Perspective as Logic: Positioning Film in Architecture (Routledge Research in Architecture) [1 ed.] 1032381892, 9781032381893

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsements
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Approaching the Observation: Theoretical Framework
Design Strategy: Hypotheses and Arguments
Process of Design Experiments: Drawings and Models
Structure of Book
Notes
References
1. Positioning the Screen: Logic of Perspective
Reality Effect and the Mirror Stage
Shock Effects and 3D Mapping
Virilio's Prediction
The Screen and the Fiction of Architecture's Symbolic (2D-3D)
Notes
References
2. Problematizing the Screen: Duality of Representation
Abscence and Illusion
Problematizing Architecture's Symbolic
Demonstration and Perspective Projection
Notes
References
3. Analysing the Screen: Vision and Mediation
Facsimile: Fiction and the Undecidability of Moving Images
Para-Site: Impossible View and Impossible Point of View
The Slow House: The Question of Mediation
Notes
References
4. Questioning the Screen: Architectural Limits of Representation
Peter Eisenman and the Rhetorical Figure
Brunelleschi and Eisenman
Michael Webb and Two Names for Infinity
Perspective as an Order Relation Between the Void (Ø) and Infinity (ω)
Notes
References
5. Demonstrating the Screen: Undoing the Showing
Logic of Perspective
Suture and Retroaction: Layered and Recursive House
Perspective as Logic
Note
References
Conclusion
Concluding Remarks and Further Research
References
Index

Citation preview

‘It took not a third party but a second party, Stefanos that is, to reveal to the first party, me, what this somewhat ridiculous project concerning the temple on the island is all about. Through his ability to explain, a rare skill and one to be awarded the highest respect, he has brought forth a literary tour de force.’ —Michael Webb, Architect, founding member of Archigram ‘This highly original book provides a deep perspective into seeing the screen as an ontologically unique element for the field of architecture. It provides a historically grounded, thought-provoking architectural logic of perspective that produces for the reader an intersectional (image) space unlike anything we have seen before.’ —Richard Koeck, Professor and Chair in Architecture and the Visual Arts at the University of Liverpool, UK ‘In this book of rare originality Roimpas develops a rich interpretation of how the screen has become a constitutive element of architecture. At home in the Renaissance as much as in contemporary art and philosophy, the author offers a captivating account of the screen’s architectural potential.’ —Maximilian Sternberg, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, UK

Perspective as Logic

Perspective as Logic offers an architectural examination of the filmic screen as an ontologically unique element in the discipline’s repertoire. The book determines the screen’s conditions of possibility by critically asking not what a screen means, but how it can mean anything of architectural significance. Based on this shift of enquiry towards the question of meaning, it introduces Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou in an unprecedented way to architecture—since they exemplify an analogous shift of perspective towards the question of the subject and the question of being accordingly. The book begins by positing perspective projection as being a logical mapping of space instead of a matter of sight (Alberti & Lacan). Secondly, it discusses the very nature of architecture’s view and relation to the topological notion of outside between immediacy and mediation (Diller and Scofidio, The Slow House). It examines the limitation of pictorial illusion and the productive negativity in the suspension of architecture’s signified equivalent to language’s production of undecidable propositions (Eisenman & Badiou). In addition, the book outlines the difference between the point of view and the vanishing point by introducing two different conceptions of infinity (Michael Webb, Temple Island). Finally, a series of design experiments playfully shows how the screen exemplifies architecture’s self-reflexive capacity where material and immaterial components are part of the spatial conception to which they refer and produce. This book will be particularly appealing to scholars of architectural theory, especially those interested in the domains of philosophy, psychoanalysis and the linguistic turn of architecture. Stefanos Roimpas (Athens, 1989) is an architect who recently completed his PhD thesis entitled Screen: The Intersectional Element of Architecture (2022) at the University of Cambridge with the supervision of Prof François Penz. His diploma project at École Spéciale d’Architecture-Paris (ESA) en­ titled The Lens City with the supervision of Sir Peter Cook was shortlisted for the RIBA Silver Medal (2013). He has previously worked for Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam and co-curated the Cyprus Pavilion, Anatomy of the Wallpaper, at the 14th Venice Biennale (2014).

Routledge Research in Architecture

The Routledge Research in Architecture series provides the reader with the latest scholarship in the field of architecture. The series publishes research from across the globe and covers areas as diverse as architectural history and theory, technology, digital architecture, structures, materials, details, design, mono­ graphs of architects, interior design and much more. By making these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series aims to promote quality architectural research. Exteriorless Architecture: Form, Space and Urbanities of Neoliberalism Stefano Corbo Transgressive Design Strategies for Utopian Cities: Theories, Methodologies and Cases in Architecture and Urbanism Bertug Ozarisoy, Hasim Altan Sverre Fehn and the City: Rethinking Architecture’s Urban Premises Stephen M. Anderson The Poetics of Arabian Sūqs: A Hermeneutic Reading of the Development of Arabian Sūqs from the Pre-Islamic Era to Present Jasmine Shahin Architectural Possibilities in the Work of Eisenman Michael Jasper Marcel Breuer: Shaping Architecture in the Post-War Era John Poros The City on Display: Architecture Festivals and the Urban Commons Joel Robinson The Philadelphia School and the Future of Architecture John Lobell Architecture and the Housing Question Edited by Can Bilsel and Juliana Maxim For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Research-in-Architecture/book-series/RRARCH

Perspective as Logic Positioning Film in Architecture

Stefanos Roimpas

Cover design credit: A Perspective of Perspectives by Author First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Stefanos Roimpas The right of Stefanos Roimpas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Names: Roimpas, Stefanos, 1989- author. Title: Perspective as logic : positioning film in architecture / Stefanos Roimpas. Description: Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge research in architecture | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022052602 (print) | LCCN 2022052603 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032381893 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032384252 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003344995 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture--Philosophy. | Perspective. | Projection. Classification: LCC NA2500 .R65 2023 (print) | LCC NA2500 (ebook) | DDC 720.1--dc23/eng/20221109 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022052602 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022052603 ISBN: 978-1-032-38189-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-38425-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-34499-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003344995 Typeset in Sabon by MPS Limited, Dehradun

For Afrodite

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction Approaching the Observation: Theoretical Framework 3 Design Strategy: Hypotheses and Arguments 9 Process of Design Experiments: Drawings and Models 12 Structure of Book 15

xi xii 1

1

Positioning the Screen: Logic of Perspective Reality Effect and the Mirror Stage 21 Shock Effects and 3D Mapping 34 Virilio’s Prediction 41 The Screen and the Fiction of Architecture’s Symbolic (2D–3D) 47

21

2

Problematizing the Screen: Duality of Representation Abscence and Illusion 57 Problematizing Architecture’s Symbolic 70 Demonstration and Perspective Projection 81

57

3

Analysing the Screen: Vision and Mediation Facsimile: Fiction and the Undecidability of Moving Images 91 Para-Site: Impossible View and Impossible Point of View 95 The Slow House: The Question of Mediation 101

90

x Contents 4

5

Questioning the Screen: Architectural Limits of Representation Peter Eisenman and the Rhetorical Figure 118 Brunelleschi and Eisenman 126 Michael Webb and Two Names for Infinity 137

117

Demonstrating the Screen: Undoing the Showing Logic of Perspective 162 Suture and Retroaction: Layered and Recursive House 169 Perspective as Logic 177

162

Conclusion

190

Index

197

Figures

1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13 5.14 5.15 5.16 5.17 5.18

Three-dimensional perspective Construction lines in 2D–3D Implied image of space Logic of anamorphosis Teatro Olimpico Behind the picture plane Para-site third intervention Mechanisms M1-4 Behind the view Henley Royal Regatta Landscape as a Dot Matrix Diagram of the Regatta postcard in plan and perspective Michael Webb, sketch I Michael Webb, sketch II Proportion and scale in an image Perspective and exchangeability of elements Library Model I Library Model II Multiplicities and inscription Planar progression in perspective The layered house Layers of the house Recursive house Recursive house entrance Recursive house living room Simplified graph of desire Recursive house second projection A perspective of perspectives (side view) A perspective of perspectives (top view) A perspective of perspectives (sketch) The space of perspective(s) Confusion of scales and visual meaning Visual observers An architecture that generates its own house

52 53 60 61 71 72 99 119 136 140 142 144 145 147 156 163 165 166 168 170 171 173 174 174 175 176 180 180 181 182 183 184 185

Acknowledgements

First of all, I would like to thank my parents, Villy and George, whose every decision and sacrifice allowed me to be here today. I am deeply indebted to my PhD supervisor, Prof François Penz, for the academic ethos, support and guidance he provided during all my years in Cambridge. He truly embraced the search for the unknown and created an environment that encouraged but also controlled my academic curiosity—out of which this book was born. Looking back, I am grateful to Sir Peter Cook and Stefan Lengen for revealing a new horizon of architectural questions during my diploma in Paris (2012) which sparked a flame that is still burning—stronger than ever. I am equally obliged to Matteo Cainer for being a point of support and sage advice all these years. My dear friends from Darwin College, Dr. Eliran Bar-El and Dr. Girish Nivarti, deserve a special note of gratitude for all our adventures and reading sessions throughout the years. Finally, I have no words when it comes to my partner Afrodite, who has been patient and supportive of my intellectual ventures in her own special way which constantly challenges and inspires me.

Introduction

The idea behind this book started from an observation. Namely, the filmic screen is being used within architectural space as one of its components; included as an element of its effective repertoire alongside walls, windows, or columns. While certain cases exemplifying such an encounter of surface and space will be discussed in the course of the book, a noteworthy example to set the tone is Diller and Scofidio’s project Facsimile (2004). The intervention consisted of a 5 × 8m wide screen that was slowly moving along the façade of the Moscone Convention Centre in San Francisco. The apparatus first scanned the building’s façade and then broadcasted a combination of live and pre-recorded footage to the street. It was aiming towards a temporal confusion between real and fictional images perceived within Moscone’s space. The screen, as the architects explain1 was conceived as an instrument of deception substituting impostors for actual building occupants and spaces. I suspect several readers might have already witnessed a similar or even amplified version of this condition via the technique of 3D mapping where the immaterial component of the moving image is an active part of the physical space they visited. For example, the installation Ateliers de Lumières which completely transforms through a multiplicity of projections the space of Fonderie du Chemin-Vert, a historic steel factory, has been a particularly popular attraction in Paris since its opening in 2018. Nonetheless, beyond the empirical encounters of the screen within architectural space there are only a few texts where its emergence as architectonic element has been observed and identified as such. These include Anne Friedberg (2006), Richard Charles Strong (2014), Richard Koeck (2013) and Bernard Tschumi (1994). Of course, many books have contributed to the vast literature that connects the fields of architecture and cinema for the most part utilizing one as a lens to discover new knowledge or reveal novel properties of the other—and vice versa. That is, either exploring the architectural significance of film (Penz, 2017; Lamster, 2000; Webber & Wilson, 2008; Konstantarakos, 2000) or investigating the cinematic importance of architecture (Eisenstein, Bois & Glenny, 1989; Forget, 2013; Cairns, 2013; Janser, 2001). In other words, beyond the epistemological and methodological differences that separate these accounts DOI: 10.4324/9781003344995-1

2 Introduction they all focus on the content of the screen. Rarely do we find a direct acknowledgement of the condition where the moving image is now a constituent of architecture’s space, while a systemic study of the screen’s properties, the spatial logic that is able to create and its potential architectural consequences simply does not exist. Yet, the few cases that consider it architecturally do so in a very promising manner. For instance, Tschumi suggested that ‘today, the two areas of investigation most likely to provide fertile discoveries’ are his famously disjointed terms of space and event—hence, the title of the book Architecture & Disjunction. Interestingly, Tschumi situates the screen at their intersection claiming that ‘the interchangeability of the two terms can be found in the new media technology that at once defines and activates space, such as electronic façades that are both enclosure and spectacle’ (1994: 22). Equally, Anne Friedberg claims that once the screen, which combines the ‘historical specificity of the cinema screen and the luminous moving images projected upon it’ is inserted in the space of architecture it forms a ‘transitional surface as light becomes a building element in a newly immaterial architecture’ (emphasis added, 2006: 151). Most importantly, there exists a singular instance—to the best of my knowledge—within the theoretical literature of the discipline where the use of the screen in architectural space has been predicted and accordingly speculated upon. Treating the screen as one of the architectonic elements has in fact been theorized for the first time thirty-nine years ago by French architect and philosopher Paul Virilio in The Lost Dimension2 (2012), where he anticipated an architectonic mutation referred to as the wall-screen. Specifically, Virilio envisioned that images on this new kind of wall would be increasingly assuming ‘the value of space, taking over all the dimensions in the projection room, and finally fusing and confusing architecture with projection technique—a fusion that had previously eluded the fresco’ (emphasis added, 2012: 123). The logical link between the projective geometry of perspectival paintings decorating the walls of Renaissance villas and the moving images on the surface of the wall-screen should not go unnoticed. It relieves the phenomenon of the screen from its reasonably assumed technological determination. Certainly, the observation I am presenting for investigation and the condition that Virilio predicted is possible due to a significant increase in resolution, frame rate, colour depth, or contrast ratio among many other technical intricacies. Formally, these are conditions of necessity which alone do not provide sufficiency for what is at stake in Virilio’s vision where architecture fuses with a projection technique. This confusion, or rather, perceptive ambivalence renders the architectural manifestation of the screen as an ontologically unique element which exists (in space) only as long as it appears; namely, through its image. In consequence, Virilio suggested that its architectural significance could be read as being isomorphic to the value of the two-dimensional fresco and the relation it sustained with the space it existed, alongside the implied or illusory space it represented. In hindsight,

Introduction 3 he assured future architects interested in the topic that the discipline already possessed—from the Renaissance onwards, which marks the codification of perspective projection (Panofsky, 1997: 27)—the logic to comprehend this new element. Specifically, what an object is and how it appears or representation and self-reference. It is no surprise that psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who rarely discussed architecture, defined the above-mentioned frescoes as the moment that our discipline was able to represent itself on the surface of its walls (Lacan, 1992: 136). Virilio’s hint was that these two modes of representation are bound by the same logic of appearance, where the relation of the human subject to the space of architecture goes through its image.

Approaching the Observation: Theoretical Framework I should be very clear about the status and epistemological limits of the object I am devising to study. Founded on theoretical, historical and empirical accounts, the phenomenon I refer to as screen meticulously avoids questions of technology, materiality and other particularities of stylistic or empirical determination. Any surface projecting, or reflecting, still or moving images, within or as part of an architectural object is considered a screen and examined as part of the whole that architecture’s process designates as its output. For example, the fact that certain screens use LCD panels backlight from CCFL lamps or OLED technology without backlight is not included as important in the scope of the book which focuses on the screen’s role and effect in architecture’s signifying process. This is a point I would like to highlight; conflating a characteristic of the screen for a property which would determine how it produces spatial meaning and define the potential architectural consequences it entails. In a similar manner to the multiplicity of empirical differences separating various screens like colour depth, refresh rate, contrast, response time or panel type consider the irregular rationalizations presented by Marcel Proust with regard to Françoise’s preparations for the daily meal served at Combray: A brill, because the fish woman had guaranteed its freshness; a turkey, because she had seen a beauty in the market at Roussainville-le-Pin; cardoons with marrow, because she had never done them for us in that way before; a roast leg of mutton, because the fresh air made one hungry and there would be plenty of time for it to ‘settle down’ in the seven hours before dinner; spinach by way of a change; apricots, because they were still hard to get … . (1982: 65) Film theorist Christian Metz provides an insightful way to read such distinctions. Specifically, he claims that these characteristics, which are essentially resources and means of expression are communicated in a vocabulary that indicates an analytic statement, while in reality they are a

4 Introduction plea, a claim for legitimacy and an appeal for recognition (1975: 24). Returning to Virilio’s frescoes, such surfaces contained numerous noteworthy characteristics of this kind like the chiaroscuro technique or specific colour pigments unique to the time period as the blue Azurite. However, the property that brought forward this (painted) surface as architecturally significant was the self-reflexive capacity—from mise-en-scène to mise en abyme—being a constituent of the production of its space. The gap separating the two is what grounds the book’s theoretical approach which focuses on the screen’s conditions of possibility towards meaning, or in Metz’s terminology, it examines the signifier of the screen, not its signified. In other words, this book will not investigate what this or that screen means, but rather how it can mean anything of architectural significance. Admittedly this is a challenging question. As a result, the succeeding chapters are organized around two lines of questioning. i ii

First, what are the unique properties of this new element of architecture’s repertoire? Secondly, based on such discerned properties; what is the architectural significance and consequences of the screen once operative within its space?

This direction of enquiry ensures that the following investigation is devoid of any subjective aspirations and speculative tone. It should also be noted that at this early stage I am not postulating any significance relating to the screen and solely expressing the academic curiosity of discovering whether this observation holds any with regard to the discipline of architecture. That is, I am simply asking if and why architecture should be interested in this new element which found its way in the three-dimensional space the latter proclaims as its primary object. If it does its exposition should be systematically constructed and demonstrated. As Whitehead wrote when criticizing the rigid methods of empiricism, the true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation. (1978: 5) In consequence, the book must first identify certain properties that relate to the screen. Secondly, it requires a framework to review if and under what circumstances the discipline of architecture has already regarded such properties as significant; essentially arriving at a renewed, but established, point of departure towards the examination of the screen. In the third place, it will demonstrate the logical inference between a discerned property, its significance and how it applies to the screen once inserted in the space of architecture.

Introduction 5 Let’s begin with the theoretical framework. As I have already hinted—and the next chapter will show in more detail—the few scholars that have already identified the screen as architectonic element agree that its most obvious function is the ability to lie, to create illusions by producing an image of space which can (sometimes) deceive the viewer. Interestingly, these accounts focused not so much on the viewer’s uncertainty but on the fact that s/he could be duped. In other words, attention was placed on the rules responsible for allowing such a perceptive confusion or production of spatial meaning in the first place. Formally, they focused on the relation between architectural object and subject, mediated by the object’s image as a representation for the latter. In consequence, an architectural consideration of the screen necessitates the examination of self-reference, reality effect and the tension between reality and fiction. As such, the book will examine these concepts through Jacques Lacan and especially his work on the symbolic and the logic of pas-tout. A logic which emerged in his psychoanalytic treatment, exemplified through the symbolic register of language and most importantly for the purpose of this book transposed on the scopic field of vision and perspective projection. A logic where the real (which together with the imaginary and symbolic registers constitute the subject’s reality) is portrayed as constitutive lack of the symbolic order. This ontological gap equals—among many other negative predicates—the impossibility of a complete universal language and an autonomous system of representation. In other words, it precludes a conception of language where all propositions can be separated as true or false, leaving no remainder for undecidable statements. In visual terms, it precludes a complete imaginary identification between an object and its representation, leaving no remainder for elements which cannot be represented—which escape the question of knowledge. It is a remarkable shift from Alberti’s conception of perspective where anamorphosis, the suspension of meaning, is considered as its rule instead of exception (Lacan, 2004: 86). This shift is crucial because it will allow the book to look beyond the screen’s signified or the phenomenon of illusion which can be categorized as true or false and focus on the logic for fabricating the appearance of space irrespective of the final output’s verisimilitude. In other words, it will allow us not to focus on what perspective is showing or representing but reveal something new about the rules that allow representation to take place. Moreover, it equips us with a fundamental postulate: architectural reality, with regard to the subject, is not represented but rather produced through the act of formalization or symbolization. The screen’s insertion in architecture, being a surface among objects, produces a tension between the immediate reality of space and the ‘reality effect’ of its projected images analogous to Lacan’s structural distinction of reality and the real—as resisting, or not yet symbolized. ‘Thus, the real differs from reality. This is not to say that it’s unknowable, but that there’s no question of knowing about it, only of demonstrating it’ (emphasis added, Lacan, 2001: 408).

6 Introduction In other words, we could say that the screen’s insertion in architecture’s space is not merely able to enrich the actual space to which it appears, but rather able to demonstrate the spatial conception from which we consider it and most importantly render amenable to knowledge aspects inherent in the logic for producing the space it belongs. It should be noted that Lacan presents a body of work whose depth is comparable to those of Plato or Aristotle (Milner, 1995: 20), which is divided in two forms, texts and seminars. All texts which were written by Lacan prior to 1966 with the intention of being published are collected in one volume entitled Écrits (2006) while later essays appear in the Scilicet journal. On the other hand, beyond the highly formalized published texts Lacan held twentysix annual seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1980, intended for a wider audience which are seemingly more accessible. From 1953 to 1963 they took place at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris and attracted several celebrities to attend like Claude Levi-Strauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty or Émile Benveniste (Žižek, 2007: 126). From 1964 to 1969 the seminars were held in the École Normale Supérieure and then thanks to Levi-Strauss, they were moved to the amphitheatre of the law school at the Panthéon (ibid). More than half of the seminars are available in French while ten have been published as English translations by W.W. Norton and Company and Polity; these are seminars I, II, III, VII, VIII, X, XI, XVII, XX, and XXIII. My first point of contact with Lacan’s ideas was in 2011 during a lecture by Prof. Chris Younès in École Spéciale d’Architecture (ESA-Paris), when I was a fourth-year architecture student at the time. Specifically, certain sessions from 1964 included in Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (2004), such as The split between the eye and the gaze, Anamorphosis, What is a picture? or The line and the light, were discussed since they provide crucial insights on perspective projection and are some of the rare instances that Lacan directly engaged with architecture and its self-reflexive capacity. In hindsight Seminar XI is the starting point which grounds this study’s use of Lacan in relation to the screen’s mode of appearance and the point that initiated a constant back and forth between his seminars and written texts. As Slavoj Žižek explains the impression that the seminars are clearer and more transparent than the écrits is deeply misleading: they often oscillate, experiment with different approaches. The proper way is to read a seminar and then go on to read the corresponding écrit so as to ‘get the point’ of the seminar. (2007: 129) During this process of studying Lacan, I would like to highlight the works of Alain Badiou (1969; 2018), Slavoj Žižek (2007; 2008; 2014), JeanClaude Milner (1995), Bruce Fink (1997), Ed Pluth (2007), Alenka Zupančič (2017) and Dylan Evans (1996) have been indispensable tools and secondary sources, which will be encountered in the following chapters.

