Beyond the Edifice: Architectural Visualization Reconsidered

Database City: November 4th 2008.

Greg J. Smith / http://serialconsign.com

Figure 1: OMA produced image compiling “architecture’s greatest hits”

1. Introduction

Scanning the pages of a glossy architecture or design publication will undoubtedly

reveal dozens of digital renderings. This computer-generated imagery (CGI) is cultural

currency in the design world as they serve an illustrative and diplomatic purpose and can

inform the public as to the geometric and material realities of a project that has not even left

the drawing board. Given that it takes several years of training to read all but the most basic

architectural and technical drawings, CGI has been a major public relations coup for the

architectural community. Through the combination of perspective projection, digital lighting

and bitmapped textures viewers can approximately understand how a building fits into the

skyline, sits in relation to the streetscape and get a sense of the experiential quality and views

within the interior of the proposed design.

An interesting thing happened in the wake of the onslaught of speculative imagery

that has accompanied development in markets like Dubai. The design community appears to

have developed fatigue towards pixel perfect renderings and hyperreal atmospherics. This

endless stream of images does little in the way of offering any imagination or insight as to

how Dubai will emerge as be anything beyond “the ultimate neo-liberal Utopia”.1 Scathingly

dismissed as “a failed videogame in the desert”2 and “imagineered urbanism”3, criticism of

architecture in Dubai generally only approaches the city in relation to sociopolitics, culture

1 Woods, Lebbeus. “Delerious Dubai” on Lebbeus Woods. Posted March 5, 2008. http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/delirious-dubai/ - accessed Oct. 22, 2008. 2 Manaugh, Geoff. “The Game” on BLDGBLOG. Posted October 9, 2008. http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/game.html- accessed Oct. 22, 2008. 3 Davis, Mike. “Fear and Money in Dubai” in The New Left Review - September/October 2006. http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2635 - accessed Oct. 22, 2008.

friction or global economics. What about the aesthetics of architectural production in Dubai?

What if we were to step away from structures and consider these images as cultural artifacts?

Put quite simply, the economy of images has been saturated with heroic renderings—we are

numb to them. While renderings are effective at communicating the formal and material

qualities of proposed designs, they do very little in advancing spatial discourse. This

considered, CGI can be read as a prime example of “high definition as the new orthodoxy”.4

The representation of spectacle in Dubai, a mirage in the desert, is emblematic of a

larger question in architecture. When architects are confronted with recessions they can

retreat to the drawing board, but what happens when the culture of representation becomes

impoverished? Beyond the Edifice: Architectural Visualization Reconsidered is a critical

examination of architectural drawing in light of emerging urban informatics. This paper will

position that outside the industry of design and building, a natural application for

architecture’s representational expertise is the mapping and recontexualization of urban

space. In order to develop this argument it is worthwhile to revisit the very origin of the

discipline of architecture for some inspiration and perspective.

2. First Principles

Many of the enduring values within architecture can be traced back to the writing of

architect and engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio who lived and worked in Rome in the first

century BCE. Vitruvius authored De architectura, more commonly known as The Ten Books

of Architecture, where he broadly defined a set of guidelines for the discipline. The work

contained an exhaustive analysis and codification of Greek architecture and schematized a

pragmatic, proportion-based aesthetics. When the text was rediscovered in the 15th century,

it became a cornerstone of Renaissance architectural thought by providing a mainline to

classical antiquity. Coupled with perspective projection, a novel form of representation, this

codification of history helped inspire a new era of humanist design resulting in some of the

most treasured architecture ever produced. What is relevant to this discussion is the fact that

books VIII, IX and X of his series thoroughly documented Roman technology and framed the

architect as not only a designer, but as a multidisciplinary technologist active in the realm of

infrastructure, clock construction and mechanical engineering. In Book X Vitruvius wrote:

Some things, with a view to greater convenience, they worked out by means of machines

and their revolutions, others by means of engines, and so, whatever they found to be useful

4 Diller, Elizabeth. Architecture is a Special Effects Machine. Presented at TED 2008 in December 2007. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/liz_diller_plays_with_architecture.html- accessed Oct. 27, 2008.

for investigations, for the arts, and for established practices, they took care to improve step

by step on scientific principles.5

This depiction of the architect as a machinist, emulating and augmenting natural processes

through observation and tinkering, speaks to a time when the breadth of the discipline was

considerably more expansive than today. It is not surprising that architecture has become

increasingly focused given the general trend of specialization across disciplines. Furthermore,

the manner in which architecture is subjugated by market forces and the political climate

makes for very flexible job descriptions. This discussion about architectural machines is worth

reflecting on as given the current technological and epistemological moment it may reveal

some latent opportunities.

