Some ideas I am having trouble with...

“Thus not only does our access to the experience of places necessarily pass through the media that make them accessible to us, this mediation is architecture itself. In other words, it is not only the necessity of mediation but also the mediatic condition, the establishing of fictions, that is intrinsic to architecture and the urban landscape.”

Ignasi de Sola-Morales
Mediations in Architecture and in the Urban Landscape

The bolded line is essentially my thesis. But how do I explain that the mediation - the photograph, the written work regarding architecture is architecture itself..... ??? Or is that what I should be saying? It's so hard to try and sum up what the entire work is on through one such profound statement.

Helen Liggett sort of answers this in Urban Encounters, but I am still not sure if I understand it enough to explain in my own words.

“Both making and viewing images make new space… Viewing the photographic images becomes a mode with which to encounter the urban, not as a static environment, but as a boarding house with certain vacancies where temporal experience need only apply.”

Helen Liggett
Urban Encounters, 1993.

I am also trying to address 'the establishing of fictions' being intrinsic to architecture... fiction comes up again in a quote by Elias Torres:
"It is also true that through photographs fiction is greater, although reality might be more surprising.”

Those are two of my main issues right now.
a.

They may graduate me yet...

An excerpt from "Mediations in Architecture and in the Urban Landscape" by Ignasi de Sola-Morales

Perhaps the veracity that we can concede to the media [graphic, literary, photographic], which enable us to acquire knowledge of architecture and urban landscapes, makes these media inescapable and essential to our approximation of this reality.
The production of the medium and the production of the experience are two facets of the same process. Architecture and the urban landscape are at the same time the medium and the result of this mediation that makes places out of non-places, form out of formlessness, intelligibility out of non-intelligibility, solidity out of fluidity.

Thus not only does our access to the experience of places necessarily pass through the media that make them accessible to us, this mediation is architecture itself. In other words, it is not only the necessity of mediation but also the mediatic condition, the establishing of fictions, that is intrinsic to architecture and the urban landscape.”

Eavesdroppings: Stories from Small Towns When Sin Was Fun

The preface – this thing – is the toughest part of a book to write because it has to account for what follows: the selection of personal experiences and the experiences of acquaintances, narrated without moral or political purpose, recalling, for fun more than anything else, the humorous side of solemn or outrageous evens in the legends of small towns.
I’ve used the real names of all persons involved which, I trust, will lend the stories some historical credence.
Digressions, I must admit, became a problem. While trying to focus on local events, I wound up recounting the extraction of a beer glass from a man’s rectum in the emergency ward of a Toronto hospital, and the flight of a Salvation Army bass drum through the show window of a gay bar in San Francisco. However, digressions of this sort are unavoidable when one considers what matheaticians tell s – that all people and the events they are involved in are at most only six degrees removed.
It’s the small-world effect. We are all connected, and I assume that the stores related here, if pursued further, would connect us to similar events and people ine very small town and city in North America.

Bob Green
2006

See the rest of the book (most of it, anyway) on GoogleBooks.

In Praise of Shadows

by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are, and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse oursleves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But, the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gas light, gas light to electric light - his quest for a brighter light never ceases; he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow

I would call back, at least, for literature, this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away useless decoration.

Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secret of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. The "mysterious Orient" of which westerners speak probably refers to the uncanny silence of these dark places. And even we as children would feel an inexpressible chill as we peered into the depths of an alcove to which the sunlight had never penetrated. Where lies the key to this mystery? Ultimately it is the magic of shadows.

In conversation, too, we prefer the soft voice, the understatement. Most important of all are the pauses.

In the Dark Violin of the Valley

by Ted Hughes

All night a music
Like a needle sewing body
And soul together and sewing soul
And sky together and sky and earth
Together and sewing the river to the sea

In the dark skull of the valley
A lancing, fathoming music
Searching the bones, engraving
On the draughty limits of ghost
In an entanglement of stars

In the dark belly of the valley
A coming and going music
Cutting the bedrock deeper

The earth-nerve, a scalpel of music

The valley dark rapt
hunched over its river, the night attentive
Bowed over its valley, the river

Crying a violin in a grave
All the dead singing in the river

The river throbbing, the river the aorta

And the hills unconscious with listening.


*This poem was the one I had chosen in my M1 Independent Design Studio directed by Dereck Revington. It was to be the inspiration for, or force behind, the individual projects that were to come. It is a very dark, violent poem and so, subsequently, the projects of the term were rather dark, emotional, sometimes unnerving.
a.

Between Ornament and Monument

Between Ornament and Monument
Siegried Kracauer and the Architectural Implications of the Mass Ornament
By Joan Ockman

"Surface-level expressions, by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things." Siegfried Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament" (1972)

"Ultimately Kracauer's theory of the city is both against theory and against architecture; and in it, it is ornament that has privileged status as a bearer or consciousness. For Kracauer, the surfaces of the city, its fleeting appearances and skin-deep effects, are, paradoxically, the true signs of its historicity.”

Chapbook

chapbook, the name given since the 19th century to a kind of small, cheaply printed book or pamphlet hawked by chapmen (i.e. pedlars) from the 16th century to the early 19th century, and containing ballads, fairy‐tales, old romances, accounts of famous criminals, and other popular entertainments.

(From Answers.com)

Good to know.