Introduction 7 Finally, with Lacan being the theoretical foundation of the book, I should plainly clarify this choice but also explain why other frameworks or theoretical tools have been rejected, instead of overlooked. In other words, why Lacan and not something else? As previously mentioned, the need for such a framework emerged only after the analysis of existing accounts which deemed necessary to examine architecture’s signifying process, alongside the relation of two and three dimensions in the production of meaning and the self-referential potential of this newly observed element. Such notions or propositions like elements which signify nothing, the possibility of architecture’s language being autonomous or the relation a form sustains with regard to truth and knowledge are only encountered but not wholly accounted for within architecture’s corpus dealing with the question of meaning. For the most part this literature concerns the study of architectural elements as signs of language. Namely, the field of semiotics founded upon the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1986), Charles Peirce (1985) and subsequently expanded by other semioticians (Morris, 1971; Mukařovský, 1978; Jacobson & Halle, 2002; Barthes, 1977). Within architecture the semiotic endeavour originated mainly in Italy (Eco, 1972, 1976; Tafuri, 1980) and reached its climax in the years 1979 and 1980 with five major publications in English (Bonta, 1979; Preziosi, 1979a, 1979b; Broadbent, Bunt & Jencks, 1980; Krampen, 2011) Semiotics and the study of architectural signs would be an effective framework if the book aimed to illustrate the meaning of a screen when used in certain architectural moments—or formally searching for the signified of the screen. Yet, when enquiring how it can mean or what is the logic that allows it to produce spatial meaning it proves to be inadequate. While this limitation will be discussed in chapter 2, especially regarding Lacan’s reversal of Saussure’s conception of a sign, it should briefly be outlined. Semiotics consider the sign as representing something for someone and language as a communication device operating at the service of the object it refers to (Broadbent, 1977). In consequence, questions like ‘what is the nature of this something?’ and ‘who is this someone?’ are either presupposed or overlooked. Semiotics take the sign as object, and language as a communication mechanism that draws correspondences between signs (words, utterances, drawings, or elements of architecture) and objects of external reality or pre-agreed conventions. As a result, language is treated as a closed system, where meaning is either achieved or not and a statement is either true of false. In other words, such a framework will never equip us with an understanding of what is the nature of this something, it will only illustrate what it does or what it represents. Gilbert Chaitin in his essay Lacan and Semiosis outlines how Lacan’s opposition to traditional semiotics follows two convergent paths: the one leads through the rejection of the view that language can be used as a mere tool in the process of communication; the other detours

8 Introduction around the dead end of the pursuit of a philosophical metalanguage which would explain the truth of language, the meaning of meaning. (1988: 37) Another framework which could admittedly be considered appropriate for the study of the screen once inserted in the space of architecture is the one of phenomenology; introduced in the discipline by authors like Juhani Pallasmaa (2009, 2011, 2012), Alberto Pérez-Gómez (2000) and Christian Norberg-Schulz (1984). Indeed, if the question at stake was to portray the essence of the intersectional space produced by the screen, or to outline the multi-sensorial experience of the human subject within its limits, a process of phenomenological reduction resulting in the ‘screeness’ of the screen would be appropriate. Equally, if the book adopted a teleological narrative, aiming to outline how certain affects can be achieved through the screen in the space of architecture, phenomenology would be an indispensable tool. However, since the book aspires to study how it can mean, how it can contribute to architecture’s production of space that the screen is now a constituent of, it should be noted that phenomenology simply does not deal with the logic of the screen’s appearance (as image) within architecture’s space—which the book will later demonstrate as logic for producing space. Additionally, while a comparison between Lacan and Merleau-Ponty is well beyond the scope of this book (see Shepherdson, 1997; Dews, 1999; Kemp, 2006; Phillips, 2019) it should be highlighted that the two approaches are not opposite to each other but rather address the subject’s emergence from a topologically different direction—Lacan from the outside in while Merleau-Ponty from the inside out (Sobchack, 1992: 99). For example, this difference in orientation does not disturb Lacan’s indebtedness to the Visible and the Invisible (1968) discussed at length in his Seminar XI where it ‘is possible to show how Lacan came to find his own concerns already present in Merleau-Ponty, though in a veiled or indirect way’ (Shepherdson, 1997: 76). The sole difference which deserves to be mentioned at this point, especially with regard to the book’s aim, is their distinct conception of the gaze—the point from which the subject is being looked at, which guarantees meaning and its emergence, equivalent to the master signifier in language or the vanishing point in perspective. ‘Merleau-Ponty presents the gaze as something that comes from the world—not from objects in the world but from the world as a whole … that invisible horizon in which visible things find their place … in other words, presents the gaze as something that, in Lacan’s language, comes from the Other, Lacan by contrast regards the gaze as an object, not as an empirical thing but as a specific form of the objet petit a, and more precisely as the object of the scopic drive (Ibid.: 82). For Lacan, the gaze is not a property of the subject but is rather its constitutive; with regard to the previous quote, it is specifically what allows elements to appear and find their place or (symbolically) exist in the world. The limitation concerns the screen’s appearance in

Introduction 9 the space of architecture—which the book will examine based on the logic of perspective projection instead of empirically through a resulting object—rather than the effects of such a phenomenon on the human subject of architecture. In other words, it would be impossible to account phenomenologically for the screen’s logic of appearance being a constituent of architecture’s process and determinant of the spatial meaning produced since the point that guarantees such meaning is already included in the world or place represented—instead of produced. Beyond semiotics and phenomenology there exists a smaller heterogeneous set of literature (Hendrix, 2006; Holm, 2000, 2010; Hays, 2010; Manolopoulou, 2013; Lahiji, 2018; Čeferin, 2020) within the discipline which equally draws support from Lacan for its corresponding theoretical, historical or design-oriented research. For the most part, these authors focus on a usually secondary (Hays through Žižek, Manolopoulou through Holm) but critical reading of philosophy and psychoanalysis—with an emphasis on Lacan—to successfully disseminate such concepts within architecture. While some of these cases will be discussed in the book, they do not constitute a formal framework of investigation to be utilized or adopted as a study’s theoretical pillar. Nevertheless, they remain vital points of support and dialogue throughout the following chapters. Finally, Peter Eisenman should be mentioned as a unique case who formally engaged with the question of meaning and managed to construct an architectural edifice from his PhD thesis (2006) defended in August 1963 at the University of Cambridge until the latest publications (2004, 2007) based on the philosophical work of Jacques Derrida and Chomskian linguistics. His case will be extensively discussed in chapter 4, especially with regard to the screen’s illusionary capacity, pictorial ambiguity and the suspension of meaning in his notion of the rhetorical figure.

Design Strategy: Hypotheses and Arguments I will now outline the book’s strategy, present the main research questions, and in anticipation delineate a preliminary milieu of response as seen in the sequential progression of the chapters which begins from the observation of the screen. A brief analysis of existing literature accounting for the observed element follows in order to obtain the necessary structure and notions to position the observation and its forthcoming examination. The discerned structure concerns the screen’s mode of appearance—namely, perspective projection—and includes several key concepts such as the notion of illusion, representation and self-reference, reality effect and meaning between two and three dimensions. Crucially, such notions and mechanisms are not empirically amenable to observation but rather necessitate a theoretical framework to be approached and associated in a systematic manner. Hence, the book studies perspective through Lacan in order to produce a set of hypotheses and arguments that relate to the element of the screen being a

10 Introduction constituent of architecture’s space. These are then explored through the text’s theoretical expositions and a series of design experiments which involve physical models. Finally, the book connects these instances back to the initial observation illustrating the retroductive progression of the overall argument. As such, I will now present the book’s principal hypotheses alongside some of the screen’s key concepts that the former will analyse in a retroactive manner in order to verify them. Hence, I propose the following four hypotheses which relate to the screen’s discerned properties: i The screen while observed to belong in architecture’s repertoire is a unique, or rather distinct element, from an ontological point of view. It exists, only as long as it appears. Being by definition relativized to appear in relation to the three-dimensional space it belongs and the two-dimensional space it implies, the screen’s contribution to architecture’s production of space can only be studied with regard to its mode of appearance; namely, perspective projection. ii The screen’s significance does not rest on its illusions. Yet, examining the rules and logic for producing such illusions is the only formal and logical tool to determine its consequences with regard to architecture’s spatial conception and production of meaning. iii The screen introduces movement to the logic of such rules. First by the moving images it projects and secondly by its spatial performance where architecture’s subject moves along the spaces fabricated by the screen. Hence, the discourse of self-reference (or the inherent logic of Renaissance frescoes) is not witnessed as a layer on top of an existing object but rather is now a constituent of the object that architecture’s process proposes as its materialized output. iv The screen’s insertion within the actual space of architecture spatially performs but most importantly demonstrates the limit of architectural symbolic articulation; from representing meaning to questioning the logic responsible for producing such meaning. The validity of these hypotheses relies on demonstrating that the screen’s discerned properties which allowed their formulation, are in fact satisfying them. The properties I will now present and will in turn preoccupy the rest of this book are brought forward by the reading of existing accounts (instead of being axiomatically imposed or assumed) and rest on being demonstrated as significant against or through well-established and seminal moments that investigated the core and logic of these notions—sometimes even irrespective of the screen’s role in their respective examinations. These are cases where the properties in question have been examined or utilized extensively and their analysis will provide a contribution to the understanding of the screen and a point of support in the developing argument with regard to the screen’s role in architecture’s production of space.

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Consequently, the book will provide an in-depth analysis of the following properties and cases: i Perspective projection and the nature of the split viewing subject via Brunelleschi’s seminal experiment in Florence (1415). ii The limits of viewing and the notion of an impossible point of view through Diller & Scofidio’s installation Para-Site (1989). iii The question of mediation and the difference between a view framed by a window or recorded and projected on a screen through The SlowHouse (1989) by Diller & Scofidio. iv The notion of illusion and the significance of elements (like columns which are not load-bearing) to appear to the viewer different than what they are through Peter Eisenman’s House I (1967–1968) project. v The logic of perspective alongside the status of the vanishing point and the point of view as being of different infinite magnitude via Michael Webb’s drawings for the project of Temple Island (1987). In other words, have you ever wondered what happens and why is it architecturally significant when you look through Brunelleschi’s drilled panel and the image of space superimposes with the actual space of the Baptistry? Why Diller and Scofidio claimed that the view of the ocean through the Slow House’s window is equally mediated with the same view projected on the screen? Why Eisenman wants you to realize that some columns in House I are not columns even though they look like they are? What is at stake in Webb’s drawing where he tried to depict a perspective projection from the point of view of the vanishing point? These carefully selected cases challenge the core properties of the screen’s function. They will be shown to operate at the limit of architecture’s production of meaning and by extension able to position the study of the screen in the sequence of their shared logic—which delineates a novel relation between architecture’s subject and object; instead of separating them. These original expositions, beyond their role in the screen’s demonstration, contain valuable insights for the book’s implication in the broader field of architectural research. Specifically, the counterpart to the popular field of design-based research; that is, research-based design. This can be grasped by considering a shared driving force and underlying exploratory attitude towards the design process that respectively characterizes these cases. Namely, the motivation against, or beyond, a goal-oriented approach where the architectural project exists at the service of a client it serves or a problem it resolves—without of course excluding these factors. To be precise, the projects in question do not operate under the gaze of a problem whose resolution would deem them as successful or unsuccessful. On the contrary as the book will show, what they offer—in the form of a drawing, model, or building—is the capacity to explore, approach, and question notions which are fundamental to architecture’s conception of space and

12 Introduction relation with its subject. In other words, while Brunelleschi’s apparatus might be impressive, the Slow-House’s kitchen functional, House I’s bedroom comfortable or Webb’s drawings simply beautiful the stakes are higher. These characteristics are descriptive by-products of what the project does instead of focusing on what it is about. Specifically, the book shows that in isolation these instances account for the subject’s relation to architecture’s space, architecture’s impossibility of being an autonomous system, the gap that separates the point of view from the vanishing point alongside a geometrical proof of what illusion is, and the immediacy of mediation in architecture’s relation with the notion of outside accordingly. In other words, the book will demonstrate that there exists an architectural way of thinking about universal notions—in this case vision, absence, mediation, and infinity respectively—architecturally, that is through architectural means: models, drawings, buildings. Finally, I would like to present two arguments specifically linked to the screen’s performance within space underpinning the overall study. First, the screen whose examination necessitates the study of its logic of appearance—namely, the rules perspective projection—is able to transpose this logic, which is usually bound to the process of architecture’s creative process and restrained in two dimensions, within the space of architecture. It is this spatial performance that will show how the self-reflexive capacity of architecture is now constituent of its space where architecture does not achieve meaning by means of representation but rather produces its space through its representational logic. Secondly, the screen unifies architecture’s representational structure or process with its output. As a representation of its own potential articulation, it turns the building into a de-monstration apparatus. Crucially, what is at stake is that the building is not a finished or frozen object, materialized after the creative process came at a halt but still in process. Formally, the screen allows architecture not to provide an object through a process of conception as its output but rather a process as object. Consider for example Eisenman’s negative declaration that ‘a form of representation that no longer, like perspective or axonometric, sees the object as a representation for a subject, has yet to be proposed’ (2004: 146). The screen will be shown not to simply use the logic of perspective to represent meaning (for a subject); on the contrary the screen uses perspective as logic to produce space which is not at the service of the object it refers to but rather produced by it.

Process of Design Experiments: Drawings and Models Having outlined the strategy and theoretical approach of the book I will now present its experimental or explorative side since the research behind this book was characterized by a constant interchange between theory and practice. Over the course of the past years, I produced numerous drawings and physical models—a curated selection of them is included in this

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book—which resulted in a process of investigation between the pursued theoretical arguments or analyses and design experiments that either challenged or elucidated the notions in question. Apart from rare exceptions, most of the figures in the book are original drawings or model photos, whose purpose is to either illustrate, question or most importantly help me understand and explore further the concepts I have been studying and theorizing about. Such drawings and models are an integral part of the book which—while hard to quantify their impact in isolation—when considered in hindsight as part of the apparatus that studied the phenomenon of the screen and the whole body of work that the study presents are indispensable. As such, I should clarify their role and contribution to the book, especially in anticipation of the fifth chapter, which is wholly dedicated to a series of design experiments. The models and drawings that will be encountered by the reader—both mine and those belonging to the case studies discussed in the book—share a common attitude or driving force: they deal with and investigate an idea or concept that relates to the screen’s logic instead of depicting a form, object or building which includes a screen. They can be better understood by taking distance from the conventional or traditional use associated with these mediums. For instance, where the model as substitute for a building is considered as an objective and factual representation of reality. It refers to an object and most importantly operates at its service. Yet, this conception by no means exhausts its raison d’être as logic of architectural articulation; it simply showcases a limiting use case of a representational technique. Peter Cook, whose work is driven by the act of drawing while his published research actively pursues drawing as being the motive force of architectural ideas admits that architectural drawings are easily able to transcend any refence to reality […] this is not some abstract or nihilistic position; more an ambition that is essentially borne of the belief that architecture has much left to discover and that the architect can make drawings that transport him or her into a form of séance. (emphasis added, Cook, 2008: 177) The notion of discovery beyond factual correspondence of features between model/drawing and depicted object/reality is eloquently positioned by Richard Foqué as the distance separating, in his terms, an explanatory to an exploratory model (for producing knowledge). Interestingly he situates such productive undecidedness as an inherent attribute of a design-based approach. Where scientific inquiry tries to answer the question how things are, design inquiry tries to answer the question how things could be. Both challenge the physical world […] Scientific research is based on the

14 Introduction testing of a hypothesis put forward in the form of an explanatory model […] The essence of the design inquiry, on the other hand, aims to develop in parallel as many hypotheses as possible, not on the basis of explanatory models but of exploring ones, models with probing capacity. (2010: 42) However, acknowledging the distinction between these two paradigms is not enough. Admittedly what Foqué considers as the factual enquiry of the explanatory model, or the book describes as the miniature scale model of a building is (by definition) easily amenable to verification. That is, a definite judgment of whether it functions as intended, if meaning has been achieved, or simply if the resulting propositions are distinguished as correct or wrong can be derived. On the other hand, consider the following quote by French painter Pierre Soulages which illustrates his attitude towards the blank canvas and exemplifies the most salient structural traits of the shift in question. C’est ce que je fais qui m’apprend ce que je cherche (Encrevé, 2007: 110), or ‘it is what I do that teaches me what I am looking for’. In other words, I do not (know what I) look for, but I find it or discover it (what I did not know it existed until) through drawing. Certainly, while the case of a painter’s personal creative process is arguably positioned at the edge of the exploratory paradigm it illustrates the rejection of propositional meaning and the representation of a state of affairs the possibility of which is inscribed in the object it refers to. Nevertheless, with regard to the exploratory model we should critically ask: how do we know if a drawing or a model has explored successfully or enough? This is not merely a rhetorical question but rather addresses the epistemological core of such an approach, which by definition is not characterized by a telos where it produces a result to be categorized as being true or false. Formally, how should we conceive of a model determining the very criteria for selecting the represented facts? In logical terms, that is the ‘true model’ of the unconscious that allows the subject—observer, viewer—of the facts to produce some new knowledge about the reality that the facts are describing (Badiou, 2007: 84). Alain Badiou formalizes this distinction apropos the Lacanian psychoanalytic treatment, where the demonstration of a subject’s real is at stake. “‘Demonstration’ means that the real is not what is shown or monstrated [ce qui se montre] but what is de-monstrated [ce qui se dé-montre], hence that it’s the undoing of the showing’” (2018: 169). In other words, the demonstration rests upon questioning the rules/ logic/mechanism that allowed the former representation/correspondence/ showing and by consequence provides a new understanding of the object or reality represented—through such rules. This shift will be extensively discussed in chapter 4 where instances such as Brunelleschi’s apparatus, Eisenman’s House I or Michael Webb’s drawings that interrogate the core of the screen’s appearance in space and architecture’s limit of signification will be shown to be (logical) models of this kind; they demonstrate.

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Finally, the design experiments in chapter 5 follow the same strategy and posit that there exists knowledge concerning architecture’s conception of space beyond the projected content of the screen. Yet, it can only be known or demonstrated as a proof of concept through examining how the screen’s showing appears in space. As a result, the models represent neither a space nor an object but rather the production of space through the screen’s operation. They are three-dimensional fabrications of the logic of perspective which ultimately will be tested as logic for producing space. They examine how the screen displaces architecture’s object, by making it part of its own model, and how it allows the space of architecture, which houses the human subject, itself to be turned into a demonstration. They concern with the invention of a method that exposes the hidden logic of the production of its space.

Structure of Book Following the Introduction, the book has five chapters and a concluding section. I will present a concise summary, so as not to jeopardize the sequential reasoning progression they required. Chapter 1, Positioning the Screen provides a short overview of existing accounts which acknowledged the observation of the screen and examined it as a newly inscribed element of architecture. In addition, it presents the unique case of Paul Virilio who predicted the screen’s emergence and theorized on its spatial and representational implications. The chapter introduces through these accounts the first key notions and Lacanian concepts to position the study of the screen like suture, mirror stage and reality effect in relation to three-dimensional space and two-dimensional images and illustrates them accordingly. Chapter 2, Problematizing the Screen explores the relation between the screen’s mode of appearance in space and perspective projection as the signifying process of representation and self-reference between image and space. It examines in depth Lacan’s shift on Alberti’s conception of perspective exemplified by the negative affirmation that the latter is not simply a matter of sight. In consequence the chapter showcases how perspective concerns a logical mapping of space where anamorphosis is considered the rule, instead of exception, in the production of visual and spatial meaning. The effects of this shift and the screen’s potential to question the nature of architecture’s space through its moving images are examined via Brunelleschi’s seminal experiment in Florence. Hubert Damisch’s implied tautology of using two mirrors or a mirror and painted panel in the experiment is studied in order to portray perspective and the screen’s function as operating beyond a one-to-one correspondence of features. That is, not exhausted at descriptive illusion but rather able to show the limits of the representational process which allows illusions to take place. Chapter 3, Analysing the Screen examines three carefully selected case studies by architects Diller and Scofidio. These are the installations of

16 Introduction Facsimile (2004) and Para-site (1989) alongside their seminal project SlowHouse (1989). They showcase in practise the screen’s apparatus—which includes recording cameras, the filming technique of manipulating the footage and the screen’s projected moving images—and provide novel testing ground for the book’s developing arguments to be pursued further. Founded on the dialectic investigation of perception and representation these case studies examine fundamental notions of the screen’s spatial performance such as the undecidability of moving images beyond being true or false in terms of illusion, showing a space from an impossible point view or making the architectural subject question the nature of recorded and real or unmediated space. Chapter 4, Questioning the Screen follows the collection of discerned properties and assumptions relating to the element of the screen through problematizing its mode of appearance (chapter 2) and analysing three case studies illustrating its rationale (chapter 3), in order to offer an in-depth analysis regarding their architectural significance and the screen’s role in architecture’s production of meaning once inserted in its space. Hence, why is it architecturally significant, or in other words what unknown part of architecture’s signifying process is being demonstrated, when a visitor encounters the ambivalence between real and pre-recorded footage; when is trying to comprehend whether the images on the screen are real or fictive; or when s/he sees a space from an impossible point of view? This chapter aims to show that such conditions included in the screen’s logic of appearance can be examined as logic for producing instead of representing space. It draws support and provides a critical reading of two seminal but seemingly unrelated to the screen cases like Peter Eisenman’s House I (1967) and Michael Webb’s drawings for Temple Island (1987) that deal precisely with the notions under examination like pictorial ambiguity and suspension of meaning or the relation between the point of view and the vanishing point in order to position the study of the screen in the sequence of their shared logic—which delineates a novel relation between architecture’s subject and object; instead of separating them. Chapter 5, Demonstrating the Screen showcases a series of three design experiments in the form of physical models which involve projectors, screens and a miniature endoscope able to record in detail the fabricated spaces. The chapter deals with the notion of demonstration proper and examines the study’s most crucial insights relating to the screen’s investigation being a constituent of architectural space. They include the primacy of proportion over scale, the retroactive production of meaning in the act of visiting a space and most importantly how the screen allows architecture not to propose an object through a process but rather present its process as object. In anticipation, the screen exemplifies how for architecture selfreference is a spatial distinction where the constructed elements are part of something to which they refer. The conclusion functions as a synthetic overview of the book’s progression. It outlines the screen’s significance as element of architecture and

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positions certain implications, but also limitations, regarding the distinctive theoretical expositions and design experiments in the process of its demonstration. In addition, it reframes the book’s theoretical approach which allowed the former to take place and reminds the reader that it can be used as a lens to discern architectural demonstrations beyond the scopic field and the logical mapping of space. This book offers a re-edited text of my doctoral thesis ‘Screen: The Intersectional Element of Architecture’ (Roimpas, 2021) completed in 2021 under the supervision of Prof. François Penz in the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge.

Notes 1 For the architect’s official project description see: https://dsrny.com/project/ facsimile 2 The book consists of five essays originally written in 1983 and published for the first time in 1991.

References Badiou, Alain, ‘Mark and Lack: On Zero’, trans. by Zachary Luke Fraser and Ray Brassier, Cahiers Pour l’Analyse (10.La Formalisation, 1969) http://cahiers. kingston.ac.uk/pdf/cpa10.8.badiou.translation.pdf Badiou, Alain, The Concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics, Transmission (Melbourne: re.press, 2007) Badiou, Alain, Lacan: Anti-Philosophy 3, trans. by Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018) Barthes, Roland, Elements of Semiology, 34. [print] (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1977) Bonta, Juan Pablo, Architecture and Its Interpretation: A Study of Expressive Systems in Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1979) Broadbent, Geoffrey, ‘A Plain Man’s Guide to the Theory of Signs in Architecture’, Architectural Design, 7–8 (1977), 474–482. Broadbent, Geoffrey, Richard Bunt, and Charles Jencks, Signs, Symbols, and Architecture (Wiley, 1980) Cairns, Graham, The Architecture of the Screen: Essays in Cinematographic Space (Bristol: Intellect, 2013) Čeferin, Petra, The Resistant Object of Architecture: A Lacanian Perspective (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2020) Chaitin, Gilbert, ‘Lacan and Semiosis’, in The Semiotic Web 1987, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok (De Gruyter Mouton, 1988), pp. 37–64 10.1515/9783110868388.37 Cook, Peter, Drawing: The Motive Force of Architecture, AD Primers (Chichester [England]: Wiley, 2008) Dews, Peter, ‘The Eclipse of Coincidence: Lacan, Merleau‐Ponty and Schelling’, Angelaki, 4.3 (1999), 15–23 10.1080/09697259908572053

18 Introduction Eco, Umberto, ‘A Componential Analysis of the Architectural Sign/Column/’, Semiotica, 5.2 (1972) 10.1515/semi.1972.5.2.97. Eco, Umberto, A Theory of Semiotics, Advances in Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976) Eisenman, Peter, Eisenman Inside Out: Selected Writings, 1963–1988, Theoretical Perspectives in Architectural History and Criticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004) Eisenman, Peter, The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture (1963), facs. reprint (Baden: Müller, 2006) Eisenman, Peter, Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) Eisenstein, Sergei M., Yve-Alain Bois, and Michael Glenny, ‘Montage and Architecture’, Assemblage, 10 (1989), 110 10.2307/3171145 Encrevé, Pierre, Soulages: Les Peintures, 1946–2006 (Paris: Seuil, 2007) Evans, Dylan, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London; New York: Routledge, 1996) Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997) Foqué, Richard, Building Knowledge in Architecture (Brussels: UPA, 2010) Forget, Thomas, The Construction of Drawings and Movies: Models for Architectural Design and Analysis (London; New York: Routledge, 2013) Friedberg, Anne, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006) Hays, K. Michael, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde, Writing Architecture Series (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2010) Hendrix, John Shannon, Architecture and Psychoanalysis: Peter Eisenman and Jacques Lacan (New York: Peter Lang, 2006) Holm, Lorens, ‘What Lacan Said Re: Architecture’, Critical Quarterly, 42.2 (2000), 29–64 10.1111/1467-8705.00286 Holm, Lorens, Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier: Architecture, Space and the Construction of Subjectivity (London; New York: Routledge, 2010) Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language, Reprint of the 2., rev. ed. 1971 (Berlin New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002) Janser, Andres, Hans Richter - New Living: Architecture, Film, Space, ed. by Arthur Rüegg (Baden: Lars Müller, 2001) Kemp, Ryan, ‘Notes Towards a Phenomenological Reading of Lacan’, Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, 6.1 (2006), 1–9 10.1080/20797222.2006.11433915 Koeck, Richard, Cine-Scapes: Cinematic Spaces in Architecture and Cities (New York: Routledge, 2013) Konstantarakos, Myrto, ed., Spaces in European Cinema, Intellect European Studies Series (Exeter, England; Portland, OR: Intellect, 2000) Krampen, Martin, Meaning in the Urban Environment, The City Sociology of the City, [Repr. der Ausg.] London: Pion, 1979 (London: Routledge, 2011) Lacan, Jacques, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. 7, 1st American ed (New York: Norton, 1992) Lacan, Jacques, Autres Écrits, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller and Le Champ Freudien (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001)

