In practicing their profession, architects evoke on paper or on screen images of the buildings they are conceiving for their clients so that they can decide that what the architects have conjured up for them is precisely what they want to build. Then the architects have to summon, by drawings, the same buildings for contractors who will imagine how to proceed in erecting them using what, socially, is considered the most cost-effective way. This double conjuring con- dition, dealing with the imagination of others, has become a stressful burden because of market conditions and societal circumstances. In the attempt to avoid such a burden, the consequences have been of two types. On the one hand, there is a group of architects who have become design-build profession- als and therefore avoid the need of working with the imagination of the builder; as an additional consequence they can achieve a substantial reduction in the number of drawings necessary for the construction details by making them repetitive from building to building and consequently meaningless in specific situations. To convince their clients these design-build architects strengthen their authority by arguing that their architecture is an outcome of functional and constructively rational thinking since they know how to physically author their building. On the other hand, there is a select group of architects carrying out what they call a critical practice using visual public relations based on an over publishing of their design drawings when they are at the beginning of their career aiming to become starchitects.
Both the design-build and stardom conditions result in architects becom- ing authors with a consequent acquisition of authority. The result of these posi- tions of authority is that the labor of architectural conjuring is not necessary anymore by avoiding dealing with the bodily imagination embodied in con- struction drawings: in the case of the design-build architects, by making these drawings unnecessary and, in the case of the starchitects, by farming them out to building management or construction firms.
110 Traces and Architecture
The gaining of architectural authority allows illustrations to substitute demonstrations. In this circumstance the process of evoking buildings for both parties, the clients and the contractors, becomes utterly unnecessary. The con- sequence is that future constructions result from idiosyncratic inklings. This unfortunately justifies all the possible forms of a building production that does not belong to the imaginative universal of an imaginable cosmopoiesis, but rather is based on a fictitious personal imaginary.
The making of buildings has been solved mostly within a neoclassical and jurisprudential equation of simulation and dissimulation in a matter of verisimi- larity. This is a sanctioning of a verisimilar relationship between the drawing mien and the appearance of the constructed buildings accomplished through autocratic and prescriptive sets of instructions. This verisimilarity as the appear- ance of being true or real has also become the legal criterion for construc- tion. This legal resemblance makes buildings looking as they appear in the presentation drawings that had been critically acclaimed. Although it is a purely visual fulfillment, this legitimizing mimesis is carried out not only by the com- mercial firms, but also by avant-garde architects, starchitects and design-build professionals.
Nowadays, in almost every part of the civilized world the virtue of archi- tects is based on their graphic documents. These documents are drawings and models and the traditional interpretation links these products to the con- structed environment through the metaphorical goggles of mimesis. Different theories of mimesis have ruled these architect’s documents, but nowadays they can be distilled in a simple dictum stating that the built artifact should look as the drawn expression of it. In the past, this parroting condition had been quite acceptable since the drawings and the models were quite impure, impre- cise, vague, and not directly belonging to any specific moment of architectural imaging of the professionally enforced contractual sequence of architecture services. Everybody knew that the documents were not completely veracious and therefore they were to be taken with a grain of salt.
Regrettably, visual fidelity is now the key legal requirement, the dictum of likeness has become reciprocal: the building should look as the drawings and the drawings as the building. From this point of view, the illustrations of Palladio’s Four Books would be rejected as false and incorrect representations, because they show proportions, angles and dimensions that are not in the built pieces. Medieval Architecture had the same lack of visual verisimilarity. Although they had been built following sets of measurement taken carefully from the prototypes, many of the replicas of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem or of the Flying House in Loreto do not look at all as the originals. Nevertheless, they are accepted as candid replicas of those holy buildings.1
Unfortunately, the elemental conditions of representations by which drawings made before and after the construction do not necessarily look like the corresponding constructed pieces and buildings is not possible anymore. The association between authority and legitimization has completely parted documents and authors. A drafter’s contract based on this process of legiti- mization obliges the architects to produce drawings that should not nurture any imagination. The outcome is that the reading of drawings has become an unimaginative routine; what was once a pleasant walk in the intangible
vagueness of the realm of discernment and construing of factures is now a ster- ile exercise in the tangible precision of the realm of contingency.
The power of imagination has been ruled out by the digital machines required for the making of perspectives or photo-rendering. In the history of theoretical writings on architecture, there is a widespread agreement that per- spective drawings are not proper and legitimate drawings for construction and tectonic conceiving and presentation. Yet, recently, the use of digital represen- tations has transformed, in accepted reality, what was expressed in the pseudo- sensible statement made by Dr. Brook Taylor in 1719, who, in his famous book on perspective, wrote:
“A Picture drawn in the utmost Degree of Perfection, and placed in a proper Position, ought so to appear to the Spectator, that he should not be able to distinguish what is there represented, from the real original objects actually placed where they are repre- sented to be. In order to produce this effect it is necessary that the Rays of Light ought to cone from the several Parts of the Picture to the Spectator’s Eye, with all the same Circumstances of Direction, Strength of Light and Shadow, and Colour, as they would so from the corresponding Parts of the real Objects seen, in their proper Places.”2
The recognized outcome is that perspective, a mechanical product, is an objec- tive viewpoint for casting the legitimate appearance of a building. Perspective machines, mechanical or digital, generate a trivially unimaginative and visually impaired view of the constructed world. These machines have put at rest all the imaginative undertaking of the people involved in the making of architecture. The act of reading drawings does not entail the immense labor of imagina- tive construction required before the invention of merely informative drafting machines. These drafting machines—electronic or non-electronic—are equiva- lent to those dreadful children’s coloring books, authoritative instruments to teach neat exactness. The completed picture of a coloring book brings about a feeling of having imagined an image, when it has been merely a following of guidelines. With the use of coloring books and drafting machines, imagination is useless, only neatness is required.