Construction
Model
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As we saw in the case of Barker’s panorama space could be given a rhetorical function. Besides being a spatial construction in itself, the panorama could have an agenda embedded in space as an idealized utopic version of the industrialized city or as scenes from military battles and colonies to promote the nation state. So was it the case with Spuybroek’s pavilion of water ecology and so was it the case with the diagrammatic strategies of ‘Just There Modernism’ in Dutch urbanism constructed by groups like MVRDV, Max1 and NL Architects.(1) Space may so to speak work for something else. Not just as a medium that frames or contains data objects and operands, but rather as an entity that is giving its place to something else, lending its position and potentials to the service of another purpose.
Further the use of space, as a model was also an important part of the development of the digital synthetic space as argued in the chapter Informed Space. John Walker’s ideas with AutoCAD was that all the information regarding a project could be accumulated in a model space, which is still today the terminology used for its production environment. All the aspects of model space may then be presented through drawings and projections in ‘paper space’.
In the following chapter, I will propose two such ways to use space –as a model and as a metaphor.
Four Spatial ModelsThe art historian Yve-Alain Bois has posed the rhetorical question if a painting can be a model or theoretical practice? If so, what would the dependency between the painting and the model then be? Bois asks:
Can one designate the place of the theoretical in painting without doing violence to it, without, that is, disregarding painting’s specificity, without annexing it to an applied discourse whose meshes are too slack to give a suitable account of painting’s irregularities? … This approach simultaneously presupposes a rejection of established stylistic categories (and indirectly an interest in new groupings or transverse categories), a fresh start of the inquiry in the face of each new work, and a permanent awareness of the operating rule of painting in relation to discourse.(2)
Bois is well aware of the delicate balance when constructing models. On the one hand, painting must keep its specificity so it can be identified as a painting, and on the other hand, it must carry the agenda of a theoretical practice. In this way, the model becomes an entity that always goes beyond the frame so to speak – neither entirely a painting, nor entirely a discourse. A similar balance can be observed in the examples of design spaces above. They are on the one hand spatial constructions in their own right, embedded by operands and parameters, while they on the other hand, are embedded in a larger discourse or critique as Karl Chu’s critique of the insistence on buildability. We could argue that, just as the painting as model questions its frame, so may space as a amodel question its embedding – questions the delicate balance between embedding and disembedding.
Bois offers us, with a solid reference to art historian Hubert Damish, four positions from where we can discuss this.
The first model is a perceptive model, which may be “disturbing the permanent structures of perception, and first of all the figure/ground relationship”.(3) Bois identifies this model in the works of Piet Mondrian as an “enterprise of destruction”(4) of the figure/ground relationship of painting on canvas by straight lines, “because the line has the function of destroying the plane as such that it will have to be straight”.(5) The perceptive model does in the work of Mondrian serve as a tool for embedding a specific artistic manifest of modernity by destroying the frame for categorical conventions.
We may construct the same model for a design space. The figure/ground discussion in F.L. Wright’s Unity Temple between room and architecture, the relationship between the inside and the outside in the buildings by RM Schindler, the symbolic rather than formal perception of Robert Venturi’s Las Vegas and the questioning of stable categories in Lars Spuybroek’s Water Pavilion. Destroying the presumed categories of perception is a powerful tool for radicalism and shock in architecture as Anthony Vidler has described in Warped Space. The perceptive model of Bois can finally be compared to the questions of spatial constituency that Kern has raised as a change in the figure/ground relationship between space and object in architecture and to the deception techniques in Robert Barker’s panorama and especially Comment and Eberhardt’s critique hereof.
The second model that Bois proposes is a technical model. This model is particularly interesting to architecture since it contains the technical and material resistance. The technical model insists on the real space of the canvas and painting as constructions with a technical logic. However, for Bois there are two kinds of techniques: “There is the epistemological moment of technique, where thought and invention take place, and then there is all the rest, all the procedures that borrow from tradition or contest it…”(6) As Bois uses this model to analyze Jackson Pollock’s paintings, it does correspond with our discussion of Schindler’s use of the cast concrete slabs and ‘tilt slaps’ to construct space. It also corresponds with the critique of the current media used in the production of architecture as argued by Manuel Da Landa and others. It is not the repetitive use of AutoCAD workstations that holds much potential for dislocating techniques through this technical model. Rather it is the creative and critical use of media and a constant pushing of computer applications like MAYA to its creative limit.
This can be related to the chapter Media and to the discussion of the influence and dependency posed by technique and technology. Nevertheless, no matter what technique that is used to produce and frame space in architecture, there is a technical agenda that cannot be reduced to tectonic categories or ignored as trivial routine.
