitations, from consciousness into a mental space at great distance from perception. in spaces of permanent artificial lighting, set at light-occluding orientations to exterior solar exposure, we mask all cues that recall our permanent orthography.
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we separate ourselves from the influences of the great registers of external change, and we construct a timeless vacuum for visual experience. interior spaces enable us to visually register only our own movement and domain.
orthogonal I (XX, xx) : linear circumferentiallinear experiences with the earth
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the earth is swept by an orthographic disposition, as if a current, guided by the temporal difference between one point and another. moving east to west, points undergo similar changes in solar exposure successively. along our westward orthographic current, we locate ourselves on swept landscape using a straightforward artifice, a grid imagined on and of the land for mind in representation. we experience the earth varying by our changing orientation to the sun’s glance, and correlated with iron’s polarity (magnetic) at a polar (earth spherical) perpendicular, we produce a linear scheme for locating self.
orthographyearth-measure
polar coordinates (planetary scale), euclidean coordinates (horizon scale)X-X solar Y-Y magnetism
X and Y are integrated as a grid in two directions, allowing parallel and perpendicular relationships for geolocating and for projecting movement. the cartesian scheme is a natural orthographic system, by which we deduce relationships between ourselves and distant points east, west, north, and south. conceiving by a grid of lines, we prefer positions orthographically related to our own - we adapt most easily to the simplicity of locating along lines radiating north-south and east-west. experientially, at points along radial axes, landscape is unique every foot, mile, second, and minute. yet we may suppose relationships spanning orthographic points, a product of our own structure of thought.
artifice is how we may label a grid laid upon a network that is as fluid as wind, but the linguistics of word choice and thinking reveal a false bias - ‘artifice’ disempowers our tendencies and frameworks of knowledge, and also the natural schemes upon which our grids are imagined. it is critical to appreciate our own thought structures just as we appreciate natural systems. we are bodies in nature. identifying knowledge and thought as false, on the basis of abstraction, is an act of self-elevation : we conceive of ourselves as distinct from the world, thereby capable of thinking which we can reject because we believe it does not belong to the natural world of eternal processes. but just as thought, emotion, memory, and systems of nature are critical partners in experience and perception, so too are our frameworks of knowledge and thought, because we are of nature.
installation I : recordingsorthogonal II (XY) : latitudinal
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orthogonal II (XY) : latitudinallinear experiences across landscape
41°48’50”N
71°35’00”W
71°34’00”W
71°33’00”W
71°32’00”W
71°31’00”W
71°29’00”W
71°28’00”W
traveled route to coordinate points
7-inch surface soil samples
oil+light experience map
recorded ambient audio: full spatiality
photographs 90° and 270° to true north50mm normal lens length
satellite imagery of coordinate points
sites of collection(one minute longitude distance)
71°33’00”W
71°32’00”W
71°31’00”W
71°30’00”W
71°31’00”W
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
EEEE
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71°3
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41°48’50”N41°48’50”N
71°3
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41°48’50”N41°48’50”N
41°48’50”N41°48’50”N
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orthogonal II (XY) : latitudinallinear experiences across landscape
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landscape is conceived as a gridded field, but we transit the field irregularly. by time we are still in linear relation to our past self. we may consider the body a field, and thereby conceive of our movement as a minor field traveling across an expanse. but at greater scale, the body is minimized to a point, and our motion assembles an uneven line of travel, often contrary to the nature-based cartesian scheme.
we carve out space in mind or space in object, within which and from which we experience. we perceive the object from the orientation we recognize, from the realm we spatially identify in each moment. in automobile, rate of motion varies greatly, and we inhabit a minor space within which all seems at rest. this is a space of study for relativity, yet the phenomenon is made further complex by attention and our relationship to the outside.
varying rate of travel, lit condition, and ambient noise within and without the vehicle suppose our perception of space as minor (limited to the vehicle), or major (a connection to the outside world). the primary phenomenon of high speed movement : we transfer instantaneously and constantly between perceiving ourself in motion and at rest. at the major scheme, in auto we experience a broad-scale change in perspective, and our perception adheres to the linear quality of our scaled movement. in such motion, we construct a sense of the outside, and it is vague and indefinite, while simultaneously constructing a sense of the inside, and it is relatively specific and definite. maurice merleau-ponty:
our perception ends in objects, and the object once constituted, appears as the reason for all the experiences of it which we have had or could have. for example, i see the next-door house from a certain angle, but it would be seen differently from the right bank of the seine, or from the inside, or again from an aeroplane : the house itself is none of these appearances : it is, as leibnitz said, the geometrized projection of these perspectives and all of all possible perspectives, that is the perspectiveless position from which all can be derived, the house seen from nowhere. 67
what is true in ponty’s description, of slower variations in relationship to object, is true to an extreme in vehicular transit. we construct a multiperspectival experience of outside space, to which we cannot keep pace. simultaneously, we conceive of ourself and objects at relative rest with exactly the process he describes.
