On Light - Holl, Pallasmaa, Zumthor, Ando & Kahn

Here is a collection of quotes from my recent reading. They are mostly on light. I have posted them as contextually relevant to thinking about how a light projection art installation can enhance the articulation of architecture - which is what we are attempting to promote with the project for the Cameron Offices.   

Steven Holl Anchoring

• Space remains in oblivion without light. Light's shadow and shade, its different sources, its opacity, transparency, translucency, and conditions of reflection and refraction intertwine to define or redefine space. Light subjects space to uncertainty, forming a kind of tentative bridge through fields of experience. What a pool of yellow light does to a simple bare volume or what a paraboloid of shadow does to a bone white wall presents us with a psychological and transcendant realm of the phenomena of architecture.

Juhani Pallasmaa The Significance of the Shadow (in The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses)

• During overpowering emotional experiences, we tend to close off the distancing sense of vision; we close the eyes when dreaming, listening to music, or caressing our beloved ones. Deep shadows and darkness are essential, because they dim the sharpness of vision, make depth and distance ambiguous, and invite unconscious peripheral vision and tactile fantasy.
  
• The imagination and daydreaming are stimulated by dim light and shadow. In order to think clearly, the sharpness of vision has to be suppressed, for thoughts travel with an absent-minded and unfocussed gaze. Homogeneous bright light paralyses the imagination in the same way that homogenisation of space weakens the experience of being, and wipes away the sense of place.
  
• In our time, light has turned into a mere quantitative matter and the window has lost its significance as a mediator between two worlds, between enclosed and open, interiority and exteriority, private and public, shadow and light. Having lost its ontological meaning, the window has turned into a mere absence of the wall.

Peter Zumthor The Light on Things (in Atmospheres)

• So the first of my favourite ideas is this: to plan the building as a pure mass of shadow then, afterwards, to put in light as if you were hollowing out the darkness, as if the light were a new mass seeping in. The second idea I like is this: to go about lighting materials and surfaces systematically and to look at the way they reflect the light. In other words, to choose the materials in the knowledge of the way they reflect and to fit everything together on the basis of that knowledge.

Tadao Ando (in Michael Auping, Seven interviews with Tadao Ando)

• The memory [of my childhood home] has always stayed with me, the ways the rooms seemed to be painted in shadow and light. That is how I experience space.
  
• You are able to see the light because of the darkness. Because of the darkness you felt the strong presence of light.
  
• When you sit inside of a dark room and you look out at the garden that is naturally illuminated, you can begin to feel the fundamental relationship between light and darkness, the reason they need each other to express themselves.
  
• Shadows and darkness contribute to serenity and calmness. In my opinion, the darkness creates the opportunity to think and contemplate.

Louis Kahn Light is the Theme

• Silence to Light
  Light to Silence
  The threshold of their crossing
       is the Singularity
       is Inspiration
  (Where the desire to express meets the possible)
       is the Sanctuary of Art
       is the Treasury of the Shadows
  (Material casts shadows shadows belong to light)
  
• A great American poet once asked the architect, 'What slice of the sun does your building have? What light enters your room?' - as if to say the sun never knew how great it is until it struck the side of a building.
  
• No space, architecturally, is a space unless it has natural light.
  
• When a man says that he believes that natural light is something we are born out of, he cannot accept a school which has no natural light. He cannot even accept a movie house, you might say, which must be in darkness, without sensing that there must be a crack somewhere in the construction which allows enough natural light to come in to tell how dark it is. Now he may not demand it actually, but he demands it in his mind to be that important.
  
• When you have all the answers about a building before you start building it, your answers are not true. The building gives you answers as it grows and becomes itself.
  
• It is much better not to cover anything up but to show the full nature and relationship of part to part, including the present condition of each which is a record of how it got that way.

Can localising Twitter re-energise public space?

