![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
|
1992 PETER EISENMAN Visions' Unfolding: Architecture in the Age of Electronic Media In his continuing attempts to foil conventional and culturally restricted interpretations of architecture, Eisenman explores in this essay the idea of endowing space 'with the possibility of looking back at the subject', a space that cannot be put together in the traditional con struct of vision. To that end he takes up the concept, and tactic, of the fold, credited by Eisenman to Gilles Deleuze. During the fifty years since the Second World War, a paradigm shift has taken place that should have profoundly affected architecture: this was the shift from the mechanical paradigm to the electronic one. This change can be simply understood by comparing the impact of the role of the human subject on such primary modes of reproduction as the photograph and the fax; the photograph within the mechanical paradigm, the fax within the electronic one... The electronic paradigm directs a powerful challenge to architecture because it defines reality in terms of media and simulation, it values appearance over existence, what can be seen over what is. Not the seen as we formerly knew it, but rather a seeing that can no longer interpret. Media introduce fundamental ambiguities into how and what we see. Architecture has resisted this question because, since the importation and absorption of perspective by architectural space in the 15th century, architecture has been dominated by the mechanics of vision. Thus architecture assumes sight to be preeminent and also in some way natural to its own processes, not a thing to be questioned. It is precisely this traditional concept of sight that the electronic paradigm questions... As long as architecture refuses to take up the problem of vision, it will remain within a Renaissance or Classical view of its discourse. Now what would it mean for architecture to take up the problem of vision? Vision can be defined as essentially a way of organizing space and elements in space. It is a way of looking at, and defines a relationship between a subject and an object. Traditional architecture is structured so that any position occupied by a subject provides the means for understanding that position in relation to a particular spatial typology, such as a rotunda, a transept crossing, an axis, an entry. Any number of these typological conditions deploy architecture as a screen for looking-at. Theories and Manifestos of Contemporary Architecture (ed C Jenks et al). |
|
Macro Micro Architectures:
|
| Box Shockwave... |