installation I : recordings(dis)orthogonal III (X’Y’) : commute
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(dis)orthogonal III (X’Y’): commuteline of movement experiences across landscape
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(dis)orthogonal III (X’Y’) : commuteline of movement experiences across landscape
1 MILE
march 24 2010
08:35:37
82.02’
64.9 MPH 08:36:07
88.58’
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108.27’
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111.55’
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104.99’
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1 MILE
march 24 2010
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1 MILE
march 24 2010
30 s
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photographic capture tangential to south-bound travel30 second interval
photographic capture tangential to north-
bound travel30 second interval
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(dis)orthogonal III (X’Y’) : commuteline of movement experiences across landscape
1 MILE
march 24 2010
1 MILE
march 24 2010
08:35:37
82.02’
64.9 MPH 08:36:07
88.58’
66.2 MPH
08:36:37
88.58’
57.0 MPH
08:37:07
78.74’
59.9 MPH
08:37:42
108.27’
63.3 MPH
08:38:12
111.55’
74.5 MPH 08:38:42
104.99’
74.7 MPH
08:39:12
91.86’
78.1 MPH
08:39:43
101.71’
66.0 MPH
08:40:13
180.45’
67.3 MPH
08:40:43
147.48’
75.8 MPH
08:41:14
170.60’
64.6 MPH
08:41:44
160.76’
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08:42:15
167.32’
59.5 MPH
08:42:45
164.04’
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08:43:15
167.32’
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08:43:46
167.32’
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08:44:18
177.17’
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08:44:49
193.57’
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08:45:19
213.255’
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08:45:59
200.13’
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200.13’
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308.40’
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08:57:43
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75.46’
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08:29:25
98.425’
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1 MILE
march 24 2010
09:51:28
295.28’
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295.28’
21.7 MPH
10:00:30
301.837’
33.8 MPH
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292.00’
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10:01:30
288.71’
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10:02:39
282.15’
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282.15’
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265.75’
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180.446’
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193.47’
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10:17:31
78.74’
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78.74’
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85.30’
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78.74’
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1 MILE
march 24 2010
1 MILE
march 24 2010
northbound/southbound : capture geolocation and time
northbound/southbound : satellite-determined elevation
northbound/southbound : traveled route (cartesian-irregular)
northbound/southbound : satellite image1 MILE
march 24 2010
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built architecture is our most frequent venue for spatial experience. public/private, known/inferred, frequency/infrequency of inhabitation, emotional memory, time, attention, light, sound all serve simultaneously in our perception of the architectural space.
the building allows perception that emphasizes a conception of form and volume, around a circumnavigable object. with the building, we sense sound, light, and air, as with the landscape. but due to the building’s scale (nearer to our own), changes in relationship to object permit perception around the object, and we construct a temporal sense of the object’s limits, which we cannot with landscape due to overwhelming vastness.
at the scale of the building, we experience perceptual blackouts that follow from our social selves: interpersonal relationships enable knowledge of adjacent space in the apartment building, and conversely, limitations in interpersonal relationships prevent our experience of nearby space. public and private are the manifestation of known and unknown resulting from social regulation.
each sensory experience operates profoundly differently at the scale of the building - socially-unknown spaces lie beyond our perception, but the audible activities of adjacent spaces - across sectional divides - expands our knowledge beyond the public/private divide, and expands a volumetric and social perception without invitation.
the following records as a series of photographs in forward and rearward perspective, at five simultaneous cuts - limited where required by social restriction to access, perception, and knowledge.
