In 1974 the Institute presented a seminar at the Architectural Association on the subject of the photograph in the context of architectural education and publishing.
This short essay tries to revisit and re-use the text of this seminar and place it within the culture of current design practice. Photoshop, I think, brings a new angle to this.
The old text, with new comments, follows.
It’s interesting to note that at the Architectural Association there is a fashion for writing semiological analysis of architecture. I find this intriguing, not because semiology is enjoying a vogue in intellectual circles, but more because what is being in this instance analysed is not the buildings themselves but published photos of the works. The application of semiotics in the architectural arena is perhaps itself open to question, but the apparent acceptance of the photograph as being not a photograph of the building but the building itself is, I feel, perhaps worth a brief comment.
Firstly, the fact of the photograph does not in itself signify the exis-tence of that which is being photographed, although it may signify the existence of the idea of the object. For example, the picture postcard of the Arc de Triomphe is as much a picture of the idea of the Arc de Triomphe as it is of the actual object. The fact of the postcard denotes that the Arc de Triomphe is an important idea more reliably than it denotes that such an object exists in the form shown.
Secondly, what one can see emerging is an architecture that only related to photographs of architecture. With reference to this, the history of modern art has often been described as a history of photo-graphs of modern art; and perhaps the history of modern architecture might also be viewed in this kind of way. The influence of the photo-graph of a building as seen in the magazines is perhaps one that’s worth discussing further. It is out of this interest in photos that I am drawn to make a short comparison here between a pin-up, a car and a building.
122 David Greene
Photos of these have interesting areas of correspondence; these correspondences could demonstrate that this tradition of architec-tural focus has given us a kind of architecture as irrelevant as the styling of the car and as culturally and morally empty as the pin-up. I’d like to point out that I present this not as a complete or logical analysis but as a question for comment.
The images I am thinking of are a Ford advert and a piece of architec-ture (I think by Denys Lasdun), both taken from the Observer supple-ment of 28 April 1974. The pin-up was taken from volume 39, no. 4 of Men Only. The first area of correspondence is technical competence: the high quality of the photographs and the quality of printing; the expert placing on the page by skilled graphic designers; the careful selection of the final image to support the claims of the accompanying text.
Secondly, all three are also dynamic objects, in that they are normally perceived whilst moving, or move and change themselves, and yet they are here perceived in a very static and posed way and are just as new. There’s not a spot of road dirt on the car or graffiti on the building, and the girl’s skin resembles that of a baby. This might be a second area of correspon-dence, which could be described as aesthetic: a carefully contrived aesthetic stereotype is manufactured. The subtle skin textures and balance of light and shade are matched by the pristine finish of the cellu-lose on the car and the immaculate shutter marks on the building. (In order to support this image, functional elements are subtly groomed.)
The third area of interest lies within the text accompanying the pictures. A superficial examination will reveal that, first of all, all three make extravagant claims for their subject. All three products are described in an extremely evocative but very vague vocabulary that leans heavily on a dictionary of descriptions whose meaning is open to a wide variety of interpretations. This dictionary of descriptions serves no useful purpose, other than – like the photographic technique – to support the previously mentioned pre-packed aesthetic stereotype. I quote Men Only of the girl: ‘A certain element of woman’s poise and bearing grins through Dulcie Scott as a fresh free and unswerving femi-nine spirit.’ About the building Stephen Gardiner writes, ‘The light filters in through secret angled openings, staircases slant and slowly rising steps are greeted by bright green turf, laid neatly between white walls.’ And of the car Ford writes, ‘All little things, but it’s surprising how they strengthen the lines’ … .
It is certainly difficult to deny the centrality of the photograph in discussion about architecture and learning about it. Imagine if we could only pass comment on, talk with reference to and compare buildings one had actually been to rather than merely visited through the photograph.
The presence of these photographs is not particularly a problem. Their prolifer-ation, the startling improvements in techniques of printing, image enhancement, picture quality, etc. – all this is well known, and was so in 1974. What was not actively realised 28 years ago was that technology would present the designer with a tool that could in quite a literal sense create photographs. Photographs of reality and the ‘yet to be’ become now indistinguishable.
We might speculate on the consequences of the lack of difference between the ‘is’ and the ‘yet to be’ within the photograph, and we can examine and talk about the latter in the same way as we can about the former because we are, in both exam-ples, discussing a photograph. We may even be gazing at a moving picture, watching the shadow of a cloud pass across an ‘elevation’.
Generations of students and tutors, critics and journalists have been talking about the drawings on the wall in front of them as if they were talking about architecture, or an architecture yet to be, rather than discussing drawings. Now the discussion addresses photographs, and the critics will be unclear whether they are built or unbuilt.
The collapse of geography, time and place brought about by the mobile phone infects the studio and its coterie of talkers and writers. I talk to my friend, but his phone number no longer betrays his whereabouts. I look at his project, and I no longer see a drawing.
The air mouse, such an innocent and incongruous name for such a potent weapon. The picture grows and evolves on the screen in response to the twitches of fingers and the small journeys of the mouse across its pad.
123 Foto-graph, Foto-shop
photo-graph: light-drawing. photo: photos, greek, light. graph: graphitos, greek, written or drawn in a particular way. shop: a building or room for retail sale. photo-shop: light sale.
Foto-graph; Foto-shop.
Consider the flailing body of Jackson Pollock above the canvas on the floor: it is hard to imagine a greater shift in the relationship of the movement of the body and the production of the picture than that between Pollock and the cordless mouse.
Pollock took the canvas off the easel and made it horizontal (on the floor); the com-puter takes the drawing board (horizontal) and places it on the vertical screen but leaves the pencil on the horizontal surface – strange spatial shifts.
Who decided that drawing should be like watching TV?
Pollock does not allow us to forget the substance of the world, his body, the bulk and plasticity of the paint. The similarities in movement are picked up with an absolute difference of substance and message. In the field of architecture, perhaps Brutalism, with its total lack of smooth surface, its essential, substantial roughness, was a similar antithet-ical reminder or, more, an early warning of the imminent arrival of … air mouse, that untethered creature which when we enter its habitat allows us to forget the substance of the planet, everything that is except for light. Foto-graph, Foto-shop, Light-machine.
People say Archigram’s project should have been easier with current tech-nology; I believe it would have been impossible/entirely different/too smooth to do the job. Pollock couldn’t fake it, you might say his body, the paint and the canvas blur into one object. No such collisions are possible with air mouse. Faking it is easy. Faking it is all that’s left. The space between the body and the picture (if that is what we can call it) is the infinite gap of the digital world.
There has always been a kind of drawing in architectural design that is trying to say ‘and here is what it would look like’. The photograph is of interest here because we accept it as usually speaking directly of ‘and this is what it looks like’. Photoshop says both simultaneously. Only the small print may advise you of its secrets … ‘this may be a computer generated image’.
The perspective and the axonometric, the plan and the elevation languish in the backwaters of the architectural representation industry. We can talk of hardcopy but not the drawing. Design becomes TV. The slightest quiver of the finger on the mouse may only pull down another menu; such quivers of the hand holding the ruling pen would have betrayed the authorship of the drawing.
And we haven’t mentioned video. Imagine yourself as a builder. Imagine you build your building from a video. Foto-shop, Light-machine, you have a new job; you make light into substances and events. As a builder you need to attend film school.
Are you making a film or a building?
1 David Greene and Mike Barnard.
124 David Greene