Introduction

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Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Alan Sheridan, Reprinted (London: Karnac Books, 2004) Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006) Lahiji, Nadir, Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy. (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) Lamster, Mark, ed., Architecture and Film (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000) Manolopoulou, Yeoryia, Architectures of Chance, Design Research in Architecture (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2013) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, ed. by Claude Lefort, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) Metz, Christian, ‘The Imaginary Signifier’, Screen, 16.2 (1975), 14–76 10.1093/ screen/16.2.14 Milner, Jean-Claude, L’œuvre Claire: Lacan, La Science, La Philosophie, L’Ordre Philosophique (Paris: Seuil, 1995) Morris, Charles W., Writings on the General Theory of Signs, Reprint 2013 ed. (De Gruyter Mouton, 1971) https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:101:1-2016081611110 Mukařovský, Jan, Structure, Sign, and Function: Selected Essays, trans. by John Burbank and Peter Steiner, Yale Russian and East European Studies, 14 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978) Norberg-Schulz, Christian, Genius loci: towards a phenomenology of architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1984) Pallasmaa, Juhani, The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Arthitecture, AD Primers (Chichester, U.K: Wiley, 2009) Pallasmaa, Juhani, The Embodied Image: Imagination and Imagery in Architecture, AD Primers (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2011) Pallasmaa, Juhani, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, 3rd. ed (Chichester: Wiley, 2012) Panofsky, Erwin, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 1st paperback ed (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1997) Peirce, Charles S., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volumes I and II: Principles of Philosophy and Elements of Logic, ed. by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Vol. 1/2, 5. [printing] (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1985) Penz, François, Cinematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2017) Pérez-Gómez, Alberto, and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge, 1. MIT Press paperback ed (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000) Phillips, James, ‘Merleau-Ponty and Psychoanalysis’, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, ed. by Richard G.T. Gipps and Michael Lacewing (Oxford University Press, 2019) 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198789703.013.11 Pluth, Ed, Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject, SUNY Series, Insinuations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007)

20 Introduction Preziosi, Donald, Architecture, Language and Meaning: The Origins of the Built World and Its Semiotic Organization, Approaches to Semiotics, 49 (The Hague, [Noordeinde 41]: Mouton, 1979a) Preziosi, Donald, The Semiotics of the Built Environment: An Introduction to Architectonic Analysis, Advances in Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979b) Proust, Marcel, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. by Scott Moncrieff, 1st Vintage Books ed (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), Vol. 1 Roimpas, Stefanos, ‘Screen: The Intersectional Element of Architecture’ (Apollo University of Cambridge Repository, 2021) https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/ handle/1810/332619 Saussure, Ferdinand de, Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Roy Harris (LaSalle, Ill: Open Court, 1986) Shepherdson, Charles, ‘A Pound of Flesh: Lacan’s Reading of “The Visible and the Invisible”’, Diacritics, 27.4 (1997), 70–86 Sobchack, Vivian Carol, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1992) Strong, Richard C., ‘Habit, Distraction, Absorption: Reconsidering Walter Benjamin and the Relation of Architecture to Film’, in The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture, ed. by Nadir Lahiji, Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy (London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 164–181. Tafuri, Manfredo, Theories and History of Architecture (London; New York: Granada, 1980) Tschumi, Bernard, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1994) Virilio, Paul, The Lost Dimension, trans. by Daniel Moshenberg, Semitext(e) Foreign Agents Series (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2012) Webber, Andrew, and Emma Wilson, Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis (London New York: Wallflower, 2008) Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, ed. by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Gifford Lectures, 1927–28, Corrected ed (New York: Free Press, 1978) Žižek, Slavoj, How to Read Lacan, How to Read, 1st American ed (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2007) Žižek, Slavoj, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, Routledge Classics, Routledge Classics ed (New York: Routledge, 2008) Žižek, Slavoj, The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014) Zupančič, Alenka, What Is Sex?, Short Circuits (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017)

1

Positioning the Screen Logic of Perspective

This chapter surveys how and why a small set of architectural scholars came to acknowledge the screen as an architectonic element and under what circumstances its potential architectural significance could be examined. Specifically, it will first discern how the key notions of absence and illusion underlie these accounts and then problematize them accordingly to serve as a renewed, but established, starting point for the forthcoming examination of the screen. For example, while the accounts of Anne Friedberg and Paul Virilio are methodologically distinct, they share one common concluding remark. That is, if the screen ought to be faithfully studied from an architectural perspective, such a study should depart from the notion of reality effect. Equally, pictorial ambiguity and the way meaning emerges through the screen’s capacity to create illusions of space—namely, per­ spective projection—is posited as a requirement for the screen’s examina­ tion by all accounts, albeit in different terminology. Finally, some key concepts like suture or Lacan’s mirror stage are introduced in parallel to the reading of the following accounts.

Reality Effect and the Mirror Stage Anne Friedberg dedicates a chapter of The Virtual Window (2006) to consider the screen as architecture, as an expansion of material-built space through the ‘virtual window’ of the film, television, or computer screen. The constant increase of the screen’s scale and resolution—beyond the question of origin—presents now a transitional surface as light that becomes a building element in a newly immaterial architecture (2006: 151). Defining the screen as transitional is Friedberg’s way of identifying that a novel mode of representation is potentially effective in this new space, or even paradigm of space conception, which is produced by material and immaterial components. It concerns how the subject of architecture relates to a three-dimensional object (of external reality) mediated by the twodimensional representation of its image. As such, the screen’s projected images construct, or appear to be, a space while their effectiveness is DOI: 10.4324/9781003344995-2

22 Positioning the Screen intelligible if founded upon cinema’s spectatorial origin, that is the laws of one-point perspective (2006: 155). Therefore, her investigation is centred around the perceptual uncertainty produced within architecture’s space by the immaterial component of projection. She argues that the screen introduces two spaces to the subject, or rather, one space with two dimensions; a real one attributed to the physical elements and a virtual one produced by the screen. Their intersection—Friedberg shows through analysing the short film Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (Edwin S. Porter, 1902)—is of crucial archi­ tectural importance since, under certain conditions, it produces visually an illusory continuity of space. Beyond cinematic continuity, situated between on-screen and off-screen reality, it illustrates some originary space tension between the material space of the theatre and the virtual space of the screen (2006: 158). As film historian Charles Musser writes with wittiness the film ‘lampoons a rube farmer who confuses what he sees on the screen with real life and becomes more and more involved with the images’ (1994: 321). This confusion is formally referred to as reality effect and consists of a tension between three terms: (1) image; (2) space; and (3) subject, where the screen within architectural space shifts the relation of the architectural sub­ ject and the three-dimensional space it occupies to its image. In Uncle Josh, when the screen is switched on a woman appears dancing and immediately Josh jumps out of his seat to occupy the narrow space of the stage in front of the screen and dance with her. Supposedly he is duped; thinking that the dancer is a real person for two reasons. First, the film’s depicted space mat­ ches in texture and proportion the elements of the theatre such as the bal­ ustrade’s height and the floor’s timber cladding. Secondly, the relative size of the projected woman—scale is no longer effective in the frame’s digital space—meets Josh’s height when he stands in front of her moving image. Thus, it looks like he is performing with her in a unified shared space, defined and measured only as an extension of the theatre’s stage. Architectural his­ torian Lorens Holm provides a particularly insightful definition of the reality effect when discussing the relation between a perspectival space—like the nave of San Lorenzo in Florence—and its image. The subject’s relation to space goes through the image. It is not the presence of the image per se, but the ambiguity between image and reality, which is the symptom of subjectivity. Let us call this the reality effect … Without confusing the reality of the photograph [moving image in the case of Uncle Josh] with the effects of architecture, we draw attention to the fact that the reality of architecture has a lot to do with the fact that it looks just like its photograph. (commentary added, Holm, 2000: 41) Deferring the analysis of how subjectivity is produced as a symptom between an image and external reality for chapter 4 via a close reading of

Positioning the Screen 23 Brunelleschi’s demonstration, Friedberg accurately portrays Uncle Josh as a mise-en-abyme (2006: 158). Unlike a mise-en-scène, what the short film was supposed to represent (a scene of a woman dancing) is included as part of its representation. She explains Josh’s situation of spectatorship as being ‘doubly exposed: he is projecting his presence into a remote location [that is beyond the materially occupied space], a prescient illustration of the sub­ jectivities suggested by telepresence’ (commentary added, 2006: 159). Thus, the space shared by Josh and the dancer is occupied in a way which reproduces the spatial conditions of its occupation, while she explicates that ‘the frame of the screen marks a separation—an ontological cut—between the material surface of the wall and the view contained within the frame’s aperture’ (emphasis added, Ibid.: 157). Formally, it is this ontological con­ fusion which makes something two-dimensional like the image on the screen appear as a three-dimensional element, localized in the theatre’s space. The character of Josh unintentionally shows that the fundamental relation he has to space comes as an image, otherwise he would not have been deceived by the virtual dancer. In other words, the screen’s intersection with the edge of the theatre stage attests that the architectural subject can (be deceived to) occupy a space by viewing its image. For this reason, Friedberg emphasizes the importance of the screen being placed exactly at the edge of the stage since it becomes harder for the viewer to distinguish between objects that appear within the frame and those located off-frame. The apparent continuity, which momentarily causes an ontological confusion of the three-dimensional space constituted by a two-dimensional projected content is considered by Friedberg in cinematic terms; specifically, the concept of suture which fol­ lowing her description takes place when: […] movement off the edge of one shot is met by the movement into the frame of the next, the spectator is effectively “cut” out of cinematic space while, at the same time, being sutured into it. (Ibid.: 156) Suture is a concept externally introduced to film theory and by extension to the developing line of thought concerning the architectural representation of the screen. Therefore, a brief outline of its history and core ideas which preceded its cinematic formulation should be outlined. It was first men­ tioned suggestively by Lacan in Seminar XI as a psychoanalytic concept with no precise definition, which then found itself at the centre of a philosophical debate in Cahiers pour l’Analyse (1966–1969) between Jacques-Alain Miller (1966) and Alain Badiou (1969), before finally being transferred into cinema by Jean-Pierre Oudart (1996). In fact, the abovementioned debate on suture’s logic is according to Slavoj Žižek the focal point of a true philosophical event which concerns the key problem of the entire field of ‘structuralism’—that is the status of the subject and the relationship between subject (or lack) and structure (2012b: 145).

24 Positioning the Screen As formulated in cinema theory and utilized by Friedberg, suture has to do with how the subject is constituted in the process of reading a film. Oudart denies that cinematic discourse is a simple articulation of successive shots and through the concept of suture outlines how a shot firstly perceived as objective is reinscribed or allocated as subjective (belonging to the point of view of a person in the film) in the next one. What is being ‘sutured’ is the gap between them where the second shot represents the absent subject for/of the first shot (Ibid.: 151). Following Oudart the elementary logic of suture and the process of reading a film progresses in three steps: i First, the spectator is absorbed by a shot in an imaginary way. Unaware or untroubled by the screen and the frame ‘he himself is fluid, elastic, and expanding: he is at the cinema’ (Oudart, 1996: 51). ii Then, this state of imaginary euphoria is suddenly interrupted when the spectator becomes aware of the screen and its frame. Seeing the image in its limits makes according to Oudart the spectator’s imagination cast a phantom in its place: the Absent One (Ibid.: 60) or in Žižek’s words: ‘I realize that what I see is only a part, and I do not master what I see. I am in a passive position, the show is run by the Absent-One, the Other, who selects, frames and manipulates images behind my back’ (2012b: 150). iii Finally, the sequence is completed by a third shot which designates or appropriates absence to a point of view identifiable within the filmic space, usually one of the protagonists. Thus, the Absent One is concealed or ‘sown up’. In Oudart’s words ‘the appearance of a lack perceived as a Some One (the Absent One) is followed by its abolition by someone (or something) placed within the same field’ (1996: 47). The (filmic) field which encompasses both the space represented in-frame and the space implied off-frame is discussed by Oudart with reference to a scene from The General (1926, Bruckman & Keaton) where two armies meet near a burnt bridge on the banks of the river. At first a group of them is shown crossing the river from a distanced shot. He notes that at this stage the spectator ‘does not yet perceive either the framing, or the distance, or the camera’s position; the image is still for the spectator only a moving and animated photograph’ (1996: 50). Then, the enemy soldiers appear in the frame, but their size seems to be significantly larger than those already visible in the shot. For a moment the spectator is confused ‘like the Poe character who sees a butterfly as large as a ship’ (Ibid.) but quickly realizes that not all soldiers are located in the same space. Those who appeared to be surprisingly large in relation to other objects appearing in the scene were initially positioned off-frame; on a place of higher altitude that could not be seen from the point of view and position of the camera. As such, the spectator ‘experiences with vertiginous delight the unreal space separating the two groups’ and wonders how and why the scene was framed in such a

Positioning the Screen 25 way. Oudart notes that even though this question is and will remain unanswered, it (the sequence of framing) will nonetheless radically trans­ form the spectator’s relation with the film. Namely, from an imaginary experience to a symbolic configuration, from looking at a moving image to asking to whom does this point of view belong to? However, suture is not to be conceived as a straightforward operation where the imaginary register is simply preceding the symbolic one. In the process of suture, the second shot does not just follow the first one, it is signified by it—or in Oudart’s terminology suture is the abolition of the Absent One and its resurrection in someone (Ibid.: 47). Steven Heath describes it as a complex and multiple play of the symbolic and imaginary register which produces the spectator as subject in the film where ‘it is not the spectator’s imaginary […] which sutures the discourse; rather, the suturing function includes the spectator as part of an imaginary production’ (1981: 90). Out of this ‘complex and multiple play’ Oudart delineates that suture has a double effect: retroactive at the level of the signified and anticipatory at the level of the signifier (1996: 47). The first one has to do with allocating an objective shot to a protagonist (as subjective) since ‘it [the objective shot] presides over a semantic exchange between a present field and an imaginary field, representing the field now occupied by the former (Ibid.)’. The second one, where suture is anticipatory at the level of the signifier begins from a subjective (point-of-view) shot which has to be allocated to an identifiable subject presented/ recognized within a film’s objective shot. In Oudart’s words, anticipation begins ‘just as the present filmic segment [subjective point-of-view shot] was constituted as a signifying unit by the Absent One, that something or someone, replacing it, anticipates on the necessarily discrete nature of the unit whose appearance it announces’ [a subject the spectator can identify with] (commentary added, Ibid.). In short, the ultimate threat is not that of an objective shot that might not be ‘subjectivized’ (we might not see the skull might not be allocated to some protagonist within the space of diegetic fiction), but that of a point-of-view shot which will not be clearly allocated as the point-ofview of some identifiable protagonist, and which will thus evoke a freefloating gaze without a determinate subject to whom it belongs, looking back at, putting it into the picture (i.e. the gaze of an impossible subjectivity that cannot be located within the diegetic space). (Žižek, 2012b: 151) Introducing the concept of suture in the screen’s examination is important, even though Friedberg mentions it only in passing. Why? Because, it allows us to make the case that the screen’s significance lies beyond its illusory capacities, which are in fact taken for granted. Following the previous quote, we could say that maybe the ultimate threat in the screen would be to never reveal its spatial illusion … if that were the case there would be

26 Positioning the Screen nothing to be ‘sutured’, no posited Absent One to be concealed, no space to be signified by the two-dimensional illusion. So, what does it mean that the screen should not be judged upon its illusory capacities? The following point might seem subtle; nonetheless is important. As mentioned earlier, Friedberg discusses how the architectural subject can be deceived to occupy a space by viewing a moving image. Such an illusion could either last a few moments or persist in full, as seen with the character of Josh. The first reading which I consider naïve would be to think of the screen’s operation as successful upon the subject’s deception. If the viewer truly thinks s/he is witnessing a space while looking at an image, then the screen’s architectural role is fulfilled. However, while its role might be exhausted in this reading, the screen’s (architectural) significance can be neither solely attributed, nor axiomatized upon its illusory capacities. The concept of suture is the first theoretical notion which elucidates why the process of deception, even after the illusion is revealed is more important than the illusion itself. It shifts the question to how the viewer was deceived—the mechanisms of deception—and what has such a deception contributed retroactively to his/her understanding of reality—the effects of deception. Such an examination has nothing to do with the technical intricacies necessary for producing illusions but is also indifferent as to why they took place. On the contrary, it sets out to study the relation between the virtual and actual components which now constitute architectural space. In a similar manner to Oudart’s spectator who does not need to know why or how (at a technical level) the framing of consecutive shots works but they still radically transform his/her filmic reality the insertion of this two-dimensional surface within architectural space allows us to think of the architectural representation as logic; instead of focusing on the logic of architectural representation. That is, as mentioned in the introduction shifting away from what kind of space is a screen showing but rather demonstrating how such a space is (visually and physically) produced. Thus, examining Josh’s ontologically ambivalent dance with the virtual dancer can be positioned in the following way: why and how the mecha­ nisms responsible for producing spatial ambiguity—and by extension its affect—are of architectural interest? Although the question is well beyond Friedberg’s scope her suggestive framework for pursuing such an investigation is rather precise; namely, psychoanalysis or phenomenology. Her admission that the screen functions as an architectonic element, opening the materiality of built space to virtual apertures is focused on the architectural subject—and the notion of spec­ tatorship upon encountering the screen in spatial terms. Facing a screen, the spectator/viewer/user is caught in a phenomeno­ logical tangle—twin paradox—of mobility and immobility (the mobility of images; the immobility of the spectator) and of materiality and immateriality (the material space of the theatre, domicile, or office

Positioning the Screen 27 and the immateriality of the cinematic, televisual, or computer image). (2006: 150) The book finds support in her acknowledgement that under certain con­ ditions an image, animated or still, has the ability to appear—or be momentarily misrecognized—as space. Hence, Friedberg concludes by proposing a potential and detailed methodological framework to study the subject’s encounter with the screen, formulated around the question of ‘where are we?’ when in front of a cinematic screen. ‘The answer might be something like: in a subjective elsewhere, in a virtual space, a virtual time’ (2006: 178). As such, she differentiates between a psychoanalytic approach grounded on Jacques Lacan and a phenomenological one centred around Vivian Sobchack’s reading of Merlau Ponty1. In her view, switching-on the projector in a darkened hall enacts the condition of Lacan’s mirror stage to occur. On the other hand, with reference to Shobchack’s phenomenology, while the subject is located in such a place detached from ‘raw sensations’ (when lights are turned off and the screen is flooded with light) it is still impossible for meaning to emerge beyond the orbit of senses—immediacy of sensation, temporal duration, etc. The distinction should not be regarded as a methodological dilemma between psychoanalysis or phenomenology because Lacan and MerleauPonty do not present two separate structures, indifferent or opposite to each other. On the contrary, these seemingly distinct theoretical positions share a common point of difference—even though Friedberg obfuscates or bypasses it. That is, how to account for the emergence of subjectivity, which in consequence is witnessed in distinct conceptions of language, vision, desire, etc., and how they relate to human experience accordingly. In fact, Sobchack herself states the point of divergence in topological terms: ‘in Lacan’s work the act of seeing and its relation to the constitution of the Self is explored ‘from the outside in’ while in her phenomenological reading of film, Self-consciousness is explored ‘from the inside out’ (1992: 99). Éli­ zabeth Roudinesco (1990: 350) reports that the relationship between Lacan and Merleau-Ponty can be traced back to Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel (Paris, 1933) which significantly influenced both. In addition, James Phillips (2019) discusses three distinct encounters between them during the 1950s. The second2 one is particularly interesting with regard to the investigation of the screen, the symbolic register of perspective projection and the notion of meaning achieved through an image. It took place in 1957 when Lacan gave a lecture at the Société française de Philosophie, which Merleau-Ponty attended. Phillips reports that a debate followed the lecture centred on the notion of parapraxis. Parapraxes are unaccountable errors in the production of meaning, through a process of signification or commu­ nication, such as a slip of the tongue or a mistake in writing. During the debate where ‘Merleau-Ponty argued that a parapraxis is a failure of lan­ guage use, Lacan countered that it is a successful use of language in that it

28 Positioning the Screen allows the unconscious to speak’ (Ibid.: 9). This difference addresses the core of (linguistic) meaning and the subject’s role in the process of pro­ ducing it. Merleau-Ponty presupposes language as a tool for communica­ tion. He considers a failure the discordance between a signifier and its signified, where we utter something different to what we wanted to say and communication (correspondence of meaning) is not successful. However, Lacan held a different conception of language. He considered errors and slips of the tongue as significant, as manifestations of the unconscious and treated them as means to better understand the logic that allows meaning to emerge in the first place and constitute the subject who uttered them. As Žižek notes, ‘there is no subject to the unconscious knowledge: the unconscious knowledge articulates itself through slips and gaps, behind the subject’s back’ (2016: 216–17). As a result, it is such parapraxes that allow access to the ‘things we do not know we know’ (Žižek, 2012a: 62) through examining the articulation of signifiers in all forms, even when designated as non-derivable or wrong according to certain rules. At stake is not the pursuit of meaning but rather what is amenable to the question of knowledge in the signifiers’ articulation, in the act of uttering formalizing or symbolizing sounds, words and drawings. As will be shown in more detail in chapter 2, Lacan pursued this examination (of articulation) by dissoci­ ating the signifier from the corresponding signified claiming that it is the logic of this association that allows a better understanding, or even access to the object or reality to which we were initially representing or referring to. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that a confirmation regarding Sobchack’s above-mentioned symmetrical operation for the subject’s emergence between Lacan and Merleau-Ponty comes from the working notes published by Claude Lefort as an appendix to The Visible and the Invisible (1968) with regard to the nature of external reality and symbol­ ization. Whence the question: how can one return from this perception fashioned by culture to the ‘brute’ or ‘wild’ perception? … By what act does one undo it (return to the phenomenal, to the vertical’ world, to lived experience)?. (1968: 212) This quote is of interest to the developing line of thought regarding the notion of ‘return’ and the act whose aim is to ‘undo’ it because as Peter Dews notes ‘for Merleau-Ponty, therefore, there is no radical gap or gulf between our openness to the world and the world itself (1999: 17). Returning to a wild perception designates at a first level the idea of a world and the viewer’s relation to it before the emergence of tools and techniques to represent it. It refers to a proper pre-symbolic, or unsymbolized conception of the world in architectural terms. The closer we can get to it, in a thorough epistemological manner, is by removing our eye from the hole drilled in Brunelleschi’s panel or via a time machine looking for the origin separating symbolic to ‘brute’

Positioning the Screen 29 perception. As will be discussed in chapter 2 both manoeuvres miss the point. Yet, at a second—properly retroactive—level, the return is an ‘outside-in’ move to what Lacan designates as the real. In this case it stands for anything in the symbolic register (of language, social conventions, or perspective projection) which resists signification or has not yet been given a symbolic identity. For purposes of clarification, the real, as discerned by Slavoj Žižek (2007, 2012a), appears throughout Lacan’s work in the middle of (as med­ iating) five distinct conceptual oppositions. Specifically, between: i ii iii iv v

Pre-symbolic reality & reality structured by the symbolic network Inert presence of positivity, no lack & a hole, gap in the symbolic Logical consistency & pure contingency Symbolic properties (of an object) & the object itself (in writing) What cannot be inscribed & writing itself as opposed to the signifier

While some of these concepts on the real will be encountered in the course of the book, Merlau-Ponty’s wild perception refers to the first dyad and the impossibility of a human subject—as speaking being, symbolically inscribed—to consider the supposed ‘time before the word’ from within our symbolic order, using the categories and filters it provides. As Bruce Fink explains, in order to conceive of that time, we give it a name: the real. Lacan tells us that ‘the letter kills’: it kills the real which was before the letter, before words, before language (1997: 25). Thus, beyond Fink’s initial remark the real should not be considered as a temporal designation; formally it is not even of the order of being, but its inherent impasse. ‘In other words (the real) is a negativity that has important consequences for the field (language, perspective) structured around it’ (Zupančič, 2017: 22). The mirror stage already cited and advocated by Friedberg to ex­ amine the screen is indeed one of Lacan’s most detailed accounts where the visual and linguistic aspects of his teaching are intertwined in one case—the infant’s body stands for the real as preceding its entrance into the symbolic realm of gestures, norms and ultimately language through its specular image and the mother’s verbal communication. As such the mirror stage exemplifies the emergence and structure of the subject. Similarly, to the concept of suture I will outline it in a concise manner below. It was first presented in 1936 during the Fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress at Marienbad, but only published as a revised version in 1949 entitled The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience (Lacan, 2006: 75–81). It was allegedly based on an experiment3 conducted by Lacan’s friend and psy­ chologist Henri Wallon in 1931, even though never attributed to him as Élisabeth Roudinesco reports (2003: 29). Wallon’s experiment consisted of placing a human infant and a chimpanzee in front of a mirror to compare