Figure 2 (left): Hegeton's Ram and Tortoise / From Wescher's Poliorcétique des Grecs

Figure 3 (right): The Water Screw - From the edition of Vitruvius by Fra Giocondo - 1511

Over the course of Book X Vitruvius described a range of architectural devices for labour,

infrastructure, measurement and warfare. These devices were kinetic, mobile and some of

them were war machines built for the sole purpose of destroying buildings–an odd goal for a

supposedly construction-oriented, “additive” discipline. While Vitruvius’ machines have been

framed as being indicative of a nagging lament in architecture6, this investigation will instead

read these devices as emblematic of a territory into which future expansion is possible, a

space of opportunity rather than a liability. So it is between these curious bookends, the

“expanded architecture” of Vitruvius and the digital ephemera of Dubai, that the following

discourse takes place.

5 Vitruvius. Vitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture (trans Morris Hicky Morgan). Cambridge: Dover Publications, 1960. pg. 284. 6 Ingram, Catherine. “Architecture: The Lament for Power and the Power of Lament” in Harvard Architecture Review. Vol. 8, July 1992. Pg . 59.

3. Contemporary Representation

Architectural drawings can be broadly described as technical, conceptual and

experiential. To elaborate on these classifications, technical refers to plans, sections and

elevations – the orthographic projections typically associated with design. Conceptual

drawings includes a range of “informal” drawings from the proverbial napkin doodle to a

generative diagram. Experiential drawings are subjective representations that a viewer can

inhabit to understand the spatial quality of a proposed design. Each of these drawing

typologies provides a very specific means for considering and analyzing space.

Figure 4: Toyo Ito / Sendai Mediathèque / 1997-2000 (clockwise from lower left corner: photograph, first-floor plan, front elevation, and longitudinal section)

Consider the Sendai Mediathèque pictured in Figure 4. This building could be read

in plan (to analyze layout), elevation (to consider a specific façade) and section (to get an

abstract view of the spatial quality of the interior). We could also utilize perspective (to capture

a point of view) and diagram (to track the flows of movement or use) in analyzing this facility.

Each of these views yields data from and a new reading of the same space. Designer

Elizabeth Diller has quipped that architecture is nothing but “a special effects machine” 7, and

thus considered, the focus of the discipline could be described as the engineering of

perception rather than the construction of built form. Given this line of thought, perhaps

there might be a natural application of architectural expertise in the execution of urban

visualization? Later in this discussion we will parse the implications of that question but it would

be wise to make a few more observations on the interface between architectural production

and technology first.

Figure 5: James Kieran and James Timberlake / Le Modulor meets Barcode

Figure 5 was produced for Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake’s 2003 text

Refabricating Architecture. The graphic juxtaposes Le Corbusier’s Le Modulor alongside the

ubiquitous bar code, suggesting that a romantic aesthetic based off a perceived “universal

language” and the human form has been replaced (or at least augmented) by a pervasive,

information-rich network of objects and protocols – an altogether different form of

codification. While Kieran and Timberlake use the image to contrast the utopian homogeneity

of the international style with the design possibilities offered by mass customization, it can also

be considered as indicative of another fundamental shift, one in modes of production and

representation.

Despite the ascent of computer aided design (CAD) software since the late 1980s,

the way that most architects design has not fundamentally changed. In most practices the use

of digital tools can be characterized as facilitating the compartmentalization and management

of drawing tasks (technical drawings) and the production of images for client communication

(experiential drawings). The potential game-changing allure of parametric modeling8 looms

on the horizon but the software has yet to see any meaningful deployment outside

“boutique” experimental firms and some of the largest transnational corporate firms. Building

7 Diller, Elizabeth. Architecture is a Special Effects Machine. Presented at TED 2008 in December 2007. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/liz_diller_plays_with_architecture.html- accessed Oct. 27, 2008. 8 According to Chris Yessios, parametric modeling is characterized by “entities (that) carry their attributes and properties within their representation, which allows them to be manipulated and transformed according to these properties.” See Yessios, Chris. “Is There More to Come?” in Architecture in the Digital Age: Design and Manufacturing. Kolarevic, Branko (ed). Spon Press: New York, 2003. pg. 263-269

