Kaleidoscopic City: Through the looking lens

Banou, Sophia

Abstract

This project critically addresses the ways that the city has been represented, in architectural practice and beyond, while seeking new ways to articulate the complex unseen weave of movements that forms the contemporary city. As the transition from site to drawing is limited by architectural conventions that appear to favour the static, it is within the gaps of architectural representation that we see its inability to grasp the kinetic, the dark writing of the world (Carter). This project considers the various types of urban representation while examining the discrepancies that appear to occur between matter and appearance (Bergson). Moreover, it attempts to reassess the agencies of both space and drawing that become missed in the translation from reality to representation by using Edinburgh, birthplace of the kaleidoscope (Brewster) and the panorama (Barker) as a site of investigation.

Drawing from previous experimentations on architectural notation, the presentation will develop around an installation, a representation of a “square” in the city of Edinburgh. One among a series of transversal sections into the city, in the form of an archaeological dig this representation will focus on the kinetic rather than the static elements of the urban space, surveying the various types of movements that take place from ground to air. This process will be structured around six ‘optical devices’ in the city and the different ways that they look at it. The mechanisms involved in their function, as well as the visual approaches that they imply, will be reconsidered by means of a set of characters, animate and inanimate, that act in the city across a variety of temporal and technological scales.

• Presentation Conference Type: Other
• Conference Name: Plenitude and Emptiness: Symposium on Architectural Research by Design
• Start Date: Oct 4, 2013
• End Date: Oct 6, 2013
• Deposit Date: Apr 28, 2020
• Keywords: architectural drawing; design research; urban representation, kinetic city, kinetic drawing, kaleidoscope, drawing movement
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/5941054