30 Positioning the Screen their reaction towards their reflected images.4 The difference lies in the infant’s attraction and the chimpanzee’s indifference. According to Dylan Evans, the former becomes fascinated by it and ‘assumes it as its own image, whereas the chimpanzee quickly realises that the image is illusory and loses interest in it’ (1996: 115). Why is this the case? The child through the mirror anticipates a complete formation between the unified reflected image of its body and the partially controlled (due to its young age) ex­ perienced body—whose movements are nevertheless perfectly reflected in the image. Following Terry Eagleton’s reading the child who is still physi­ cally ‘uncoordinated’ begins to construct a centre of self, an imaginary one, where the notion of the ‘I’ is reflected by some object or person in the world (2008: 143). What Friedberg calls imaginary is the child’s identification with this seemingly complete image whose lack of coordination over its physical body exposes it as an incomplete entity. At this pre-symbolic level Lacan situates two important functions. First, the impossibility of the image and the body to form a unified whole produces a tension which forces the child to identify with the image, while the body is seen as a rival of this unity. The child misrecognizes itself, finding in the image ‘a pleasing unity which it does not actually experience in it own body’ (Ibid.). As such, the ego—moi—is constructed out of a misrecognition—méconnaissance—and marks the child’s introduction in the imaginary order. What I have called the ‘mirror stage’ is of interest because it manifests the affective dynamism by which the subject primordially identifies with the visual gestalt of his own body. In comparison with the still very profound lack of coordination in his own motor functioning, that gestalt is an ideal unity, a salutary imago. (Lacan, 2006: 113) However, the mirror holds a second function. Namely, it materializes in this simplified experiment the point of view from which the child is seen. For the first time, the child sees how it is seen. Prior to this showing, the concept of self was an alterity. A third term, or rather a second body (usually the mother) is part of the identification process. The child is compelled to identify with its mirror image by the Other via gestures but also through the act of naming—assigning to it a symbolic identity—saying something like ‘That’s you Maria! Yes, it is!’ (Pluth, 2007: 53). The child’s name even though semantically meaningless in itself, is the signifier repre­ senting the emerging subject and its symbolic place which has been pre­ pared for it … ‘one’s name fixes one’s destiny. This is why the first name is generally chosen with great care, even if this great care is not without ambiguities’ (Erik Porge, 1997: 16). In structural terms, the Other’s role is crucial in grasping how and why through the ego’s formation—the image the child is identified with and the name it is referred as—the subjective production takes place. When in front of the mirror, the Other is present for

Positioning the Screen 31 the child as doubly seen, standing in front of the mirror and reflected in the mirror. The Other’s body is seen by the child as unified in both modalities, unlike its own body which is only visible in the specular image. As such, the infant is able to differentiate its self-image as different from the image of the Other but also to see its self-image as a visible body like the Other. The Other thus provides the grounds for the infant’s recognition of difference at the same time that it bears witness to and authorizes that difference as making a difference (Sobchack, 1992: 110). However, this dyadic structure of bodies between the mother and the child shifts to a triadic one when the father enters and disrupts the imaginary harmony, which is equally referred to as the pre-Oedipal stage. The father signifies what Lacan calls the (symbolic) Law and forces the child to recognize in its figure that a wider familiar and social network exists to which it only partially belongs (Eagleton, 2008: 143). With regard to the mirror stage, it marks how the ‘specular I turns into the social I’ (Lacan, 2006: 79). Being the first signified without a signifier, the father’s appearance as law makes the child to acknowledge the taboo or prohibition that he symbolizes and to which now it relates and shaped accordingly. It is this moment that decisively tips the whole of human knowledge [savoir] into being mediated by the other’s desire, constitutes its objects in an abstract equivalence due to competition from other people, and turns the I into an apparatus to which every instinctual pressure constitutes a danger, even if it corresponds to a natural maturation process. The very normalization of this maturation is henceforth dependent in man on cultural intervention, as is exemplified by the fact that sexual object choice is dependent upon the Oedipus complex. (Ibid.) As Eagleton points out Lacan’s originality is to rewrite this process based on Freud’s Oedipus complex in terms of language where its identity is constituted by relations of difference and similarity to other subjects around it and moves from the imaginary to occupy a place in the symbolic register (2008: 145). This shift will be discussed in chapter 2 with regard to the reversal of Saussure’s conception of a sign and the differential status of the language. For the moment, Wallon’s original experiment showed us that humans and animals relate differently to the imaginary and part ways at the symbolic level. The first part of the mirror stage is pre-symbolic where both animals and humans equally belong and operate. For instance, regarding the social symbolic; the notions of motherhood or hierarchically organized groups exist in animals as well, but they explicitly lack the third term as figure of symbolic authority. Certainly, such animals (lobsters, elephants or bees) are part of a structured group, potentially operating very complicated tasks, but their master figure/signifier is a natural instead of symbolic

32 Positioning the Screen authority. Beyond visual competence, an animal will never recognize a King neither bow nor respect one, simply because it was identified or named as such. A biological imperative of survival regulates group-determined rela­ tions. Thus, an animal’s imaginary identification needs to be considered as a cognitive rather than social ability—given certain biological capacities (I assume eyes, receptors and some cognitive areas of the brain being active) it can formulate an intersubjective relation, even of minimal degree, with its mirror image. However, humans can do it without a mirror; you can close your eyes and imagine any identity you like, from your favourite author to a fictional character.5 The symbolic only emerges through the rupture of recognizing the impossibility of assuming the ideal image—realizing that while you try, you are not and most importantly cannot fully become this or that identity like The son or husband. Because the Other identifies the child with this ideal image, and portrays it as significant, the child in return strives to match its ascribed symbolic identity, which is impossible and by definition fails. ‘The child’s release from this alienating image … will occur through his discovery of subjectivity by his appropriation of language from the Other, which is his means of entry into the Symbolic order in the capacity of subject’ (Lacan, 1973: 161). When Sobchack outlines three6 presuppositions shared by all theories of film, she attributes the impossibility of full identification with the ideal image and its illusory capacities as the second one—where the viewer is assumed to experience something absent as significant. Any film pre­ supposes that it will be understood as signification, as conveying meaning beyond the brute material presence of light and shadow on a plane sur­ face. Cinema requires a symbolically competent viewer to be inscribed in its order. Sobchack agrees with Lacan that ‘such self-consciousness (knowing what is to see and be seen) does not show itself in either the infant’s of the animal’s behaviour toward that which we ‘immediately’ see as film’ (1992: 52). Notions like ‘reality effect’ or the screen’s illusion should be read in this way and be regarded as a tool instead of a dis­ advantage. It is precisely there that the screen’s contribution to archi­ tecture starts to be delineated similarly to Žižek’s insightful commentary in the documentary The pervert’s guide to cinema (Fiennes, 2006). ‘Even if all we perceive is reality, part of it is structured and functions like fiction. And this is cinema, at its purest form … not reproduce fiction and make it indistinguishable [as a permanent illusion] from reality but to show reality and make the subject perceive it as fiction’. In fact, as will be seen in the following section, Virilio explicitly warned against the opposite direction where ‘the film industry will enter into crisis when it pretends to verisimilitude (2009: 73). The perceptual cut produced for example in Uncle Josh by the projected dancer contained within the image of the theatre’s space and the point of its failure—or successful revelation—when we change position reminds us why the screen can contribute to architecture’s symbolization. This is a key point

Positioning the Screen 33 of ontological importance, differentiating the moving image of the filmic screen to other technological inventions which could very well add some­ thing new to our spatial understanding of architectural experience. For example, fully immersive options like virtual reality headsets begin to function only after the equilibrium has shifted towards fiction. The point is not to discredit the illusion nor expect the impossibility of a complete deception. The quest is not towards articulating what the meaning (of illusion, architecture, film) is but rather how it is produced by outlining its constitutive structure—as such it does not rest on a perfect realism able to fool the subject since ‘images do not derive from reality but are rather a form of its condition’ (Bredekamp, 2017: 283). Beyond the linguistic reg­ ister Hubert Damisch proposed an insightful connection to the visual world of perspective projection. The following quote appears when defending the contemporary relevance of perspective against those arguing that is an outdated convention. Perspective, I repeat, is not a code, but it has this in common with language, that in and by itself it institutes and constitutes itself under the auspices of a point (the vanishing point), a factor analogous to the ‘subject’ or ‘person’ in language, always posited in relation to a ‘here’ or ‘there’, accruing all the possibilities for movement from one position to another that this entails. (1995: 53) Freud’s grandson’s Fort-Da (absent-present) game—he was throwing an object away and returning it, pronouncing the corresponding word with each move—is one of Lacan’s most used examples regarding the differential structure of language, even at the primordial level of symbolization. They stand for the first utterings of the child which refer to the mother’s presence or absence. For the first time as Bruce Fink explains, the two terms are interdependent since ‘here’ is only designated by the very possibility of her being ‘gone’ (1997: 18). ‘This chain develops in accordance with logical links whose grasp on that which is to be signified, namely the being (l’être) and the existent (l’étant) operates through the effects of the signifier’ (Lacan, 2001b: 238). Perceiving the presence of the specular image along­ side the Other’s forms the child’s ego from the outside—in an attempt to return to Shobchack’s terminology. Language functions as substitute for being where the pre-speaking child biologically exists but is not symboli­ cally inscribed. It is the function of the misrecognition which characterizes the formation of the ego in the subject’s reality principle (Lacan, 2006: 80) where the signifier/word/utterance stands for the absence of referent/object and its symbolic/existential presence. In consequence, the screen’s onto­ logical gap, responsible for exposing architecture’s laws to the reality effect, is derived from making something absent appear as present in the physi­ cality of space.

34 Positioning the Screen

Shock Effects and 3D Mapping Richard Charles Strong wrote about the screen as an element of architecture in the essay Habit, Distraction, Absorption: Reconsidering Walter Benjamin and the Relation of Architecture to Film (2014) which appeared in the book The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture edited by Nadir Lahiji. Strong was still a Philosophy graduate student at the time whose research focused primarily on the social, political, aesthetic and epistemological force of various conceptions of habit from Hume to Bourdieu. This is worth mentioning for two reasons. The first one concerns Strong’s relation with the phenomenon of the screen. Specifically, he uses this new observation—he acknowledges the screen as an element of architecture—as a tool for his philosophical critique on Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (2008). The book considers important that its own starting point (the observation of the screen) is equally admitted as such by an author positioned outside the field but also potentially indifferent to its architectural significance. Strong observes and declares—without drawing support from any architectural source—that there is a new ‘material at the disposal of the architect and builder. This is true in so far as the filmic image is now a building surface material in essence no different from plaster, brick, drywall, marble façade or béton brut (perhaps not load-bearing, but certainly loaded)’ (Strong, 2014: 173). The second reason has to do with the framework, which according to Strong, this new observation necessi­ tates in order to be studied from an architectural point of view. He con­ cludes that given the emergence of the screen as a new element ‘we should look into film theory in order to understand some of the changes taking place in architecture’ (Ibid.: 176). Briefly, the argument presented in Strong’s paper unfolds in the following way: i W. Benjamin posits an equivalence between architecture and film; specifically, as Strong explains that the best way to understand the relation between film and the film-going masses is by looking at the way the masses relate to architecture. ii Strong refutes this analogy; even if it held in the past, it definitely no longer does because of the screen’s emergence as an element of architecture. iii From the external position he occupies to architecture, he provides one property which characterizes the architectural space which includes a screen. That is, the screen ‘gives inherent shock effects to some buildings (Ibid.: 164). The following review will survey these three points in order to delineate Strong’s observation of the screen and how he proposed further research into the topic. Analysing in depth W. Benjamin’s seminal paper is beyond the

Positioning the Screen 35 scope of this book; it will only be considered as the point from which Strong’s argument distanced itself in order to make the latter better intelligible. Benjamin examines how different arts relate to their corresponding audience where the audience is considered as being either an individual or a collective subject; the latter is referred to as ‘the masses.’ The relationality an art has with its audience is divided in two states: concentration and distraction. It is exemplified by an analogy that Benjamin draws between cinema and architecture, passing through painting. ‘Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception, as architec­ ture has always been able to do […] and as film is able to do today’ (2008: 36). Thus, observing a painting is associated with an individual concen­ trated look while visiting a building and by extension watching a film is correlated to a collective state of distraction. This receptive difference between the two-dimensional mediums of painting and film brings forward the property of shock effects which is inherent in the latter—but not included in the former. The following quote captures Benjamin’s compar­ ison between a filmic screen and a canvas. The image on the film screen changes, whereas the image on the canvas does not. The painting invites the viewer to contemplation; before it, he can give himself up to his train of associations. Before a film image, he cannot do so. No sooner has he seen it than it has already changed. It cannot be fixed on. The train of associations in the person contemplating it is immediately interrupted by new images. This constitutes the shock effect of film, which, like all shock effects, seeks to induce heightened attention. (emphasis added, 2008: 53) It is worth mentioning that in an endnote Benjamin himself offers a more literal translation of the last phrase where the shock effect of the film ‘seeks to be buffered by intensified presence of mind’ (Ibid: 54). Strong explains that what enables a film, any film, to produce shock effects is its very (mechanical) constitution. That is, the sequential almost imperceptible progression between the moving images in timely intervals of 24 seconds; in other words, shock effects are inherent in the medium of film regardless of content (2014: 165). As such, he sees Benjamin’s description of the shock effect applying to ‘a spectator or rather the mass spectators’ collective perception of images being constantly interrupted by change or movement which then precludes nothing like thoughtful attention or contemplation (.ibid). The antithesis that distraction and concentration form is illustrated by Benjamin through the art of painting which marks how an artist is absorbed by it, concentrated like the legend of a Chinese painter that entered his completed painting while beholding it (2008: 39). On the other hand, the masses are described as being distracted while absorbing the work of art into themselves. According to Benjamin the same holds for architecture which ‘has always offered the

36 Positioning the Screen prototype of an artwork that is received in a state of distraction and through the collective’ (Ibid.: 40). Yet, he clarifies that there exist cases where archi­ tecture is not received in this passive tactile and optical manner. For example, such dual reception (use and perception) cannot be understood in terms of the concentrated attention of a traveller before a famous building. ‘On the tactile side, there is no counterpart to what contemplation is on the optical side (emphasis added, Ibid.: 40). In other words, when the subjects absorb any art in a state of distraction this happens predominantly by tactile instead of optical means. As Strong explains ‘Benjamin contends that this tactile absorption that one finds in film is best understood in terms of an analogy with architecture and […] its mode of reception by the distracted masses’ (2014: 171). Thus, in order to show that this is not the case anymore Strong claims that the screen as element of architecture fulfils the above-mentioned missing counterpart—to what contemplation is on the optical side. His main example of the screen’s emergence within architectural space is the lobby of the Comcast Centre in Philadelphia which is discussed in relation to its illusionary capacities. The seamless integration of the screen’s edges with the surrounding three-dimensional space is highlighted by Strong in a similar manner to Friedberg’s commentary on Uncle Josh. The screens at the Comcast Centre are seamlessly integrated into the lobby walls, or rather, they form the surface of the lobby walls. Their resolution is so high that if the screen produces an image similar to the wood panels around them one cannot easily distinguish them from the actual wood. (2014: 174) What is usually displayed on these screens is visual content related to the city of Philadelphia, depictions of the solar system or even natural landscape scenes. While this content does not seem to be of particular architectural relevance Strong points out one of its properties which is worth mentioning. Instead of commenting about what else these images could have been he rather specifies what they are not. Namely, he emphasizes that they are—at least at the level of intention—specific to the building’s location as opposed to using stock footage or merely showing a movie or replaying a television programme (Ibid.). Analysing the projected content itself was well beyond the scope of Strong’s paper. His main focus was to make the case of its existence within architectural space and showcase the argument that buildings that use the medium of the filmic as the surface of its constituent parts—wall, ceilings and floors—do have the shock effect built-in (Ibid.: 177). As a result, the observation of the screen allowed him to challenge Benjamin’s analogy between architecture’s and cinema’s mode of reception. In other words, one can conclude that distraction, tactile appropria­ tion, and absorption of a building are intensified and extended with the insertion of the filmic into the surfaces of our buildings. (Ibid.)

Positioning the Screen 37 This is where we part ways with Strong’s insightful argument; or rather carry on from its conclusion which admits that the observation of the screen ‘may prove to provide positive potentials for architecture, or they could be deleterious; it is too soon to make such a judgement’ (ibid.). The book’s task at hand is to examine how and why this projected footage can be determined to be of architectural significance. The fact that W. Benjamin presented the analogy of architecture and film via a reference to painting should highlight the importance (of dimensionality) separating these mediums. Notwithstanding that technological advancements enabled the emergence of (what this book refers to as) the screen 70 years after its publication, its faithful study includes the shared history of imitation between architecture and painting. Chapter 2 will examine the represen­ tational capacities of perspective projection at the moment it entered the walls of architecture; as seen in the frescos of the Renaissance period. For the moment I would only like to point out how Lorens Holm’s overview of this shared history is echoing in anticipation of the emergence of buildings like the Comcast Centre. First, painting imitates architecture. Then, when painting discovers perspective and can finally get it right, i.e. when painting has discovered the laws which governed architecture (architecture’s unconscious), architecture starts to imitate painting. It becomes possible for architec­ ture to represent itself, as if its two-dimensional image were slideprojected upon its walls. (Holm, 2000: 40) In other words, the Comcast building in Philadelphia should not be re­ garded as merely a building with some screens. The merging of the two mediums which share the same underlying representational logic is pivotal. Certainly, it is still an exception where three-dimensional space blends with two-dimensional projections and the roles of spectator and participant (or visitor) coincide. While the building localizes cinema, the film’s projected content dislocates the building. Even though the building is physically unchangeable, cinema is forcing it to adapt to a generated filmic context through the technique of editing, cutting, zooming, recording, projecting, etc. alongside the physical one where is situated. In other words, we start seeing how the screen potentially allows architecture to surpass the physi­ cality of the site it occupies. The deceptive capacity of the screen and its role as element of architec­ ture is also considered by Richard Koeck who has extensively published (Penz and Koeck 2017, Koeck and Warnaby 2015, 2010) on the relation of architecture, cities and cinema focusing mainly on the filmic significance of architecture and urban environments. It should be noted that Koeck has equally produced several installations and exhibitions—like If These Walls Could Talk (2020), Augmented Reality: Recreating Sir Edwin Lutyen’s

38 Positioning the Screen Unbuilt Cathedral (2018) or Liverpool: a city on screen (2008)—involving elements of virtual reality, holograms and projections, which reflect his active interest in the connection between multi-media technologies, cinema and architecture. However, it is in Cine-scapes (2013) that Koeck directly acknowledges the element of the screen, primarily through a discussion on electronic fa­ cades and the technique of 3D mapping. The founding hypothesis of Cinescapes is similar to Strong’s positioning of architecture and cinema. Koeck argues that ‘we have reached a point today in which film and architecture are not only related disciplines that have mutually informed each other, but are, indeed, inseparable (emphasis original, 2013: 6). Overall, the aim of this book is to ‘use film as a lens through which we look at urban spaces, a cinematic gaze can reveal filmic and/or cinematic phenomena and qualities that are present in postmodern landscapes, and which perhaps are other­ wise disregarded or merely passively consumed’ (Ibid.: 5). As such, film and architecture operate at the epistemological and ontological level accord­ ingly. For example, during his analysis, Koeck speaks of Tallinn’s old town as urban continuity (Ibid.: 75), Rem Koolhaas’ Casa de Música in Porto as urban montage or points out how the social function of a residential apartment building in Liverpool operates as an urban dissolve in relation to empty warehouses from the turn of 20th century (Ibid.: 82). However, the concluding chapter, Urban Screen Evolution: From 2D to 4D, is where the phenomenon of the screen is directly acknowledged and discussed. It begins with a commentary on Guy Debord’s notion of spec­ tacle and the transient nature of moving images that appear in our cities like advertising walls and electronic billboards similar to those in Piccadilly Circus. Koeck claims that ‘it is easy to overlook the fact that whilst the appearance of the city might become more ephemeral through the use of screens with changing images, we face a more permanent change to the perception and consumption of imagery in urban environments’ (Ibid.: 171). This change is illustrated via two shifts of scale which regard first, the (space of) interaction between the human subject and the screen and sec­ ondly, the relation of a screen with the space it appears. New technological innovations in the field of image visualisation have begun to do two things in relation to space; first they have changed the measurable distance between the body and the screen (micro scale); and second, two-dimensional images have started to conquer threedimensional space (macro scale). (emphasis original, Ibid.: 172) Micro scale focuses on the constantly decreasing distance that separates the human body from various types of screens. Koeck traces historically this distance which was measured in meters during the 1950s due to the TV screen’s insertion into our living rooms to the present-day division between

Positioning the Screen 39 the eye and modern prosthetics of wearable computing, which is either measured in centimetres or completely nullified in cases like a wireless LED contact lens developed by researchers in the University of Washington. However, the macro scale is more pertinent to the book’s scope of research since it allows the screen or new technologies of projection to engage architecture at the level of a building and/or a city. Koeck focuses primarily on the technique of 3D projection mapping and its relation with a building’s different surfaces. Considering the book’s framework, it is no surprise that he is interested in such a technology. 3D mapping allows Koeck to conflate his main object of study with its own methodological approach; a building (or city) and the filmic techniques used to explain it. As a result, he brings forward several examples where such animations have been implemented and outlines the multiplicity of the resulting condition. Most points concern a potential use for this technique like entertainment, marketing campaigns and the advertisement or simply being able to convey a positive emotional message. For example, he states that visitors of the Millbank Tower Event (2011)—where Nokia projected promotional footage for a new phone on a Grade II listed skyscraper in London—which looked for an animation work that would intellectually engage with the characteristics of a listed landmark building were disappointed, but then they were probably in the minority. Instead, the event managed to deliver a stunning live audio-visual performance which maximised the potential of the tower as a giant vertical urban screen for entertainment and advertisement. (2013: 176) However, among the examples, Koeck brings forward two notions which particularly concern the logic that these projections relate to architecture’s implied (production of) space. One has to do with the perceptual shift of dimensions and the second one with movement. The secret of such work lies not in the fact that moving image and light are projected on to an existing building, but that the 3D animations are precisely measured to fit an existing façade thus creating the illusion of a building beginning to move, shift and reconfigure itself. In other words, a custom-made projection maps three-dimensional point on a twodimensional surface, in this case, the façade of a building. (2013: 174) This dimensional interplay is portrayed through the 555 Kubik (2009) installation which intervened on the rectangular sandstone façade of the Galerie der Gegenwart (one of the three buildings composing the Hamburger Kunsthalle Museum) designed by Oswald Mathias Ungers in 1997. The projective spectacle was created by the cross-disciplinary design studio URBANSCREEN which specializes in site-specific installations of this kind and was directly influenced by the existing building. Specifically,

40 Positioning the Screen the project entertains the following self-reflexive question: how it would be, if a house was dreaming? As URBANSCREEN explains in the project’s description7 ‘the conception of this project consistently derives from its underlying architecture—the theoretic conception and visual pattern of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. The basic idea of narration was to dissolve and break through the strict architecture of O.M Ungers’. As a result, multiple potential layouts of how the façade could have been are shown in a dynamic and constantly evolving animation. Koeck focuses on how the digital content ‘can be matched to an existing façade, to the extent that the side of the building seems to liberate itself from its static, two-dimensional existence and begins to venture into a third and even a fourth dimension’ (175). In other words, the projections successfully displace the architectural object and supersede the initial articulation of windows. Admittedly a viewer who joins the show after the projections started is only witnessing a continuously unfolding production of space where a situation of reflexivity evolves describing the constitution and spacious perception of this location by means of the building itself. As such, Koeck makes an astute observation regarding all technologies of projection or image visualization and their relation with the discipline of architecture. Namely, they do not solely engage the subject’s relationship with space, but also to movement (179). Whilst in the history of film, it was images that began to move in front of our eyes, facilitating a cultural revolution that was based on representation, in the future it will be the movement of our body that will alter our relationship with images in urban landscapes, and thus our understanding of the world. (179) This quote, which is situated in the concluding remarks of the book is noteworthy because it conveys a condition of the screen which might initially seem like a paradox. That is, (the logic of) the mechanism that produces the visual meaning of projections through aligning the twodimensional moving images with the three-dimensional building, inherently accounts for the viewer’s position or point of view for the alignment to take place. While this duality will be considered by the book in chapter 2 and further investigated in chapter 5 through certain design experiments, I should conclude this section by outlining why Koeck’s investigation does not address it further. Hence, the following two points are not limitations but rather situated beyond the scope of Cine-scapes (2013). First, all instances relating to the phenomenon of the screen discussed by Koeck are contained within the performance of 3D mapping projection. That is an interventional technique operating on top of an existing archi­ tectural object and not included in the process of producing it. While there are use cases for such events, the spectacle treats the three-dimensional building as a backdrop for receiving the projections and does not initiate a dialogue or a negation between the two systems for producing space;

Positioning the Screen 41 namely, constructing three-dimensional forms and projecting twodimensional images which appear as space. In other words, indeed the footage projected on Galerie der Gegenwart is inspired by the existing building, but it could be successfully displayed on any other flat surface of similar proportions. Beyond the level of intentional reference, it is almost indifferent to the building itself, merely using it as the medium through which projections appear. At this moment, I should only highlight that it does not exhaust the potential of the screen’s production of spatial meaning. Finally, what happens if/when the projections do not achieve spatial meaning or do not correctly align? This suspension of meaning or production of non-sense is equally not considered by Koeck alongside most accounts which discuss the screen. As will be shown, I do not consider this temporal territory as an error or limitation of the screen but rather as productive negativity of the condition (of alignment) whose rules should precisely be studied to better understand the illusion produced.

