Reading betweent the Images Painting Clues and Architecture (original) (raw)
Related papers
The body of architecture and its images
2017
The technical reproduction of images has eviscerated something fundamentally corporeal to the appreciation of artwork and of the architecture that contains it. Prior to its reproducibility, the experiencing of artwork required a full body commitment, even when the artwork itself was twodimensional, the experience was a three dimensional one. It always required physical presence and bodily engagement; whether it was walking towards it, around it or looking up to get a better view.
INTERPRETATION OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE
Granthaalayah Publications and Printers, 2023
The interpretation of art involves examining the meaning behind a work of art, which may include its historical, cultural, social, and political contexts. Similarly, the interpretation of architecture involves analyzing the meaning behind a building's design, style, and construction. The architecture was essentially practical in ancient times, offering shelter and security for individuals and communities. As cultures got more complicated, though, architecture became increasingly intricate and symbolic. Gothic architecture, for example, arose throughout the medieval period as a representation of Europe's spiritual beliefs. Architecture has evolved to reflect shifting ideals and views in the contemporary period. The Industrial Revolution resulted in the development of new materials and construction processes, which resulted in the rise of new architectural styles such as Art Nouveau and Art Deco. In architecture, the twentieth century saw a trend towards functionalism and minimalism, with architects like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe arguing for a machine aesthetic. The aim of this study is to explore the interpretation of art and architecture, focusing on the subjective nature of interpretation and how it is dependent on the viewer's understanding and cultural context. The objective is to analyze examples of famous architects and buildings, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou Opera House, and Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, to illustrate the different forms and styles of architecture and the various interpretations that they can elicit. By examining these examples, this study aims to provide insights into the ways in which architecture can reflect cultural, social, and political values, as well as the personal beliefs of the architect.
The Affect of Painting as a Physical Space
2018
This Ph.D by Practice narrates five spatial paintings that took place over three years, between 2014 and 2017, across a range of sites and exhibition spaces in the UK. This series of work and written thesis seeks to understand what a new materialist reading could bring to painting’s language once it enters architectural space. Each painting uses fragments of both made and found things, that are closely interrelated with painting’s vernacular: edges; translucency; colour; thickness; proximity; etc. These are theatrically staged with space itself - where architectural space becomes complicit with the work. It is the viewer/reader who makes the work do its work, from within the painting, through being in-action with the works as a physical spatial encounter, examining thematics of visibility and invisibility through the concrete materialization of the structures that govern painting. The thesis argues how the experience of painting as a spatial practice requires new interpretative meth...
ART AND ARCHITECTURE CORRESPONDENCES by Hugues HENRI
To talk today about visual arts and architecture, and a possible dialogue between them, we must overcome some preliminary difficulties. Difficulties of a methodological nature, and cultural difficulties linked to the very conditions of the research. Putting forward the hypothesis that there may be a common ground for exchange between art and architecture gives rise to a certain fear. As if the very fact of envisaging a contact between these two fields could harm and weaken them, especially for architecture. Artists and architects have long preferred to remain within their respective fields. This caution is hardly understandable considering that today many artists and architects work with materials and techniques that are heavily contaminated by other disciplinary fields. Something has happened since Le Corbusier asserted - with a simplicity and clear-sightedness that today would pass for suspicion - that the architect should be a very good connoisseur of art. Critically, there is also the fact that such research implies a desire to discuss - with unmeasurable consequences - the existence of disciplinary specificities, or a desire to address the theme of the aesthetic primacy of the architectural product to the detriment of the objectivity of constructive practice and effective methodology; or a desire to identify the hegemony of an expressive practice in the confrontation of the artistic fact as a whole. However, research on the relationship between architecture and the visual arts in modernity is not new; moreover, this research enriches a complex tradition which, far from undermining the autonomy and specificity of architecture, has, for example, revealed the complementary nature of the artistic and architectural experiences of the first decades of the 20th century. The great historians of modern architecture, from Pevsner to Behrendt, from Gedion to Zevi, from Argan to Tafuri, from Benevolo to De Fusco, have in fact revealed - at different times, for different positions and purposes - the close and dense links of the figurative and architectural poetics that lay behind each artistic movement ; they revealed the significant structural, methodological and formal analogies of the works; moreover, they highlighted the ideal correspondences that animated the activity of artists and architects at that time. It could be said, then, that circumstances were different; the relationship between the Modern Movement and the artistic avant-gardes is explicit, obvious, flagrant; above all because the aim was the same for artists and architects; but what seems obvious and linear today was not at all, especially if we look at the events in a more precise historical perspective.
Architectural Drawing: Architecture's Speculative Visual History
This Thing Called Theory, 2017
This paper explores the apprehension of meaning in architectural drawing afforded through each drawing's structuring 'diagram'. Rather than being confi ned to technique alone, the 'diagram' of an architectural drawing helps to inform its delivery of visual meaning. Through their diagram, architectural drawings, and more specifi cally presentation drawings, anticipate a response to the theoretical proposition of the architecture portrayed. In this manner, and in order to deliver meaning beyond technical representation, architectural drawings can anticipate a role for a viewing subject that frames the bodily interaction between viewer and viewed image.
