ARCH_317 Architecture Core Studio I: ‘Picture Houses: Accumulating Images’

In contemporary architectural discourse, forms and formats are in flux. Drawing as a hand-mechanical system is being supplanted by electronic imaging. At the same time, composed part-to-whole relationships are giving way to the accumulation of vast sets of things and information. In this studio, students examined the conceptual underpinnings of drawing, imaging, composition, and accumulation to brush up against their productive limits.

 

Picture Boxes: Drawing vs. Image

 

The death of drawing has already been pronounced: it has been declared in books, exhibitions, and symposia. As with all inanimate deaths, there is no finality. Occasional zombies abound, but it turns out that the flatline was misread. Contemporary architects continue to invest in architectural drawing; however, today’s drawings are a product of electronic imaging generated in digital interfaces that map image and model onto one another and rely on a series of animated frames. 

Each actor in the studio had to acknowledge and challenge the default orthogonal relationship between the “box” that constitutes architecture and the “box of pictures” that constitutes projection planes. The studio was structured to introduce the productive potential of iterative translation though multiple formats, and aimed to produce architecture wrapped in the guise of images.

 

Picture Frames: Composition vs. Accumulation

 

Architecture is embracing “more”—wider collections of a greater diversity of things—not only in visualization tactics, but also in form-making strategies. Robert Venturi’s “difficult unity of inclusion” addresses complex compositions and part-to-whole relationships. Today, according to Andrew Holder, “things” are finding new relationships as ordered, arrayed, and accumulated conglomerations. As these things “crawl out of the picture frames and structural bays,” they enjoy affinities with one another, pushing into and defining the interstitial space. 

Students analyzed precedent images and collected artifacts and atmospheres from those precedents. Reassembling the amassed pieces, each project attempted to establish new relationships between them as a recast set of interrelated architectural characters, props, and scenes.

 

Picture House and Image Construction: Gallery/Museum and Studio

 

Students conducted design research for two projects: a film viewing pavilion on Art Hill and a cinema and film studio in downtown St. Louis. Models were conceived along the lines of film sets or dioramas to be hybrids of pictures, built-ins, models, and accumulations of disparate things. The word “picture” is tied to the history of perspective painting, coming from the picture plane: the confluence of the parallel material screen and illusory frame. Rather than seeing pictures as illusions, students examined how they negotiate coextensive material data and optical logic by looking to the material construction of contemporary images. Their investigations considered the relationship of screen to frame across architectural representation, tectonic systems, and programmatic requirements. 

Architecture will take on the qualities of a set of characters across multiple scales, producing interactions between the things gathered within its bounds, as well as with external actors in the urban site.