Notes from mass identity architecture architectural writings of Jean Baudrillard - F Proto 2006 

page 26/27 Baudrillard quote: (sub heading called Architecture: Between nostalgia and anticipation) 

'Architecture is a mixture of nostalgia and extreme anticipation' 

'We're looking for the lost object...we use language but it's always at the same time a form of nostalgia, a lost object. Language in use is basically a form of anticipation, since we're already in something else....we have to be in these two orders of reality: we have to confront what we've lost and anticipate what's ahead; that's our brand of fatality....But it's hard to understand because the idea of modernity is for all that, the idea of a continuous dimension where it's clear that the past and the future coexist...we ourselves may no longer be in that world - if we ever were - for it may be no more than a kind of apparition. This seems to be true of any kind of form. Form is always already lost, then always already seen as something beyond itself. It's the essence of radicality...it involves being radical in loss and radical in anticipation - any object can be grasped in this way.' (p 27) 

Baudrillard makes a distinction between two types of architecture, architecture that 'destroys' space and architecture that creates it, an architecture that is 'full' and one that is empty. The empty sort manages space rather than generating it...the 'full' architecture type generates space. Lacan also compared architecture to an emptiness or void...that architecture should embody a vacant nucleus or core (he uses the analogy of the vase (Das ding) which brings both emptiness and fullness into a world that had not 'previously known of them'. Architecture does not therefore fit into a pre-existing space but instead it creates an absence. For Lacan this void (the 'radicality' that Baudrillard speaks of) is lost or at least produced only in the guise of something else. It is from the start missing or displaced. Baudrillard too speaks of this origin or beginning as a kind of 'lost object' which can never be grasped but understood only through 'extreme anticipation' or 'retrospective nostalgia' (quotes from p 172). 

Perspective: for Lacan perspective allows for the passing over of painting into architecture -the same type of void creation - perspective resembles architecture, Baudrillard describes perspective as simulation in the essay 'On Seduction' (1979) (a discussion about perspective and trompe l'oeil painting - the latter is called an art of seduction and emptiness). Get this text - use for Spain presentation. Also David Hockneys article about 15th century artists using optical devices to paint from (projecting images onto the surface of the canvas) before photography was in use. 

Filippo Brunelleschi discovered perspective in 1425 through his optical device in which he looks out at a reflection of a painting in a mirror through a hole drilled in the back of that painting (camera obscura)...creating a perfect model of simulation (according to 

Keith Broadfoot p181). Reflecting the prints in a mirror could be tried...in relation to prints reversed in photoshop? Broadfoot describes the doubling well, paraphrase: he says that what Brunelleschi produces is an 'effect of the real' (probably Baudrillard quote but no reference given) where the spectator looks at a painting as though actually looking at the Church of San Giovanni from the same point of view inside the Santa Maria del fiore (where Brunelleschi painted it). A confusion between fiction and reality - between a painting that is an architecture and architecture that is a painting. From here on we can no longer tell which came first, which is modelled on what (which is what Baudrillard says of simulation). For Baudrillard this inaugural moment of perspective is made possible through the role of the void...the hole drilled into the back of the painting, which simultaneously has been created and removed....we enter the perspectival space through this void but the void is also concealed from sight (recalling the meaning of the word perspective 'to see through'). 

Nathaniel Coleman (ed) - 'Imagining and making the world, Reconsidering architecture and Utopia' (notes) 

opening quote from Paul Ricoeur 'ideology and Utopia as cultural imagination' 

'let us begin with the kernel idea of 'no-where' implied by the very word 'Utopia' and Thomas Mores descriptions: a place with has no place, a ghost city; for a river no water: for a prince no people, etc. What must be emphasized is the benefit of this kind of extra-territoriality for the social function of Utopia. From this 'no place' and exterior glance is cast on our reality, which suddenly looks strange, nothing more being taken for granted. The field of the possible is now opened up beyond that of the actual, a field for alternative ways of living. The question therefore is whether the imagination could have any constitutive role without this leap outside. Utopia is the way in which we radically re-think what is family, consumption, government, religion etc. the fantasy of an alternative society and it's topographical figuration 'no-where' works as the most formidable conte station of what is...cultural revolution proceeds from the possible to the real, from fantasy to reality' (end) 

Nathaniel coleman begins introduction with 'there is no Utopia without architecture, at least where bodies are present....Utopia is an architectural problem' (p 1). He talks about the failure of modernist architecture and the 'dystopic conditions of the present epoch' limiting the value and utopian sight of 'most of what is built'. 'must utopia (therefore) remain unrealizable and unimaginable'. 'In consideration of (these) themes the aim of this (book) is to interrogate the relation between architecture and utopia in particular with an eye toward recuperating a utopian mindset as being at least as important for architecture as design, engineering and developers'. Argues that the real possibilities of utopia require an architectural frame, 'both utopia and architecture are problems of form' (p2). 

