Revolutions in Parallel: The Rise and Fall of Drawing in Architectural Design.

This dissertation examines how the foundational principles of architectural design are influenced and reflected the discipline’s conceptual media. The first section explores the transition to drawing as architecture’s conceptual medium. Arguing that the use of drawing within masonic traditions of the Gothic period was not the same as its use during the early Renaissance, this work maintains that the simultaneous employment of plan, section and elevation (i.e. triadic form) was key to changing how drawing was understood and utilized in design. Examinations of Strasbourg Plan A (c. 1260) and the Milan Cathedral Plan and Section (c. 1390) demonstrate how drawings that appear orthographic may not indicate the use of orthography to prefigure forms in space. The examination of Raphael’s interior drawing of the Pantheon (c. 1509) further demonstrates that more than just a technical hurdle, the use of triadic form indicates epistemic shifts in both the understanding of design as a human rather than exclusively divine activity, and in the elevation of form as the primary quality of architectural contemplation. The second section of this dissertation examines the transition to computation as the medium of design. Through an exploration of Peter Eisenman’s House VI (c. 1975), this section demonstrates that the shift towards process-based (as opposed to form-based) thinking isn’t dependant on computation as a medium, and yet the medium of drawing constrains the ways in which process can contemplated. Further, this section suggests that rather than being a twentieth-century development, a turn to process is evidenced during the nineteenth-century by emerging fields like morphology, biology and genetics. Gehry Technologies’ project for the Yas Island Formula-One Hotel and Evan Douglis’ project for Choice Restaurant (both 2009) demonstrate how the focus on process and the use of computation as a medium impact both the practice and aesthetics of architecture. Tying these sections together, the over-arching argument of this work is that these two shifts in medium are similar in scope and impact for the architectural discipline. Like the transition to drawing centuries before, today’s shift to computation imbricates both technical and epistemological developments for the representation, design and practice of architecture.Ph.D.ArchitectureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64659/1/kluce_1.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64659/2/kluce_2.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64659/3/kluce_3.pd

Lens-less capture and emerging moving imaging technologies: An investigation into the ways in which digital pinhole capture and advances in lens-less capture in imaging technologies may affect the form and content of moving images

This thesis is a practice-led enquiry that investigates the creative potential of pinhole video, a new imaging technique which is undocumented elsewhere. Although fixed pinhole image capture has been possible since the advent of chemical photography in the 1830s, it currently occupies a niche area maintained by artists and enthusiasts working in analogue rather than digital photography and film. Through the researcher's creative practice – a set of research-driven experiments using digital movie cameras combined with pinhole apertures and documented through autoethnographic method – the thesis establishes a guide to the creative capabilities of pinhole video capture and how a lens-less video aesthetic might be generated. The researcher’s practice is contextualised in relation to the work of two moving image artists working in 16mm film: Christopher Harris and Jennifer Nightingale, and also Jason Joseffer, a professional cinematographer who works in video. It is informed by conceptual frameworks derived from Media Archaeology, remediation and historical enquiries into the nature of perception by, in particular, Jonathan Crary. The investigation also encompasses the relationship between this lens-less video practice and existing digital image capture, particularly motion capture using the Lightfield camera’s three-dimensional technology, and situates these within changing definitions of the ‘camera’ and the ‘lens’. The thesis contributes new knowledge and a craft method via the insights provided in the experimentation and reflective observation of how pinhole video capture is achieved, thereby demonstrating the range and creative potential of video works produced by this method. It argues that although pinhole video technique and scientific lens-less imaging technologies approach image capture from different directions, both are important attempts to open out new possibilities that enlarge perception and increase understanding of how light operates, offering an exciting artistic potential that can be taken further

Exploring Past, Present and Future

UID/HIS/04209/2019 POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007460.publishersversionpublishe

Airport Aura – A Spatial History of Airport Infrastructure

Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, the emergence of airports as gateways for their cities has turned into one of the most important architectural undertakings. Ever since the first manned flight by the Brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright on December 17th 1903, utilitarian sheds next to landing strips on cow pastures evolved into a completely new building type over the next few decades – into places of Modernism as envisioned by Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright (who themselves never built an airport), to eventually turn into icons of cultural identity, progress and prosperity. Many of these airports have become architectural branding devices of their respective cities, regions and countries, created by some of the most notable contemporary architects. This interdisciplinary cultural study deals with the historical formation and transformation of the architectural typology of airports under the aspect of spatial theories. This includes the shift from early spaces of transportation such as train stations, the synesthetic effect of travel and mobility and the effects of material innovations on the development, occupation and use of such spaces. The changing uses from mere utilitarian transportation spaces to ones centered on the spectacular culture of late capitalism, consumption and identity formation in a rapidly changing global culture are analyzed with examples both from architectural and philosophical points of view. The future of airport architecture and design very much looks like the original idea of the Crystal Palace and Parisian Arcades: to provide a stage for consumption, social theatre and art exhibition

Dialogic Dissensus: The Postmodern Sideshow

In the United States, the sideshow occupies a marginal and often controversial space in popular culture. Despite a decline of the sideshow during the early twentieth century, its postmodern reinvention in 1980 has inspired a proliferation of the aesthetics of the sideshow within mass media and culture as a highly profitable commodity. The current existence of the sideshow as a thriving genre can sometimes be met with surprise, disbelief, or disgust because of the history of sideshow and existing codes of “normality.” Although there is pre-existing scholarship on Bakhtin and the sideshow, what is missing is an exploration of Bakhtin’s dialogism in relation to the art of the postmodern sideshow. This dissertation argues that the postmodern sideshow as an art form is an example of a reinvention of intersubjectivity through Bakhtin’s dialogic and still relevant for understanding contemporary aesthetics. Furthermore, I propose that the carnivalesque is an aspect of the dialogic because the carnivalesque renews hope for a better future which reverberates through unfinalizable time. Instead, I will propose an intertextual genealogy between philosophical thought and the first-hand voices of sideshow performers and related show people in the spirit of dialogism. However, I assert that the dialogic is nearly impossible without a dissensus because of precarization and our permanent cellular connection as a result of our technological progress, which did not exist at the height of postmodernism. This new tyranny of normality has depersonalized our time, dissolved our friendships and communities, our ability to communicate, and our social consciousness to empathize with others in a fundamental shift to our notions of exploitation. A revolution of the aesthetic regime through the maternal will create a new paradigm that reorganizes our senses, our social consciousness, and the conditions for possibility in the dialogic.https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1022/thumbnail.jp