Architectural Representations, Changing Technologies, and Conceptual Extensions

Author(s): Swati Chattopadhyay

Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 71, No. 3, Special Issue on
Architectural Representations 1 (September 2012), pp. 270-272
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural
Historians
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editorial
Architectural Representations, Changing
Technologies, and Conceptual Extensions
I
n 1989 Robin Evans noted, we are only just beginning
to investigate the power that drawings and photographs
have to alter, strategize, obscure, renew, configure and
diffuse what they represent.1 More than twenty years has
passed and perhaps we are still just beginning that investi-
gation, only today the field of study itself has changed.
Computer-aided design is not just changing the nature of the
architectural profession, outmoding traditional ways of
designing and assembling buildings, and privileging large
corporations over small firms, it is also posing new challenges
to the archivist and the scholar. Digital media has trans-
formed the publishing industry; should it also prompt new
ways of thinking about how we present our research and to
whom, and in what form? Must a written narrative continue
to preoccupy the practice of architectural history? Should a
rigorous digital model of an historical site be considered a
work equivalent to a publication? Long gone are the days
when the art or architectural historian as teacher was the
keeper of the treasured image; our students now can access
more images of buildings and sites on their phones than we
can provide during class time.
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 71, no. 3 (September 2012), 270272.
ISSN 0037-9808, electronic ISSN 2150-5926. 2012 by the Society of Architectural His-
torians. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or
reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and
Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/
jsah.2012.71.3.270.
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As architectural historians we study and communicate
through drawings, prints, photographs, and models of build-
ings and cities. We scrutinize the relation between visual and
textual representations, negotiating the gaps that separate
drawings from buildings; we present architecture through
discourse and formulate ways of seeing the landscape. We
employ architectural representations as vehicles for present-
ing ideas, but often do so uncritically. Given the technological
sea-change taking place in the production, storage, and
reproduction of textual and visual content, it seems appropri-
ate to ponder the historical problem of representation. This
special issue of the JSAH is intended to serve that purpose.
Buildings can be seen to represent an idea or ideology, be it
kingship, domesticity, Enlightenment, imperialism, social-
ism, and any number of other iterations selected by the archi-
tectural scholar and the people she studies. In this approach
to the problem of representation, the building or urban
ensemble is seen as an emblem or a symbol of a dominant set
of social relations, even if imperfectly realized in practice.
Underlying such analyses is the assumption that only some
people and institutions have the language, resources, and
authority to make themselves or their ideas manifest in pub-
lic. In other words, not everyone wields the power of repre-
sentation. Scholars may focus primarily on the formal choices
or encompass the social and political processes through
which these representations are validated.2
 Related to this method are those scholars who analyze
architectural rhetoric or the set of architectural figures and
conventions that stand in for and speak the values of real
ones that are absent; rhetoric that endeavors to convince the
viewer of the truthfulness of the representational ele-
ments.3 They present us a history of the intertwined nature
of architecture as representational and abstract art, and of the
debates between historical and abstract styles.
The body of literature that examines the techniques of
representationperspectives, sketches, orthogonal draw-
ings, and computer-aided modelinghas primarily focused
on the technological innovations that have altered the
practice of the architect and the imagination of buildings.4
Some of these, Robin Evanss essays for example, have been
sensitive to the process of translationas in transportation
and attendant transformationfrom drawings to buildings,
questioning the priority of the two-dimensional object over
the three-dimensional building and vice versa.5 It is difficult
for us to imagine iconic buildings, from the Egyptian pyra-
mids to the Guggenheim museums, apart from their repre-
sentations as published images; their iconicity is a product of
their presentation in the media. Some scholars have turned
to the specific problem of the role of textual and visual
representations in the dissemination of architectural know
ledge with the broadening of the public sphere from the
eighteenth century onward, to evaluate the role of a reading
public and mass media in the circulation of architectural
ideas in the modern world.6 From their perspective, the rift
between representation and reality holds little sway.
Architectural drawings and virtual models work as pro-
jections into time and space in multiple senses; they not only
will an image of the future building in the present, they
extend and elaborate the fabric of buildings in dimensions
and locations that cannot be realized in lived tactile space.
Renaissance architects projected birds-eye views long before
these views could be experienced in practice. Now virtual
space as prosthetics seeks to extend our sensory reach and
minimize the distinction between virtual and real space in
immersive digital environments. And yet, as Diane Favro
notes in this issue, we still contend with some older prob-
lems of truthfulness when it comes to digital reconstruc-
tions. There is diffidence in accepting that all historical
narratives are constructions in which one chooses what one
elucidates and what one leaves out. Few scholars have inter-
rogated the language and conventions of architectural his-
toriography, the narrative mode through which the visual
and textual evidence are gathered to present a coherent
story.
The articles in this special issue self-consciously reflect
on the role of visual representations of buildings and
A r c h i t e c t u r a l R e p r e s e n tat i o n s , C h a n g i n g T e c h n o l o g i e s , a n d C o n c e p t u a l E x t e n s i o n s
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citieswhat they do or do not do. Take the architectural
plan, for example. An ancient tool, the building plan has
beendrawn and used in innumerable ways to generate and
represent building form: as templates, models, and com-
modities in pattern books, builders guides, and catalogues;
as municipal documents and construction drawings; for dia-
gramming spatial and formal relations; and as expressionistic
drawings that bear traces of the design process.7 By the nine-
teenth century, municipalities, by requiring permissions for
new residential constructions and modification to existing
buildings (showing addition of rooms and plumbing, for
example) had turned this highly technical device into a
commonplace object that placed a new demand of visual
literacy on ordinary citizens. David Friedmans article exam-
ines one of the earliest systematic uses of the architectural
plan for the documentation and valuation of property in
Renaissance Rome. As Friedman argues, as an ensemble
these plans allowed the citizens to see the topography differ-
ently, enabling a new city imagination.