RE-THINKING ART AND ARCHITECTURE: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY EXPERIENCE
In creative thinking, just as in architectural thinking, the context provides the necessary paths for the design. That said, conceptual thinking and theoretical ideas provide more than a mere context for architectural design, in that they help the architect make order out of chaos and create a pattern of order through their intuition and expressions of a culture. Within this explosion of creativity, art can help in the exploration of new means of expression, new materials and new forms, and in this sense, can enhance creative approaches in architectural education and architectural design. Since architecture as a discipline is about the creation and production of space, it has inherent spatial, social and cultural bonds, and as such, is a representation of values, meanings and identities. The concept of representation assumes many meanings. Represent as a noun is picture or sign, while to represent is to convey, to express, to correspond to. 1 In Lefebvre's model, the process of representation is defined according to three concepts or interrelated modes, being spatial practices; representations of space; and spaces of representation. Spatial practices can refer to social space that embraces the production and reproduction of social practices in particular locations. It embodies a close association within a perceived space between daily reality (daily routine) and urban reality (the routes and networks that link the places of work, 'private' life and leisure). 2 Representations of space refer to the conceptualized space that leans towards a system of verbal (and therefore intellectually worked out) signs, 3 and this is the dominant space in any society. Representational space is lived directly through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of 'inhabitants' and 'users', and tends towards coherent systems of non-verbal symbols in the form of signs and codes that overlay physical space, making symbolic use of its objects. 4 In this regard, architecture is a continuous act involving the taking possession, to some degree, of the abstraction of codes, signs and meanings. It mingles with art in a bid to be creative, to be different, and to be new and unique. Just as art, in itself, it is an attempt to bring order out of chaos, the principles of art help architecture not to portray , but to evoke the ideas lost within the chaos of daily life. Accordingly, it focuses on the abstract world of art to realize the truth, and in this respect, architecture is about combining the rational and the irrational. In this sense, space is not only a rational entity, nor is it something that exists at the level of the surfaces that define architecture, or a physical entity that can be measured by dimensions. It is about creating something rational out of many irrational relations and inputs, and about the meanings attributed to spaces within the system of spatial relations within the built environment. Since it is about the patterns of lifestyle, culture, tradition, individuals, beliefs and values, it can be considered intangible, meaningful, conceptual , perceptual and cognitive. In this regard, space is not something confined solely to architecture, being constituted out of some social, cultural, mental and physical processes. It is about the spatial practices, both rational and irrational, that give meaning to a place, which is why architecture is always in search of the genius loci. " How spatial organisation in some sense is a product of social structure " , " how space is socially produced and reproduced " and " how social relations are spatially produced? " have emerged as the most important discussions related to spatial theory over last two decades, having highlighted the significance of space and time as an associate entity rather than two distinct subjects. Studies of time-space relationships in several disciplines, but especially those of geography and history, have begun to emphasize the significance of both spatial and temporal dimensions in social theory, and in this respect, any conceptual framework for understanding spatial consciousness can only be constructed by exploring the relationships between social processes and spatial form. Having roots in ancient history, architecture as a discipline has always been about form, space and order, although the method of designing and producing form differs totally between the ancient and modern times. Form no more follows function, nor is it produced for a specific function. Instead, it is produced in line with the symbolic and conceptual meanings attributed to the form based on a specific social activity. Accordingly, it can be argued that each form of social activity defines its space, meaning that social space is made up of a complex network of individual feelings and images about and reactions towards the spatial symbolism that surrounds the individual. 5 Social space changes with changing social relationships, mental images and the spatial behaviours of individuals in everyday life, and is therefore complex, heterogeneous and perhaps discontinuous, but totally different from the physical space. 6 As a result, we can say that architecture is a social art, and so to understand the spatial form of a building or a city it is necessary to define the social space with reference to some social activity with the symbolic qualities of that form. Yet form is a narrative of meanings generated through explorations of programmes and uses of space, being sometimes decomposition of meanings, and at others, a re-composition of meanings driven from history at different times, like a juxtaposition of layers of a different context. The desire is not for architecture that communicates directly one meaning, but rather for material and spatial forms that produce multiple associations and ambiguous situations. 7 4 3
VRA Bulletin, 2007
The study of architecture has a special and problematic niche within the larger field of art history and visual culture. For many scholars, the complicated terminology of architectural components and the complex mathematics of engineering issues provide a powerful deterrent to engaging with architecture. The vocabulary of architecture is, by and large, not shared with painting and sculpture, although there are some exceptions; for instance, concepts such as texture and lighting are employed in architectural ekphrasis. Beyond the already mentioned engineering issues, formal issues such as massing, proportions, composition, and detailed studies such as profiles and capital analyses share vocabulary with the other arts, but the thrust of the question lies along very different lines. More impenetrable still is the architectural drawing, the abstract rendering in two-dimensions of threedimensional reality, whose conventions are often illegible to the uninitiated. At a fundamental, methodological level, the questions asked of architecture only rarely coincide with those investigated in painting or sculpture. Functional issues of use, social implications, political ramifications, gender questions and religious, devotional repercussions all carry a very different weight in architecture than in painting and sculpture. While these issues are reflected and embedded in other major media, buildings were and are designed to frame and control all these discourses, resulting in architecture being the locus of the lived historical experience, painting and sculpture serving as aspects (among others) of that experience within the building. Thus while the scholarly apparatus surrounding painting and sculpture on one hand and architecture on the other have developed into different organisms, the objects under study belonged together, forming part of the same experiential culture, not just visual in nature but simultaneously encompassing all of the senses, emotions, and intellect.