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EDITORS

CHRISTINA CAPETILLOANNE ELISABETH TOFT

Questions of Representations in Architecture

Editors: Christina Capetillo and Anne Elisabeth Toft

Graphic Design: Daugbjerg + Lassen

Translation: Thomas Falkenberg Svendsen and Kimi Lum

Copy-editing: Dawn Michelle d’Atri and Amy Klement

Printing: Narayana Press, Gylling

Published by: Arkitektskolens Forlag, Aarhus 2015.

© 2015 Arkitektskolens Forlag, authors, architects, artists, photographers and publishers.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior

permission in writing from the publishers.

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyrights. For some contributions it has not been

possible to identify the legitimate copyright holder or we have been unable to obtain an answer from the copyrigh

holder. If we have violated any copyrights, this has not been our intention, and we will honour any justified claims.

Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. Errors found, please contact: [email protected].

ISBN: 87-90979-43-5

The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation

ARKITEKTSKOLEN AARHUS

QUESTIONS OF REPRESENTATIONS IN ARCHITECTURE

Editors

Christina Capetillo

Anne Elisabeth Toft

FOREWORD/ 7

INTRODUCTION/ 8

Anne Elisabeth Toft and Christina Capetillo

PROMENADE ARCHITECTURALE/ 17

Victor Burgin

ARCHITECTURE AND THE UNCINEMATIC/ 28

Victor Burgin

CUT AND COLLISION: RAIMUND ABRAHAM AND THE DRAWING OF

IMAGINARY ARCHITECTURE/ 46

Martin Søberg

SIGNS IN CIRCULATION: ON OMA’S IMAGE POLITICS/ 58

Anne Elisabeth Toft

AMID.CERO9

ON THE REPRESENTATION OF ARCHITECTURE/ 70

Efrén Gª Grinda and Cristina Díaz Moreno

in Conversation with Anne Elisabeth Toft and Christina Capetillo

SURFACE TENSION: PETER ZUMTUR AND PHOTOGRAPHY/ 84

Philip Ursprung

BLURRED VISIONS: ARCHITECTURES OF SURVEILLANCE FROM

PHILIP JOHNSON AND MIES VAN DER ROHE TO SANAA/ 96

Beatriz Colomina

ATELIER BOW-WOW

ON THE REPRESENTATION OF BEHAVIOROLOGY/ 110

Yoshiharu Tsukamoto


A CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPE/ 127

Christina Capetillo

THE COMPOSITE: ON THE FORMATION OF LANDSCAPE

THROUGH IMAGES/ 148

Christina Capetillo

SLA ARCHITECTS

ON THE REPRESENTATION OF LANDSCAPE/ 152

Stig Lennart Andersson


WORKS/ 167

Walter Niedermayr

IMAGES AND THOUGHTS ON MAKING SPACE VISIBLE/ 188

Walter Niedermayr

PHOTOGRAPHIC SPACE – PHOTOGRAPHIC SCALES/ 192

Dag Petersson

CONTRIBUTORS/ 208

CAPTIONS AND CREDITS/ 212

CONTENTS

18 19

The pilotis present a shallow box

pierced in a strip along the sides

and open to the sky where the solarium walls unwind.

Extensions of the pilotis form a peristyle for the terrace,

from which a figure gazes as if looking out to sea.

98 99

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

says during the same interview: “Architecture is how you enclose space. That’s why I hate

photographs, TV and motion pictures.”7

Television, too, arrived in the United States at mid-century. Long part of science-fiction fan-

tasies of the future, television was featured at its first public demonstration in 1927, prompt-

ing Buckminster Fuller to state that his Dymaxion House, designed the same year, was

organised around a TV communication centre. The Dymaxion House was equipped with

the latest media technology (telephone, radio, television, phonograph, Dictaphone, loud-

speakers, microphone, and so on), but some of these technologies barely existed in 1927.

Only in the late 1940s and 1950s was television widely introduced to the American public.

DuMont and RCA offered their first sets to the public in 1946, and between 1948 and 1955

nearly two-thirds of American families purchased a television set.8 In 1950 the most famous

of mass-produced suburbs, Levittown in Long Island, offered a television set built into the

wall of its prefabricated Cape Cod house. Television had become part of the architecture of

the American house.

Johnson’s Glass House, built at the time when most Americans owned a television, avoided

all media technology. There was not a TV set in sight in any of Johnson’s houses, including

the Hodgson House of 1951, whose client was a CBS executive. In one TV interview, John-

son insisted that the Glass House has “no television, no telephone, no gramophone, … no

noise of any kind”.9 No media in a house designed for the media.

And yet the Glass House itself was operating as a TV set, but not in the obvious sense of

the views that the house makes possible. If the post-war suburban house operated as a

television set, broadcasting family life through the picture window, Johnson’s Glass House

closed itself to the outside, much more radically than a stone house could, to become a TV

broadcasting studio.

The model was picked up later by authorities on the American house like Martha Stewart,

who not only uses her own houses as a broadcast studio but owns a country estate in

Westport, Connecticut, with a series of model houses, in the same way that Johnson built

a series of model structures on his estate over the years, each of which became an oppor-

tunity for broadcast. Each time the Glass House seemed to run out of steam, Johnson built

a new pavilion, one that renewed the discussion of both the earlier house and of himself.

“I keep building around the place because I get itchy,” he said. “Nobody asks me to build

funny things, so I do them myself as sort of tests. Clients always want something definite

with toilets and other unnecessary gadgets but I can always build what I like for myself. So

about every five or six years I build another funny thing.”10

The Glass House was built first, in 1949; the brick guesthouse, also of 1949, was remod-

elled in 1953, the pavilion in the lake added in 1962, and “the swimming pool, which is an

essential part of the composition, wasn’t built until 1963. In 1965, I had some pictures I

7 Ibid.

8 Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the

Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1992).

9 In fact, there was a telephone in the Glass House

and a television set in the guesthouse, as many

people recalled.

10 Bernier, “Fons et Origo”, p. 23.

184 185

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