This post is a quick look at integrating Twitter with public space. Microblogging and public conversation through Twitter and mobilisation through Facebook groups and causes have subsumed the traditional role of the town square as a site of rhetoric and protest - today it is much more effective to promulgate ideas and propaganda from online speaker corners. Flashmobs, Foursquare and geotagging of photos are leading the reintegration of online spaces with physical landscapes, and encouraging cities to be understood to have invisible, virtual layers. Dan Hill, City of Sound, elaborates such an understanding with his narrative, the Street as Platform.

Our exclusive focus on online spaces had been at the expense of public space. This neglect has seen further deterioration of public space following trends of automobile domination and commercialisation - issues which many cities are begging to grapple with, while others such as Canberra continue to ignore. Transport hubs such as Circular Quay in Sydney are particularly vibrant, while tourist precincts that seek spectacle such as Darling Harbour in Sydney and Federation Square in Melbourne are overtly manicured, and commercialised cafe strips and shopping malls are tightly controlled. Skateboarders are designed out of public space, loitering teenagers are chased out, the homeless are evicted and even buskers have to audition. The State Library steps in Melbourne which are claimed organically as a sunny lunch spot is an often cited, but perhaps rare, example of open public space. The other most exciting public space in Melbourne is of course the lane ways, where hidden out of sight amongst the garbage there is more freedom for spontaneous expression.

State Library in Melbourne

The Container Bar in Tattersalls Lane, Melbourne

Clearly most of the internet is now more truly public domain, where you can express yourself in almost anyway you want (excepting of course that money, technology and literacy is required to to access the internet). The internet is more efficient and more accessible, it is searchable, and subgroups can easily exist with less antagonism to others. The internet's power is that it is global. However public space is all around us, it is more tactile and immediate. The power of public space is that it is local and specific. If online discussion can be reintegrated with public space then it can benefit from being in your face and able to be bumped into.

Again an example from Melbourne - the public can send simple SMS messages to be displayed on the facade of Federation Square, but there is not opportunity for this to link with wider discourses or be viewed elsewhere.

Federation Square, Melbourne

What might a more sophisticated public display be like? In terms of local and global, I am advocating a condition of 'both and'. Twitter is an ideal platform to use because it is not exclusive to a location. Twitter apps such as Twitter Streamgraphs, Tweetcloud, Twittermap and Trendsmap suggest a potential for making Twitter feeds endlessly navigable. Even in the simplest terms, if windows such as these can be projected or displayed in public space they can entice the public into new discourses.

Twtter Streamgraphs visualises changing word associations over time as a stacked graph

Tweetcloud visualises word associations at a given time as a cloud

Twittermap visualises tweets in real time by location

Trendsmap visualises trending topics by location

I was also wondering if it would be possible to track the mood of the city. Precedents here include The Dumpster and We Feel Fine, visualisations that both harvest blog posts, and have been reviewed by Mitchell Whitelaw in Fibreculture. As Whitelaw points out, the critical difficulties working with data such as this are the accuracy of filters and legibility of visualisations. When working with datasets as large and broad as the twittersphere or blogosphere - there is so much noise.

One final idea - architecture can take on a personified identity and interact directly with this discourse, as exemplified by the Tower Bridge opening a Twitter account.

Photomontage: the sublime modern, mockup

Here is my first go at montage - Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum is framing a rocky landscape in southern India and that is Andrew's CN Tower making an appearance in the background.

Sublime Modern A1

This is harder than I expected! I am by no means a photoshop expert, and I hadn't counted on how careful I have to be to align perspective. The perspective issue is a biggish one: to do this generatively, all montages and source material will have to be the same perspective - which will make finding appropriate source images exceedingly frustrating. For example in finding appropriate images to montage with the Kimbell I immediately ruled out 98% of my own photo library and had little luck googling. So new respect to Gutschow, who I must assume is thinking ahead when taking her photos.

