October 11: The Case for and Against Drawing
This talk confronts the agency of the architect’s visual instruments by focusing on the most ubiquitous one of all: the drawing. What are the consequences of a mode of seeing imposed by the two-dimensional practice of drawing, inserted as it is between the design of architecture and its production as full-scale construct? What gestures, prejudices, strategies, distortions surreptitiously invade and contaminate architecture—its making and its reception? Focusing on the Renaissance—from Alberti, Raphael through Michelangelo—as the moment when architectural drawing became codified and enforced with norms and conventions, this talk seeks to unpack the complexities, ambiguities, and limits embedded in the architectural drawing, specifically in the orthographic projection drawing, that became the architect’s basic representation tool to this day.
October 13: Plane and Simple. Architecture and the Seduction of Relief
Reliefs as paintings and paintings as reliefs abounded in the Renaissance and called into question the limits between two sister-arts that had quarreled bitterly about each other’s claim to artistic nobility in what is collectively known as the paragone debate. Perhaps the greatest though silent partner in this quarrel was architecture, the traditional physical support for these reliefs. Yet, what the relief as a two-dimensional enlivened plane embedded into architecture contributed—or took away from it—was not discussed by either theoreticians or practitioners at the time: architects used reliefs unsparingly but did not reflect on their role and use. Starting with the debates focused on the architectural relief in the later 19th /early 20th centuries, when the topic emerges and quickly comes to a head at the hands of Hildebrand, Burckhardt and Wölfflin, this talk examines the relevance and demise of the relief in the longue durée: its Renaissance conception and architectural use from Raphael to Michelangelo, its consequences in later avatars and ultimate rejection.
October 14: Photospace: Renaissance Architecture and the Photographic Atlas
The appearance of photography in the 19th century caused a sea change in the arts. Architecture felt it no less. Indeed, among technologies that affected the very conception of architecture and constituted a pivot point in its course, photography holds a significant place. However, once again a two-dimensional support inserted itself within the tools of the architect, within architectural seeing and aesthetics. Arguably the climax in the sequence of representational media laminating referent to representation, the photograph and its seriality caused a shift in the conception of the architectural monument and its presentation as object both within the museum space and the city. Focusing on the rise of the Renaissance architecture photographic atlas in the later 19th century, this talk looks at the surreptitious slippages from the photographic medium into architecture, its description, conception, representation and pedagogy.