Information Modeling (BIM)9 is also gradually being implemented (in varying degrees) in

most CAD applications. In surveying this range of technologies the key point to be

considered is that with very few exceptions, “design technique” remains relatively unchanged

while “workflow” is pulled forward by the slipstream of broader economic and technological

forces. Architectural historian and theorist Kristina Luce has the following to say about this

moment in architectural production:

We are only just beginning to see the effects that the computer may have on buildings and

architectural practice. As the computer’s ability to organize information transforms how the

architectural problem is conceived, a similar discourse as that which synchronized drawing

and architecture is developing between computation and architecture. New boundaries

around the architectural problem and our discipline will be formed.10

These types of disciplinary growing pains are by no means unique to architecture, and are

merely indicative of the various informational “strata” that accrue in the ongoing

transformation to a knowledge-based economy. Digital humanities scholar Alan Liu’s text The

Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information is a thorough examination of

the tensions and implications associated with this enterprise. Liu describes the distinction

between “informating” (a paradigm we have already worked through) and “networking”,

which is presently transforming culture:

If “informatiing” previously generated a thick wrapping of second-order information around

automation, then networking now rewrapped the entire ensemble in an even thicker, third-

order interface perfectly adapted to the boundary-crossing, decentralized, and outward-

looking orientation of the new global economy.11

Liu’s language is quite telling and it readily relates to this conversation about architectural

production. What has occurred in architecture is a reconfiguration of workflow rather than

representation. Architect and scholar Peter Eisenman has gone as far to state that

computation in design will not amount to much until architects start including algorithm design

as part of their broader practice.12

The point of this commentary is not to position architects as luddites. The last decade

has been very positive and technological innovation has emerged from the “top-down” and

“bottom-up” with both larger design firms and small research-based practices interrogating

workflow, exploring fabrication and mass customization and benefiting from multidisciplinary

9 BIM is “uses three-dimensional, real-time, dynamic building modeling software to increase productivity in building design and construction” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_Information_Modeling - accessed Oct. 28th, 2008. 10 Kristina Luce quoted in interview with the author on Serial Consign. Posted January 21, 2008. http://serialconsign.com/node/177- accessed Oct. 25, 2008. 11 Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pg. 141. 12 See Peter Eisenman’s contributions to the roundtable discussion in de Kerckhove, Derek. Peter Eisenman &. Antonino Saggio. The Charter of Zurich. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2003.

collaboration. However, the vast majority of practices response to the broader cultural shift

from the assembly line to the cubicle farm has merely been sidestep from the drafting board

over to the digital workstation without skipping a beat.

4. City Memory / City Model

As a discipline, architecture is fundamentally invested in the representation of urban

space, a collective activity that could be described as “city modeling”. Over history these

representations have been communicated through numerous media including technical

drawing, painting, maquette, collage, diagram, CGI and time-based visualization, making the

architect a “jack of all trades” when it comes to visual communication. This flexibility

considered, it is the act of drawing a line that is most fundamental to architecture. When

considered poetically, what is the city but the result of an untold number of drawings?

Constrained by ordinance, zoning and the demands of clients, architects are engaged in a

discipline-wide collaboration to draw and redraw urban space - construction lines prefigure

cranes and scaffolding. This considered, it would be wise to attune ourselves to the notion of

the city as an archive.

Archives are based on the passage of time, as their very existence is predicated on

the temporal disconnect between the contents they protect and organize and the outside

world. The Italian architect and urban scholar Aldo Rossi (1931-1997) wrote The

Architecture of the City, a treatise aimed at exploring the nuanced relationship between the

practice of architecture and urban context. In this text Rossi broadly considers the city as a

public realm and expansive text which has yielded many “historical artifacts” – buildings,

vernacular styles, spaces and idiosyncrasies. Published in 1966, the text was a serious

consideration of the role of history in urban space which starkly contrasted the reigning

Modernist design ideology of the time. Rossi’s writing about the city drips with nostalgia and

he identifies the “soul” of urban space as resulting from the city’s aptitude for codifying

history:

One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory it is

associated with objects and places. The city is the locus of the collective memory. This

relationship between the locus and the citizenry then becomes the city’s predominant

image, both of architecture and of landscape, and as certain artifacts become part of its

memory, new ones emerge. In this entirely positive sense great ideas flow through the

history of the city and give shape to it13

This notion of urban space as “flow” is a theme Rossi returns to repeatedly with his

suggestions that citizens and designers need to act as intermediaries between the city and