The third model that Bois proposes for a theoretical practice is the strategic model. He argues with the help of Lévis-Strauss that the significance of a work first is “by what it is not and what it opposes”, which makes it a strategy.(7) An opponent is needed to construct a strategy – someone or something to oppose, somewhere to move away from. This creates a sort of historical and conceptual figure/ground dislocation, where every model (painting or space) is positioned between concepts that the model is not a part of and goes beyond the historical context in which, it does not belong.
The strategic model can be a very powerful tool for space, to control rules and claim a specific singularity in history. The strategic model does to Bois contain the meaning of a battle as the fights between individuals of strong opinions, just as “the strategic metaphor par excellence, that of chess”.(8) This could be mirrored in the battles between FL Wright, RM Schindler and Richard Neutra, which on the cover may seem trivial and pretentious, but were in essence profound battles between different views on architecture. This was especially the case, between Schindler and Neutra. It was a battle of modern architecture, with the old Viennese school with Wagner and Loos on the one side and the new French CIAM school of International Style, Le Corbusier and Mies van de Rohe on the other.
A way to relate this to the strategic use of design space may be through the concept of the diagram. We could see it as a strategy constructed in space, as a conceptual passage or connection between worlds apart. It could be between noise pollution and urban densification along a freeway(9) or between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and suburban housing blocks.(10) It can also be the spatial strategy that Lars Spuybroek constructs with the work of eight themes of early European expressionist artist and the construction of an exhibition space in his Nante project through dynamic splines,(11) or as Greg Lynn does between the patterns of waves of the coast of Long Island in his House Prototype.(12) Not only can the application of a strategic space be found in different kinds of diagrams it can also be found on both sides of what Spuybroek calls the ‘Cartesian split’ between European program and American form.(13)
The fourth and final model proposed by Bois is a symbolic model, which is “… a key to the interpretation of the world, a key neither mimetic nor analogical, but, as for science or language, symbolic”.(14) This symbolic model is according to Bois found throughout modern art through signs at their most symbolic level. However, the function of the symbolic model is not just to produce a symbolic linkage, it also serves to display the ‘taxonomic collapse’(15) of the well known categories and thereby to go beyond the ‘cultural task’.
The geographer Sara Fabrikant has used space as a symbolic or metaphorical model to construct landscapes of data. As a metaphorical model, space does not have a ‘voice’ of its own. It is merely a vehicle used to position and contain data. We may add spatial properties to data that previous were without such properties, and arranges these data in a design space, defined by a specific set of parameters. Fabrikant calls this process ‘spatialization’ with a reference to the cognitive scientist George Lakoff as a metaphorical mapping from physical space into a conceptual space by embedding objects with few or no spatial attributes into spatial constellations with structures of similar spatial attributes. Fabrikant describes it as:
Spatialization, which combines powerful visualization techniques with spatial metaphors, has a great potential to overcome current impediments in information access and retrieval. Spatialization is utilised to create lower-dimensional digital representations of higher-dimensional data sets, whose characteristics are often quite complex. These digital data sets may not be spatial in nature. Common spatial concepts such as distance, direction, scale and arrangement which are part of the human’s experience in everyday life are applied, to construct abstract information spaces. Spatialization offers the field of geography, which investigates space and spatial relations, opportunities to apply the body of knowledge to other non-spatial domains.(16)
By using a spatial metaphor, Fabrikant constructs a correlation between data and the design space, much in the same way as the dependency between place and space in the part Investigation and technology and space in the chapter Media. The examples that she mentions are primarily related to information retrieval where the place of the library becomes the ‘theme’ for the space that contains and organizes the data, since this enhances the user ability to navigate and generally relate to the spaces that Fabrikant proposes.
The computer scientists Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, have taken Fabrikant’s mapping one step further. They remark that there is generally an easiness of perception towards spatial representations; if we have to browse large amounts of data it is easier done by looking at a space filled with data than going through spreadsheets with the same data.(17)
Through the concepts of spatialization and mapping, Fabrikant, Dogde and Kitchin offers us a practical approach to what Benedikt previously has defined as spatiology and constructed through information, but also what Stankiewitz described as constellations of operands. Fabrikant even goes as far as to name a spatial frame of reference after Benedikt, ‘Benediktine space’, which together with geographic and cognitive space is described as practical applications of spatialization.
