| 3 |
|
Recording & projecting architecture
Recording & projecting architecture
A project for the city of Rome
The research empirically explores the semantic value of images and the potential of image-based communication in respect to new-media culture, computation and to the ongoing process of dematerialization, focusing on how these processes affect current interpretation of the City and imagining possible architectural propositions.
Dematerialization is seen here as the current stage of what Martin Heidegger defines in his assay “The Age of the World Picture”, as the modern ambition to measure, quantify and digitalise the world, translating it into its image. The practise of imagining the world is intimately related to the invention of the notion of space as we know it, this word coming from the Greek “stadion”, which generally means “standard measure” and particularly indicates a metrical unit equivalent to 200 meters.
The relevance of investigating processes of digitisation and dematerialization in relation to our understandings of the City lays on the one hand in the prominence and proliferation of images which together constitute the multeplical aesthetics of contemporary built environment and, on the other, in the related phenomena of codification, displacement and concealing the driving dynamics and fundamental processes affecting the physical space of the City, which appears unreadable.
In the presentation I will consider the polysemous nature of the notion of image, extending its relevance beyond the domain of visuality and considering its similarities with the related notions of imprint, numerical image, record and projection. From a realist perspective, which implies believing the wold as being subsistent autonomously from human interpretation, an image can be defined more generally as any recordings of reality which implies a process of translation of a certain subject or data into its virtual version and corresponds to a degree of detachment from what is recorded. This distance from the subject allows images to be interpreted as an autonomous systems of signs.
In the case of Rome`s periphery the interpretative potentials of translation processes and the distance between the City and its image is embodied in Pier Paolo Pasolini`s critical readings over the rhetorical ambition of social progress which guided post-war reconstruction program, expressed through his poetic representation of misery and disillusion in Roman suburbs. Pasolini`s movie trilogy on Rome contributes to construct the shared image of Rome`s periphery and ultimately its actual conditions, and it can be read in turn as part of the cultural context of the City. In that case, the virtual and potential evil and the moral corruption represented in the movies seams to have prevented its realisation. Beside Pasolini`s authorial position, this example shows the interpretative potential of translation processes between different languages, media, dimensions, domains and their effectiveness in manipulating (reverting when necessary) the meaning of the ontological, moral and social reference system underlying a given work.
From these considerations, this research investigates the moment of translation between the physical space of Roman peripheries and the virtual space of its image, by means of three photographic devices used for recordings on field as well as conceptual and design instruments. They explore three modalities of imprinting photographic images while addressing different cultural aspects as well as historical stages, which are found to be present in contemporary culture and therefore relevant for interpreting urban conditions. Furthermore the recorders query the distinction between interpretation and automation in the production of contemporary images.
The First device is a four pin-holes camera obscura imprinting one multiple image on five projection planes. The pin holes measure 0.55 mm and the focal lenght is 150 mm on the central plane. It outputs one singular set of images, picturing space from four slightly diverging points of view. The optical alchemy of the camera obscura has been understood and noted by Aristotle in the IV century before Christ, and thousand years later it has been used by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti to establishing the mathematical rules of one point perspective.
The Second device is a slow-rate dolly camera which shots a split picture pour 7.5 meters. It expresses the logic of mechanical production of images, repetition and linear sequencing picturing urban space in four strips of images by means of two oblique mirrors.
The Third device is the simulation of a cinematic walk-through an iconic apartment building in the Tuscolano_II peripheral district. The third recorder addresses the notion of non-linear editing and it is based on a combinatorial matrix that links representation techniques and degrees of privacy in the building. It is meant to be composed by 16 perspective scenographies representing space at different scales and by four webcams. It outputs a four-windows cinematic image which corresponds to as many navigation paths through the building, showing multiple footage of various interior spaces at the same time. It is inspired to certain works of combinatorial literature such as Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes by Raymond Queneau or The Garden of forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges.
Because of their specific modalities of imprinting the recorders challenge the structural correspondence between recording and recorded object allowing the interpretation of photographic imprint as autonomous flat spaces. The resulting images are seen as Imprint bearers collecting superimposed traces of various photographic imprint. This quality of the recordings has been used as a base for further speculations which aim to represent an inverse process of translation_that from the flat space of the image into architectural space, as being a third dimension in-between image and physical space. This drawing is obtained by extracting the different layers of traces collected on the recordings in a quasi-spatial dimension that shares its qualities with both bi-dimensional and tri-dimensional space. The drawing has been sampled and recombined to explore its formal characteristics which depend by different densities of intersecting, oblique paths composing an intricate field of lines.
To summarise: This last phase of the research investigates the re-translation from image to physical space by envisioning a third dimension of becoming between the first two, which is represented through speculative drawing.
The notion of imprint bearer has been further interpreted and translated into the architectural idea of a library which collects and expresses in space the image of written culture: a self-writing machine which records the translation of physical books into virtual and numerical images.