13 Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City. New York City: Opposition Books, 1982. Pg. 130.

the forces acting on it “in order to recognize the modes of its transformation”.14 Rossi also

addresses a “deep structure” of urban organization, composed of key characteristics that can

be read throughout the system.15 His assessment of architecture is useful to this discussion

because it describes urban form as emergent, resulting from incremental developments

occurring over time and yielding in an immersive cultural repository – the city as a living

archive. While there is an undeniable nobility to Rossi’s perception of “urban time” his

depiction of temporality is perhaps at odds with the pulse of 21st century cities. Using Rossi

as a foil, how would one even begin to address the duration of a “New York Minute” let alone

a so-called “instant city” like Shenzhen, China? Has the aforementioned networking that

characterizes contemporary knowledge culture ushered in a new understanding of time in

the city? Another perspective on urban time and archiving worth acknowledging is that of

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), specifically his unfinished meta-text The Arcades Project.

Figure 6: Detail of Index to The Arcades Project

Walter Benjamin is noted for his many contributions to cultural studies and aesthetic

theory, but one of the most enduring legacies that surrounds his scholarship is The Arcades

Project on the history of Paris, which he worked on from 1927 through his death (the text

was published posthumously). Benjamin was prescient in his attention to, and decryption of

the ephemera of everyday life, he has been described as a writer who “took seriously the

debris of mass culture as a source of philosophical truth.”16 A historical text, The Arcades

Project excavated the history of Paris during a time characterized by the onset and

propagation of Modernist thinking. The project places a particular emphasis on the

experience of street life, moving through and seeing the city and is written as if to provide a

14 Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City. New York City: Opposition Books, 1982. Pg. 139. 15 Ibid. Pg. 128. 16 Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991. Pg. ix.

taxonomy of urban experience. A sampling of the “taxonomy classes” in Benjamin’s text

include fashion, catacombs, the flâneur, the streets, urban renewal, etc. Each of these “tags”

contained itemized bibliographic references, quotes and personal commentary by Benjamin

yielding a non-linear scholarship that has more in common with a database then a

philosophical or historical treatise. Walter Benjamin described his index card-based topical

writing system as an act of architectural construction - indicative of “the conquest of three

dimensional writing”.17

The combined research trajectories of The Arcades Project rendered Paris with

bittersweet affection - a city in the midst of transition where one epoch was gradually

disintegrating into the momentum of a new age. Benjamin provides a useful foil to Rossi;

while his outlook is equally romantic he provides a toolkit and methodology for examining

some of the finer details of urban experience. His work also draws attention to the potentially

enlightening nature of carefully observed ephemeral events that occur in urban space and

position “urban metadata” as the substance of cultural research.

To be clear, this portion of the discussion was not intended to paint a picture of the

city as a self-commemorating mausoleum but instead to highlight some relevant models for

considering time and history in urban space. Given the anecdote that opened this foray,

which depicted the cityscape as emerging from an accumulation of drawings, it is important to

acknowledge that diagrammatic readings of the city are very much shaped by time. At exactly

what resolution of time are you considering urban space? Seconds? Minutes? Centuries?

5. Database Architecture

We have considered the illusionary nature of CGI, architecture as mechanical

engineering, the relationship between digital technologies and architectural representation

and the importance of time in the city. These separate strands of research can be woven

together to position urban informatics as a logical arena in which architects can apply their

representational expertise. Over the last decade architects have gone to great lengths to

position themselves as designers of not only structures, but information. While much of this

cultural research is hermetic and founded on the application of an “informational veneer”18 to

the practice of architecture, what we have witnessed with the success of multidisciplinary

research labs such as Rem Koolhaas’ AMO is a genuine effort to expand the territory

traversed by practitioners.

17 Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Volume I: 1927-1934. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (ed). Cambridge: Bellknap Press of Harvard, 1996. Pg. 456. 18 For a brilliant reading on contemporary information aesthetics see “Information Is Style” in the aforementioned The Laws of Cool by Alan Liu. Although explicitly about web culture this argument can easily be mapped onto broader visual communication.