The Model of ConstructionsWe could argue that if the process of spatialization is affective, space it less active and influential than if the process is effective. In addition, we could expect that if the spatialization is conducted in the spatial cultures and professions of architecture and geography the process would be effective in relating non-spatial data to already established spatial structures. In other words, we could expect that the architect is more likely to translate non-spatial data into an architectural vocabulary of space (building blocks, stacks, hills etc), while the geographer is more likely to translate data into a geographic vocabulary of space (landscape, water, grass, islands, mountains etc.). As Fabrikant remarks, such an established spatial structure is also based on former perceptional experience of space.
This is of course no surprise, but it shows that a space was constructed before the process of spatialization began. That the data was translated to fit into the pre-established space and that space was not a neutral medium in this process either. What could be seen as a neutral, metaphorical use of space, as a vehicle for spatialization, is in fact quite the opposite; the data is truncated, as in Abbott’s flatlands, to fit in the spatial environment and it if fixed in the role that it has to play in that space. Such a method is neither foreign to semantics and metaphors, where the initial meaning of an object of expression is truncated deliberately. Nor to architecture and design, where references and paraphrases are frequent tools. However, such a method calls for an acknowledgement that the construction of a spatial metaphor not is a neutral activity. Just like language and writing has certain constraints and rules for metaphors, so does space have certain constraints on the construction of spatial metaphors.
Since model space can inscribe almost everything and contain almost anything, we will have to establish certain conceptual filters that will focus our attention on a more specific part of the gamut of opportunities. The use of space as a model makes it possible to interpret a wide range of data, why it is so appealing to a discipline of integrated design and to design processes in an interdisciplinary environment. The model defines the reading of the given design space as well as the mental space through which it is conceived.
Rather than discussing, how one could spatialize data through the use of space as a metaphor, it would be far more interesting to look at the relationship between the data and the space, at what was lost in the data and what was gained in the space.We may observe that the metaphorical use of space is an opportunity to place data, structures, programs and expressions in a spatial context; to offer them a spatial presence, which they did not have before. This could be from a non-spatial state, as the text in The Virtual Architect, which had no spatial attributes but became spatial notations in the space of the Aarhus harbor. Or it could be from an ‘informed’ state as the particles in Different Rule(r)s, which are spatial (three dimensional) from the start but will be accumulate attributes as they move along the structures of a designed space as a kappa tau curve.
(1) Speaks, Michael (1997), “Just There Modernism,” in Nine+One, (1997), Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.
(2) Bois, Yve-Alain (1990), Painting as Model, Cambridge, MA: OCTOBER Book, The MIT Press, p. 245.
(3) Here Bois quotes Hubert Damish.
(4) Bois, Yve-Alain (1990), Painting as Model, Cambridge, MA: OCTOBER Book, The MIT Press, op. cit., p. 247
(5) Bois, Yve-Alain (1990), Painting as Model, Cambridge, MA: OCTOBER Book, The MIT Press, Ibid., p. 248
(6) Bois, Yve-Alain (1990), Painting as Model, Cambridge, MA: OCTOBER Book, The MIT Press, Ibid., p. 250
(7) Bois, Yve-Alain (1990), Painting as Model, Cambridge, MA: OCTOBER Book, The MIT Press, Ibid., p. 254-5
(8) Bois, Yve-Alain (1990), Painting as Model, Cambridge, MA: OCTOBER Book, The MIT Press, Ibid., p. 255
(9) MVRDV (1998), FARMAX, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, p. 492-509.
(10) MVRDV (1999), Meta City Data Town, Rotterdam: 010 publishers.
(11) Spuybroek, Lars (1999), “A Straight Line is a Badly Informed Curve,” transcript from audio file, in http://www.creativebase.com/interview/template/?d=nox (mp3, 240501) (http://www.classic.archined.nl/extra/archi_tv/tv1/eng/hoofdframe1.html), London: RIBA.
(12) Lynn, Greg (1999), Animate Form, New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, p. 142-163.
(13) Speaks, Michael (1998), “It’s Out There ... The Formal Limits of the American Avant-Garde,” in HDA Dokumente zur Architektur 10, ‘Other Space’, Graz, Austria: Haus der Architektur.
(14) Bois, Yve-Alain (1990), Painting as Model, Cambridge, MA: OCTOBER Book, The MIT Press, op. cit., p. 253
(15) Bois, Yve-Alain (1990), Painting as Model, Cambridge, MA: OCTOBER Book, The MIT Press Ibid., p. 254. On the paintings of Piet Mondrian.
(16) Fabrikant, Sara (2000), “Spatialized Browsing in Large Data Archives,” in Transactions in GIS, 2000/4, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, p. 69.
(17) Dodge, Martin & Rob Kitchin (2001), ‘Mapping Cyberspace', www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/casa/martin/ amazon.co.uk_article.pdf
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