Virilio’s Prediction Paul Virilio’s work holds a profound role in the structural development of this book. Specifically, this section aims to demonstrate that in The Vision Machine (1996) and The Lost Dimension (2012), originally published in 1989 and 1991 respectively, Virilio predicted the use of the screen as an element of architecture and outlined the conditions of its possibility. It should be noted that the significance of the screen’s speculation lies beyond its validity or truth value in hindsight. The screen as object of study was not there to be empirically observed and examined; nonetheless, its potential architectural implications were outlined irrespective of its factual existence. Overall, he claimed that the screen’s architecture is intersectional, defined the space it generates as interchangeable, but most importantly suggested that a faithful study of its architectural implications should follow the shift from immediate reality to reality effect. In a similar manner to the previ­ ously discussed existing accounts, the following exposition aims to discern how Virilio problematized the screen and which notions or concepts were crucial in its investigation. Virilio’s proposed framework of critically en­ quiring what an image is and how it acquires the value of space bypasses from an epistemological point of view technology as the tool to position or render the screen’s insertion among architecture’s elements intelligible; hence, I refer to it as a prediction. Sylvère Lotringer (2001) prefaced an allencompassing interview with Virilio with the following two questions. i ii

In what sense can one still ‘build’ something—anything—when inter­ faces replace surfaces? What becomes of architecture with the advent of such a space, defined by technologies of communication?

42 Positioning the Screen As a provisional conclusion, which sets the tone regarding the gravity of the screen’s emergence as an architectonic element, Virilio replied to Lotringer in the following way: the result is that next to actual space […] there is now virtual space, and the two are interdependent. We have before us a stereo reality. Like the lows and the highs that create a field effect, a relief effect, we have now actual space and virtual space. And the architect has to work with both. Just as the architects of Versailles worked with the gallery of mirrors. Except that now it is not simply a phenomenon of representation; it is a place of action … Thus you have to work with this stereo reality, with this relief of reality. We are heading toward a world in which the quattrocento’s perspective of space is no longer sufficient. We need an Alberti, a Brunelleschi … to create a real-time perspective for virtual space. (2001: 41–42) Evidently, the screen’s capacity to form illusory images which under certain conditions are assigned the value of space (alongside the temporal dimen­ sion of event/action) is central in Paul Virilio’s response. Specifically, these conditions are attributed to the rules of perspective projection which are capable of making something absent appear as present, or—as expressed in the previous section—making an image assume the value of space where architecture’s virtual dimension produces its actuality. This proposition should be viewed neither as a conjecture nor a per­ sonally motivated assumption. It is retroactively deduced by Virilio fol­ lowing the effect of projective techniques on elements of architecture where ‘the moment high-speed photography was invented, making cinema a concrete possibility, the problem of the paradoxically real nature of ‘virtual’ imagery was in fact posed’ (emphasis added, 1996: 61). This precise ontological problem drives Virilio’s examination of how and to what ex­ tend architectonic elements such as the window and later the wall are mutated by the above mentioned technologically enabled virtual imagery—the first of which is the television screen. His famous exposition regarding the mutation (or displacement) of the window by the television screen progresses in the following way: i The first window is the door which serves as a physical means of access. ii The second window, illuminating the accessed space and providing views to the outside world is the window as such. iii Finally, the third window is a recent invention. That is, ‘the television screen … which no longer opens onto adjoining space but instead faces beyond the perceptible horizon, becomes a selector of electronic images and interrupts the passage of bodies’ (Virilio, 2012: 111).

Positioning the Screen 43 These electronic images are important because, according to Virilio, they introduce a novel organizational logic to the architectural plan. A logic which is beyond the functional one of separation fulfilled by the different modes of access such as the door ‘with its hierarchies of spaces into prin­ cipal and secondary rooms or receiving and serving units’ (2012: 113). The first element which (historically) performs this spatio-temporal shift is the wall because “until recently, the city separated its ‘intramural’ population from those outside the walls. Today, people are divided according to as­ pects of time” (emphasis added, Ibid.: 32). In other words, such technol­ ogies enrich the daily rhythm of inhabitation by what Virilio refers to as false day which results in a doubling of space and time of the building’s lived experience. On the one hand there is the primary day, wherein we live; on the other is the secondary day, which is recorded somewhere for us[…]In the one, the heat is turned on electrically to prepare for the weekend, while the other timer is set automatically, and electronically, so as to record things that will be seen much later. (Ibid.: 114) As a consequence, this new mediated architectural reality is characterized by an ‘exhaustion of physical, or natural, relief and of temporal distances telescopes all localization and all position. As with live televised events, the places become interchangeable at will (emphasis added, Ibid: 35). Regarding the screen as architectonic element the question that arises is the following. What is the architectural significance of occupying (in a virtual and/or physical way) places which are interchangeable at will? In other words, what is the value of architectural space being interchangeable? The condition of this mediated (architectural) reality affects both the viewer and the object itself—while both components are equally involved towards the question of space and the question of time being interchangeable accord­ ingly. As far as the confusion produced by an image pretending to be a space is concerned, we have already discussed the exemplary case of Uncle Josh. The second aspect which relates to the temporal confusion of such mediated spaces I believe is intuitively understood by most of us. Among a plethora of examples, I will present Peter Eisenmann’s story of a recorded wedding where he examines the real and mediated aspects of the event and by extension enquires what is included in an architectural experience. As the bride was coming down the aisle (they were filming for home video use), suddenly the producer said, “Cut, okay, go back. We need this again.” And so the bride stops, walks back, and comes down the aisle again […] The question, again, was whether there was ever a real event because it looked rather like a rehearsal for a videotape. Perhaps the only time the real wedding would be seen would be on the edited

44 Positioning the Screen videotape, in which case the edited videotape would become the reality. (2007: 20) What this rather commonplace story holds for the developing consideration of the screen is revealed when read alongside Eisenman’s distinction between experiential (or subjective) and linear (or internal) time. It is found in the text A Second Language where he explains at length how the notion of narrative (as linear time) in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) is ‘dis­ located’ from being seen as the film’s first or natural language. Briefly, something which dislocates the traditional relation between a form and its meaning is called by Eisenman a text (2004: 227). In the film dislocations of this nature occur mainly through the soundtrack. Eisenman observes that the lead song was originally sung in 1951 but the version used in the film was from 1963. Another key song in the film In Dreams by Roy Orbison is also not from the fifties, but again from 1963. These observations alongside a few other anachronistic remarks8 make Blue Velvet textual since it is a film, where ‘the media par excellence for displaying internal time, is used … to dislocate the very phenomenon of narrative time supposedly natural to it’ (Eisenman, 2004: 229). Beyond this particular reading of Lynch’s film Eisenman clarifies that all films contain this self-reflexive potential; evident for instance in how early films matched the narrative and chronological time to coincide. On the other hand: […] architecture, unlike literature or film, has never had the capacity to contain or display a linear or internal time. […] The question of how time could be introduced into architecture itself, rather than merely as the experience of our response to architecture’ remains unanswered. (Ibid.: 229) Virilio’s notion of false day is addressing the exact same question without precluding its possibility. He posits that every distortion of the astronomical day (chronological time in Eisenman) had profound effects on the arrangement of urban space and architecture, like his previous example where the window displaced the door. According to Virilio, the time (or type of day) that architecture traditionally houses within its object has progressed in the following way. Solar day was prolonged by the candle­ light chemical day which was then replaced by the electric day that ‘indefinitely prolonged the perception of daylight’ (2012: 116). The latter is characterized by a constant stream of technological inventions such as supersonic transports, laser optics, holography or three-dimensional tele­ vision, and is directly opposite to the astronomical day. Virilio describes this condition as the moment where the division between reality of temporal and spatial distances and the video-graphic representations has been abol­ ished. Considered at its extreme, observed phenomena are replaced by

Positioning the Screen 45 mediated events where the observer has no immediate9 contact with the observed reality (Ibid.: 51). This ontological consideration, especially the way ‘observed reality’ is constituted for the viewer is key and (not surprisingly) Virilio compares it with holography which was arguably the most immersive audio-visual technology of his time. Interestingly he condemns it, or at least finds no proper spatial (interest or) properties in its way of appearing to inscribe it to his already developed sequence of technologically displaced architectonic elements. The following quote specifies why Virilio distinguishes holography from other technologies of tele-presence and communication which create the ‘false day’. Seeing that which had previously been invisible becomes an activity that renews the exoticism of territorial conquests of the past. But seeing that which is not really seen becomes an activity that exists for itself. This activity is not exotic but endotic, because it renews the very conditions of perception, which is necessary to physical reality […] Holography is in no way the perfection of perspective […] It is instead the end: the extermination of all perspective of reality. (Ibid.: 117) Thus, (I repeat) Virilio who has posited the need for a new Alberti or Brunelleschi for real time perspective, claims that the architect has to ‘work with this stereo reality, this relief of reality’ which is comprised of two interdependent spaces (actual and virtual)—instead of replacing or favouring one over the other. Most importantly, while he admits that the quattrocento might not be sufficient to fully grasp this new condition it certainly grounds our understanding of it. This new condition is unambiguously described by Virilio as ‘the time of cinematographic factitiousness; literally as well as fig­ uratively, from now on architecture is only a movie’ (emphasis added, 2009: 65). It is a realm where representations (statements or propositions) cannot be simply divided as being true or false but rather approached in terms of plausibility and impossibility. ‘The shift of interest from the thing to its image, and especially from space to time, to the instant, leads to a shift in polarities from the old black-and-white real-figurative dichotomy to the more relative actual-virtual’ (emphasis added, Virilio, 1996: 70). The logic of perspective is what mediates, or binds together, the two-dimensional (virtual) space and the three-dimensional (actual) one; while holography, as Virilio writes, is the end of precisely this negotiation. This line of thought is followed by a rhetorical question concerning a complete disintegration of the building, as the object of architecture, only to conclude with a speculation which finds itself at the core of this book. Something will affect the building in its very persistence, the resistance of its materials, the duration of its immediate efficiency. It will become less that a décor—a form-image as unreliable as a mirage. (emphasis added, 2012: 119)

46 Positioning the Screen This something is the screen, as the mutation of the wall by projection. It is presented as a particular manifestation, certainly technologically enabled, of a broader architectural concern, that is space and its representation. Virilio’s sequence could be extended since the window supersedes the door, and the screen displaces the window. In fact, as mentioned in the intro­ duction he described it as: […] the architectonic mutation of a wall-screen. The images on this wall increasingly assumed the value of space, taking over all the dimensions in the projection room, and finally fusing and confusing architecture with projection technique—a fusion that had previously eluded the fresco. (emphasis added, 2012: 123) The two emphasized notions of the quote—specifically, the mutation of the wall-screen and its historical referent in the fresco—are linked by Virilio in the following way. The wall screen is the latest instance of a series of mutations which reach the very ‘principle and nature of architecture’ (Ibid.: 135). Its imminent emergence will be an event of considerable importance since it ‘inversely and paradoxically builds an imperceptible [projective] order, which is invisible but just as practical as masonry’ (Ibid.: 40). How important will it be? According to Virilio, at least comparable to the last time a projection technique was confused with architecture—which occurred in the Renaissance where architectural scenes were depicted on the walls of architecture. As such, any understanding of the screen and its implications, is conditioned upon studying representation and the merging/confusion/ illusion of space with projection; namely, linear perspective and its reality effect. Just like cinema which insofar as ‘it is grounded in the photograph will contribute to the circulation of this currency of perspective projection’ (Heath, 1981: 30), the wall-screen insofar as it is grounded on cinema it will bring forward the relative fusion/confusion of the factual (or operational, if you prefer) and the virtual; the ascendancy of the ‘reality effect’ over a reality principle (emphasis added, Virilio, 1996: 60). The reference to the Renaissance is not arbitrary or merely well suited for the purposes of this line of thought since it coincides with both Friedberg’s and Strong’s concluding remarks. It is Virilio’s way of addressing (or directing the reader toward) the shared history of imitation between architecture and painting which brings forward the same epistemological question towards its physical spatial reality and virtual imagelike consti­ tution. It signals that the screen’s contribution to the discourse of archi­ tectural representation is not exhausted at making an image appear as space. Rather it concerns the limit of symbolic articulation where archi­ tecture is able to represent itself beyond its process of conception—the drawing or the model—but in its object or building as output.

Positioning the Screen 47

The Screen and the Fiction of Architecture’s Symbolic (2D–3D) To what extend is 3D mapping, Uncle Josh, or the Comcast Centre’s screen merely a trick? Does this kind of illusion, and the mechanisms producing it, contain something of architectural significance? Jonathan Crary provides an insightful positioning of this line of enquiry apropos the significance of the camera obscura. For those who understood its optical underpinnings it offered the spectacle of representation operating completely transparently, and for those ignorant of its principles it afforded the pleasures of illusion. Just as perspective contained within it the disruptive possibilities of anamorphosis, however, so the veracity of the camera was haunted by its proximity to techniques of conjuration and illusion. (2007: 33) Following Virilio we can agree that ‘the screen became the last wall. Not a wall out of stone, but of screens showing images. The actual boundary is the screen’ (Virilio & Ruby, 1998: 181). Yet, it should be highlighted that Virilio is not referring to the technique of projection—how it works, and which rules it follows—but rather considers projection as technique, in the sense that projection is what makes the space distinct. This is because Virilio does not treat the phenomenon he coined wall-screen simply as a new element (pro­ duced out of a new construction technique) but rather as enabling the con­ struction of a new technique for producing architectural space. Basically, along with construction techniques, there’s always the construction of techniques, that collection of spatial and temporal mutations that is constantly reorganizing both the world of everyday experience and the esthetic representation of contemporary life. Constructed space, then, is more than simply the concrete and material substance of constructed structures, the permanence of elements and the architectonic of urbanistic details. It also exists as the sudden proliferation and the incessant multiplication of special effects which, along with the consciousness of time and of distances, affect the perception of the environment. (2012: 39) Considering Virilio’s shift to projection as technique, or perspective as logic, how are we to study the screen being a constituent of architecture’s pro­ duction of space? While there is no ready-made answer to be isolated several traits characterizing this change of perspective towards the screen’s obser­ vation have been suggested. Friedberg focused on the subject’s perceptive ambivalence trying to localize where are we when in front of the filmic screen through the concepts of suture and the mirror stage. Koeck and Strong dis­ cussed the logic of perspective and the alignment of two and three dimensions

48 Positioning the Screen in the spectacle of moving images taking place within an architectural object. Virilio focused on the self-referential potential of this phenomenon with regard to the projections producing the space of architecture. Guided by the previous exposition of existing accounts regarding the screen’s emergence as architectonic element, the focus of investigation narrows down to this new element’s distinct mode of appearance. Its capacity to produce images which (under certain conditions) assume the value of space reflects an underlined ontological ambivalence; since the screen is only as long as it appears. The resulted space which is comprised both by actual and virtual elements not only contributes to architecture’s spatial conception but equally affects its subject; complementing his/her role of inhabitant (or visitor) with the one of simultaneously being a spectator. To examine the principles that determine the screen’s function between two and three dimensions let’s consider the following two (plus one) interdependent questions. i

ii

What is the difference between seeing a three-dimensional ‘real’ performance, or event, like theatre from a specific point of view and looking at a screen projecting the very same event recorded from the same point of view? What is the difference between a seeing a space from a specific point of view and looking at a photo of that space taken from the same point of view?

Finally, once this difference is delineated why should it be considered of architectural relevance or importance? It should be noted that the second question is directly examined at length by architectural historian Lorens Holm (2010) and will be explored in the following chapter. This part will focus on the first question and specifically outline how Christian Metz approached the difference (of the signifier) of theatre and cinema in his seminal paper The Imaginary Signifier (1975). Framing this question aims to position how meaning is produced between two and three dimensions between presentation and representation of an object and its image. Metz begins to consider the topic by discussing the presence (of objects) in theatre versus the inherent absence (of objects) represented on the filmic screen. Those which appear on a theatre’s stage do not consist of images, the perceptions they offer to the eye and the ear are inscribed in a true space (not a photographed one), the same one as that occupied by the public during the performance; everything the audience hear and see is actively produced in their presence, by human beings or props which are themselves present. (1975: 47) In theatre while an object like a chair can either pretend to be something else or ‘explain to me that it is a theatre chair’ in the end it is a chair (Ibid.).

Positioning the Screen 49 On the contrary in the cinema it will not be there when the spectators see it; ‘it will have delegated its reflection to them (Ibid.: 48). Whereas the example with the chair might sound obvious (at a practical level) it illustrates how Metz structurally locates absence in different parts of cinema’s and theatre’s (signifying) process. As such, ‘in the cinema it is not just the fictional signified [like the chair which pretends to be something else], if there is one, that is thus made present in the mode of absence, it is from the outset the signifier’ (commentary added, Ibid.). This always-already nature of the cinematic (imaginary) signifier is particularly revealing with regard to the notions of illusion and reality that Metz attributes to the cinema. He takes for granted its symbolic dimension and illusory capacity; that is cinema functions as such only because we know ‘it is not real’. That is why instead of con­ demning the cinematic perceptions for being ‘false’ he explicitly posits the opposite. ‘Or rather, the activity of perception in it is real […] but the per­ ceived is not really an object, it is its shade, its phantom, its double, its replica in a new kind of mirror’ (Ibid.). This is a unique self-referential property of cinema’s signifier which only exists without being there. In Metz’s words, ‘the cinema involves us in the imaginary: it drums up all perception, but to switch it immediately over into its own absence, which is nonetheless the only signifier present’—hence the title Imaginary Signifier for his paper which is alwaysalready there for the spectator to emerge as a symbolically inscribed subject. It is for this reason that Metz does not conflate the ontologically con­ stitutive absence of cinema with its seeming ability to manufacture illusions. He emphasizes that while actors, characters, elements of the set, sounds, or even the plot might be fictional; cinema ‘ … does not aim for the fictional illusion proper’ (Ibid.: 47). Certainly, I can identify with the character or the actor of a film, or even be completely fooled for a short time like the character in Uncle Josh, but this tells us nothing about how I emerge or become a subject in its process. The question arises precisely of where it is during the projection of the film […] when I recognise my like on the screen, and even more when I do not recognise it, where am I? Where is that someone who is capable of self-recognition when need be?. (Ibid.: 50) Simply replying ‘at the cinema’ misses the point since the question tries to go slightly further. It looks for the point in the film’s signifying process (during the cinema showing) occupied from the subject’s point of view (looking at myself looking at the film). Replying topographically is not wrong but rather considered as a precondition for the question itself. Metz argues that the process which produces cinematic meaning works because the spectator knows s/he is at the cinema. If the most extravagant spectacles and sounds or their most improbable assembly, the one most remote from all real experience, do not prevent

50 Positioning the Screen the constitution of meaning (and to begin with do not astonish the spectator, do not really astonish him, not in spirit: he simply judges the film as strange) – that is because he knows he is at the cinema. (Ibid.: 51) While this point might seem distant to the screen’s function as an element of architecture it narrows down the argument for its architectural significance. It affirms that its role is not to produce the best possible real-size illusions of space nor is exhausted if such illusions are revealed. As such, after the spectator knows s/he is perceiving something imaginary s/he comes to understand that it is him/her who is perceiving it. This second self-reflexive part of cinematic knowledge ‘divides in turn: I know that I am really per­ ceiving, that my sense organs are physically affected, that I am not fanta­ sising, that the fourth wall of the auditorium (the screen) is really different from the other three […] and I also know that it is I who am perceiving all this […] that therefore I am myself the place where this really perceived imaginary accedes to the symbolic by its inauguration as the signifier of a certain type of institutionalised social activity called the cinema’ (Ibid.). Thus, the search for the point of subjective inscription is dependent upon the sequence of three preconditions for (cinematic) knowledge: i I know I am at the cinema, ii I know I am perceiving something imaginary, iii I know that it is I who am perceiving it; both physically & symbolically. What this sequence amounts to is the statement that in front of the filmic screen as a subject I identify with myself. In fact, Metz defines identification as a process between the spectator and the screen where ‘the spectator is absent from the screen as perceived, but he is also (the two things inevitably go together) present there and even ‘all-present’ as perceiver’ (Ibid.: 56). That is why the screen is portrayed as a strange mirror that ‘returns us everything [all represented objects] but ourselves, because we are wholly outside it (emphasis added, 51). In anticipation, I should note that the geometrical articulation of being wholly outside the viewing plane of the screen will be demonstrated in chapter 4 through Michael Webb’s per­ spectival drawings. This the first (and only) topological response provided by Metz to the previous question of where is that someone who is capable of self-recognition. Due to its externality the spectator follows a succession of three stages in the process of understanding a film. Specifically, the spectator ‘must perceive: i the photographed object as absent ii its photograph as present iii [and finally] the presence of this absence as signifying’ (Ibid.: 58).

Positioning the Screen 51 These two sequences, one relating to the self-reflexive nature of the cin­ ematic subject and the other to the process of signification form a firm basis to examine how something absent can appear as present within architecture’s space and experience. In other words, Metz provides two ways—both underlined by absence—to understand the screen’s effect on the space it is now part of but also the subject viewing its projection. Both are crucial regarding the question of meaning because the lack of the screen, being a surface, is portrayed as productive negativity in the pro­ duction of space. Such a production rests on two readings that function in opposite, from a topological point of view, directions. Specifically, either we consider an illusion of two dimensions where meaning is guaranteed on correctly aligning a two-dimensional image and three-dimensional space, or we consider the production of space in three dimensions, which is a misrecognition of a two-dimensional image. Figures 1.1 and 1.2 illustrate these two operations, which crucially do not cancel each other out but rather consider the vanishing point or the point of view accordingly as their point of departure. It is based on a physically mod­ elled three-dimensional space populated by several objects. The model is used to portray the two operations; namely, how space comes to the viewing subject as an image and secondly how this articulation can be represented in two-dimensions so it could appear as space. Thus, on the left there is a photograph of the model where in the foreground a scale figure looks at the space through Alberti’s gridded viewing plane that all lines from the eye to the objects would intersect. On the right-hand side, the resulted representation of the model’s space is shown in two dimen­ sions in a perspectival drawing. Please note how the constructing lines underlie both perspectives. They converge towards the viewer’s eye when going from space to image and converge to the vanishing point when proceeding from two to three dimensions. Hence, it should be noted here, why the screen is being considered as an intersectional element. Being constituent of architecture’s production of space where it exists thought its appearance it makes its object engage both the subject’s perception and representation—which intersect. Namely, it creates a spatial condi­ tion which simultaneously puts the viewer in relation to objects (per­ ception of three-dimensions) and to images (representation of twodimensions). As expected, the gap that separates them is fundamental with regard to the screen’s appearance, or in general the logic of per­ spective projection. As will be examined in the following chapter it indicates that it is not an absolute representational system but rather accounts for elements which are not able to be represented once a van­ ishing point is posited and the subject occupies a point of view or is relativized in its space.

52 Positioning the Screen

Figure 1.1 Three-dimensional perspective. Physical model exploring the vanishing point and the point of view divided but also connected, or rather inter­ sected by the frame of the screen. Source: By the author.

Positioning the Screen 53

Figure 1.2 Construction lines in 2D–3D. Converging and diverging constructing lines in the process of fabricating the image of space and the illusion of space as image accordingly; highlighting the curious relation between the vanishing point and the point of view in these two operations. Source: By the author.

Notes 1 These two paradigms are complimented by an architectural and a cinematic point of view which do not constitute a structured frame of investigation founded upon an established theory like the psychoanalysis—through Lacan and Metz—and phenomenology—through Sobchack or Shaviro. Yet, they offer an existing account from the corresponding disciplines acknowledging the new space conception as produced between the screen and the space of the auditorium or hall. Friedberg cites Herman G. Scheffauer, a journalist, on how photographs are ‘smitten into life, into movement and conscious expression … a fourth dimension has begun to evolve out of this photographic cosmos’ ( 1960: 76). Regarding architecture she refers to Frederick Kiesler’s description that the viewing subject ‘is possible to lose himself in imaginary, endless space’ ( 1928). 2 The first encounter took place in January 1955 when Merleau-Ponty gave to the Société française de Psychanalyse entitled ‘Philosophy and Psychoanalysis’ and the third one, was at Henry Ey’s annual colloquium at Bonneval, France ( Phillips, 2019: 8–9).