installation I : recordingsorthogonal IV (x’y’) : building
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orthogonal IV (x’y’) : buildingsimultaneous lines of experience across architecture
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orthogonal IV (x’y’) : buildingsimultaneous lines of experience across architecture
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“the physicist’s atoms will always appear more real than the historical and qualitative face of the world [...] as long as the attempt is made to build up the shape of the world (life, perception, mind) instead of recognizing, as the source which stares us in the face and as the ultimate court of appeal in our knowledge of these things, our experience of them. the adoption of this new way of looking at things, which reverses the relative positions of the clear and the obscure [...] if we abandon the empiricist postulate
of the priority of contents, we are free to recognize the strange mode of existence enjoyed by the object behind our back. the hysterical child who turns round ‘to see if the world behind him is still there’, suffers from no deficiency of images, but the perceived world has lost for him that original structure which ensures that for the normal person its hidden aspects are as indubitable as are its visible ones.”1
simultaneous cuts at five sections in two perspectives : fore and rear
1. ponty. 24
orthogonal IV (x’y’) : building
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we conceive the world through ninety-degree relationships : paralell, perpendicular, latitude, longitude, global positioning. at all scales and between scales, we consider space as definable or comprehendable in orthogonal terms. this is the prime foundation of the architect’s creative space in mind and worksurface. orthography is critical to communication and measurement, but the experience of space, and the fluidity of spatial experience, lie beyond the bounds of orthography alone.
this work is an assembly of the orthographic and perceptual spaces we inhabit.
even in dimensional terms, we know space to relate by defined angles and distances, by the action of light, sound, and air, but we simultaneously experience space as changing every instant.
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installation II : projectionsexperience : perception + orthography
this work takes account of
memory emotion attention inhabitation knowledge inference sensation
as critical partners to orthography in our perception of space, acting on factors of
dimension light sound material
oil and light act as mediators of phenomenological complexity coincident in orthographic space
this has been a study in drawing (ink, coffee, graphite, oil, light), photographic survey and projection, sound, parametric modeling, and assembly of layered drawing/projection/sound
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graphite, oil, coffee, ink, photographic projection, parametric model
graphite, oil, coffee, ink, light, parametric model
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graphite, oil, coffee, ink, light, parametric model
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graphite, oil, coffee, ink, photographic projection, parametric model
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graphite, oil, coffee, ink, photographic projection, parametric model
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oil, ink, photographic projection
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graphite, oil, ink, photographic projection
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graphite. oil. ink. light
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cslight, physical model, time lapse photography
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perspective. elevation. section. plan.
the architect is conditioned to analyze and organize the world through distinct orientations. within weeks of beginning formal training, the designer adopts use of a centuries-old system of measured representation: strict viewpoints - set to horizontals and verticals - order visual interpretation and design planning. the architect’s understanding of sight and experience generate a language of discourse, a method of process, and a style of thinking.
plan (xy). elevation (xz/yz). section (xz/yz). perspective (xyz)
rigid orthogonal relationships, segregated into specific combinations of x y and z, become the discussion in practice and the framework of ideation.
these orientations define the boundaries of sanctioned representation, and the designer’s conscious thinking is trained to obey the specified viewpoints - plan elevation section and (in a simulative manner) perspective define the spatial arena of the designer’s imagination. method has linguistic consequences, and both thought and dialogue is trained in plan, elevation, section, and perspective.
representation and ideation in the established mode owe to centuries of layered and self-verified history, a history which regards past discoveries scientifically, but only rarely allows for new insight that challenges the foundational understandings of the architect’s sight.
plan. elevation. section. perspective.
design drawing and thinking contain a primary flaw: they neither match nor mimic the natural world nor our experience of space.
plan?elevation?section?perspective?
our experience of space is fluid, specific to every person, every position, every moment in time.
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in normative design process, measured perspective serves as the prime means of simulating visual experience of space. myriad problems challenged the pioneers of perspective, during a period when disagreement and misunderstanding begat a discourse leading to current methods. even in its nascency, as painters forged a common sense of the results of measured perspective, artists disagreed about the values underpinning the act. alberti and pierro della francesca each believed perspectival accomplished different feats: the former favored a system that evoked the natural world, and francesca aimed to achieve to accomplish on pure geometry.1
alberti: perspective?francesca: perspective.
perspective, elevation, section, and plan : the terming of a fluid dynamic by which every person perceives space.
perspective. elevation. section. plan.
depiction processes by which images are created are inventions, but the orientations that representation employs are not inventions - they are standardized forms of a temporal experience by which we perceive our environment.
perspective elevation section plan
no formal training process informs the architect about how space is experienced - a fine attention to memory, emotion, and knowledge would partake in an accurate understanding of spatial perception. yet architectural interventions are imagined for specific or imagined sites, and at no point is an architect led to seek an understanding of how he perceives the world, nor how drawings relate to his a-mathematic experience of the world. drawing and conventions are taken as givens, and thinking evolves to match the two dimensional traditions of the practice.
