Jack isles

The Eyes of The City

Jack Isles HTS 3 Essay 2

The Eyes of The City

Introduction

Since the conception of visual representation, architecture has been dictated by methodologies of perception. The history of both measurement and representation are interwoven into the fabric of space through the didactic influence of our tools and technologies, constricting our capacity to image and realise physical form. Whilst this may come as little to no surprise upon reflection of stylistic developments in design, concurrent with advancements in technology, fabrication and representation. The contemporary tools through which we imagine emergent forms of urbanity have radically repositioned the role of the architect as one estranged from the operational processes behind our own spatial configuration. The gaze of the city has become lost in the digitalised representations of its own reflection, with the spatial logic of the urban and its hinterland being driven by the tools through which we measure and perceive our own resource ecologies. As vast and growing swathes of urbanism demand a growth in consumption of both natural and synthesised resources alike, the extents of the city have grown in their importance. These networks of logistics, labour and inhabitation instrumental in the extraction of stone, oil and mineral, central to the feasibility of urban growth are nor more than ever driven by the mediums through which the landscape is read, systemizing their spatial logic and potential profitability.

Through the lens of recourse extraction, a spatial logic to contemporary urbanism is revealed, one contingent not on any architectural or ‘design’ logic as it has been historically understood, yet on the capacities of our technologies through which we imagine the unknown. This essay shall utilize the realm of resource extraction as a means of uncovering not only emergent forms and scales of urbanity yet the technological tools which define their manifestation. Tools which, whilst utilized for very clear spatial outcomes, bare little presence within architectural discourse confounding the alienation of conscious architectural critique in their practice. Devoid of any input or further, critical knowledge of the mechanisms and techniques central to landscape analysis architects are stripped of any agency within an expanding urbanity unlike any other before it. Whilst not endeavouring to provide any singular solution to an otherwise multifaceted issue, this essay will aim to highlight the means through which lack of critical knowledge towards a given tool can result in a subservient relationship. One in which the user or in this case the architect is stripped of any viable agency, within a practice so central to the production of contemporary space.

The Eye That Blinds Us

Contemporary advancements in spatial representations have seen the rise of automation dominate the realm of imagination. However, predating the proliferation of digitalised innovation, the development of perceptional methodologies have dictated the realm of architecture, art and design alike. Theorists such as Juhani Pallasmaa sight shifts in history as early as that from the spoken towards the written mode as an operative agent in the construction our contemporary methods of design. Highlighting the new-found importance on visual communication through writing as the precursor for a sensory hierarchy which dominates contemporary practice. One in which the hegemony of the eye[1] takes precedence over all others (taste, smell, hearing, touch). Writing in this sense as Pallasmaa understood it was a technology of perception and visual communication, of which its limits, mediums and logic bore a direct and profound influence on our representation and design of space. Yet in more recent history, notable shifts in visual representation continued to reconfigure our understanding and construction of the physical in ways that would set in motion a chain of events which would subsequently shape our planet.

The perspectival revolution during the Renaissance was perhaps the foremost radical shift in the way architecture was imagined and represented. Christian Ganshirt describes perspective as one of the key discoveries of the modern age, formulating “generally valid, empirically sound rules that allowed anyone applying them to depict three dimensional situations.” Ganshirt further writes “seeing in perspective became the basis of a completely new understanding of space and landscape that shaped the art,

architecture and science of subsequent centuries” [2]. Whilst not only irrevocably reforming movements in art and design, the more significant aspect of this representational revolution was in that perspective was now considered to be a scientific tool, and one that can be ‘objectively’ deployed. Artistic representation had thus given way to science, with a systematic logic set in use to visualise any given spatial potentiality. The perception of perspectival representation as a scientifically constructed tool possible of representing ‘reality’ gave was to a ubiquitous interest in the capacity for technological advancements to hone our imagination of the real. Architecture as discipline and its physical manifestation became dependant on a visual system of observation, constructed through the tools of its own representation.

Subsequent developments in both analogue and digital technologies of observation formed elemental platforms through which we came to not only design but perceive the world. Further, technological developments came to afford the world new means through which design could shape and sculpt social attitudes towards humanity. A powerful example of this is extensively illustrated through the social implications bought about through the application of the camera. In Denis Cosgrove’s Apollo’s Eye, Cosgrove writes about the series of NASA’s first photographs that captured the entirety of the earth floating in the vast universe, taken from Apollo 8 in 1968 (Earthrise) and Apollo 17 in 1972 (Blue Marble). These images contributed to a significantly “altered image of the earth.” Further engendering a cosmopolitan worldview that was without “all those difference and nationalistic traits” [3]. The social and spatial repercussions of such images upon the adoption of globalized architectural systems and networks are profound.