Photomontage: the sublime modern; and the generative city - an architecture of remixed geometry

This is a proposal for an interpretive light projection art installation at the partly demolished Cameron Offices. As I wrote in a previous post, the modern architectural masterpiece has been misunderstood and unappreciated, and this project is an opportunity to encourage a new public engagement with the important building.

The intention is to generate a series of photomontages that emphasise the powerful sublime of modern architecture's allusion to ruin, and explore the structural and compositional geometries expressive of this and the ideological urban ordering of public space, landscape and network connections, that is particularly inherent in the Cameron Offices. This perhaps connects to the zeitgeist interest with city form amid contemporary concern about population growth and climate change.


Theoretical Position

Modern architecture alludes to ruin through its expressed structure and lack of ornamentation. The Cameron Offices, by virtue of having never been connected to its intended broader urban network and then by its now partly demolished nature, is a fragment that requires the imagination of what might have been. This allusion to something greater is how the sublime functions, as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant determine, and why ruins are sublime.

Giovanni Piranesi, Il Campo Marzio dell' Antica Roma, Second Frontispiece

Manfredo Tafuri in examining utopias through a discussion of Giovanni Piranesi's Campo Marzio demonstrates that excess can reveal truth. Here the 'struggle between architecture and the city, between the demand for order and the will to formlessness, assumes epic tone' and points to 'no other possibility than that of global, voluntary alienation in collective form... a place of total disorder' (Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development).

Giovanni Piranesi, Carceri d'Invenzione, Plate VII (The Drawbridge)

With other Piranesi drawings, such as his Carceri d'Invenzione (imaginary prisons) series, ambiguity as well as dramatisation and exaggeration contribute to their theatricality.

Gevork Hartoonian proposes ideas of the tectonic and theatricality developed from Gottfried Semper to centre a critical practice within the contemporary culture of spectacle that foregrounds hollow image-making and commodity fetishism. The tectonic, which distinguishes architecture from building, is the purposeful articulation of the relationship between construction (core form) and dressing (art form), and it is this excess that is theatrical - while an art form or image that has no relation to the core form is simply spectacle. See Hal Foster's essay Image Building for a critique of the image-making tendencies of the contemporary architectural avant garde.

Hartoonian suggests that the idea of montage, or the cut, can be used as a critical tool by architects to repress spectacle, and that through cutting, theatricality is activated by the need to think to approach perception of the whole. Hartoonian's writings on theatricality can be found in Crisis of the Object.

This proposal and discussion also recalls Walter Benjamin's wish images that blur dreams and reality, particularly the past or future with the present. The Cameron Offices presents a wish image in that it is now a partly demolished historical fragment but also in that it is a ruin of unrealised ambition. Despite (or perhaps because of) the failure of the modern project, ideologies that point to unattainable ideals are alluring.


Precedent Work

This proposal is indebted to the inspirational photomontages of Beate Gutschow, particularly her S series which I saw exhibited a couple of years ago at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) in Chicago. In the S series, fragments of modern architecture are composited out of context in a landscape of vastness where no totality is perceivable to emphasise the sublime and theatrical.

Beate Gutschow, S#14

Along similar lines to Tafuri's discussion of utopia, Philip Gefter in his New York Times review of Gutschow's work reminds that 'optical precision is not the same thing as reality' and that 'fabrication may be truer than life'.

I intend for my montages to reference Gutschow's S series, however even if I didnt, I expect that working with images of modern architecture and emphasising an allusion to ruin a similar feeling would be unavoidable.

A quick google search throws up a few other artists working with related ideas. Adam Ryder also uses digital compositing techniques to explore his interest in urban infrastructure such as carparks. Gregory Crewdson crafts his images in a different way, setting up scenes much like a stage set.

Adam Ryder, Cityscape Photomontage (1/2)

Gregory Crewdson, Brief Encounter

Of course photomontage is not restricted to use by artists and photographers, architects too have a long history of using the technique, particularly for political messages, and it would appear that it is one of the retro presentation techniques currently most fashionable amongst students.