The conditions of the ongoing process of dematerialization of physical culture lead to a profound redefinition of the programmatic aspects, the urban role and the spatial characteristics of a contemporary library. Specifically, the conventional organisation of a public library, with books repository and reading hall is ineffective in a scenario where immaterial information can be displaced and hosted somewhere else, still remaining individually accessible from every point of the network.
This architecture project envisions the limit of the process of dematerialization of physical culture in the case of a blinds library: an set of apparata whose agency is that of evoking in blind readers the mental image of an infinite reading space.
The blinds library of Rome is a soft structure which opens to multiple interpretations, absorbing and reflecting definitions. It is indeed a library for blinds, but it is even a maze-like sensuous garden or an architectural game-field for viewers, and it is globally recognised as an architectural attraction comparable to the London Eye. The blinds library is situated in Parco di Villa Borghese, next to Valle Giulia faculty of architecture and well connected to Piazza del Popolo and the Central Library of Rome. The park has been interpreted as a Campo (field) of intensities and programmatic islands, between which the library forms an open-air pavilion similar to a dense architectural garden, which blinds reach following a path of lavender and other aromatic plants unfolding in the wood. Other buildings in the parc house cinema, art and leisure related programs between which are The Globe Theatre and The Caffe dell`Arte.
Blinds readers navigate the library by means of their innate sense of number, their enhanced kinesthetic cognition, touch and hearing. The architecture of the library borrows from Braille language its peculiar relations between number, sign and significant. The unstable field of knowledge constituting the library is organised and indexed in an hypertextual network of relations linking different topics and establishing their relations of proximity, contiguity and interconnection in space. Topics are expressed in keywords associated to three numbers: the first two indicates rows and columns scanning the ground floor, while the third number correspond to a singular cable in the field. Cables are numbered from 1 to 2013 and their trajectories are numerically controlled.
The numbering of the cables and the directions of the galleries are crossed in such a way that the reader will encounter numbered cables arranged in non-consecutive couples (as they were pages of a book browsed randomly or non-linearly). This numerical displacement evokes in the blind reader the mental image of a space whose architecture remains mysterious, enigmatic, unintelligible and infinite. In the library, the sense of infinite and the experience of the hypertext which are normally grasped only through vision, are translated into spatial experience and conveyed through the association of spatial elements with displaced and non-consecutive numbers.
Beside the universal sense of number, the library engages blind sensing through the instability of its architecture. Due to its peculiar distribution of forces and delicate balancing of weight, every intersection and branch of the mobile network slightly vibrate and swing at same for the atmospheric flows and for the movement of human bodies in space. Instability creates peculiar connections between readers introducing another form of sociality which looks beyond the rethorics of the Public Building and which is based upon mutual awareness and shared intents in the community of the library, translating in architectural space some virtual potential of network theories.
Blind readers access information in lecterns disseminated within the field. Each of these lectern can host and display one or more interrelated topics by means of a reading-&-writing Braille desk and it is connected or clustered with other lecterns hosting related topics. These platform are individual reading spaces reinterpreting some of spatial characteristics of libraries before Gutenberg`s invention of typography and the establishment of Free Public Library as building type and programmatic institution. The evolution of the idea of public library can be described as a slow movement of emancipation of a bookshelf (armarium), normally grouped with a desk and a chair, into a institutionalised space programmed to host books and readers and which has become crucial for sharing, producing and preserving knowledge. Lecterns are quasi-hermetic spaces in between a piece of furniture and an intimate study-room which are structurally more stable then the mobile galleries and the staircases, finished in pine wood, black rubber and textiles.
Furthermore, the reading-&-writing Braille desk allow blinds readers to interpret and contribute to the heritage of the library by proposing compilings, editings and original interrelations between texts belonging to different times, languages and subjects. The hypertextual association proposed by any reader is evaluated by the community of the library and, when accepted, it is translated in a new gallery connecting two sectors of the library and crossing many others along the path.
The community of the library challenges the structural relation between author, librarian and readers by introducing the role of the plural librarian, a multeplical reader echoing the nature of the Urbe, that of embodying the general idea and the conceptual origin of urbanity while being a specific place, at same. Proposing their interpretation, blinds perpetrate the movement of self-writing and the becoming of architecture, shifting the urban role of the library from a dimension of contemplation, collection and preservation of physical books to that of interpreting and indexing the global text.
The kinetics of the library is based on the incalculable possibilities of assembling two different kind of spatial elements: the lectern and the mobile unit which are shifted in the field by a system of pulleys and chains. Together they constitute the topography of the library and weave the pattern of cables with their movement. The mobile unite is a narrow tactile environment capable of assuming various forms. Blinds walk on metal meshes beating the rhythmic sound of their walk while holding on the handrail rope with their hand. Each of these unit displays two consecutive numbers engraved in Braille scripts and hosts sensor activators connected to the numerical system of the library.
|
[PDF]
[JPG]
[JPG]
[PNG]
[Abstract]
|