Exemplifying the agency of representation not only in the visualisation and construction of physical space yet to the conception of the very social agendas which underpin our spatial fabric.

Whilst the agency of various revolutions in representation are both innumerable and read through a myriad of scales, their collective history inescapably expounds the questions; What are the contemporary tools through which we imagine our occupation of the lithosphere? And how are they influencing our spatial organisation? The answers to which are many in their plurality. With a reductive assertion towards the dominance of any single given technology potentially unproductive and undescriptive of the multifaceted approach with which we conceive and imagine space.

However, within emergent forms of urbanity there are those in which the role of the architect has become nonapparent or at best subordinate to the didactic influence of our tools of measurement and observation. With the influence of new developments in technologies on spatial practice perhaps best articulated in the logistical networks through which the circulation and extraction of resource commodities are made. As the growing dependence on resource ecologies becomes ever more central to the expanse of the city, the eyes through which we imagine the hinterland and its architecture have become ever more integral to the future of urban growth.

Geographies of Geology

The unquenchable lust for the extraction of resources has both been driven and a driver of urban expansion since its initial conception. With the spatial organization of our resource dependant urban models being largely explored through the tools and cartographic lexicon of geography. The earth’s hidden secrets and commodities throughout history were thus read through the undulation of its surface. With towns and cities being swept across the map into vast dunes of urbanity, resting in the cradle of a resource abundant ecology. The charter for these forces not only traced the lines, troths and bends in the earth’s surface yet more so the cartographic means through which they were represented. The representation of territory thus begun to engender its own creation, and our tools of measurement and observation in geography begun to affect the logic of our own occupation. Hashim Sarkis in his essay The World According to Architecture defines the pedagogical effect of geography and geometries as thus “the history of geography is strongly linked to the history of discovery and colonization. The instruments for the discovery of territory were extended into its documentation and then, in turn, into its appropriation and transformation.” [4] Expounding the fact that it has not simply been the earth’s surface that determinates its occupation, but the means through which we systemise its own reflection.

However today the physical markers in space to which geographic cartographies clung, charting the flow and course of resources have been rapidly replaced in favour of digitalised representations, often imperceptible to the human eye.

The perception of geology, a practice central to the extraction of stone and numerous minerals, carving the bedrock of our constructed environment is one beset by developments in technological measurement. Whilst the presence of

water bodies, rock samples at the earth’s surface and numerous other methodologies carried out in part by observations of the human eye traditionally marked the science of the geological measure. Today their successors have been replaced for arguably far more accurate means in measurement and observation, abstracted from any human scale of perception giving way to new scopes of projection in the estimation of geological structures and their potentially lucrative components. The repercussions of such radically repositioning the role of the geologist, inhabitant and designer as one subordinate to the speculative landscapes created through our specialized digitalized measurements and projections.

Perhaps most concurrent with advancements in measurement and spatial representation across both geology and numerous disciplines is the Point Cloud. Point Cloud technology has universally changed the way we perceive geology. Capable of rapidly merging different scales of information Point Cloud technology can “develop large-scale landscape projects while maintaining a positive feedback loop that remains true to GPS coordinates.” [5] Devices ranging from satellite imaging apparatus to subterranean observational probes measure a large number of points on a geological structures surface and features, producing a point cloud as a data file. The point cloud represents the set of points that the device has measured in space and provides to date the most accurate representation of hypothetical geological structures, hidden from any possible level of human perception. The precision and detail of these digital technologies have consequently made them the primary agent in geological exploration. However what is most important to note in the proliferation of the point cloud as an observational and representational technique is perhaps not its unique capacity to visualize hypothesis upon geological matter, but the agency these representational landscapes have upon the practice of spatial design.

Urban networks surrounding recourse extraction have grown to an unprecedented scale, in accordance with an expediential growth in both population numbers and global resource demands. Cities, networks of accesses and egress and the infrastructure through which we move both people and inert matter have seen the rise of a new frontier in urban design, one cast in the shadow of our own point cloud technologies. These new urban models trace the fabric of our digital projections often without any form of conscious reflection, with architectural criticality instead automated into the construction of geological representations. A notion often neglected in architectural discourse, Christophe Girot, Chair of Landscape Architecture at Swiss institute ETH highlights the prevalence of Point Cloud technology in the fabrication of our contemporary architecture as thus; “In a field of work where 2D layering, projection, and zoning were the rule in the twentieth century, we have now entered an age where geo-referenced 3D visualizing has become the state of art and an absolute necessity of the dynamic modelling of large-scale projects.” [6] The urgency for an integration of these technologies into the architectural discipline is nowhere more apparent than across the vast mining landscapes of Australia’s Pilbara