1 klein, robert. “pomponius gauricus on perspective.” the art bulletin. vol 43 no 3. 1961. 212
representation, thought, history
the human visual experience.
impression of space is derived from sensory input and cognitive interpretation.
we must begin not by simply considering how we might draw a space, nor how we might draw a space if we attempt to “draw as we see.” rather we must demand: are current and historic modes of representation true to how we experience space, or to how we remember the experience of space? we wonder simultaneously:
1 what does it mean to visualize space? visual experience2 how would we represent space experienced in forward and peripheral vision? recording3 how do we remember spaces and objects we observe (and, necessarily, how did we interpret what we experienced)? memory
experience is a process governed by sight, memory, emotion, and knowledge, all four partaking in immediate and retained impression.
immediate experience is an exchange between sensory information, retained impression, emotive state, and knowledge. spaces exist in objective, mathematically quantifiable reality. in experience, this is optically, audibly, and tangibly sensed. the sensed passes through a process of cognition, where collected impression is interwoven with memory of the concerned space, memories of spaces identified as similar, tangential emotive factors at both the time of passage and in the past, and knowledge of the orthographic and humanistic conditions that describe and pertain to the space of passage.
perception is not a process of recollection and identification of memory - perception is a process whereby memory, emotion, and knowledge mingle with the senses simultaneously and interdependently. maurice merleau-ponty :
to perceive is not to experience a host of impressions accompanied by memories capable of
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clinching them; it is to see, standing forth from a cluster of data, an immanent significance without which no appeal to memory is possible. to remember is not to bring into the focus of consciousness a self-subsistent picture of the past; it is to thrust deeply into the horizon of the past and take apart step by step the interlocked perspectives until the experiences which it epitomizes are as if relived in their temporal setting. to perceive is not to remember.1
spatial perception is an activity that assembles sensing, remembering, feeling, and knowing, but which does not occur as any one component element singularly. the conditions of present mind (emotion knowledge) and past mind (emotion memory knowledge) are present as ethorous molecules alongside and indistinguishable from the molecules composing physical space.
the newly experienced has a distinct phenomenology from the oft experienced. newly exposed to a space, sense is transformed by emotion and memory sharing tangential relation to the physically experienced. perception of the just-expereinced is not vacuous and untethered - perception is as if a door leaf, whose hinges of memory, emotion and knowledge arrive without direct association to the experience itself, but whose presence needs no call for specification.
in spaces of long-term inhabitation, the leaf hinges mature to become a partial product of the space itself. t is digested and retained of previous and similar situations, and the retained experience is informed by all emotive conditions that which is digested and retained in mind differs greatly from immediate, direct experience of space, and the inverse is true as well :
example.
it is difficult to separate experience of built object, memory of built object, and experience of a secondary image of the built object. our remembered sense of the eifel tower often adheres more to represented images (in distant perspective or elevation) than it does to a literal visit. the experience of the paved base, the ticket window, the slanted elevator, the first tier, the railed upper tier, these all may rest in static memories that nearly follow perspective. but the general recollection, the term eifel
1 ponty, maurice merleau. phenomenology of perception. tr. colin smith. london: routledge and keagan. 1962. 19.
tower, will likely recall a full-figure mental image of the object, in near elevation, or at least distant perspective (itself nearly elevational).
how many visitors have experienced the eifel tower from that vantage point? how many tourists have walked to montmartre, stood atop sacre couer, and taken in the eifel tower from a hilltop, distant vantage point? or at least a similar, clear view from a distance and elevation? very few.
so the retained eifel tower, the one of immediate memory and recollection, comes either from secondary image, or from an abstracted recollection of the experienced object. that abstraction alters the memory, so that the built object, experienced in ground-level perspective, is recalled in elevation, or perhaps plan, or perhaps section.
similarly, we may retain st. peter’s square as plansimilarly, we may retain the pompidou center as sectionwe may retain the empire state building, as with the eiffel tower, in elevation and perspective
that we might retain an image of the object as an abstraction of the actual experience, has deep and vindicating consequences for the relevance of architectural representation. if we can experience an object from the ground, and retain it mentally as an elevation or a section or a plan, then logic dictates that designing in the modes of elevation section and plan is relevant for the human experience of space.