Figure 7 (left): MVRDV / METACITY/DATATOWN / 1998-99 Figure 8 (right): Asymptote / 3DTF / 1998

An early precedent of “information architecture” produced within architectural

practice is METACITY/DATATOWN, a 1998-1999 video installation and publication

designed by the Rotterdam-based MVRDV. This project is founded in the notion of an

expansive, statistics-based study of urbanism as reconfigured by globalization and

connectivity. In the statement for the project MVRDV positioned the work as follows:

How to study this Metacity? Initially, one can describe its vastness and explore its contents

perhaps only by numbers or data. Its web of possibilities – both economical and spatial –

seem so complex that statistical techniques seem the only way to grasp its processes. By

selecting or connecting data according to hypothetical prescriptions, a world of numbers

turns into diagrams. These diagrams work as emblems for operations, agendas, tasks.19

MVRDV used the aforementioned statistical analysis of key global cities as the basis to

propose Datatown, a speculative utopian city without the burden of topography, race,

ideology and representation.20 Broadly considered, this project could be considered a dot-

com reconsideration of the Modernist project, with the emphasis being placed squarely on

information as infrastructure rather than highways and roadways.

Of the same era, Asymptote Architecture’s 1998 project 3-D Trading Floor (3DTF)

provided a real-time model of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). 3DTF represented a

relatively logical intersection of optimism about the web economy, firmly established traditions

of financial visualization and widespread curiosity about virtual environments in the 1990s.

Asymptote also developed a companion project to this visualization, Advanced Trading Floor,

a dynamic space which housed and showcased 3DTF by way of an expansive wall of LCD

19 MVRDV. METACITY/DATATOWN. Rotterdam: MVRDV/101 Publishers, 1999. Pg. 16. 20 Ibid. Pg. 58.

monitors. Described as “almost a tangible verification of the real and virtual worlds”21, the

project was prescient for applying an architectural approach to visualization and considering

how architecture could function as an interface. However, acknowledging the bias of

hindsight, this schism between “datascape” and “control centre” appears rather awkward a

decade later.

It is important to be cognizant of the ambition expressed in projects like

METACITY/DATATOWN and 3DTF as they embody a desire to transpose architectural

strategies into the realm of information design. The flow of influence between information

technology and architecture is not one way; recent trends such as media façades, kinetic and

responsive elements and self-monitoring infrastructure speaks to a growing desire to situate

emerging developments in information technology as part of the architectural project.

Another poignant reference to information architecture comes by way of Lev Manovich’s

identification of the database (a “viewable, navigable and searchable” collection) as the

“symbolic form” of contemporary culture. In making this assertion Manovich identifies the

spatial quality of the database by contrasting it to an architectural plan and highlights the fact

that the database now represents a perceptual blueprint much like perspective projection did

in the Renaissance.22 The specificity of Manovich’s language is very helpful in framing urban

information visualization as a potential extension of architecture. In referencing architectural

representation techniques when schematizing the database as a key cultural paradigm

Manovich implies a direct interrelationship between these modes of organization. If the

database can be read in relation to drawings and the city has been schematized as a system

of drawings, where exactly does that position the draftsman in the 21st century?

21 Culled from the press release for 3DTF and the Advanced Trading Floor at http://www.floornature.com/articoli/articolo.php?id=650&sez=3&tit=Asymptote-Architecture,-VIRTUAL-TRADING-FLOOR 22 Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. Pg. 219.

Figure 9: Adrian Holovaty / Everyblock / 2007

6. City of Nodes

Having drawn attention to the middle ground between architecture and information

design it would be wise to further parse the notion of the city as a database. In considering

the previous discussion on the idea of the “city as history” they key factor to be considered is

time. Rossi read the procession of urban history as occurring at an almost glacial rate and

while that patina is a tangible presence in the city, Benjamin’s index of the ephemeral

provides designers with a more useful perspective when considering urban space in light of

distributed, mobile computing. The intersection of the World Wide Web with geographic

information has been described as:

“…an interconnected, online digital network of discoverable geospatial documents,

databases, and services. It includes a range of application domains from global weather and

geological sensors to family travel blogs, public transit information, and friend trackers.”23

This depiction of the web as an emerging geospatial archive problematizes the notion that

architecture, information technology and geography as separate enterprises. Cast in this light

the web, urban space and economies of exchange become a complex assemblage, the

comprehension of which requires perspective from multiple disciplines. Architects need to

admit that the materiality of urban fabric is no longer limited to concrete and steel but also

includes bandwidth, code and connectivity - not just as infrastructure to be managed but tools

to be manipulated. The flow of the contemporary city is characterized by timestamped events,

granular locations and interlinked narratives.