The Perception of Depth

At its highest point Mt. Meharry (1,249m) surveys the low slung mining fields of Western Australia’s Pilbara, an area ₂ more than 500,000 km , roughly the size of Spain. Embedded within what is thought to be the world’s oldest geological member vast mineral deposits bend and curb beneath the adjacent earth. These fertile soils rich in Gold, Copper, Zinc and Nickel have become home to a network of rails, roads and cities that in 2013 generated a 20 per cent share of the global steel market. Dotted across the land, each city and its associated parts form an intricate mechanism of logistical distribution, instrumental in its own territorial division. However its spatial configuration is not only determined “by new industrial forms based on global supply chains” [7], but the means through which we measure what lies beneath.

Large privatised mining outpost dominate the region and punctuate the landscape, mining ever deeper, continuously driven by the seemingly unending appetite of the global economy. These nodes of extraction form the nuclei of a complex network dedicated to its own service and continued maintenance. Cities such as Port Headland and Karatha, or “good earth” from the native language of the region, house the service industry dedicated to the productions of the mines. The domestic infrastructure used to house some 15,000 workers in Karratha alone, along with the logistical networks linking both the workers to the mines and the recreational outlets provided by the

municipality cast an image of modern urbanity inescapably in demand of critical reflection. The spatial logic, placement and configuration of these networks are conceived precisely in the reflection of the digital models through which we speculate upon them. With the placement of mines relative to prospective geological structures and the towns which service them positioned for optimum efficiency in their service.

Unlike other contemporary models of the city, the urban fabric of these networks of extraction are often temporary in nature, contingent on the flux and flow of the mines’ production. Within this void of permanence, architectural discourse has little input on the quality of these spaces, the domestic nature or volume of this emergent urbanity.

Each temporary camp or city, which house the miners, reflect the technological dynamism of the digital flows that define them. Shifts in market value based on readings of the earth thus dictate the volume of these temporal dwellings, determining the definition of the Pilbara’s population. However as cities of the region grow in both scale and size their capacity for the consolidation of new architectural potentialities are rarely discussed.

Whilst throughout the history of the urban, booms in localized resource discoveries has become a catalyst for the consolidation of contemporary cities, most notably the gold rush of California and the development of its cities during this poignant era. The new-found role of little known digitalised technologies within this process has come to engender a condition in which discussions on the potential future growth and investment of these outcrops are largely mitigated through the speculations of the digital. A process in which the role of the architect is seldom present. The institutionalized nature of contemporary forms of measurement and representation have thus succeeded in the alienation of architectural discourse from the practice of modern city making, begging the question what agency is left within the discipline at large, in a future driven by the digitalized eyes of our own imagination.

Conclusion

Australia’s Pilbara is a unique yet not unprecedented example of a spatial practice driven by the didactic influence of observational technologies. As resource extraction becomes ever more central to the growth of urbanity at large, it is imperative architectural practice reflects on the capacity of these conditions to consolidate an expand our urban fabric. More so now than ever, through an interrogation of the confounding elements which drive their conception.

In doing so reclaim agency for architecture in process so central to the expanse of the urban.

Throughout history architectural practice has been carved by its own representational techniques, and their counterparts in measurement and observation. A phenomenon being radically reshaped by the nature and practice of digital innovation. Today spatial design is no longer liberated through its capacity to visualise and image yet instead subservient to technological methodologies of which little are willing to critically discuss. Digitalized forms of observation have come to dictate the architecture of our imagination, one that defines that of our cities. We have become subservient bodies to the eye’s of technology, eyes that from behind we have become truly blind. In order to reclaim agency in the operative processes of spatial practice at all scales, the contemporary practice of architecture should not adhere to the dogma of its traditional strictures, alienating key factors in contemporary design as the marginalized remnants of irrelevant disciplines.

Bibliography

1.

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

2005, 11.

2.

Christian Gänshirt, Tools for Ideas: An Introduction to Architectural Design, Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2007, 163, 164.

3.

Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, 257-8.

4.

Hashim Sarkis, “The World According to Architecture: Beyond Cosmopolis”, in New Geographies: Scales of the Earth, Vol. 04. (2011), 107 5.

Christophe Girot, “Scales of Topology in Landscape Architecture”, in New Geographies: Scales of the Earth, Vol. 04. (2011), 161 6.

Christophe Girot, “Scales of Topology in Landscape Architecture”, in New Geographies: Scales of the Earth, Vol. 04. (2011), 156 7.

Charles Waldheim and Alan Berger, Logistical Landscapes. Landscape Journal vol. 7 University of Wisconsin Press 2008, 1.