Since its infancy, photography has proven to be not only an unparalleled means of objective documentation, but also a fertile field of aesthetic experimentation. Photography then may be interpreted as the privileged place where Architecture (in a wider sense space) is deconstructed, reassembled, and re-established as a realm whose perception is continuously questioned. This gaze, able to be casted onto the world to produce changes and shifts in the way we perceive, see, understand it, is the very topic within the lecture by Laure Catugier.

Arch 550 Current issues in Architectural Design Module 01 Architecture & Photography

This module focuses on the relationship between Architecture and Photography, emphasizing how the concept of architecture, as well as our understanding of the architectural and urban experience, is to a great extent, constructed on the basis of visual representations. In particular, the aim is to analyse and discuss the emergence and evolution of Photography neither as a documentation nor as simple figurative transposition of reality, but as a construction of a gaze able to question and subvert reality. Since its infancy, photography has proven to be not only an unparalleled means of objective documentation, but also a fertile field of aesthetic experimentation. Photography then may be interpreted as the privileged place where Architecture (in a wider sense space) is deconstructed, reassembled, and re-established as a realm whose perception is continuously questioned.

This gaze, able to be casted onto the world to produce changes and shifts in the way we perceive, see, understand it, is the very topic within this module. Students will be offered the opportunity to engage in this discussion and realize photography as a medium to convey aesthetic concerns, and express a subjective understanding of architectural space.

The introductory seminar of the module will tackle the topic in a very general fashion focusing on the discourse of different scholars who investigated the complex articulation of the process of vision as a critical and productive activity and not merely as a passive looking. The following are just some of the aspects that are characterizing the seminar discussion: the idea that what we see is always influenced by a whole host of assumptions concerning the nature of beauty, truth, civilization, form, taste, class and gender (Berger); the investigation into the nature of photographs as a contemplative universe that discloses an entire set of narratives about how we confront the world (Barthes); the dialectic of the representation (Foucault); the manifold nature of photography from an appropriation of the thing photographed to an act of evidence, from a device for experiencing the world to a predatory act (Sontag); speculations about the future of our computerized visual culture (Virilio).

The module is articulated in two parts.

In the first part students will discuss and analyse the conceptual nuances of the topic reviewing a set of assigned readings. In the second part students will be assigned to produce two individual concept works following the suggestions offered by two guest lecturers: Laure Catugier (artist/photographer, Berlin) and Michele Cera (architect/photographer, Italy).

Biography:

Laure Catugier (1982, Toulouse, France). 2004 BA of Architecture, École Nationale Supérieure d´Architecture de Toulouse, France. 2007 MA of Art and Design, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Toulouse, France. She lives and works in Berlin. Her work is based on architectural codes that she misappropriate, with the aim of bringing a new focus on the norms of measurement. Her practice consists mostly of photography, video, sculpture, and sound performance in which she experiments with the geometry in space. Echoes in a space, shadows on a facade, melodies produced by construction elements: the resulting forms she obtains give shape to the immaterial.