Design Strategies for Reimagining the City

The Disruptive Image

Linda Matthews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000602166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Design Strategies for Reimagining the City is situated between projective geometry, optical science and architectural design. It draws together seemingly unrelated fields in a series of new digital design tools and techniques underpinned by tested prototypes.

The book reveals how the relationship between architectural design and the ubiquitous urban camera can be used to question established structures of control and ownership inherent within the visual model of the Western canon. Using key moments from the broad trajectory of historical and contemporary representational mechanisms and techniques, it describes the image's impact on city form from the inception of linear perspective geometry to the digital turn. The discussion draws upon combined fields of digital geometry, the pictorial adaptation of human optical cues of colour brightness and shape, and modern image-capture technology (webcams, mobile phones and UAVs) to demonstrate how the permeation of contemporary urban space by digital networks calls for new architectural design tools and techniques. A series of speculative drawings and architectural interventions that apply the new design tools and techniques complete the book.

Aimed at researchers, academics and upper-level students in digital design and theory, it makes a timely contribution to the ongoing and broadly debated relationship between representation and architecture.

Part I Constructed Fields of Vision

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003133872-2

When addressing the impact of technological development upon art practice, Walter Benjamin drew a distinction between two of its practitioners – the painter and the cameraman. The distinction is defined by transformative conditions brought into being by the camera and by new ways the world could be experienced, understood and, ultimately, built. Inasmuch as linear perspective technology had for centuries constrained the viewer to a closed set of preordained viewing conditions, and thus a particular construct of urban space, so did the technology of the moving image instigate a new range of visual, experiential and formal conditions that exceeded the impact of its predecessor. The transformative effect of camera technology's ‘plunging and soaring, its interrupting and isolating, its stretching and condensing of the process, its close-ups and its distance shots’¹ liberated the viewer from the constraints of the perspectival urban narrative.

Six years before Benjamin's essay, the revolutionary filmic techniques presented in Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) had already demonstrated what new viewing techniques might mean for conceiving a profoundly new kind of urban space.² Vertov used cinematic fragments (later described by Benjamin as ‘a large number of pieces, which find their way back together by following a new law’,³) to multiply rather than limit the urban viewing experience, thus unleashing the new potential of camera technology to draw the viewer's attention to the artifice and ‘constructed’ visual fields of previous urban narratives.

The awakening of the critical viewer was only one of the many newly enabled disruptive effects of Vertov's radical approach. Others, including a more inclusive and extended viewing field, contributed to undoing the visual conceit of spatial infinity, so intrinsic to the believability of perspectival space. With the new conditions for presenting urban space came new ways of producing this space. By penetrating deeply into the ‘web’ of reality, architects as ‘surgeons’ could avail themselves of these new technological conditions and apply them to the city.⁴ Modern architectural counterparts of the multiple, fragmented spaces of Vertov's city can arguably be seen in the distributed programs of Tschumi and Koolhaas,⁵ among many others, whose overlapping and non-sequential programmatic distribution engenders disruptive effects similar to those produced by Vertovian filmic techniques.

The distinction Benjamin drew between the painter and the cameraman also applies to the transition from the analogue to the moving digital image, or, technologically speaking, from the film camera to the digital camera device. This technological transition creates a corresponding new set of viewing conditions according to which the contemporary world is now to be experienced, understood and once again, to be built. However, Benjamin's distinction requires updating if the extent of the new viewing conditions is to be considered and deployed comprehensively.

Addressing a more contemporary digital frame, Mario Carpo extended the role of Benjamin's cameraman beyond that of a single 'technician' at work in the making of images. New operational conditions requiring ‘some form of almost collective decision-making’⁶ exclusively initiated by the digital came into play, defining a very different type of urban experience: ‘open-endedness, variability, interactivity, and participation are the technological quintessence of the digital age.’⁷ Yet issues of authorship are only one aspect of the new operating conditions that confront those whose role it is to represent urban space and those who attend to the design and production of its form. It is the geometry that underpins digital technology and its close alignment with the way the principal perceptual properties of human vision are understood that determine the ways in which this technology can be deployed to represent the plural and fragmented space of the contemporary city. As an accompaniment to ‘the traditional forms of architectural notations (plans, elevations and sections)’,⁸ the contemporary architect can draw upon the new effects and conditions of the digital – the numerical basis of the digital algorithm and the pixel – for the resources and techniques of architecture in an operational context of ‘hitherto unimaginable venues and possibilities for openness and participation by even nontechnical agents in all stages of design’.⁹

The geometry of the digital image operates according to the three principal perceptual properties of the human visual system (HVS): colour, brightness and shape. Mediated by camera technology, these properties establish both the generative conditions for representational space and how it is perceived, understood and inhabited. The new, Internet-enabled presentation of virtual and real urban space thus offers a practical basis for the perception and assembly of material form. And, although the intrinsic instability of the digital ruptures the traditional ‘indexical’ link between design drawing and object, as Mario Carpo noted, ‘digital variability may equally cut loose the indexical link that, under the old authorial paradigm, tied design notations to their material result in an object’,¹⁰ another replaces it that instead draws upon the numerical grid of the pictorial pixel array to assign qualitative properties to the city's viewed surfaces. These new associations reinforce the city's ambiguity and complexity by directing the viewer's attention to the constructed nature of the image and its presentation of the city as an iconic and promotional space.