23 Turner, Andrew. Brady Forrest. Where 2.0: The State of the Geospatial Web. O’Reilly Radar, 2008. Pg. 4.

Figure 10 (left): Dan Hill / Urban Informatics Strategy Diagram / 2008 Figure 11 (right): Johann Heinrich Lambert / Modified Perspectograph / 1752

As pointed out earlier, Vitruvius described the responsibilities of the architect as

extending into the realm of mechanical engineering. He contextualized architects as not just

designers but civic technicians, capable of engineering solutions for any number of urban

scenarios. While machine-making has (largely) fallen by the wayside within architecture

instrumental thinking has not. Winy Mass of the aforementioned MVRDV schematizes

contemporary architecture as having recently shifted into the development of “devices”,

objects that:

...can combine top-down, large-scale issues with bottom-up, individualized input: a

combination of analyses with proposals. Consequently, when architecture is a device, its

products can be understood as “instruments” of general observations, as “messengers of

urban transactions and criticism”.24

The term “instruments of general observation” suggests a certain abstraction implying these

“devices” are not machines in the Vitruvian sense, rather diagrammatic machines. Over the

last few decades architects have rigorously explored the possibilities of diagrammatic thinking

in design to prototype form, resolve program and conduct cultural research. The irony about

much of this work is that it either is either discarded, dissolves into the formal expression of

the project or worse yet, becomes “design publication marginalia”.

Figure 10 is a diagram25 of a feedback loop illustrating the flow of influence between

urban space and urban perception. Traditional conceptions of architecture position the

discipline as only really being concerned with “city model” and that connection is tentative

(based on reading the city as resulting from architectural drawings). Given the investment in

diagrammatic thinking within architecture why not foreground this work? Why not identify

urban information visualization as an endgame of diagrammatic thinking and acknowledge that

24 Mass, Winy. “Architecture is a device” in KM3: Excursions on Capacities. Barcelona: ACTAR, 2005. Pg. 45. 25 Diagram by Dan Hill. Originally posted at http://cityofsound.com/blog/2008/08/two-or-three-re.html– accessed Oct. 27, 2008.

it could become a key vehicle for inquiry and research within architecture? In many ways the

visualization-as-diagram embodies Winy Mass’ notion of the architectural device, an

“instrument of general observation” as well as the Vitruvian notion of urban “mechanical

engineering”.

Given the representational toolkit used to schematize, analyze and communicate

building design it only follows that these graphic strategies could be fruitfully applied in the

visualization of not just structure and urban space, but experience.

Figure 12 (left): Louis I. Kahn / Traffic Study Project (detail) / 1953 Figure 13 (right): Burak Arikan / MYPOCKET / 2008

This reading of architectural representation and urban information visualization in

relation to one another admittedly relies on a rather narrow and idealized vision of

architecture. However, in looking beyond the constraints of revenue streams and standard

modes of practice within the discipline there is undoubtedly an incredible opportunity at hand

with urban informatics. There have been numerous gestures towards time-based

representation systems in the past, Louis I. Kahn’s prescient Philadelphia Traffic Study

Project (Figure 12) from 1953 broke the urban grid down into streams of traffic. Kahn

contextualized this work as a query into what spaces, activities and buildings formed the

“creative center of human communication”.26 This type of a “diagrammatic city” has been

evident in countless other master-planning exercises and utopian visions for the city and is

also lurking in the subtext of new media work like Burak Arikan’s MYPOCKET (Figure 13), an

elaborate exercise in self-surveillance.

Given the rapid development of techniques for geo-locating, classifying and mobilizing

data in urban space architects should seriously consider the communicative possibilities of

these new tools. They can provide an opportunity for the discipline to invite citizens into the

“space” of their graphic communication, and have these representations become

26 Kahn quoted on the MOMA Architectural Drawing online archives page for Philadelphia Traffic Study Project. http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A2964&page_number=1&template_id=1&sort_order=1 - accessed Oct. 27, 2008

participatory forums for discourse, infrastructure and policy development. These

visualizations and interfaces could be considered urban maps for “analysis, discovery, and

design”.27 Expanded notions of cartography aside, urban information visualization speaks to

some of the purest convictions within architectural design – that the perception of urban

possibility is the true site of construction.

27 Varnelis, Kazy and Leah Meisterlin. “The invisible city: Design in the age of intelligent maps” on Adobe Think Tank. Posted July 15, 2008. http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/thinktank/tt_varnelis.html - accessed Oct. 23, 2008.

7. Bibliography

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