54 Positioning the Screen 3 Comment se développe chez l’enfant la notion de corps propre, (in Journal de Psychologie, November–December 1931, pp. 705–48). 4 The counter-reference to an animal and its behaviour is a constant theme in Lacan’s teaching where many core concepts are explained in a similar fashion. For example, in chapter 2 I will discuss how bees communicate through dancing in relation to the primacy of signifier and the impossibility of animals to lie by telling the truth. 5 Eagleton notes that ‘the drives themselves are extremely flexibly, in no sense fixed like biological instinct: their objects are contingent and replaceable’ ( 2008: 133). 6 i) act of viewing ii) cinema’s and spectator’s communicative competence iii) Film as viewed object ( 1992: 19). 7 The following quotes are from the website of URBANSCREEN, www. urbanscreen.com/555-kubik/ 8 Some other anachronistic remarks include a shot where a 1958 Fleetwood Cadillac is shown or the consumption of Heineken beer before the late fifties. 9 As will be shown in chapter 3, this condition can be considered as being one step prior to the project Slow-House and the juxtaposition of an ocean view framed by a window and shown concurrently on a screen.

References Badiou, Alain, ‘Mark and Lack: On Zero’, trans. by Zachary Luke Fraser and Ray Brassier, Cahiers Pour l’Analyse (10.La Formalisation, 1969) http://cahiers. kingston.ac.uk/pdf/cpa10.8.badiou.translation.pdf Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. by Michael William Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 19–55 Blue Velvet (De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1986) Bredekamp, Horst, Image Acts: A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency (De Gruyter, 2017) 10.1515/9783110548570 Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, October Books, Repr (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) Damisch, Hubert, The Origin of Perspective, trans. by John Goodman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995) Dews, Peter, ‘The Eclipse of Coincidence: Lacan, Merleau‐Ponty and Schelling’, Angelaki, 4.3 (1999), 15–23 10.1080/09697259908572053 Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Anniversary edition, second edi­ tion (Malden, Mass. Oxford, UK Carlton, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2008) Eisenman, Peter, Eisenman inside out: Selected Writings, 1963–1988, Theoretical Perspectives in Architectural History and Criticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004) Eisenman, Peter, Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) Evans, Dylan, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London; New York: Routledge, 1996) Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)

Positioning the Screen 55 Friedberg, Anne, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006) Heath, Stephen, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981) Holm, Lorens, ‘What Lacan Said Re: Architecture’, Critical Quarterly, 42.2 (2000), 29–64 10.1111/1467-8705.00286 Holm, Lorens, Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier: Architecture, Space and the Construction of Subjectivity (London; New York: Routledge, 2010) Kiesler, Frederick, ‘Cinema Manifesto’, Close Up (August 1928) Koeck, Richard, ‘Cine-Montage: The Spatial Editing of Cities’, in The City and the Moving Image, ed. by Richard Koeck and Les Roberts (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010), pp. 208–221 10.1057/9780230299238_14 Koeck, Richard, Cine-Scapes: Cinematic Spaces in Architecture and Cities (New York: Routledge, 2013) Koeck, Richard, and Gary Warnaby, ‘Digital Chorographies: Conceptualising Experiential Representation and Marketing of Urban/Architectural Geographies’, Architectural Research Quarterly, 19.2 (2015), 183–192 10.1017/S1359135515 000202 Lacan, Jacques, The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. by Anthony Wilden (New York: Dell Publishing, 1973) Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006) Lacan, Jacques, Écrits: A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan, (London: Routledge, 2001) Lotringer, Sylvère, and Paul Virilio, ‘After Architecture: A Conversation’, trans. by Michael Taormina, Grey Room, 3 (2001), 33–53 Manley, Charles, Cast, Inc Thomas A. Edison, and Paper Print Collection, Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show, produced by Porter, Edwin S.Uction, Camera (United States: Edison Manufacturing Co, 1902) Video. https://www.loc.gov/ item/00694324/ Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, ed. by Claude Lefort, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) Metz, Christian, ‘The Imaginary Signifier’, Screen, 16.2 (1975), 14–76 10.1093/ screen/16.2.14 Miller, Jacques-Alain, ‘La Suture (Éléments de La Logique Du Signifiant)’, Cahiers Pour l’Analyse, 1 (1966) http://cahiers.kingston.ac.uk/pdf/cpa10.8.badiou.translation.pdf Musser, Charles, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Oudart, Jean-Pierre, ‘Cinema and Suture (April-May 1969)’, in Cahiers Du Cinéma Volume 3: 1969–1972: The Politics of Representation, ed. by Nick Browne, Repr (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 45–57 Penz, François, and Richard Koeck, eds., Cinematic Urban Geographies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2017) 10.1057/978-1-137-46084-4 Phillips, James, ‘Merleau-Ponty and Psychoanalysis’, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, ed. by Richard G.T. Gipps and Michael

56 Positioning the Screen Lacewing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) 10.1093/oxfordhb/97801 98789703.013.11 Pluth, Ed, Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject, SUNY Series, Insinuations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007) Porge, Erik, Les Noms Du Père Chez Jacques Lacan: Ponctuations et Problématiques, Points Hors Ligne (Ramonville Saint-Agne [France]: Erès, 1997) Roudinesco, Élisabeth, Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) Roudinesco, Élisabeth, ‘The Mirror Stage: An Obliterated Archive’, in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed. by Jean-Michel Rabate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 25–34 10.1017/CCOL0521807441.002 Scheffauer, Herman G., ‘The Vivifying of Space’, Freeman (24 November–1 December 1920); reprinted in Lewis Jacobs ed., Introduction to the Art of the Movies, (New York: Noonday Press, 1960), pp. 76–85 Sobchack, Vivian Carol, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) Strong, Richard C., ‘Habit, Distraction, Absorption: Reconsidering Walter Benjamin and the Relation of Architecture to Film’, in The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture, ed. by Nadir Lahiji, Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy (London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 164–181 The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, 2006 Virilio, Paul, The Vision Machine, Perspectives, Repr (Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press, 1996) Virilio, Paul, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. by Philip Beitchman (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2009) Virilio, Paul, The Lost Dimension, trans. by Daniel Moshenberg, Semitext(e) Foreign Agents Series (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2012) Virilio, Paul, and Andreas Ruby, ‘Architecture in the Age of Its Virtual Disappearance’, in The Virtual Dimension: Architecture, Representation, and Crash Culture, ed. by John Beckmann, 1st ed (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), pp. 179–187 Zupančič, Alenka, What Is Sex?, Short Circuits (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017) Žižek, Slavoj, How to Read Lacan, How to Read, 1st American ed (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007) Žižek, Slavoj, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London; New York: Verso, 2012a) Žižek, Slavoj, ‘“Suture”, Forty Years Later’, in Concept and Form, Volume II: The Cahiers Pour l’Analyse and Contemporary French Thought, ed. by Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (London: Verso, 2012b), pp. 145–164 Žižek, Slavoj, Disparities (London Oxford; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)

2

Problematizing the Screen Duality of Representation

I have already discussed a collection of existing accounts which acknowl­ edged the observation of the screen and showcased from an architectural point of view how they all deal with a common issue presented in different forms. That is, the relation of the subject to external reality where space is mediated by its image, presented to us through a common process of der­ ivation. Namely, the effect of confusion, or momentary illusion, between two and three dimensions. Following the screen’s appearance which ‘had previously eluded the fresco, the mosaic and the stained glass’ (Virilio, 2012: 123) it is crucial to highlight the logical link established between a contemporary technological phenomenon and the analogical order of rep­ resentation which has been systematized from the Renaissance onwards. As such, examining the shared history of painting and architecture, through perspective projection is a prerequisite for the screen’s further examination.

Abscence and Illusion The screen’s capacity to produce spatial illusions will be structured upon the following three quotes which sequentially formulate a new conception of the subject situated within architectural space as inscribed between what is there as physical elements—l’être, eye as occupant—and what symbolically exists as image—l’étant, I as viewer. Tracing the mechanisms which followed the eye as organ to the I as subject (and ultimately their superimposition) is the book’s tool to directly investigate one of the screens discerned properties where it creates an image of space rather than space—namely, reality effect. i Alberti in 1453 outlines architecture’s debt to painting: ‘painting is the ‘flower of all the arts’ and suggest that the architect is indebted to the painter for inheriting ‘architraves, capitals, bases, columns and pedi­ ments, and all the other fine features of buildings’ (1991: 61). ii Lacan in 1960 after introducing his dually articulated account on the symbolic offers one of the few comments on architecture as he explains

DOI: 10.4324/9781003344995-3

58 Problematizing the Screen how it can represent itself: ‘one learns to paint architecture on the walls of architecture; and painting, too, is first of all something that is organized around emptiness … From the moment when perspective was discovered in painting, a form of architecture appears … submits itself to the laws of perspective, plays with them, and makes them its own. That is, it places them inside of something that was done in painting in order to find once again the emptiness of primitive architecture’ (1992: 136). iii Virilio in 1989 when speculating on the reception of architectonic forms and screen projection: ‘… architecture, is no longer even what it pretends to be … for all points of view and lines of vision, for all the actor-spectators who directly receive the transmission of the architec­ tonic form-image’ (2012: 99–100). What is at stake in the sequential progression of these carefully selected quotes is the self-reflexive notion which emerges through and beyond the act of representing the seemingly objective, empirically amenable objects situated within architectural space. For this reason, the following exposition will begin with Brunelleschi and Alberti’s concept of concinnitas where perspective was conceived and codified as a practical tool to map and draw the way we see—through a window—and then present how such a conception was directly challenged by Lacan. The shift under consideration regards the core of perspective where instead of being a visual phenomenon or a matter of sight it is regarded as a logical mapping of space. The investigation will thus focus on the production of meaning and what is amenable to the question of knowl­ edge in such a representational and symbolic paradigm. Brunelleschi, in the early 15th century, based on Euclidean properties of space, painted on a wooden panel the image of the Baptistry in Florence. He then devised an apparatus where the painted panel and a mirror reflecting the painting were placed at the exact spot where he painted the perspective drawing of the Baptistry. The painting was facing the real building while a hole had been drilled through its panel. For the demonstration to take place, a viewer was asked to look towards the mirror through the hole so the reflected image of depicted space and the real space of the Baptistry superimpose. That is the most elementary and descriptive reading of what Brunelleschi did—and apparently how perspective was invented or dis­ covered (Filarete, 1965; 305). A few years later, in 1435, Leon Battista Alberti appropriated the logic of this model and schematized it for painters in his treatise On Painting (1991). It is a system of a scenographic space, aiming at an impression of reality where space is set out as spectacle for the eye of a spectator—exemplified through Alberti’s pyramid of vision. It focuses on the organ of the eye where all the lines or rays of light converge. Prior to this systematization, the ex­ ternal world was reality, but now there is a tool to represent it and ascribe illusory subject positions on two conditions: the spectator shall use one eye

Problematizing the Screen 59 and the eye has to be placed in the central point. As such, no knowledge is accessible if the eye in the scene is not determined by geometry and optical properties, while the dictated subject position implies that the viewer can be out of place. Almost twenty years later, in 1452, in his treatise On the Art of Building (1988), this tool for artists finds itself at the core of architecture’s discipline. In the same way Vitruvius between 30 and 15BC proposed the idea of venustas, Alberti outlined his own vision of how beauty can be achieved in architecture through a building. The process to be followed was named concinnitas where ‘beauty is a form of sympathy and consonance of the parts within a body, according to definite number, outline and position, as dictated by concinnitas, the absolute and fundamental rule in nature’ (1988: 303). The gap between Alberti’s theoretical codification and constructed buildings following such rules has already been identified by numerous scholars and is usually treated as a discrepancy or a situational deviation from the rule. For example, Robert Tavernor brings forward the difference in plan between Alberti’s description of the Etruscan temple and Sant’ Andrea as it stands in Mantua today, questioning the attribution to Alberti by hinting to a potential involvement of another architect at a later stage of the project (1988: 160). Howard Saalman states that Alberti’s own build­ ings have only a remote relationship to his stated theoretical views (1959: 1) and Rudolf Wittkower, following the lead of Erwin Panofksy, concludes that the logical pursuit of the classical concept of concinnitas could lead to unclassical results (1998: 47). What remains, beyond all explanations, is an empirical irregularity of measurement between materialized buildings and their equivalent draw­ ings. Wittkower positions this rift in relation to objective over subjective reasoning. Crucially, this objective rendering of concinnitas encompasses the experience of visiting and judging a building, as well as the act of conceiving and making space distinct in three dimensions by the architect. ‘It is obvious that mathematical relations between plan and section cannot be correctly perceived when one walks about in a building. Alberti knew that … we must therefore conclude that the harmonic perfection of the geometrical scheme represents an absolute value, independent of our sub­ jective and transitory perception’ (1998: 18). Wittkower strengthens this position when discussing Alberti’s approach to antiquity in architecture. ‘Beauty is thus, a harmony inherent in the building, a harmony which does not result from personal fancy, but from objective reasoning’ (emphasis added, 1998: 41). In other words, the above-mentioned (numerical and proportional) standards that originated in external three-dimensional reality, were transcribed/codified in two-dimensional rules—while the act of transcription was seen as objective since it was allegedly following the rules of nature. Hence, if an architect wanted to create a building of beauty, he should first work on two dimensions according to certain calculated standards and then proceed with its construction. (Figures 2.1 and 2.2).

60 Problematizing the Screen

Figure 2.1 Implied image of space. Top: Relation of objects in space and their appearance in perspective projection. Bottom: Physical model of ele­ ments exploring anamorphosis and visual meaning. Source: By the author.

Problematizing the Screen 61

Figure 2.2 Logic of anamorphosis. Drawing exploring the relation between axono­ metric projection, the picture plane, perceived and actual space. Original A2. Source: By the author.

Why is this important? Because Alberti in his treatise is also caught in a similar deadlock of presentation and representation between reality and illusion—what an object is and how it appears. In fact, I argue the impasse is an inherent part of his theoretical view and is revealed once he explains

62 Problematizing the Screen how to judge if the former has been faithfully followed. Thomas Forget explains that Alberti considered sight as ‘the keenest of all senses in the judgment of architectural integrity, but his notion of vision is nuanced and implies a distinction between appearance and reality … the specific impression of a work of architecture is pleasing only when that work upholds underlying principles that cannot be perceived through pictorial means’ (2013: 2). It should be noted that Robin Evans generalized this claim to all architects of the Renaissance using geometry in two dimensions. In his words they presented a metric organization to be judged optically (2000: xxxiii). As such, Alberti’s impasse is the following: while the aim of concinnitas is a harmonious composition so that all parts of the building ‘correspond to one another in appearance’ the architect ‘is one who desires his work to be judged not by deceptive appearances but according to certain calculated standards’ (1988: 302, 304). Interestingly, as will be seen below, the calculated standards are often constructed in a distorted way in order to appear correctly to the viewer from specific point of views. The most basic/ objective notion of Alberti’s edifice is already eroded from within by two seemingly contradictory possibilities. Regarding the façade of Palazzo Rucellai Tavernor affirms that it was a project conceived, and constructed but also supposed to be judged based on how it appears. ‘As the façade was not composed to be appreciated in toto, Alberti may have created instead the effect of a well-proportioned composition designed to be seen from key viewing positions’ (1998: 89). They concern viewpoints of approaching the building from the narrow surrounding streets. ‘Being too close to a road, this composition could have no physical depth, and the colonnade had to be fictive (as in trompe-l’oeil painting) so he worked for the effect’ (1998: 85). That is why Alberti deviated from his standards and allowed the façade pilasters to increase in width as the elevation progresses vertically. If the pilasters and entablatures had been in proportion—as expected from The Art of Building—the rusticated zone above each window of the Rucellai façade would have been less high, and the windows more tightly framed. Alberti in this project showed a calculated negation of his standards aiming to formulate a deceptive appearance according to the calculated standards themselves. In order to attain the supposedly objective goal of natural standards he had to ensure that the architectural subject was not displaced—but correctly situated within architecture’s space (opposite the implied vanishing point) to appreciate its image. Evidently, these kinds of design techniques or tricks were well-known at the time and not unique to Alberti. For example, Sebastian Serlio’s treatise (1996) contained several practical instructions to utilize anamorphic techniques in architectural practice and distort the proportions of façade elements to appear correct from specific viewpoints. Thus, at a first level we have two terms, namely theoretical process as concinnitas and output or result as a finished building. At a second level we are presented with two ways of judging the conceptual pair. The first one is

Problematizing the Screen 63 retroactive, where after a particular case of the universal rule has been substantiated, we are trying to assess the result based on its fidelity to the rule itself. For instance, consider the façade of Santa Maria Novella which is wholly circumscribed by a square. The ratios proposed by Alberti of 1:1, 1:2, 1:3, 2:3, etc., are witnessed by the viewer since following Wittkower’s analysis, a square of half the side of the large square defines the relationship of the two storeys. In other words, the whole building is related to its main parts in the proportions of one to two (1998: 50). In this case, a corre­ spondence between codified standards and the appearance of the materi­ alized building is possible. However, when we are dealing with a dissimilarity between drawing and object, Alberti’s theory of concinnitas requires a diachronic rather than a retroactive reading. This is where the difference of designing something to appear according to calculated stan­ dards and not judging it on its appearance lies. In other words, the result should look like x but not be judged on the basis of looking like x, what is crucial is how it got to look like x. Similarly to the notion of illusion en­ countered in cases like the character of Uncle Josh, determining the con­ stancy of the result to the rule should focus on the process of its realization and conception through perspective. In this case, what a building is, is beyond appearance or rather, in Alberti’s terminology, it is hidden behind its deceptive appearance and our focus should accommodate the twodimensional conception of the building alongside the finished building itself. The passage of concinnitas determined by perspective projection is comprised by a subset of three complimentary terms. In The Art of Building, we find them as ‘concinnitas, a harmony or blend of three es­ sential conditions: numerus, finitio and collocatio’(1988: 422). Rykwert, Leach and Tavernor translate the triad as ‘number, what we might call outline, and position’. I would like to insist on the third term of collocatio because tracing its series of translations presents the most crucial archi­ tectural implications for the developing line of thought. It is the component which most clearly elucidates the societal responsibility of the architect but most importantly determines how s/he is able to attain Alberti’s theoretical aim. Tavernor notes that collocatio should be differentiated from the pragmatic aspect of contemporary planning (1998: 46) while Christine Smith rejects the rendition of position and translates collocatio as compo­ sition (1993). However, we should proceed with care since as Hubert Damisch (2016: 66) points out, the word composition does not appear in The Art of Building. The relation between composition and concinnitas in fact lies in the correspondence of architecture with painting, which in itself is epitomized by the Albertian notion of the ornament. Why is this diversion necessary? Because it was there that a hierarchy of arts was established and a precise debt of architecture to painting was outlined. Alberti claims that painting is the ‘flower of all the arts’ and suggests that the architect is indebted to the

64 Problematizing the Screen painter for inheriting ‘architraves, capitals, bases, columns and pediments, and all the other fine features of buildings’ (1991: 61). As Damisch critically points out, Alberti not only presents the column as the principal ornament of architecture but asserts that this very ornament portrays the abovementioned indebtedness. This juncture is crucial. While concinnitas stands for the congruity of the whole and its parts ‘so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse’(Tavernor, 1998: 156) ornament by definition disturbs this harmony by hinting to an excess or surplus.1 A faithful investigation into Alberti’s notion of composition obliges us to look back into Della Pittura, where the painter’s responsibility is to project three-dimensional objects by drawing in two dimensions their intersection with Alberti’s veil. That is how the artist serves istoria in a parallel way to the architect aiming at achieving harmony through concinnitas. The inter­ play between these creative passages is not one of contradiction but rather of derivation. However, this compositional inference of painting’s istoria and architecture’s concinnitas is only valid within Alberti’s conception of the visual field. It reflects the latter’s debt to the former under the assumption that perspective is defined as looking through a window where all lines (light rays) converge to the observer’s eye. While a body occupies a three-dimensional space its Albertian notion of the composition is only intelligible if conceived on the two-dimensional plane of projection or inscription. ‘But the very notion of projection implies that there is not, that there cannot be, a body to which it is linked save for a surface represen­ tation, just as Alberti maintained that painting could know bodies only through the surfaces delimiting them which can be projected onto a plane’ (Damisch, 1995: 124). As already noted, it is important to remember that there is a subject position, and the subject can be out of place if the eye and the vanishing point do not coincide. This effect which is considered or rather masked as a presupposition of perspective projection is directly challenged by Lacan’s conception of the visual field which provides a fundamental contribution to perspective projection by dismissing the purely visual aspect of Alberti’s pyramid of vision. His claim that vision is not a solely visual operation reframes Alberti’s view where the eye and the vanishing point coincide as an ex­ ception, rather than the rule. Specifically, he writes that ‘geometral per­ spective is simply the mapping of space, not sight’ (2004: 86). Before proceeding to show how Lacan arrived at this concluding negative affir­ mation a few other instances which support the case against (the primacy of) vision in the logic of perspective projection should be outlined. It is worth noting that Merlau-Ponty also regarded Euclidean perspective—its codification and transmission as a tool for representation—as a similar ex­ ception. ‘I say that the Renaissance perspective is a cultural fact, that perception itself is polymorphic and that if it becomes Euclidean this is because it allows itself to be oriented by the system’ (1968: 212). Vivian Sobchack whose view of film theory was previously mentioned discusses how sight is a modality of

Problematizing the Screen 65 perception commutable to all other senses. In her articulation against the pri­ macy of vision, she argues about a blind person’s ability to depict elements which are visually non-existent. ‘We would not expect the congenitally blind person to able to visibly represent through a conventional system of inscription a referent experienced visually’ (1992: 79). John M. Kennedy, Professor of Psychology at UTSC, whose research interest focuses on pictures in vision and touch as well as metaphor in language and pictures reinforces this claim in his fascinating article Pictures and the Blind. He claims that picturing is perceptual not just visual and after a series of experiments with blind subjects he concludes that ‘the principles that underlie line representation belong to a perceptual system that is not restricted to vision. It is a system of principles common to haptics and to vision’ (1980: 13, 16). Yet, it is in Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See (2011) originally published in 1749 that we find a systematic outline linking the notions of space, sight and field of vision with the subject. The ambition is clear from the epigraph Possunt, nec posse videntur. Translated by Kate E. Tunstall as ‘They can, but they don’t seem to be able to’ situates the essay between appearance and reality (2011: 24). The epigraph’s ‘claim is not simply that the blind can see; it is also that the blind are trompe l’oeil—they don’t look as though they can see, but they can’ (Ibid.: 25). For example, Diderot explains how symmetry as the visual appreciation—or beauty—of a metric three-dimensional disposition of objects whose whole is judged optically, is not solely reserved or attributed to sight. By using his hands to study how the parts of a whole must be arranged such that we call it beautiful, a blind man can manage to apply this term correctly, but when he says that’s beautiful, he is not judging it to be so; he is simply repeating the judgement of the sighted. (emphasis original, 2011: 172) What we find is essentially another formulation in favour of perception’s multiplicity and against its reduction to a geometric application—which nonetheless is very much involved with its constitution. Thus, when Diderot explained to the blind man how certain pictures use the rules of perspective in order to give the impression of depth (as if objects represented were threedimensional) he understood them as being isomorphic to—his understanding of—a mirror. The blind man’s conclusion provides us with a fascinating logical impasse since ‘he was tempted to believe that since a mirror paints objects, a painter representing them would perhaps paint a mirror’ (2011: 174). This implied tautology will be discussed in depth in the following sec­ tion in relation to Brunelleschi’s experiment which showed precisely the dif­ ference between using two mirrors facing each other and a mirror facing the drilled painted panel; regardless of their result which is seemingly identical. Lacan’s thoughts on vision and perspective representation only strengthen the developing argument, even though they emerged in his discourse for

