Drawn Utopias: From language to experience

Banou, Sophia

Abstract

Goodbye to Language (Adieu au Langage, 2015), was the first film by Jean-Luc Godard to make use of 3D filming techniques. Its title suggests a conflict between the word and the image while it can also be considered to refer to the concept of langage (Saussure, 1959): not a systematic convention of signification (langue) but the innate faculty of speech that manifests between the systematic and the
individual enunciation (parole). Godard revisits both the formal language and the narrative structure of film considering language as a whole. The film is an essay on the crisis of representation as a crisis of communication and the recurring commentary is on the ‘spectacle’, exposing the inadequacy of language as a mediative means of representation.

The questions that Goodbye to Language raises about the medium have been respectively tormenting architectural practice over the past sixty years. This has been brought to the fore in the persistent challenging of the convention of orthographic drawing by the accessibility of a simulative iconicity. In other words, the representational virtuality of parallel projection, is increasingly substituted a virtuality that can be considered as deriving from the televisual and cinematic (Beller, 2002) ‘Spectacle’ (Debord, 1994) and its digital descendants. The image is no longer ‘the territory’ (Corner) when it poses as its simulation. If the transition from drawing to modelling signifies, through the fixing of meaning, a loss of spatiality, how is this spatiality expressed in architectural drawing as a language of representation?

The oscillation between simulative figuration and abstract ideation is not a recent phenomenon. While perspective pursues the virtual through the simulation of a visual/embodied experience (Lynn, 1993), geometric delineation attains a virtuality, internal to the drawing as a system of signification. Considering the digital ascendancy of the image in our wider visual culture (from 3D renderings to Instagram) and of the informational model in our architectural practice (BIMM), what is left of architectural drawing when either of its two expressions is pushed to the extremes?

This paper traces the origins of this shift from the operative abstraction of the plan to the visually accessible displacement of simulation (Mario Carpo, 2011). Although this crisis of representation can be traced in the ongoing social and technological developments that were accelerated by the advent of modernity, it was only theorised at the intersection of a linguistic (post)structuralism and
an emerging focus on spatiality of the 1960s (Lefebvre, 1991). This paper considers architectural drawing through an understanding of language as a spatial condition of subjectivity rather than a purely referential representation, considering the architectural virtual through the idea of the utopic text: a signifying spatial practice that
negates both reality and mimesis (Marin, 1984). The paper will refer to drawn and ‘visualised’ precedents, drawing connection between drawn utopias of the 1960s and recent architectural visualisation.


References
Beller, Jonathan. 2002. ‘KINO-I, KINO-WORLD: Notes on the Cinematic Mode of Production’. In The Visual Culture Reader: Second revised edition, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, 60-85. New York and London: Routledge.
Carpo, Mario. 2011. The Alphabet and the Algorithm. Boston: MIT Press.
Debord, Guy. 1994. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald
Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald
Nicholson-Smith. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
Lynn, Greg. 2004. Folding in Architecture. Sussex: Wiley-Academy.
Marin, Louis, 1984. Utopics: Spatial Play. New Jersey: Humanities Press.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1959. ‘The Object of Linguistics’. In Course in
General Linguistics, 7-17. Translated by Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library.

Citation

Banou, S. (2017, November). Drawn Utopias: From language to experience. Paper presented at Drawing Millions of Plans, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Copenhagen

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Drawing Millions of Plans
• Conference Location: The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Copenhagen
• Start Date: Nov 1, 2017
• End Date: Nov 3, 2017
• Deposit Date: Nov 11, 2019
• Keywords: architectural drawing, simulation, architectural representation, utopics, digital simulation, spectacle, superstudio, Continuous Monument, embodiment
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/4525589