This book, therefore, investigates the interplay between digital geometry, camera technology and the HVS. It explores new ways in which the physical surfaces of the contemporary city can be linked to the interactive complexities of digital visioning systems. It also examines the consequences of this generative relationship for the role of the architect and the trajectory of the discipline.

The first chapter outlines the historical lineage of visioning technology's continuing effect upon urban building design from the Renaissance to the present, showing how architects have long been implicated in the way cities are represented and, consequently, built. The chapter reveals how architects and building design continue to reflect dominant visual regimes, tracing the historical influence of representational techniques and technologies upon urban form, from the viewing constraints of linear perspective construction to the disjunctive leaps of the moving image. With the digital's departure from the visual narrative of linear perspective in favour of the fragmented spatial effects of filmic montage, the chapter draws a parallel between the profound disciplinary shift brought about by the latter and that suggested by the pixel-based geometry of the digital image. It points to a link between Internet camera technology and the spatial understanding of the city, concluding that the digital image resituates representation, urban form and the architectural discipline within a new operational framework.

Chapters 2 and 3 explore the respective geometric and technological implications of this new operational framework. By outlining the perceptual effects of digital geometry's base unit, the pixel, chapter 2 identifies unique aspects of digital image-making that profoundly challenge the relationship between the viewer and the traditional representation of the physical world. It reveals how the geometric structure and composition of the digital image have a direct correspondence with the optical reception of an object's contextual colour, luminosity and shape. Privileging the qualitative properties of digital image content over the linear-dominant perspectival tradition establishes a new operational frame that draws upon the digital's unique properties for its generative potential. Furthermore, the chapter addresses the issue of multiple authorships and the emerging distinction between different types of viewers in relation to the broader disciplinary implications of digital image accessibility and the new operational conditions it initiates.

The new digital technological frame is the subject of chapter 3. It addresses the optical and spatial effects of visioning technology by first examining how the qualitative properties of the image, content and legibility (colour, brightness and shape) operate in relation to human optics, and how the digital camera mediates them. The chapter situates the discussion within an historical context that reveals how the transition from analogue pictorial techniques and devices to the digital image-making device not only transforms the viewer's engagement with urban space but releases the city's qualitative properties to new modes of form-making.

Chapter 4 examines the spatial effects of user-based webcam technology on the viewer. It revisits historic, disruptive spatial frameworks, such as 17th-century anamorphosis, to reveal how this technology can profoundly disrupt the hierarchical, ideal view of the city. The chapter describes how releasing multiple, dynamic viewpoints allows its established systems of control and ownership to be interrogated and ultimately defines the new conditions according to which urban form can be realised.

Chapter 5 unveils a range of new techniques that draw directly upon the digital geometry and technology discussions in the previous chapters to establish new ways of generating architectural form. The techniques refer to the digital image assemblies that determine an object's visibility and the role these play in urban design development. The generative potential of their disciplinary contribution is explored in two ways.

The first describes new approaches to architectural site analysis and documentation offered by the digital camera's delineation of space and time. A combination of proprietary and non-proprietary scientific image analysis software is used to extrapolate and reassemble image data relating to the complex inhabitation of urban space and its many viewed surfaces. The reassembled data present a range of image-based procedures underpinning the digital's new generative urban design processes.

The second area of investigation, presented in chapters 6, 7 and 8, takes the form of a series of practical tests exploiting the technical capabilities of the digital camera and, in this case, the situated webcam. The tests refer to camera protocols associated with HVS optical cues, colour, brightness and shape. They seek to identify a range of image-based design procedures that draw directly upon digital image geometry and its numerical link with the city's viewed surfaces. The tests examine the effects of applying three pattern types unique to the camera's technical pathways to the viewed building surface. The intention is to exploit the pathways to establish a series of generative procedures that either use the viewed building surface to shift the image's hierarchy or disrupt the camera's production of a legible image of the city.

A further ambition of the practical tests is the production of a working document or matrix that can indexically link the receptive capacities of the camera and the pixel-based geometry of the digital image directly to the building surface. By correlating observed image effects with tabulated increments of the camera's aperture range acting in conjunction with ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of figures
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Constructed Fields of Vision
• PART II: New techniques of intervention and disruption
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index