66 Problematizing the Screen different reasons. The dismissal of sight relates to his examination of the visual field where he attempts to correlate the I and the eye, the subject with the organ. Regarding vision—and seemingly contrary to Alberti—he writes that ‘it seems at first that it is light that gives us, as it were, the thread … Yet, reflect that this thread has no need of light- all that is needed is a stretched thread. This is why the blind man would be able to follow all your demon­ strations’ (Lacan, 2004: 93). His famous diagram of two overlapping triangles corresponds to this distinction (see Lacan, 2004: 106). The first triangle stands for the eye and is comprised by an object or referent (at the base), an image (middle line) and a geometral point (apex). It relates to the previous quote where space is mapped for the subject on one condition; its position is determined by the eye. That is the part of perspective that Alberti’s treatise is concerned with. As Lacan clearly notes, the Albertian subject is ‘itself a sort of geometral point’ (Ibid.: 86). The second triangle relates to the I and the equivalent positions are the picture (base), screen, and the point of light or gaze (apex). Here the subject is decentred of its visual experience. In the process of seeing it is looked back from the apex of the second triangle, the gaze, which is positioned outside itself. On a similar tone to the concept of the ‘mirror stage’ discussed in chapter 1, if there is one thing to extract from this schema is that for Lacan seeing is at least as important as being seen. That is how the difference of images and pictures is introduced: I see images, but I am in someone else’s picture (Holm, 2010: 137). As expected, the crucial point is the intersection of the two triangles where the symbolic inscription of identity resides. The geometral point is located opposite the gaze and the lines corresponding to the image and the screen are super­ imposed. ‘In his psychoanalytic discourse, it exemplifies how desire and identity function for the subject in three steps. First, I see you, then I am seen by you and finally I see myself. However, Lacan’s diagram has gained popularity among painting and film theories due to his other explanation regarding the gaze and anamor­ phosis which is introduced and repeated several times in his seminars through two examples. The first one is The Ambassadors painting by Hans Holbein, the Younger (1533) where he focuses on the seemingly strange, oblique and unidentified object in the foreground. Once the viewer moves around and changes its viewing position towards the painting the object reveals itself and appears as a skull. The second example is about the tale of a painting competition held in Ancient Greece between Zeuxis and Parrhasios which was judged upon their illusionistic qualities. Briefly, Zeuxis painted a perfect image of grapes which even attracted some birds while Parrhasios painted a veil that beguiled Zeuxis who asked him to remove it so that his painting can be seen. The Ambassadors is used by Lacan to exemplify the difference between image and picture. Vision and Alberti’s light threads determine the con­ struction of one-point perspective based on the vanishing (geometral) point,

Problematizing the Screen 67 they secure a one-to-one correspondence of features (akin to a mirror’s function) between the object and its representation. Anything that is determined by this method, in which the straight line plays its role of being the path of light, can be called an image (Lacan, 2004: 86). As such, the main scene depicting two figures encountered when standing opposite the vanishing point of the painting—at its vanishing point—is the image cor­ responding to Lacan’s first triangle. However, perspective being not only a mapping of sight introduces the viewer’s symbolic inscription in the painting’s picture—in this example it amounts to seeing the distorted skull correctly. Lacan refers to this painting as a fascinating case where the two triangles and subject positions do not coincide. The viewer has to escape the eye position of the first triangle and physically manipulate his/her gaze in order to reveal the anamorphic skull and by consequence be positioned in its picture. As Steven Heath explains, anamorphosis is in fact the recognition and exploitation of the possibilities residing in Alberti’s system; playing between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ (Heath, 1981: 28). In consequence, ‘something in the image, not the picture, resists symbolization—which leads Lacan to state that any picture is simply a trap for the gaze, a desire of the subject to understand it’ (2004: 89). Even though the subject physically moves around the room for the illusion to be revealed it is crucial to note that the skull was already there. When iden­ tified a sort of perceptional hole arises in the previously assumed whole visual experience of the image. So, what is subtracted from the whole; and most importantly how is this hole—or emptiness—operative in the visual register of the painting? The closest we get in apprehending the impossibility of reality as complete is through the gaze as a partial object. Partial in this context means split, between the two triangles of imaginary and symbolic register, i.e. the subject of imaginary identification looking at the painting and the symbolically inscribed subject being looked at by the Other. This tension—gap or split—is what initiates the place between the two registers, between reality and fiction, for the real to be approached. It is this gap that Lacan wants to show as embodied in the skull of The Ambassadors which functions in the following way. You first look at the painting at an imaginary level and try to grasp it. Then you realize that there is something missing, namely its meaning. To get closer to it you enter in the realm of the symbolic and address the Other, in this case by moving around in the room for the skull to be revealed. Finally, you realize the skull was already there and interestingly it is looking directly at the position you were occupying before seeing it. You cannot have it both ways, or in more formal terms, this incongruence is what maintains the gaze as a partial object in contrast for example to an animal’s elevation to the symbolic order—as seen before in Wallon’s mirror experiment with a chimpanzee. It is worth noting that what Lacan refers to as a partial object is formally designated in his algebraic terms as object a—a term repeatedly exemplified either through the agency of the gaze or the voice. Yet, such accounts,

68 Problematizing the Screen appear more often than not independently despite aiming to illustrate how the same Lacanian term functions. However, Hubert Damisch discusses Raphael’s Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia (ca. 1515–1516) as a rare case where the two modalities are equally present—he shows how in the visual realm of a painting object a can be discerned as voice. Or in other words, how the voice is what allows us to see the excess of signification according to the conditions of representation—that is, the rules of perspective projection. Before discussing it, Damisch’s thesis on perspective, and specifically con­ struzione legittima as a tool for painters, should be reminded. Starting by what it is not, Damisch states that its definition should not be restricted—by its applied function—in regulating the proportional diminution and con­ jugation of figures within the perspectival tableau. On the contrary, its function as a paradigm ‘extends much further … equivalent of an ex­ pressive apparatus corresponding to the symbolic element that is funda­ mental to the form of perspective’ (1995: 25). As such, even the existence of ‘only a few’ examples—of perspective paintings—showcasing the very logical operation of perspective, beyond its application as a tool of repre­ sentation, are enough to designate it as one. Specifically, these exceptional cases do not wholly conform with the rules of perspective projection but rather showcase how referring to such rules assumes its deceptive character, but also its explicit negation, which demands to be interpreted as such (Ibid.). It is in this line of thought that Damisch cites the Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia and discusses how perspective is utilized differently at the top and bottom parts of the painting. Following the description of Marisa Dalai (1983), Professor of History of Modern Art at Sapienza University of Rome, we are informed that the top part seems to nullify any perception of depth between the heads of figures and the celestial scenery, while the bottom part uses the rules of perspective in order to accommodate the musical instruments as objects located on the picture’s ground plane and its perceived depth. Dalai testifies to the impossibility of inscribing the scene’s projection to one single viewpoint to Cecilia ‘having become blind to terrestrial things, had eyes only for celestial ones’ (Ibid.: 26). Yet, it is Damisch’s view on the same matter I am more interested in. He rejects the idea that the paradigm of perspective has ceased to be operational and sees the deviation of its rules as an affirmation to Panofsky’s idea that perspective opened up an entirely new realm for religious art where vision is not purely visual—determined by light and the field of vision—but taking place within the soul of the depicted personage (Ibid.). It is this excess over the vision that Damisch sees as fundamental within perspective projection and formally calls, in borrowed terms (influenced by his reading of Lacan), a double negation. That is why he shifts attention beyond what Saint Cecilia could see, in the literal sense of the word, within the order of the painting and claims that what she could hear is at least as important in relation to the rules of perspective.

Problematizing the Screen 69 But Cecilia does not see the angel musicians appearing behind her on a gold cloud. She hears them, whereas, according to the conditions of presentation … the difference between the foreground objects and smaller angels … all contribute, whatever Marisa Dalai may say, to an effect of a perspectival da sotto in su, one all the more fully controlled for falling within the edges of a painting as opposed to spreading over the expanse of a ceiling or cupola. (emphasis original, Ibid.) Returning to the gaze, as object-cause of desire (what the viewer looks for instead of looking at) means that every picture puts the subject not only relation to its desire but specifically the desire of the Other—be seen and recognized from the apex of the second triangle in this simplified example. You want to see, but also want to be seen while seeing. Or in Lacanese the desire be sym­ bolically inscribed, i.e. ‘photo-graphed’. ‘The eye and the gaze—the two triangles—this is for us the split in which the desire is manifested at the level of scopic field’ (2004: 73). The impossibility of a full identification with the ideal image (first triangle or specular image in mirror stage) is intrinsic and the gaze through the skull is portrayed as a materialization of nothing, an index of its own impossibility. The desire to get the picture right, to understand it is not in fact the subject’s but a desire of the Other. Consequently, The Ambassadors painting is so often repeated by Lacan, because it exemplifies the tension between getting the picture right and wrong—while in fact only getting it wrong is getting it right. The productive negativity (of the object a) shows that the two states in which the viewer encounters the skull of The Ambassadors are not opposite to each other. Formally, the skull exemplifies how non-relation is not the opposite of relation; not seeing the skull is not opposite to its revelation at a later stage. Rather, as Alenka Zupančič explains it is the inherent (il)logic (a fundamental “antagonism”) of the relation­ ships that are possible and existing. This represents a new and original conceptual model of the discursive space [the symbolic of either language or perspective in our case] as generated out of, and around, a missing link in the ontological chain of its own reality. Biased by its constitutive negativity, this structure is always more or less than what it is, that is to say, more or less than the sum of its elements. (commentary added, 2017: 24) Clearly Lacan could have used any other painting to develop and communicate his idea on the gaze. However, this one creates a physical move which embodies the shift in desire from image to picture but also testifies to the incompleteness of the visual field. In his words, the geometral dimension of vision does not exhaust, therefore, far from it, what the field of vision as such offers us as the original subjectifying relation (2004: 87). This is why perspective projection has been discussed as the exception—instead of the norm—and Lacan focuses on anamorphosis as the inversion of the same paradigm.

70 Problematizing the Screen

Problematizing Architecture’s Symbolic So, suppose we follow Alberti’s treatise and ask what does it mean for a space to be or look perspectival? Lorens Holm provides a fascinating response. Such a space despite its seeming spatial solidity, has the peculiar characteristic that its most salient features are properties of the image, and are most clearly demonstrated by it (2010: 39). As Lacan argues, space pretending to be an image is only possible after the invention of perspective in painting which architecture adopts in order to represent itself [as an image painted on its walls] (Lacan, 1992: 135). Similarly to The Ambassadors’ skull pretending to be something other than what it is, for Lacan the same distinction holds for architecture conceived through the symbolic order of perspective. Specifically, he states that while there is a shift in medium and dimensions between painting and architecture, they both share the same notion of emptiness as constitutive in their equivalent conception of space. ‘One learns to paint architecture on the walls of architecture; and painting, too, is first of all something that is organized around emptiness (precisely what Brunelleschi demonstrated). Since it is a matter of finding once more the sacred emptiness of architecture in the less marked medium of painting’ (Ibid.: 136). Likewise, Lacan’s emptiness can be regarded as equivalent to what Wittkower calls essence in his essay on Brunelleschi where he also affirms the difference between architecture and painting in terms of medium—instead of essence. Granted that Brunelleschi wanted his buildings to be looked at as if they were projected on to an intersection, the difference between architecture and painting becomes one of artistic medium rather than of kind … That 15th-century painters thought it necessary to make plans of their architectural settings as if they were to be built, would seem paradoxical if they had regarded space constructed and space painted as different in essence. (Wittkower, 1953: 290) In consequence, we encounter two architectural conditions. First, spaces which appear or pretend to be an image like Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico (1580–1585, Vicenza Italy) that is preoccupied with the virtual effect of the real. The anamorphosis takes place in three dimensions where a physical space is articulated in a certain way to appear differently; namely as an image, as the backdrop of the theatre’s stage. The viewer of the spectacle can never be out of place because the stage coincides with the viewing plane of the constructed perspectival space. The illusion can only be disturbed if an actor (or the security guard in this case) is displaced and positions himself deeper in the depth of field of the view of the theatre’s set as seen in the sequence of images in Figure 2.3. The discrepancy of proportions shows the implied plane of inscription where meaning is guaranteed and the illusion’s suspension when a person is wrongly positioned. Secondly, we

Problematizing the Screen 71

Figure 2.3 Teatro Olimpico. Space appears to be an image. Illusion is revealed only if a person physically occupies the territory behind the allocated picture plane of the scene. Source: Photos kindly provided by the personal archive of architect George Moustroufis (2018).

find images or frescoes like the one in Villa Farnesina (1506–1510, Rome Italy) which appear to be a space and are concerned with the real effect of the virtual. Such illusions produce an implied perception of space and depend upon the visitor’s position to align with their vanishing point. While Wittkower uses the terms ‘real’ and ‘reality’ interchangeably he provides a second confirmation regarding the symmetrical logic of perspective between space and image, where the image appears as space or space as image. ‘The concept of painting reality as if it were real is no less unreal or ‘unrealistic’ than that of a building in three dimensions and looking upon the result as if it were painted’ (Wittkower, 1953: 290) (Figure 2.4). Clearly, in Alberti’s case, the façade of Palazzo Rucellai does not ‘resist recognition’ in the sense that the trompe-l’oeil skull of The Ambassadors is doing. It is a mildly distorted or anamorphed object. Nevertheless, it is designed through calculated standards taking into account the observer’s gaze, having all properties of an image. Its constitution as image rather than space concerns what is repressed in its conception as a projected image of space rather than actual space. Thus, through Lacan we can see how the calculated standards of Alberti are not repressed in their function but in their appearance when the architectural viewer has to identify with the image of the presented building. This impossibility of a full imaginary identification and the tension separating reality and fiction will be now discussed through the tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasios that Lacan frequently uses to showcase its effects in the visual register. Zeuxis has the advantage of having made grapes that attracted the birds. The stress is placed not on the fact that these grapes were in any way perfect grapes, but on the fact that even the eye of the birds was taken by them. This is proved by the fact that his friend Parrhasios triumphs over him for having painted on the wall a veil, a veil so lifelike that Zeuxis,

72 Problematizing the Screen

Figure 2.4 Behind the picture plane. Drawing exploring the principle behind Teatro Olimpico’s stage and the multiplicity of elements behind the picture plane which have not yet appeared in the image. Original A2. Source: By the author.

turning towards him said, Well, and now show us what you have painted behind it. By this he showed that what was at issue was certainly deceiving the eye (tromper l’oeil). A triumph of the gaze over the eye. (Lacan, 2004: 103)

Problematizing the Screen 73 The case of grapes against the veil is according to Lacan another materi­ alization of nothing—a different modality of the gaze. What is painted is likewise an illusion functioning as a placeholder for nothingness. Zeuxis sees something, namely the veil, but this something is nothing. To be honest this notion is better portrayed in the example of The Ambassadors because the interfering object, the nothingness of the painting, is materialized through the skull. Nonetheless, realizing the impossibility of a whole per­ ceptive reality, experiencing the symbolic as non-all, is equally demon­ strated after the illusion is revealed. ‘Animals can be tricked with an appearance that imitates and substitutes for reality. But to trick a human being, to deceive in a uniquely human way, one imitates the dissimulation of reality. What is hidden is the act of hiding that seems to hide something’ (Žižek, 2014: 111). In Zeuxis’ painting, the illusion was so convincing that the image was taken for the real thing. In Parrhasios’ painting, the illusion resides in the very notion that what the viewer sees in front of him is just a veil covering up the hidden truth. Beyond the visual realm, the same distinction of the symbolic register is what renders equally impossible a complete language or the existence of ‘meaning of meaning’. In Lacan’s words, the impossibility of separating language in a structure of either meaning (as true statements) and no-meaning (as false ones) with no remainder i.e. ‘metalanguage’. ‘This is what I mean when I say that no metalanguage can be spoken, or, more aphoristically, that there is no Other of the Other. And when the Legislator (he who claims to lay down the Law) presents himself to fill the gap, he does so as an imposter (Lacan, 2001: 344). This is what separates mechanisms of communication between animals and the use of human language as rhetoric. In his exemplary fashion, Lacan discusses the behaviour of a bee, which upon returning to the hive from its honey-gathering routine, dances in two distinct ways to com­ municate whether the source of nectar is ‘near’ or ‘far’. But is it necessarily a language? ‘We can say that it is distinguished from language precisely by the fixed correlation of its signs to the reality that they signify’ (2001: 92). Its code is doubly inscribed to reality: specific moves indicate the distance from the hive to the food source while the dance itself denotes a group determined activity—food finding. Human languages, on the contrary, are able to signify precisely because there is no such rigid relation between sign and reality. As Gilber Chaitin clarifies ‘over and over’ can mean something unrelated to ‘over’, whereas a repeated dance can only mean (to the bee) an increase of distance. The bee’s code is thus, in an abstract and almost conventional way, mimetic: there is a relation of similarity between sign and meaning (1988: 46). This simplified example, is Lacan’s way of arguing against language as a system of communication with a fixed one-to-one correspondence between referent and external reality. An opposite approach: will fail to pursue the question (of language) further as long as we cling to the illusion that the signifier answers to the function of representing

74 Problematizing the Screen the signified, or better, that the signifier has to answer for its existence in the name of any signification whatever. (Lacan, 2001: 166) The first to move towards this direction by formalizing the concept of differentiality was Ferdinand de Saussure in 1916. He pointed out that the identity of a signifier resides only in the series of differences or features which distinguish it from other signifiers. Therefore, there is no positivity in a signifier, it is only a series of what it is not. For Saussure ‘a linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differ­ ences of ideas’ (1986: 74). For example, the game of chess is played on opposite sides of a board containing 64 squares of alternating colors. Each player has 16 pieces: 1 king, 1 queen, 2 rooks, 2 bishops, 2 knights and 8 pawns. The respective value of the pieces depends on their position on the chessboard and the rules governing the game. Most importantly, once two players are familiar with the rules, they can play chess with any set of objects—rocks, pencils, balls—by naming them accordingly. In formal terms, symbolic law and the relations among elements are independent of their material, or phonetic, properties. The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image … The linguistic sign is then a two-sided psychological entity that can be represented by the drawing. The two elements are intimately united, and each recalls the other. Whether we try to find the meaning of the Latin word arbor or the word that Latin uses to designate the concept ‘tree’, it is clear that only the associations sanctioned by that language appear to us to conform to reality, and we disregard whatever others might be imagined … I call the combination of a concept and a sound image a sign. (Saussure, 1986: 66–67) Before Saussure’s elaboration, a sign as linguistic unit was considered to be complete—similar to the bee’s dance. The word and the thing corresponded in a one-to-one manner where the tension of meaning was situated ex­ ternally to the sign and between the utterance and the referent. In other words, the sign used to be thought of as a mirror of the object. Saussure’s main contribution lies in splitting the completeness of the sign and locating the tension within—between signified and signifier—which makes up a linguistic unit and open up space for the imaginary. It was usually com­ municated by the famous diagram of a circle divided in half by a line. The top part corresponded to the signified and contained the image of a tree. The bottom half was the place of the signifier and was simply showing the word ‘tree’. Thus, in this case the sign is defined by its differential identity where the very absence of a feature can itself count as a feature, as a positive fact. As such, following Saussure’s seminal diagram a ‘tree’ has meaning not

Problematizing the Screen 75 in itself, but because it is not a ‘car,’ a ‘house’ (Eagleton, 2008: 84) in a similar manner to the of the Fort-Da game where the mother’s presence was only determined by the possibility of her being absent. Nevertheless, the illusion of the old Saussurean regime of representation was that the word is passive and minimally reflexive, while the object mirrored by the word is of vital importance. Umberto Eco held a similar conception of language where the sign is defined as ‘everything that on the grounds of a previously established social convention, can be taken as something standing for something else’ (1976: 16). Chaitin precisely indi­ cates that Lacan counters both notions of ‘something’ as object and the status of ‘someone’ as passive interlocutor of pre-existing associations while pointing us towards Lacan’s text Sign, Symbol, Imaginary (1985). The term semiotics … it refers to any discipline which begins with the sign taken as an object. My own definition of the sign (instead of representing something for someone) shows it to be an obstacle to the grasp of the signifier (defined as representing a subject for another signifier). The sign presupposes the someone to whom one makes a sign of something. Whatever you call this someone, there is no way around the silliness implicit in this notion. The sign of itself, taken as object, permits the someone to appropriate language as through it were a simple tool. (1985: 203–204) Saussure’s conception of a sign as a closed combination of signified/signi­ fier, situates meaning externally and is located between the sign and the referent. Yet, following Lacan, you simply don’t know where meaning is situated, you don’t speak of any referent. As Zupančič (2017: 58) notes ‘for Lacan there is a connection between the two levels, but it is not that of representation, nor that of signification. So, what is it? How to think it without falling back into the (pre-Saussurean) position of seeing language as a collection of names for a collection of objects?’ The response that Lacan provides is that the signifier in fact enters the signified—namely, in a form which, since it is not immaterial, raises the question of its place in reality (2006: 417). Which, therefore, element determines each paradigm? At the imaginary level, which is governed by a pragmatist, materialist tone there exists a meaning of something—for example a duck2. According to Saussure, uttering the word or representing the duck gets you closer to this meaning. Language in this case is conceived a system of signs. If that were the case—Lacan argues—it would always be possible to lie by substituting a false reference for a true one. Yet, language allows to lie by telling the truth as seen in the following joke form Jokes and their relation to the unconscious (Freud, 1989: 115). Two Jews met in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. ‘Where are you going?’ asked one. ‘To Cracow,’ was the answer. ‘What a liar you

76 Problematizing the Screen are!’ broke out the other. ‘If you say you’re going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me? In a similar manner to the concept of suture which was previously discussed in relation to the signifying process of moving images, this paradox of false-false introduces, according to Žižek, self-reflexivity in the order of language. ‘If the identity of a signifier is nothing but the series of its constitutive differences, then every signifying series has to be supplemented—‘sutured’—by a reflexive signifier which itself has no determinate meaning (no signified), since it stands only for the presence of meaning as such, the presence of meaning as opposed to its absence’ (Žižek, 2012: 428). The shift under consideration is founded upon the question of meaning between a thing and a word. In response to Saussure’s conception of language, Lacan holds an idealist view where the signifier is responsible for determining the meaning—to be precise, there is no meaning: by uttering, or using a signifier you produce this meaning. Lacan’s point, however, which moves beyond Saussure and the classical structuralist approach, is that this pure relational differentiality, which he admits, can only be based on a non-relation or, if one prefers, on a different kind of difference. In order for the relational differentiality to exist and to function, the one (of the binary relation) has to be missing. And this makes all the difference (the possibility of differentiation can appear only on the basis of this fundamental difference). (Zupančič, 2017: 59) Against Saussure’s seminal example of the tree, Lacan discussed in his lectures the diagram of two identical public restroom doors with different signs. Namely, ladies and gentlemen. ‘I use this example to show how in fact the signifier (‘ladies’ or ‘gentlemen’) enters the signified, namely, in a from which, not being immaterial, raises the question of its place in reality’ (Lacan, 2006: 417). Lacan showed that the word not only creates the thing, but it creates the difference in the thing itself since both doors are identical. Lacan’s use of the signifier ‘ladies’ or ‘gentlemen’ creates a symbolic effi­ cacy, a real difference in the world evident in the user’s behavior towards the object. ‘This heteronomy is thus not that between Ladies and Gentlemen, but between language as a system of differences and the ob­ jectlike surplus (a) appearing at the place of the constitutive minus of this system, spoiling its pure differentiality (Zupančič, 2017: 61). Hinting in anticipation for a second time on Scott and Venturi’s typology of the dec­ orated shed it exemplifies—in contrast to the duck—this production of meaning. Any signifier placed on the decorated shed will determine its use; ‘Eat’ turns the shed into a restaurant and ‘sleep’ makes it into a hotel.

