Persistent Modelling

Extending the Role of Architectural Representation

Phil Ayres

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136621758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

With contributions from some of the world's most advanced thinkers on this subject, this book is essential reading for anyone looking at new ways of thinking about the digital within architecture. It speculates upon implications of Persistent Modelling for architectural practice, reconsidering the relationship between architectural representation and architectural artefact particularly in the fields of responsive and adaptive architectures.

Part 1

Modelling Material

Chapter 1

The Historical Context of Contemporary Architectural Representation¹

Alberto Pérez-Gómez

Tools of representation are never neutral. They underlie the conceptual elaboration of architectural projects and the whole process of the generation of form. Prompted by computer technologies, contemporary architects sometimes recognise the limitations of tools of ideation, but most often assume a seamless identification between “binary space” and “real space.” Plans, elevations and sections are ultimately expected to predict with accuracy an intended meaning as it may appear for an embodied subject in built work. Indeed, no alternatives for the generation of meaningful form are seriously considered outside the domain of modern epistemological perspectivism, i.e., the understanding of the project as a “picture” or a reductive scale model. Even in the cases of sophisticated formal innovation and digital technologies that may allow for rapid feedback, this assumption tends to ignore the primary phenomenological dimension of meaning: the primacy of materiality, craft and temporal human participation in a building as a proposition for significant action over the delusions of seductive form.

The space “between dimensions” is a fertile ground for discovery. The expectation that architectural drawings and models, the product of the architect’s work, must propitiate a work in a different dimension, sets architecture apart from other arts. Yet, today the process of creation in architecture often assumes that the design and representation of a building demand a perfectly co-ordinated “set” of projections. These projections are meant to act as the repository of a complete idea of a building, a city, or a technological object. For the purposes of descriptive documentation, depiction, construction, or any imparting of objective information, the architectural profession continues to valorise such projective architectural artefacts as reductive. These reductive representations rely on syntactic connections between images, with each piece only a part of a dissected whole. Representations in professional practice, then, are easily reduced to the status of efficient neutral instruments devoid of inherent value, today potentially fully coordinated through software such as Building Information Modelling (BIM). The search itself, the “process work” that might yield true discoveries, is deemed to have little or no significance. Devices such as drawings, prints, physical models, photographs, and computer models are perceived as a necessary surrogate or transcription of the built work, with dire consequences for the ultimate result of the process.

This assumption concerning the status of architectural representation is an inheritance of the nineteenth century, particularly from the scientistic methodologies prescribed by Jacques Nicolas Louis Durand in his Précis des Leçons d’Architecture (1802 and 1813).² Durand’s legacy is the objectification of style and techniques, and the establishment of apparently irreconcilable alternatives: technological construction (functional) versus artistic architecture (formal), and the false dichotomy of necessary structure and contingent ornament. Although the formalisation of descriptive geometry in Durand’s design method promoted a particularly simplistic objectification, the projective tool is a product of our technological world, grounded in the philosophical tradition of the Western world, one which we cannot simply reject (or simplistically pretend to leave behind). A different use of projection, related to modern art and existential phenomenology, emerged from the same historical situation with the aim of transcending dehumanising technological values (often concealed in a world that we think we control) through the incorporation of a critical position. A careful consideration of this option, often a central issue in the artistic practices of the twentieth-century avant-garde, may contribute to the regeneration of architecture’s creative process, propitiating a truly relevant poetic practice in a post-modern world.

Today we recognise serious problems with our post-industrial cities and our scientistic way of conceiving and planning buildings. Even the most recent applications of computers to generate novel (and structurally “correct,” i.e., “natural”) architectural forms, assume an instrumental relationship between theory and practice in order to bypass the supposedly old-fashioned prejudice of “culture,” i.e., the personal imagination, with its fictional and historical narratives. It is imperative that we do not take for granted certain scientific assumptions about architectural ideation, and that we redefine our tools in order to generate meaningful form.

At the origins of our discipline, projection was perceived as the original site of ontological continuity between universal ideas and specific things. The labyrinth, that primordial image denoting architectural endeavour, is a projection linking time and place, representing architectural space, the hyphen between idea and experience which is the place of language and culture, the Greek chora. Like music, realised only in time from a notation, architecture is itself a projection of architectural ideas, horizontal footprints and vertical effigies, disclosing a symbolic order in time, through rituals and programmes. Thus, contrary to our Cartesian “common sense,” depth is not simply the objective “third” dimension. Architecture concerns the making of a world that is not merely a comfortable or pragmatic shelter, but that offers the inhabitant a formal order reflecting the depth of our human condition, analogous in vision to the interiority communicated by speech and poetry, and to the immeasurable harmony conveyed by music.