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age 7age 9
age 15
various. global children’s art gallery. http://www.naturalchild.org/gallery/
various. global children’s art gallery. http://www.naturalchild.org/gallery/
with young drawers, as with the conventions of pre-renaissance painters, plan, section, and elevation coexist in a single picture plane, producing jarring perspectives.
neither set are the workings of naivety - they are attempts to translate experience and visuality in two dimensions, before the introduction and enforcement of renaissance conceptions optically, mathematically ideal vision. they represent the instinctual translation of fluid, indefinite experience into stable, definite representation.
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angie. age 9
duccio di buoninsegna. 15c.
duccio di buoninsegna. 15c.
unknown
graphic perception : pattern recognition
maintaing optics constant (field of view, lens length approximating the human eye), our visual reading of space is an act of assemblage. every element, at every distance, is unique - no material, no identically machined or manufactured component, exists as identical object in space. every element of the built environment is individual, from the sash to the brick, from the cast to the manufactured. we do not embrace the visual world as disparate. instead, we assemble by perceived commonalities - bridging information of emotion, cognition, space (xyz) and graphics (xy) - in every moment, each orientation can be altered in perception.
in a graphic (xy, two dimensional) reading of visual scenario, we perceive patterns, assembling data of hue, saturation, luminosity. the early-education notion of negative space is one construction of a graphic translation of the spatial.
the translation to two dimensions establishes a stabilized relationship between ourselves and distance/scale. we record the spatial view (xyz) as a single plane (xy), and we force objects into flatness. this is a process belonging fundamentally to both photography and painting. the painter and the photographer make it their work to transpose depth into flatteness, and as longtime contributors to our common visual culture, their practice is innate to our instinctive perception of space, even when recognized as dimensionally spatial. recording method begets linguistics, and therefore our experience with
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and training in representational flattening inform our live-perception of space. we perceive space, in vivo, as flat, and we bridged sensory data in our field of view just as we do when viewing a painting or photograph.
unlike the painting or photograph, our reading of depth as flattness is non-permanent : a shift of the eye or an evolution of thought can recast our perception instantly around new parameters. the painting and the photograph are physical artifacts, they convey a finite information set, and in turn a limited perceptual translation - we can also read works in variable orientations, as the experience of the flat representation is also fluid within the data that is provided.
we are capable of perceiving the world as flat depictionwe break and reorient every instant
when we read reddish masonry as a common thread in graphic perception, we flatten the depth of space momentarily, and bridge distinct elements to abide a cognitive xy framework. this is distinct from a depth-conscious recognition, of built form as common in material or color - we refer here to the act of living a painterly or photographic perception of space. the flattened reading translates qualities of depth, material, and transparency in the space of our own thought.
p a t t e r n
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i m p l i c a t i o n
graphic perception : built form (all depths)
graphic perception : built form (myopic depth)
graphic perception : built form (all depths), excluding skyspace (infinite depth)
graphic perception :red hue
graphic perception : low luminosity
graphic perception : composite
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barthes, roland. camera lucida. richard howard, tr. new york: hill and wang, 1980.
barthes, roland. the eiffel tower. richard howard, tr. berkeley: university of california press, 1979.
baudrillard, jean. simulacra and simulation. sheila faria glaser, tr. ann arbor: university of michigan press, 1994.
damisch, hubert. the origin of perspective. john goodman, tr. cambridge, mass: the mit press, 1994.
foucault, michel. the archaeology of knowledge. new york: vintage books, 1972.
hartoonian, gevork. walter benjamin and architecture. london: routledge, 2009. nadir, lahiji. “architecture under the gaze of photography: benjamin’s actuality and consequences”
klein, robert. “pomponius gauricus on perspective.” the art bulletin. vol 43 no 3. 1961. 212
marion, jean-luc. the crossing of the visible. stanford: stanford university press, 2004.
mitchell, william j. the reconfigured eye. cambridge, mass: mit press, 1992.
nodine, calvin f. & dennis f. fischer. perception and pictorial representation. new york: praeger publishers, 1979.
pirenne, m.h. optics, painting & photography. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1970.
ponty, maurice merleau. phenomenology of perception. london: routledge, 1962.
preziosi, donald. architecture, language, and meaning. the hague: mouton publishers, 1979.
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