Paper Spaces 

Bernard Tschumi – translate this text, use for project sources French architect. He was the son of a well-known Modernist architect and he graduated in architecture (1969) from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich. In the 1970s he taught at the Architectural Association school in London and during this period he developed the ‘strategy of disjunctions’, a theory based on his belief that contemporary culture and architecture were best expressed by fragmentation as opposed to the classical ideal of unity. Tschumi advocated a ‘post-humanist’ architecture stressing not only dispersion but also its effect on the entire notion of unified, coherent architectural form. This attempt to deconstruct the components of architecture must be seen in relation to the linguistic theories of the French philosopher jacques Derrida. Tschumi exhibited drawings in Europe and North America and designed a number of small experimental constructions that he called ‘follies’, playing on the double meaning of the French word folie as a state of mental imbalance and a small pleasure pavilion. In 1981 he published The Manhattan Transcripts in which he exploited the cinematographic themes of frame and sequence. In 1983 Tschumi won the international competition for the planning of the Parc de la Villette, an ill-defined site of 35 ha in a working-class suburb on the northern outskirts of Paris. Regarding as obsolete the picturesque landscaping tradition derived from Frederick Law Olmsted, he proposed an ‘urban park for the 21st century’, designed as much for urban entertainment and social interaction as for individual contact with nature. His scheme, which paid little attention to existing structures, was based on the superimposition on the site of a series of theoretical points, lines and surfaces, a geometrical concept reminiscent of Vasily Kandinsky’s theories. The programmatic requirements were placed at the intersections of this ‘self-referential’ grid, which was marked by red, neo-constructivist follies. Two long, covered galleries were placed at right angles to each other, while a winding pathway revealed a ‘cinematic’ promenade of thematic gardens 

The Manhattan Transcripts 

These drawings are not based on real projects but they are not fantasy either. They exist in between, they describe a state of disjuncture between existing physical space and how that space might be altered, moved or collapsed through line and image (Tschumi also uses photography with drawing). The drawings explore unlikely confrontations, between fiction and documentary...they employ a narrative structure and sequence (a chronology) beginning with a photographic, cinematic still image of an event or the aftermath of an event. The photograph either directs or witnesses events. Maybe discuss this alongside Robert Smithson drawings.. The transcripts (called MT1, 2, 3 and 4 divided into 4 zones The Park, The street, The tower The block) include texts that set the tone for the sequences which are grouped together in threes (and labelled 1,2,3). The texts appear as though clips lifted from a film 

dialogue where a narrator is introducing a character or describing a scene, exaggerated tones and drama (film noir). The narrative gradually disintegrates (the images fracture and the line dissolves) and the apparent formal and objective rendering of information is revealed as a fiction. 

Thesis Chapter overview 

Introduction 

1) Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin, Utopia and the wish image / dream image (as introduction and / or context for subsequent chapters) 

Introduction 

1) Ernst Bloch, Utopia and the wish image / dream image (to set tone for subsequent chapters) 

Methodology: 

2 a) Appropriation and Displacement (montage and Julie Mehretu's stadium drawings, re-organising and correcting a past reality through the fragmented image) 

b) Transcription and illustration - reconstructing architectural drawing / the search for the ideal via nostalgia and memory in architects drawing (case studies) 

3) Drawing as representation and drawing for building (Bernard Tschumi) 

4) Perspective and under drawing (Brunelleshi, Alberti and optics) 

5) Futurity and Walter Benjamin's urform - Transitional drawing, projection and the lens, the captured image verses transitory image 

6) Case studies: Robert Smithson and Bernard Tschumi 

7) Exhibition project - documentation of process alongside final work. 

8) summary of texts (if contextual texts are presented to accompany the stages of practice, in book form as a catalogue for the exhibition?...will there be time?) Conclude: Utopia and drawing