Transitions: Concepts + Drawings + Buildings

Christine Hawley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351877961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Most architectural books written by practising architects fall into two categories: theoretical texts, or monographs that describe and illustrate the author's projects. This book combines both, as it explores and illustrates the methodological journey required to translate a concept to a drawing and a drawing to a building. While the term 'methodological' might imply an Aristotelian logic, there is no attempt here to rationalise the process of conception, but instead an acknowledgement of an experimental approach that presupposes a subtle knowledge of the projects. It shows the architect's fascination with the 'opaque' and the 'not said' and illustrates how architecture works through agreement and contradiction (e.g. the built and the un-built, material and immaterial). Organised into three essays Urban Collage, Ground Surface, Shadows and Lines, the book examines how conceptual threads begin to compose a specific architectural design 'language' and how they interweave from one direction to another. Importantly, the projects that illustrate the text also demonstrate how imperative or marginal the original ideas become and, to an extent they demonstrate the design process: its successes, illogicality and failures. The essays also discuss the importance of iteration through time where ideas may occasionally be developed as a linear process, but more often emerge through a series of creative digressions. Although the essays and the projects have dominant themes, these should not be regarded as autonomous, as throughout the development of both drawings and buildings, ideas inevitably segue from one domain to another. Ideas have both fluidity and the ability to transform.

Urban Collage

There are two complex processes in the way the human brain perceives image and text. The first involves visual scanning and the latter constrains the reader to a pre-constructed route that is normally horizontal and must be read from one side to another or in some instances top to bottom. The first act of scanning involved in image perception has no decipherable rules and no system for sustained focus; the second act has pre-determined rules and demands unbroken attention. When both visual symbols are brought together the demands on the brain intensify, and the methods of simultaneous cognition are still not fully understood. The co-existence of word and image can be hierarchical where one of the symbols has a supportive or explanatory role, it can be deliberately in conflict, or it can have a collaborative relationship, as we usually see in advertising. All patterns of presentation impact differently on the process of perception and the re-contextualising of image and word into three-dimensional space is even more fascinating. The intrusion of the word and image onto the urban surface creates a complex synthesis of cognition where icon symbol and space have a visual interdependence. The interruption of urban space by information displayed through advertising, street art, urban signage, unauthorised graphics and fly-posting fundamentally alters the way we perceive the city, yet this phenomenon of altered space is rarely considered within the construct of formal analyses. Planning legislation may acknowledge the need for constraint, but the Advertisement Control Act (2007) executes authority in a limited and bureaucratic manner, abdicating control over many parts of the city but, more importantly, ignoring any form of qualitative discussion.

It was during the nineteenth century that the combined result of technical advances in reprographics together with a burgeoning consumer culture resulted in an unrestrained blizzard of typography and images. There was little planning legislation in place that even acknowledged the presence, let alone the impact, of this new and highly assertive form of communication that was using the urban surface as a message board.

‘All that is solid melts into air’ declared Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the stirring evocation of the modern era in The Communist Manifesto (1848) and, as if in response to these new forces, written words began to overflow into the wider environment, sometimes in the most chaotic ways. Where once they had been confined to ordered ranks on the pure white of the book page, they now seem to roam uncontrollably within the vertical visual field – on walls, shop fronts, billboards, advertising pillars, street signs, passing vehicles, even people. (Morley 2003)

While certainly familiar to us today, this visual cacophony of word and image was clearly a heady new experience in the mid nineteenth century. (Morley 2003)

The introduction of words into the visual realm and words and image into the spatial domain has the potential to create a dramatic impact, in that it offers both a reinforced and deconstructed understanding of space. Using words and images as a focal part of the spatial lexicon has been part of a thematic pursuit within particular design proposals that considers the architectural impact of this intrusive culture.

Streets at night or in Shinjuku, Tokyo, a forest of neon signs flash, defying translation, street signs direct speeding vehicles, advertisement screens relay their messages, loud music from a passing car drowns out the engines; hum. Recorded in a photograph, a film memories of a scene frozen in paint. (Leaman 2010)

There is now a greater spread of signage and graphic disruption in the contemporary city but the origins of using the city surface to communicate to the public are found in early history and there is even earlier evidence of combining image and letter.

This spatial coexistence has an ancient history dating back to the Palaeolithic period and the earliest written (commercial) signage can be found in both early Roman and Greek inscriptions. Logographic symbols predated the use of cuneiform vocabulary (found in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC) and early Chinese written characters have always historically combined both written and pictorial signifiers. There have been periodic surges of interest in Chinese calligraphy, a typographic medium that was not immediately readable to the European observer, and which therefore became allied to the optical function of the semiograph, a visual caricature that conveyed meaning through an image without words. The Chinese calligraphic symbol is interesting in that it retains a symbolic relationship with the referent, suggesting that there could be a unity between the referent and the referred. The use of simple pictorial images or logos as associative symbols is now a deeply embedded part of current culture but these early symbols were important, as they were to facilitate a fundamental desire to communicate. Epigraphic writing originated on hard surfaces and the earliest cunaeic form was found on clay, creating a form of concrete poetry; these marks were ultimately to bring ancient graffiti into the public realm. Unlike the subsequent use of soft writing material, inscription onto built surface conveyed information into the public domain. These inscriptions, often communicating contemporary news, were typically positioned on the walls of public buildings in order to capture the attention of the largest audience. Historically graffiti was considered a form of urban disfigurement, unlike commercial typography. There may be complex cultural reasons for this, but an explicit distinction is the relationship to surface: one was inscribed and was usually an authorised sign and the other was cut or applied and often unauthorised. The permanency of graffiti and the lack of authorisation established this as a fundamental act of desecration.

