Indeterminate Delineations

Catalog description

Architecture has always been closely entangled with modes of vision. Devices ranging from Durer's perspective machine to the photographic eye have strongly shaped the way we think and design the built environment of our cities. A strange loop is in place here: our world-views provide the development of specific modes of representation, of engagement with the world, and in turn they begin to have an impact in that same world, becoming an active element in the way we understand it. Put more simply, it is the technologies through which we see and experience the built environment that define the way we construct it. In this class, we will focus on visual and physical points as anchors to tie modes of vision with modes of construction. Points play an important role in the history of visuality: if during Impressionism and Pointillism they were devised to delineate the contrast and alignments between what we see and how we see it in an attempt to investigate the mechanics of vision, it was during the post war period that Max Wertheimer's work at the Berlin School of Gesalt Psychology leveraged them as graphic elements to understand part to whole relationships central to Bauhaus' design pedagogy. Today, imaging technologies are once again placing points as central elements in the construction of our contemporary visual language, transforming ever-growing datasets of partial images in three dimensional machine readable survey models: it is with points and aggregated clouds that we are constructing the figure of our cities. As such, they become a necessary site of design investigation to move beyond monolithic views of the world. This class leverages the bi-product of scanning technologies - point clouds and image making - to explore inclusive modes of delineations: a visual sensibility to engage with the multifaceted nature of the built environment.