There is an intimate relationship between architectural meaning and the modus operandi of the architect, between the richness of our cities as places propitious to imagery and reverie, as structures of embodied knowledge for collective orientation, and the nature of architectural techne, that is, differing modes of architectural conception and implementation.³ Since the Renaissance, the relationship between the intentions of architectural drawings and the built objects that they describe or depict has changed. Though subtle, these differences are nonetheless crucial. On examining the most important architectural treatises in their respective contexts, it becomes immediately evident that the systematisation which we take for granted in architectural drawing was once less dominant in the process of maturation from the architectural idea to the actual built work. Prior to the Renaissance, architectural drawings were rare. In the Middle Ages, architects did not conceive of a whole building idea and the very notion of a scale was unknown. Gothic architecture, the most “theoretical” of all medieval building practices, was nevertheless still a question of construction, operating through well-established traditions and geometrical rules that could be directly applied on a site, often encumbered by older buildings which would eventually be demolished. Construction proceeded by rhetoric and geometry, raising the elevation from a footprint while discussions concerning the unknown final figure of the building’s face proceeded, almost until the end. The master mason was responsible for participating in the act of construction, in the actualisation of the city of God on Earth; only the Architect of the Universe, however, was deemed responsible for the conclusion of the work at the end of time.

During the early Renaissance, the traditional understanding of architecture as a ritual act was not lost. Filarete, for instance, discussed in his treatise the four steps to be followed in architectural creation. He was careful to emphasise the autonomy among proportions, lines, models, and buildings, describing the connection between “universes of ideation” in terms analogous to an alchemical transmutation, not to a mathematical transformation.⁴ Unquestionably, however, it is during the fifteenth century that architecture came to be understood as a liberal art, and architectural ideas were thereby increasingly conceived as geometrical lineamenti, as bi-dimensional, orthogonal projections. A gradual and complex transition from the classical (Graeco-Arabic) theory of vision to a new mathematical and geometrical rationalisation of the image was taking place. The medieval writings on perspective (such as Ibn Alhazen, Alkindi, Bacon, Peckham, Vitello and Grossatesta) had treated, principally, the physical and physiological phenomenon of vision. In the cultural context of the Middle Ages its application was specifically related to mathematics, the privileged vehicle for the clear understanding of theological truth. Perspectiva naturalis, seeking a clear vision for mankind, was not concerned with representation, but with an understanding of the modes of God’s presence; it was part of the quadrivium of liberal arts, associated by Thomas Aquinas to music as visual harmony, and never to drawing or any other graphic method. Humanity literally lived in the light of God, under God’s benevolent gaze, the light of the golden heaven of the Byzantine frescoes and mosaics, or the sublime and vibrant coloured space of the Gothic cathedrals.

The new understanding of a perspectival image in the Renaissance remained directly related to the notion of classical optics as a science of the transmission of light rays. The pyramid of vision, the notion on which the Renaissance idea of the image as a window on the world was based, was inherited from the Euclidean notion of the visual cone. The eye was believed to project its visual rays onto the object, with perception occurring as a dynamic action of the beholder upon the world. Vitruvius (first century BCE) had discussed the question of optical correction in architecture as a direct corollary of the Euclidean cone of vision, demonstrating an awareness (also present in some medieval building practice) of the dimensional distortions brought about by the position of an observer. The issue, however, as is well known from the great examples of classical architecture, was to how to avoid distorted perception. Architects were expected to correct certain visual aspects (by increasing the size of lettering placed on a high architrave, for example), in order to convey an experience of perfect adjustment or regularity to synaesthetic perception, always primarily tactile. Renaissance architectural theory and practice never questioned this aim.

Neither did certain fundamental assumptions about perception change during the Renaissance. When queried about the truth of parallel lines, anyone would have answered that obviously, in the world of action, those straight lines never meet. The hypothesis of a vanishing point at infinity was both unnecessary for the construction of perspective, and ultimately inconceivable as the reality of perception in everyday life. Alberti’s central point (punto centrico) of the perspective construction, for example, is often wrongly associated with such a “vanishing” point. In fact, the point of convergence in the construzione legittima is determined and fixed by the point of sight as a “counter-eye” on the “window” or, in contemporary terms, the central point on the picture plane.⁵ Even though fifteenth-century painters were experimenting with methods of linear perspective, the geometrisation of pictorial depth was not yet systematised and did not immediately transform the quotidian experience of the world, nor the process of architectural creation. It was impossible for the Renaissance architect to conceive that the truth of the world could be reduced to its visual representation, a two-dimensional diaphanous section of the pyramid of vision.

During the sixteenth century, treatises on perspective tried to translate the primarily empirical understanding of perspective into a system, and became increasingly distanced from treatises on optics. These new works, however, remained theoretical or mathematical elucidations and had almost no practical use in prescriptive representation.⁶ In Vignola’s Due Regole della Prospettiva Prattica, a “second observer” was introduced and became the distance point that allowed for a mathematical regulation of the foreshortening. The distance point was projected onto the picture plane, on the horizon line at a distance from the central point equal to the distance between the eye of the observer and the plane of the image. In other words, Vignola’s method introduced a second observer at the same distance from the central point, looking perpendicularly at the beholder, thereby adding an element essential for the representation of stereoscopic vision. Prior to this, with the apex of the cone of vision as a simplified eye, perspettiva artificialis had been, strictly speaking, a (very imperfect) monocular construction.

Before Dürer, a plan was generally conceived as a composite “footprint” of a building, and an elevation as a face. Vertical or horizontal sections (our terminology) were not commonly used before the sixteenth century, just as anatomy rarely involved the actual dissection of cadavers until ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: persistent modelling – reconsidering relations
• Part 1: Modelling Material
• Part 2: Material modelling
• Illustration Credits
• Index