While commercial signage seen both in the Greek and Roman period were discreet plaques, medieval signage became larger and more florid, with some assuming the status of ‘art’, in particular the Guild signs of the City of London. The historic development of both formal and ‘guerrilla’ typography must be considered as a formative influence on the cultural acceptance of the contemporary phenomenon. Public writing and imagery cannot be disconnected from the evolutionary development of word/image in associated fields and it is important to consider its inevitable influence on the development of writing in the public realm. If one were to trace the development of communication on the urban surface, it would have an intractable thread through other forms of literature, art and word/image conflation.

Maps, concrete poetry, illuminated manuscripts, emblems, art deco book design, advertising, film and video and all manner of digital formats like websites – these modes rely on words so involved within the graphic medium and its message that, in the first place, words may seem to be transfigured as graphic imagery and, second, the graphic imagery itself aspires to the condition of linguistic denotation. (Hunt et al. 2010)

This association of word and image has often produced conflicting interpretations. William Mitchell argues that text and visual image have a dialectic relationship characterised by the need for dominance where either linguistic or pictorial signs must exert overriding primacy, whereas Michel Foucault considers word and image to have a more blurred relationship (Hunt et al. 2010). Direct and indirect influences are found throughout history, where word and image have impacted on other creative genres such as fine art, print, film-making and latterly, of course, contemporary graphics. It is important to remember the complex interrelationships between these media that ultimately impacted onto the surface of the city.

The still life painting and portraiture of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the content of which had moved beyond figurative recordings, began to include items and signs that were emblematic. In these pictures there was an implied narrative that underpinned the understanding of the image. In these examples and, in this case, Foucault’s more nuanced view of the relationship between word and image seems more apt. During the eighteenth century a more explicit relationship between word and image emerged where landscape architects and painters such as Joseph Turner and Humphrey Repton would embellish their paintings with notes and verse. At this time the making of print and the making of image on paper were two separate technical skills executed by two different craftspeople. The physical act of production was considered a craft where figurative and literal description never existed side by side, and it was William Blake who pioneered the technology that created illuminated printing, where text and image were executed together. To understand the impact this had, one had to understand the calligraphic nature of the text that was to reinforce and contribute to the meaning of the whole. The creation of illuminated text illustrated the precise force of both methods of communication working together – and the status of creating words into text that sat alongside illustration, now enhancing this process from a craft to an art.

The nineteenth-century painter John Martin was one of the first to use alliteration, a painterly form of accentuation when depicting hell through ‘Satan Presiding at the Infernal Council’ (1827), where the foreboding atmosphere was created by Claude-Nicholas Ledoux’s architecture used as a background reference. The use of emblematic alliteration is still used in contemporary advertising where images have precisely associated connotations. Martin’s work was amongst the first to use a reverse relationship with the city, where the urban monument was not used as the surface for communication but rather as the vehicle of implied atmosphere.

David Lomas (2010) noted that the introduction of words into the physical environment transformed the twentieth century and was to have far-reaching consequences.

Guillaume Appollnaire, playwright, art critic and poet, was one of the first to create with his work ‘Mandolin Carnation and Bamboo’ the ‘calligramme’, a form of concrete poetry that adopted the form of the subject matter to create a surreal suggestion of object. The reductive outline, constructed from letter and word, relied on the symbolic codes reassembling meaning through the imagination of the observer. These associative forms in painting and text were seen many generations later in contemporary advertising. At the same time the art critic Raoul Hausmann noted that both the Russian Constructivists and the Italian Futurists had discovered that the force of image and text when superimposed created successive adversarial scenes played out amidst a flourish of image and statement. Their graphic art reinvented the notion of form and the word image compound, within which they celebrated notions of technology and dynamic simultaneity. While this work was stylistically detached from the intellectualised compositions of both the figurative painters and the abstraction of Cubism, the graphic work of the Futurists and the Cubists did share the technique of utilising printed form to accentuate or counterpoint the background subject. Much has been written about Cubist collage that has undoubtedly influenced contemporary advertising, yet the critic Clement Greenburg’s reading of Cubist typographic composition was that it was a formalist interpretation ‘for whom words … served merely to emphasize the flatness and autonomy of the picture plane’ (Lomas 2010).

The emergence of collage at the beginning of the twentieth century challenged the notion of art as autonomous and developed the influence of symbolism that then began to emerge, in urban scale advertising. In the same period Fernand Légers’ ‘The City’ used collage technique to emulate both the discordance and simultaneity of the city and produce work that echoed the style of contemporary advertisement. Léger used the style of contemporary advertising, yet many others who were either in, or aligned to, the Cubist movement understood the potency of graphic communication (Morley 2003). This period was the beginning of a cultural flux that saw the emergence of a more assertiv...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Design Research in Architecture
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• PART I Urban Collage
• PART II Ground Surface
• PART III Shadows and Lines
• Bibliography
• Index