Representations always work in relation to other repre-
sentations, of a kindred or opposing sort. They work serially
to conjure a building, but they are also frequently detached
from their original ensemble and their reinsertion into older
relationships allows us to understand their contemporary
import.8 Neil Levines article studies the process by which
Henri Labrouste produced the perspective drawing of
theBibliothque Sainte-Genevive by tracing the photo-
graph of the building, and argues that the mechanical inter-
face between the building and drawing resonates Labroustes
desire to articulate a new industrialized aesthetic.
If new technologies impart novel ways of understanding
the building or spatial ensemble, altering the relation among
buildings, images, and text, they perpetuate older traditions
in equal measure.9 Samantha Martin-McAuliffe and John
Papadopouloss re-evaluation of the Periklean building pro-
gram is prompted by the view of the Athenian Acropolis
publicized in photographs since the late nineteenth century.
These photographs created a purified vision of the Acropolis,
archaeologically cleansed of post-antique debrislater
building layers of Byzantine and Ottoman empires were
obliterated from site and sight as less valid than their antique
predecessors. These photographic points of view, they argue,
have also predisposed us to reading the significance of the
buildings in a manner very different from what might have
been intended by their makers.
Aron Vinegar extends the relation between architec-
ture and representation by taking us on an excursion into
Viollet-le-Ducs drawings of cats and the sculpted animal
figures at Chteau de Pierrefonds, suggesting that we not
read these translations from drawings to buildings through
271
an iconographic lens, because their meaning is not lodged in
their iconicity. Rather, he urges us to recognize the dynamic
possibilities of forces and movements that are let loose
inViollet-le-Ducs drawings. From this perspective, the
restored chteau and its sculptural program emerge as civil
izing emblems of a warring culture in which aggressive
movement is represented and provisionally restrained.
The autobiographical trace that Viollet-le-Duc left in
the chteau directs our attention to the agency, and attendant
power, that resides in all translations from drawings to build-
ings. Representation as portrait (of reality or nature) and
representation as proxy (stand-in) are interrelated and this
interrelationship is the locus of agency. From this overlap we
get the third meaning of the term representationto stand
for, which when extended takes us to its deployment as politi-
cal representation, the ability to present oneself or others in
their absence, to become the representative in whom power
is delegated.10 Indeed, representations are rarely, if ever, neu-
tral; they are implicitly or explicitly about desires, authorial
intentions, and power. Victor Tschudis article on the plaster
model of the city of Rome reminds us of the resilience of
such desires, as he demonstrates the extent to which this
Fascist-era artifact has monopolized the imagination of the
city, and the aesthetic, archaeological, and political implica-
tions of this monopoly in the digital present.
The articles in this volume do not exhaust possible
investigations into the problem of representation. We will
continue this discussion in the December 2012 issue of the
JSAH, addressing those instances where the historical con-
tingencies of representation are foregrounded, moving
toward those cases where the subject of representation is
itself in abeyance. The concept of representation in the his-
tory of architecture is ripe for theoretical elaboration.
Keith Eggeners term as book review editor (North and
South America) ended with the June 2012 issue. I want to
272 j s a h / 7 1 : 3 , S e p t e m b e r 2 01 2
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thank Keith for his exceptional and dedicated service to the
JSAH, and for helping the transition to incoming book
review editor William Littmann.
swati chattopadhyay
Editor, JSAH
Notes
1. Robin Evans, Architectural Projections in Architecture and Its Image:
Four Centuries of Architecture Representations, ed. Eve Blau and Edward
Kaufman (Montreal: Canadian Center for Architecture, 1989), 21.
2. For example, Patricia Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Repre-
sentation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
3. Neil Levine, Modern Architecture: Representation and Reality (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2009), 5.
4. For example, Alberto Prez-Gmez and Louise Pelletier, Architec-
tural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1997).
5. Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). Also see Stan Allen, Practice: Architecture,
Technique and Representation, Essays by Stan Allen (Amsterdam: G+B Arts
International, 2000).
6. For example, Richard Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture and the Public
Sphere in Eighteenth-century France (London: Routledge, 2007).
7. See for example, James L. Garvin, Mail Order House Plans and Ameri-
can Victorian Architecture, Winterthur Portfolio 16 (Winter 1981); Dell
Upton, Pattern Books and Professionalism: Aspects of the Transformation
of Domestic Architecture in America, 18001860, Winterthur Portfolio 19
(Summer/Autumn 1984); Hyungmin Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram:
Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity in America (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2002).
8. Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman, Introduction, Architecture and its
Image,13.
9. James S. Ackerman, Origins, Imitation, Conventions: Representation in the
Visual Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 96.
10. Raymond Williams made a distinction between three uses of the term:
representative who stands for others but in his own terms; the political
sense of making present, representing the opinions of others; and the
commonplace use of representative to mean typical sample or specimen.
See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
(NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1985), 268.