Kaleidoscopic drawings: Sights and sites in the drawing of the city

Banou, Sophia

Abstract

The city’s presence is conventionally described and comprehended in architectural representation and print media through ocular-centric processes of figuration. Yet, the means through which this visualization proceeds is not strictly sensory, and at the same time is neither universal nor static. The image of the city takes shape at the intersection of a multiplicity of visual ‘regimes’: collective and individual, conventional and impulsive. The agency of these regimes does not rely on the primacy of a hegemonic universal vision but rather on the malleability of visual perception as a process of knowledge through acts of representation.

Within this field of congested visualities, this chapter considers architectural drawing as a device of looking, a kind of visual device that is capable of offering a unified field of inter-textual visibility in lieu of a universal vision. Drawing is considered here as a kind of visual ‘prosthesis’ that brings things into visibility by proposing alternate spatializations. Henri Bergson’s kaleidoscopic analogy for human perception offers a starting point for the understanding of the urban field as equally conditioned by a plurality of conventions, images and impressions. The (re)presentation of this field through architectural drawing emerges itself as a kaleidoscopic process of knowledge (Benjamin, Didi-Huberman).

Challenging architectural drawing conventions in relation to urban representation, the chapter critically considers the modalities of visual perception that have emerged since modernity in the context of an increasingly saturated ‘visuality’ (Foster 1988). This is further explored through the installation/drawing ‘Kaleidoscopic City’, a drawing of an area in Edinburgh.

• Acceptance Date: Jan 1, 2018
• Publication Date: Aug 14, 2020
• Deposit Date: Feb 19, 2018
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: Visual Research Methods in Architecture
• ISBN: 9781789381863
• Keywords: installation drawing, scopic device, urban representation, kaleidoscope
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/873116
• Publisher URL: https://www.intellectbooks.com/visual-research-methods-in-architecture
• Contract Date: Feb 19, 2018