El Lissitzky, Poster for the 1929 Russian Exhibition in Zurich

El Lissitzky, The Constructor (self portrait)

The famous Russian Constructivist architect El Lissitzky pioneered photomontage for use as Soviet propaganda, while more recently Ashton Raggatt McDougall have designed buildings that are literal montages as provocations - their best example is the National Museum of Australia which subversively samples cultural icons to question Australian history and culture.

Ashton Raggatt McDougall, National Museum of Australia - main entrance (the glazing references the Sydney Opera House and the braille on the facade says 'sorry')

Project Description

Like Gutschow's S series, this project will montage images of modern architecture in landscapes of vastness to emphasise the allusion to ruin. The departure from the precedent work is that this photomontage will be generative, dynamic and interactive. Montages will be computer generated from selected source photographic material and will be integrated or overlayed with generated vector cityscapes that remix geometry.

Source material could be limited to John Andrews architecture, architectures that are Structuralist or Brutalist or could include other Australian or international modern architectures.

Imagery will be black and white for a sense of timelessness, and should be relatively high in contrast to show well when projected. I will experiment to be determined whether buildings that are recognisable or fragments that are unrecognisable will produce better effect, and to what extent it is desirable to populate the landscape. I suspect that in Gutschow's S series minimal population is powerful.

The generated vector cityscapes can be potentially outlines, sections or isometric views of buildings or public space, landscape and network connection plans similar to the Nolli Plan.

I can base the generative montage on previous combinatorial systems that I have worked with in Processing such as Monopolise, Space Men, Albers Square Generator and Basic Poetry Mixer. The generated vector cityscapes can be grown with various branching using a model such as the Eden Growth Model, which I have explored in Processing with the Circle Packing Eden Series - see Exploration A, Exploration B, Exploration C and Exploration D.

If text is included in the montage than writing that is descriptive of the sublime qualities of modern architecture would be suitable, such as Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, Louis Kahn's Light is the Theme and John Andrews Architecture a Performing Art.

Gutschow says she doesnt start with a preconceived image but rather 'sketches' with the component images building a montage very quickly. This gives me confidence that if I can carefully select and prepare the component images I can use computer generation to 'randomly' assemble my montages to reasonable effect. Yet I am acutely aware that when sketching Gutschow employs highly refined intuition based on her theoretical understanding of composition in painting. Computer generated montages could not approach the sophistication of Gutschow's. However with the development of a website interface it would be possible to facilitate sketching that allows the public to follow their own intuitions.

Even with a relatively limited palate of component images there are numerous permutations possible, for example: 5 landscapes, 5 background buildings, 5 focal buildings and 5 foreground objects such as people, has 625 immediately possible combinations, while if each component image can also be flipped/mirrored on just one axis then there are 10,000 possible combinations.

Interaction beyond a website interface, could be facilitated by sound or movement sensors that influence the generation of the vector cityscapes. The Cameron Offices are on the current (until November) trunk bus route between Belconnen and Civic, adjacent to a major stop, providing an excellent opportunity to engage the public.

The major reservation I have about this proposal is that photomontage lends itself to using the building as a giant billboard, as has the previous work of BEAM, which, perversely after what I have said above, means that I will fall to the trap of spectacle, where the art form is disassociated from the core form. The alternate position and exciting opportunity with the Cameron Offices is to use light projection as dressing to enhance the reading and appreciation of the tectonic - to integrate tightly with the building in such a way (involving projection mapping) feels more natural to my architectural instincts. An interesting light projection that takes this alternate position is ToDo's Artificial Dummies which are a flock that avoids and so highlights fenestrations in the wall. Another interesting project is Daniel Rossa's 555 Kubik for the Hamburg Kunsthalle, which reconfigures the buildings geometry.

The development of this project for the Cameron Offices can be followed with the label 8203 (the UC Master of Digital Design unit number).