The Storyteller

The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa

"I was deeply moved by the thought of that being, those beings, in the unhealthy forests of eastern Cusco and Madre de Dios, making long journeys of days or weeks, bringing stories from one group of Machiguengas to another and taking away others, reminding each member of the tribe that others were alive, that despite the great distances that separated them, they still formed a community, shared a tradition and beliefs, ancestors, misfortunes and joys: the fleeting, perhaps legendary figures of those habladores who - by occupation, out of necessity to satisfy a human whim - using the simplest, most time-hallowed of expedients, the telling of stories, were the living sap that circulated and made the Machiguengas into a society, a people of interconnected and interdependent beings" (pg. 93).

"'What is it you find so fascinating? What so special about habladores?'
A good question. Why hadn't I been able to get them out of my mind since that night?
'They're a tangible proof that storytelling can be something more than mere entertainment," it occurred to me to say to him. 'Something primordial, something that the very existence of a people may depend on. Maybe that's what impressed me so. One doesn't always know why one is moved by things, Mascarita. They strike some secret chord, and that's that'" (pg. 94).

William Klein

A quote from Contacts.1 - a collection of short films about photographers' contact sheets, accompanied by their own narrative.

William Klein begins....
"A picture is taken at 1/125 of a second. What do you know of a photographer's work? 100 photographs? Let's say 125? Well that's a body of work. That comes to all told one second. Let's say more like 250 photographs. That would be a rather large body of work. And that would come to two seconds. The life of a photographer, even a great photographer, as they say.... two seconds."

...and ends....
"There you are. About 20 photographs... 100 non-photographs... a few contact sheets... a few seconds."

Some of Klein's images....

Quotes

I have had these quotes written down since the beginning of M3 and they still ring true to my opinion of photography, its benefits, limits and relationships to architecture. The explanations of the quotes are not very eloquent - they were just a way for me try to explain (to myself) what it was the quotes meant to me.
a.

on photography as event

“Even so, photography offers the possibility to freeze aspects of reality of architecture and light that might vanish when contemplated in the flesh. It is also true that through photographs fiction is greater, although reality might be more surprising.”

- Elias Torres

"Although the event is always something that takes place in a global disorder devoid of meaning, this happy moment - at times accidental, at times the result of a willing intellect - constitutes an outstanding instant in a constant flux, a harmonious, polyphonic chord in a situation of permanent transition.”

- Ignasi de Sola-Morales

Though Sola-Morales is referring to an event and the architecture of an event, I find that this quote defines photography very accurately and, in a way, echos the idea behind Torres' quote. After all, a photograph is just a happy moment captured from a stream of constant flux and chaos. That instant is then transferred to a place of permanent transition where the instant will exist forever and never change.

on photography as trace/evidence

"As distinct from symbols, indexes establish their meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to their referents. They are the marks or traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object they signify."

- Rosalind E. Krauss

The photograph is an index or referent of what existed at the moment that the photograph was taken. It is a footprint or trace left by the photographed object, event or person. Just because a photograph is an accurate trace, however, does not make it true. As Barthes says previously, it is simply proof that something existed.

on the limits of photography

“The decline of narrative painting in the past century has been ascribed in large part to the rise of photography, which “relieved” the painter of the necessity of story telling. This is curious, since photography has never been successful at narrative. It has in fact seldom attempted it… The heroic documentation of the American Civil War by the Brady group, and the incomparably larger photographic record of the Second World War, have this in common: neither explained, without extensive captioning, what was happening. The function of these pictures was not to make the story clear, it was to make it real.”

- John Szarkowski

A photograph without words or captions does not tell a story; it is only a glimpse into a moment, and without captions the explanation of that moment is not any clearer to us once we have seen the image. The photograph is only evidence that the moment occurred.

Cameras are Clocks for Seeing

date | 16.02.09
chapter context

Barthes discusses what it is, as humans, we do when we know a photo is about to be taken. We transform ourselves into what we would like the image to look like – in essence, we transform our selves into the image in advance. But, when the photo is taken there is a moment of uncertain filiation – what type of image will be ‘born’.

Even though one consciously poses for a photo it is important to differentiate between the essence of the person and his effigy – he is more than his image.

In the past, there was a fascination with the mysticism of the vision of the double, often hallucinations (maybe due to schizophrenia, epilepsy). The action of taking a photo means that anyone can see a vision of themselves (unlike in a mirror). Barthes is concerned that no one has thought of this disturbance to civilization. He says that “photography is the advent of myself as other: a cunning disassociation of consciousness from identity,” (Barthes, 12). It is when our identity and our essence can be separated and considered each on its own. One still does get the feeling of the mythic theme of seeing a double, when one looks at him/herself on a piece of paper, as an object.

Because photography transforms a subject into an object, once on that piece of paper, who does the photograph belong to?

Barthes explains there are four image-repertoires that intersect when he is sitting in front of the lens. They are the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.

There is a constant self-imitation when taking a photograph and because of this, when photographed, one suffers from the sensation of inauthenticity, or imposture.

That moment when the photograph is taken, one is neither a subject nor an object, but a subject who feels oneself becoming an object- a micro-version of death (when a person dies, they become an object – and the same occurs when a photograph is taken of them). When we look at a photograph taken of us, (the product of this operation) we see what has become of us – Total Image or Death in a person. We experience ourselves as an object. That object can now be filed, used, stored by the photographer – returning to the question (who does the photograph belong to?).

When Barthes looks at a photograph of himself, he looks for Death because he believes it is the eidos of that photograph. The only thing he enjoys (or tolerates) about having his photo taken is the sound of the camera. The organ of the photographer (the finger not the eye) is such because it is linked to the trigger of the lens and to the metallic shifting of the plates. That metallic click breaks through what he describes as the mortiferous (deadly) layer of the pose.

“For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches - and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood,” (Barthes, 15).