Problematizing the Screen 77 Equipped with the notion of the self-reflexive signifier in the symbolic order we can return to our example of painting and its effect on perceived reality. As Lacan writes ‘our point of departure, the point to which we always return is that any genuine signifier is, as such, a signifier that signifies nothing’ (1993: 185). It is precisely this conception of nothing—emptiness or lack—which correlates the symbolic as non-all in both linguistic and visual registers where representation signifies the absence of what is rep­ resented. Lorens Holm reads the tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasios along the same line. The same could be said about Parrhasios’ painting. Zeuxis is fooled because the curtain is not there. The painted curtain signifies the absence of a real curtain. The difference—just like the linguistic capacity to lie by telling the truth—is that the veil is blank: in other words, it is a blank. Parrhasios’ painting is not lying because it is not representing anything—the veil as signifier represents nothing. ‘Whereas the painted grapes signify the absence of a presence as real grapes, the painted veil is still a painting which signifies the presence of its absence as painting’ (2000: 43). Accordingly, reality and illusion—or fiction—should not be regarded as antinomies, though Mario Carpo (2008) and James J. Gibson (1971) implicitly contend, with reference to the very same example of Zeuxis and Parrhasios. And so, despite all the stories of paintings that are said to deceive observers into trying to lift the curtain, or eat the grapes, or walk into the scene, I am sceptical. There would be information for seeing these things, of course, but there would also necessarily be information for seeing a painted curtain, painted grapes and a painted scene. The notion of an image that is literally and actually indistinguishable from the reality is a myth … No matter how faithful, how lifelike, how realistic a picture becomes, it does not become the object pictured. (emphasis added, Gibson, 1971: 33) Finally, at the end of the chain, the archetype (real or fictional) could be recreated identically, or proportionally identically to the original—but in any place and time and in the absence and in the stead of the original itself. From Zeuxis’s test with birds and Parrhasios’ test with Zeuxis himself to Turing’s test with a thinking machine, this is a game that has been with us from the beginning of time: the imitation game, also known as mimesis or virtual reality. (Carpo, 2008: 125) I hope it is already evident that reality and myth are not contradictory but rather co-constitutive since only through the symbolic illusion, the reality of a failed imaginary identification is revealed to be not complete. Of course, a picture can never become the object pictured but crucially its misrecognition—trying to match the ideal image but failing—is an inherent part of how the subject experiences the object. Pascal’s Pensées (2008) is a

78 Problematizing the Screen noteworthy example where attention is shifted away from a rigid one-toone correspondence between the object and its representation, towards the process of achieving such illusory results. The effect of this process is evi­ dent in his commentary on painting’s vanity which ‘attracts admiration by resembling things whose originals we do not admire!’ (Ibid.: 16). Closer to Lacan’s attitude on language, the point of interest is not the meaning of a word, sentence or discourse in general but the mechanisms responsible for creating this very meaning. Similarly, with pictures seen from too far off, or from too close up … there is only one indivisible point which is the right position. The others are too close, too distant, too high, or too low. Perspective determines it in the art of painting. But in truth and morality who will determine it?. (emphasis added, Ibid.: 13) This point, and the way of conceiving it within the rules of perspective, is what allows a link between Lacan’s psychoanalytic triad (imaginarysymbolic-real) and the visual register of painting and the moving images on the screen’s surface. It is the equivalent of the placeholder or location for the subject’s potential emergence. The main effect of such a point, around which perspective projection is organized—for the viewer as subject—is to introduce in a mechanism intended to fabricate illusions (images which appear as spaces, or spaces which appear as images) the point of the real—it is at once necessary but also what makes impossible a complete imaginary identification. It is surprisingly reassuring to hear that Slavoj Žižek posi­ tions Lacan’s real within architecture in terms of illusion and an apparent asymmetry of appearance between an object and its representation. ‘Where I see some kind of architecture’s real, is these mysterious buildings that you find from the outside they look smaller than from the inside … where the spatiality is broken (and you wonder ‘how can it be?’). Real in architecture is for me somewhere on the border between inside and outside. This would be the elementary real, it is not that we are in symbolic-imaginary space and some substantial reality exists behind it … No, it is simply this gap of asymmetry—you cannot bring together the two perspectives of outside and inside, which amounts to an ontological enquiry where a new point of view changes our object of study. Yet, all such potential points of view are situated within a shared space’ (Žižek, 2006, 12:40) Consequently, perspective should be read through its rules as included in a structural paradigm of signification, instead of examined in relation to—and through—its illusory capacities. As previously mentioned, we find a similar warning towards cinema when Virilio wrote that ‘the film industry will enter into crisis when it pretends to verisimilitude (2009: 73).

Problematizing the Screen 79 Therefore, Damisch’s advice is to submit perspective to the order of ‘similitude’, where the goal would be to produce space instead of imitating it. In Gibson’s and Carpo’s respective terminology trying to debunk the myth or judge the imitation game from its relation to the real object is a missed opportunity to examine how this myth—and the mechanisms which produced it—affects our perception of reality. I argue there is no better example of shifting our perspective towards a failed imitation game, or myth debunking proclivity than the case study of Winnebago tribe as re­ ported in Lévi Strauss’ Structural Anthropology (1963). Lévi Strauss discusses the findings of Paul Radin on how two different groups of the tribe represented their village by drawing a map. The empirical data showed a discrepancy where one group drew the organization of the village as determined by a borderline while the other group represented the village as a concentric arrangement. It is worth noting, that Radin did not stress this discrepancy; he merely regretted that insufficient information made it impossible for him to determine which was the true village organization (Lévi-Strauss, 1963: 134). Lévi Strauss stated that the factual data do not correspond to a case of one true reality and two misconceptions—and pro­ vided his own account of why the disposition of the houses was falsely rep­ resented. As Slavoj Žižek said with his whimsical sense of humour, if the point was to debunk the myth or break free from the imitation game, we could simply hire a helicopter and verify the true disposition of the village. Each group’s consistent experience of symbolic reality—being nonall—necessitated to be supplemented with some kind of virtual fiction. ‘Truth receives the mark that instates it in a fictional structure’ (Lacan, 2006: 684). Through drawing the arrangement of the true village in a false way, tribe members did not break a one-to-one correspondence between their sketches and reality; rather they tried to inscribe something that was resisting symbolization within their shared reality. Namely, social hier­ archy. As Levi-Strauss explains the two types of representations do not necessarily relate to two different spatial organizations. They may also correspond to two different ways of describing one organization too complex to be formalized by means of a single model so that members of each group would tend to conceptualize it depending upon their position in the social structure (1963: 134–35). The tension of meaning should be situated between the drawings and something which does not exist in a material objective sense—which is not yet available to the question of knowledge, i.e. the real—but very much affects the way both groups of the Winnebago tribe perceive reality. Thus, while we are more than capable of distinguishing between the objective factitiousness and the illusory subjectively driven capacities of myth; if we err and subtract fiction from the reality, we risk of bypassing the mecha­ nisms which construct it. This is how the symbolic being non-all should be read—as the impossibility of being outside of language or the symbolic in general. The

80 Problematizing the Screen very notion of outside originates from a problematic articulation. It is not a topological distinction—in contrast to inside—but rather a materially immanent limitation. When considering the symbolic as discourse, forms of articulating signifiers; what could possibly be situated outside such an order? Is there anything that cannot be symbolized? Not really, except for what resists signification or as Alain Badiou explains what is not yet available to the question of knowledge (2018: 76). That is the limitation—the Lacanian real—immanent to the symbolic mechanism itself. The cases discussed such as The Ambassadors painting show that there is an outside to which vision has no access. Namely the subject, or the place awaiting the subject’s symbolic inscription. Damisch argued, while fol­ lowing a different line of thought, that this notion of ‘outside’ was the one Brunelleschi’s experiment intended to discover. Through Diderot he finds support on the misleading analogy between a mirror and the function of the visual field—being wrongly thought of as a matter of vision. Touch only gives him [the blind man in his essay] the idea of three dimensions and so he will further believe that a mirror is a machine that projects us in three dimensions at a distance from ourselves. How many famous philosophers have employed less subtlety to arrive at notions that are equally false? How surprising must a mirror be for a blind man though? (commentary added, Diderot, 2011: 173) Thus, Damisch reads Brunelleschi’s mirror as the relay mechanism able to place the viewer not simply ‘outside’ the represented field of vision but rather as a manipulation where the represented painting functions as an ‘object to handled … to be turned round and round’—stripped away from its conno­ tation of truth value. ‘Brunelleschi did exactly the same thing: wanting to discover what was hidden behind perspective, he went to see for himself, going so far as to place his eye behind it to capture its operation in the mirror’ (Damisch, 1995: 138). Lacan was very precise in indicating that conceiving the outside of the symbolic in this way is the zero point from within and proposed the coinage extimacy—which will be examined with regard to Michael Webb’s drawings on the relation between the point of view and the vanishing point in chapter 4. In Badiou’s rigorous formulation it denotes ‘not the lack of a term satisfying a relation but rather a relation lacking’ (1969: 10), i.e. there is no lacking signifier but a signifier of lack. That is what these paintings are showing. Their ‘outside’ is the placeholder for the subject to emerge, be symbolically inscribed, get the picture. There is no external divi­ sion, it is simply what you cannot really see from where you are standing (in the case of The Ambassadors), or your position, your perspective in the symbolic. Nonetheless, it is not an outside while exhibiting or demonstrating this boundary, is reaching the limit of symbolization from within the sym­ bolic order. The following section will be devoted in the function of the

Problematizing the Screen 81 mirror by comparing an implied tautology in Brunelleschi’s experiment (brought forward by Hubert Damisch) between using two mirrors or a painted panel and a mirror which produces a seemingly identical result. It aims to show that Brunelleschi’s use of the mirror was the first architectural experiment to demonstrate such a limit in contrast to using two mirrors which would be simply monstrating two specular images—bypassing the question or place of the architectural subject.

Demonstration and Perspective Projection Hubert Damisch should be accredited for linking two well-known, aca­ demically established texts on Brunelleschi’s experiment to Lacanian ter­ minology. These are Filarete’s treatise on architecture (1965) and Manetti’s biography of Brunelleschi (1970) where Damisch focuses on the role of the mirror as a relay mechanism in Brunelleschi’s apparatus. He rightly insists that prior to its use the painted panel is merely showing the represented scene of the Baptistry, while its reflection turns it into a demonstration of the rules responsible for making such a representation possible. Yet, as I will proceed to show Damisch stopped early or at least did not push enough the link between di-mostratio and Lacan’s notion of productive negativity. A link which holds profound consequences for the screen’s mode of appearance, or perspective as a paradigm of meaning production—or signification—beyond its representational attributes. Filarete discusses the mirror in two ways. First as the device which en­ abled Brunelleschi’s discovery to produce perspective paintings in a codified way, and secondly as a practical relay mechanism which diminishes pro­ portionally not only objects and figures, but also light and shadow. i

ii

I think it was Pippo di Ser Brunellesco, a Florentine, who discovered the method of making this plane … by rational means, from what the mirror shows you (che nello specchio ti si dimostra) (1965: 303) (in the mirror) One can judge not only the diminution of figures but also the distribution of light and shadow (Ibid.)

On a similar tone Manetti attributes the showing of perspective to the painted panel while the mirror is described as demonstrating what was impossible to show via the rules of perspective projection; specifically, the sky and the clouds. i ii

Brunelleschi first showed it (nella prima cosa in che e’lo mostro) Then demonstrated the part of the sky (e per quanto s’aveva a dimostrare di cielo)

The link that Damisch establishes is the following. One mirror is insuffi­ cient; since the specular image will be reversed, a second mirror is required

82 Problematizing the Screen in order to see the picture correctly. In formal terms, a further transfor­ mation of the same order needs to be repeated in order to nullify or cancel out the first one. It is this ‘double showing’ that Damisch reads as dimostratio. However, under the guise of transmissible instructions, the technical necessity of a second mirror was known by Filarete when he advised that ‘if you dispose of two mirrors facing one another, it will be easier to draw whatever you want to do’ (1965: 315). These words imply a practical tautology between the role of the mirror and the painted panel. Specifically, the process of using a painted panel and a mirror, or two mirrors will achieve a correct but also identical pictorial representation. Unfortunately, Damisch does not reject explicitly the tautology between the two modalities where the ‘double showing’ appears—but correctly favours the mirror-panel combination where the effect of truth is dependent upon its placement at the appropriate height and distance (1995: 379). In his view Brunelleschi’s experiment, aimed at nothing less than construction of a structure of objectivity in which the subject had its assigned position, indeed one that could locate solely and exclusively by referring to a mirror, to specular reflection— which is to say, to a transformation, in the geometric sense (Ibid.: 380). Yet, while using two mirrors will show you the showing (of the first mirror), combining a mirror with a painted panel will undo the first showing and expose its logical limitations—of perspective painting in general or the sky in Brunelleschi’s particular case. Grasping their difference necessitates examining their process instead of judging the output—which is seemingly identical. The subject’s implication in the first case (which con­ cerns a structure of objectivity) is null since there is no space reserved, for its emergence between two wholly identical specular images of outside reality. Their truth value rests on a complete equivalence of features between an object and its representation where no error or dissimilarity exists between them (Collins, 1992; 77). On the contrary, using the codified rules of per­ spective projection to paint a wooden panel and then intersect it with a mirror exposes the limits of how the subject occupies a space—through its image—beyond any particular scene represented, because it attests that something always resists symbolization, or in Lacanian terms the imaginary identification is never complete, and that is why it functions as such. Of course, some views like an urban scene function better, than natural landscapes or the sky, but the point remains that such a process, even if yielding the same representational output concerns the conditions of the subject’s spatial inhabitation, which turns out to be through an image. In other words, two mirrors show a view but a mirror and a panel demon­ strate how we are able to produce the representation of such a view. Consequently, while indebted to Damisch’s critique, I claim it was not critical enough.

Problematizing the Screen 83 Drawing support from Lacan’s seminar Of the Gaze as objet petit a (2004: 67–122) Damisch claims that the perspective image, like the dream image characteristically ‘shows itself’ of its own accord—though even here there is some slippage of the subject, whereby it ‘demonstrates’ its presence (1995: 97). However, we should clarify that when the perspective image shows itself, namely is looked at by a viewer and gazing back at the viewer, what slips, or escapes signification, is what Lacan refers to as object a (in his algebraic terminology) which restricts a full imaginary identification. While the concept has been constantly reformulated throughout Lacan’s teaching, it is in the tenth seminar on Anxiety (2014)—preceded by one year the one that Damisch is quoting from—where its definition is articulated in terms of desire and lack, before being transposed in the scopic field that Damisch is interested in. Tracing this analogy will present how Damisch blurs the gaze (as object a) with perspective painting itself in identifying what is shown and what slips in the previous example. What ‘demonstrates’ its presence is the real as not yet articulated in language (or shown in perspective), is the function of the a as object-cause of desire and not the painting itself. In Anxiety, Lacan writes that the object a ‘as the leftover of the subject’s dialectic with the Other, still stands to be defined at other levels in the field of desire’ while fifty-two pages later the statement ‘the a is the cause, the cause of desire’ appears (2014: 230, 282). He proceeds by combining the notion of cause and effect with desire through the example of the obses­ sional patient in order to show how the symptom (of anxiety) appears prior to the cause (of desire). I’ll indicate right off the bat that I’m putting this forward because it allows us to move into the mapping of the a function in so far as it is unveiled as functioning, with the very first data on the symptom, in the dimension of cause. (2014: 280) In other words, when an obsession, or compulsion, articulated via the pa­ tient’s inner language such as ‘go do this or that, go check the door’s locked, or the tap’s turned off’, is not met with an appropriate action anxiety arises (Ibid.). Lacan reminds us of a crucial Freudian observation which should not go unnoticed. Psychoanalytic practice does not start from the symp­ tom’s description—compulsion together with an anxious struggle that ac­ companies it—but rather from the recognition that’s how it works. The symptom is only constituted when the subject notices it (Ibid.: 281), re­ cognises it and names as significant something that was already there (like the skull of The Ambassadors). Thus, the patient needs not to merely describe the symptom and its effects but suspect that there’s a cause behind this, or that behaviour. It is this line of thought that Lacan finds impossible to articulate if he does not ‘bring out the radical relation of the a function, the cause of desire, with regard to the mental dimension of cause’ (Ibid.: 181). Why? Because such a conception of the symptom (constitutive of the

84 Problematizing the Screen subject) needs the subject to emerge and be defined through and by the Other. This means that the cause implicated in the question of the symptom is literally, if you will, a question, but whereof the symptom is not the effect. It is the result thereof. The effect is desire. (Ibid.: 284) As a reminder, similarly to the practical discrepancy between the drawings produced by the Winnebago tribe, symptoms dreams and slips of the tongue are all tangible instances that psychoanalysis considers neither as errors nor anomalies of a system but as direct exposure to the subject’s unconscious and its function. Lacan is very precise in stating with reference to psychoanalysis’ role that ‘there is knowledge that is not known, but ‘what is it that knows?’ Do we realize that it is the Other (Lacan, 1998: 89)—whose recognition we seek? A demand implies a counter-demand on the part of the Other beyond its immediate satisfaction of food (in case of hunger) or checking whether the tap is off (in the case of the neurotic). When making a demand, we presuppose or construct some possible response on the part of the Other, and this amounts to imagining some demand coming from the Other itself (Pluth, 2007: 64). From this per­ spective (where the symptom is not the effect, but the effect is desire), Lacan claims that desire is indeed located as a lack of effect (2014: 284). A year later, on 11 March 1964, Lacan starts his seminar by linking the abovementioned exposition of the a and desire to the field of view and the act of seeing. Consequently, the conception of the object a as ‘most evanescent in its function of symbolizing the central lack of desire’ is converted as ‘the object a in the field of the visible is the gaze (2004: 105). In Damisch’s terms it is the gaze—as ‘some slippage of the subject’—which demonstrates its presence, by showing something lacking in the perspective painting, not the painting itself. However, for Lacan: […] the gaze operates in a certain descent, a descent of desire, no doubt. But how can we express this? The subject is not completely aware of this … Modifying the formula I have of desire as unconscious—man’s desire is the desire of the Other—I would say that it is a question of a sort of desire on the part of the Other, at the end of which is the showing (le donner-à-voir). (2004: 115) Following Damisch’s conclusion of chapter 6, The Monstration, where ‘painting shows; the mirror demonstrates’ (1995: 98) I should clarify that it is not the sky and the moving clouds being demonstrated but rather what could not have been represented through the rules of perspective projection in the painted panel. The mirror testifies that the symbolic register of perspective—which is shown and overlaps with the specular image—is not whole nor complete. There exist elements which cannot be inscribed to its

Problematizing the Screen 85 rules but should nonetheless not be considered as being outside of it. In this example it was the sky which resisted symbolization in the painted panel, but also existed and belonged in the frame as that part which escapes the rules of symbolic inscription. Attempting to formalize what the demon­ stration consists of, but also why the painting-mirror case, in contrast to using two mirrors, has been named as such we can discern and enumerate three points. The first two should be read as presuppositions of a demon­ stration, only identified retroactively and the last one is a realisation of the subject’s role—in what is being demonstrated. Therefore, Brunelleschi’s experiment (not the mirror) demonstrates: i The price to be a subject in perspective’s symbolic register is that space comes to you as image. Closing one eye and placing it at the hole opposite the mirror are prerequisites for the experiment to function and should not be seen as requirements for the subject’s emergence beyond this exemplary case. ii That not everything can be symbolized. The limits of representation in Brunelleschi’s case are exemplified by the sky as a negative affirmation. Perspective projection—being a symbolic register like language—is not complete. Knowing the meaning of meaning or seeing perspective from an all-seeing point are inherent impossibilities of both systems. iii The subject is not assigned a position but is produced by the structure, it is its effect. A demonstration amounts to showing what escapes the one-to-one corre­ spondence of features represented, not by extending its domain of operation (adding or including more correspondences) but by showing the limits of its representational mechanism. Thus, I see why Damisch describes the mirror as demonstrating. Alongside the panel’s hole is facilitating the subject’s inscription in the symbolic register of perspective instead of being respon­ sible for representing an object to a viewer. What makes Brunelleschi’s experiment a demonstration and not a model is neither the mirror nor the hole but how these elements combined, as part of the experiment, show to the viewer something beyond the one-to-one imaginary correspondence (between the painting of the Baptistry and the ‘real’ building of the Baptistry). If confined at this level, the discussion is situated in terms of illusion versus reality where the representation replaces reality and can potentially become confused with its ‘truth’.3 When the viewer closes one eye, places the other one at the hole, and looks at the mirror s/he becomes a subject not because of seeing a perfect image which replicates a view of the world but because s/he confronts the limitation of what can be symbolized though such a way of looking—where any picture is simply a trap for the gaze (Lacan, 2004: 89). Hence Damisch affirms Lacan’s definition of the subject which is not using language as a tool to communicate but is rather produced by it as an effect of its own utterances. Brunelleschi’s experiment

86 Problematizing the Screen demonstrated that the viewer as subject is an effect of perspective, as it is of language (Damisch, 1995: 126). This is how Damisch’s following remark should be read: ‘Brunelleschi’s discovery created the impression that, by its means, representation gained access to a new kind of ‘truth’ (not the one represented as illusion of external reality in the painting) (Ibid.: 148). His own definition of demonstration should leave no ambiguity regarding the distancing of perspective from descriptive illusion. A passage which has already been described in the book as one from ‘representing to producing’ meaning or from examining the logic of perspective projection to treating perspective as logic. A demonstration is not a matter of observation or proof, but rather one of reasoning … in the inductive mode of a recurrent reasoning founded upon a synthetic judgement a prior that authorizes a passage from the finite to the infinite. (Ibid.: 238) The difference between these two paradigms (of signification) lies in their sphere of operation and by extension their potential actuality. What has been referred to as descriptive illusion, representation of the meaning or one-to-one correspondence, functions in describing a state of affairs the possibility of which is inscribed in the object they refer to—things, objects or notions which are known and exist in a material or imaginative way—yet the question of the unknown is foreign to them. Specifically, as Damisch explains Renaissance painting within this referential paradigm represents either through citation (an existing scene or building), inspiration (modifying an existing citation) or present itself as a proposition whose sole reference is a virtual one (which if it existed in an empirical sense it would appear following the rules of citation) (1995: 244). In linguistic terms, meaning is firstly external to the sign (located between the sign and the referent) and secondly transmissible as long as a word is used to refer to its appropriate designated object. Following this line of thought, we can ap­ preciate Damisch’s critique of art historians—which are frequently ad­ dressed as the invisible reader of Origin of Perspective and echoes Lacan’s way of addressing his fellow psychoanalysts—to its full extend: but in your view … perspective appears to be no more than a simple means in the service of architecture or scenography (Ibid.: 203). What escapes their study is not how architecture is represented but rather the implications of architecture representing itself. While there is nothing wrong with such a propositional use of language or perspective, it does not amount to their conception and is by definition erroneous to think that it exhausts their full potential. In other words, there are statements which cannot be judged nor separated as true or false, and their existence calls for examining the rules of formulating such statements. As Damisch explicitly states iconography leaves off when incapable of dealing with anything in a painting that can’t be named or articulated in accordance (Ibid.: 261). Therefore, the study of

Problematizing the Screen 87 what within a painting resits signification—or what in language cannot be presented in the form of a proposition—demands an epistemological change from the object to its generative process; what Damisch calls ‘painting’s operation’ and ‘the question of representation’ accordingly. In conclusion, I should highlight that Lacan’s work on the symbolic as the book’s framework to explore the screen and by extension perspective projection is founded upon this shift. Looking at what perspective chooses not to show—or cannot know, as not amenable to the question of knowledge—displaces the existing notion of referent within representation and focuses on what Lacan calls silent meaning, which cannot be shown but only demonstrated. In short, demonstration means that in the very space where the real will insist, there must be the impasse of a symbolization, but this symbolization must contain the constraint that creates the impasse (Badiou, 2018: 169). Hence, the following chapters deal with the screen’s demonstration in different modes, such as case studies, drawn or ‘paper’ projects and design experiments.

Notes 1 Damisch points out to the formal distinction of supplement or complement. It is beyond the scope of this analysis, but he advises the motivated reader to see Jacques Derrida (2016: 145). 2 The seemingly aleatory example of the duck hints to Scott and Venturi’s (1977) case of duck and decorated shed being a seminal example of architecture’s rep­ resentational paradigm. It will be extensively discussed in chapter 4. 3 ‘e pareva che si vedessi’l proprio vero’ ( Manetti, 1970, 44).

References Alberti, Leon Battista, On the Art of Building in Ten Books (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1988) Alberti, Leon Battista, On Painting, ed. by Martin Kemp, trans. by Cecil Grayson, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin, 1991) Badiou, Alain, ‘Mark and Lack: On Zero’, trans. by Zachary Luke Fraser and Ray Brassier, Cahiers Pour l’Analyse (10.La Formalisation, 1969) http://cahiers. kingston.ac.uk/pdf/cpa10.8.badiou.translation.pdf Badiou, Alain, Lacan: Anti-Philosophy 3, trans. by Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018) Carpo, Mario, ‘Alberti’s Media Lab’, in Perspective, Projections, and Design: Technologies of Architectural Representation, ed. by Frédérique Lemerle and Mario Carpo (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 101–134 Chaitin, Gilbert, ‘Lacan and Semiosis’, in The Semiotic Web 1987, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 1988), pp. 37–64 10.1515/9783110868388.37 Collins, Daniel L., ‘Anamorphosis and the Eccentric Observer: Inverted Perspective and Construction of the Gaze’, Leonardo, 25.1 (1992), 73 10.2307/1575625

88 Problematizing the Screen Dalai, Marisa, ‘La Struttura Compositiva e Spaziale: Una Proposta Di Lettura’, in L’ Estasi Di Santa Cecilia Di Raffaello Da Urbino Nella Pinacoteca Nationale Di Bologna, ed. by Andrea Emiliani (Bologna: Edizioni Alfa Bologna, 1983) Damisch, Hubert, The Origin of Perspective, trans. by John Goodman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995) Damisch, Hubert, Noah’s Ark: Essays on Architecture, trans. by Julie Rose, Writing Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2016) Diderot, Denis, ‘Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See (1749)’, in Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay (New York: Continuum, 2011), pp. 167–228 Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Anniversary edition, second edi­ tion (Malden, Mass. Oxford, UK Carlton, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2008) Eco, Umberto. A, A Theory of Semiotics, in Advances in Semiotics, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976) Evans, Robin, The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries, 1. MIT Press paperback ed (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000) Filarete, Antonio Averlino Detto Il Filareto, Trattato Di Architettura-Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture, trans. by John R. Spencer, Yale Publications in the History of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965) Forget, Thomas, The Construction of Drawings and Movies: Models for Architectural Design and Analysis (London; New York: Routledge, 2013) Freud, Sigmund, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. by James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (New York: Norton, 1989) Gibson, James J., ‘The Information Available in Pictures’, Leonardo, 4.1 (1971), 27 10.2307/1572228 Heath, Stephen, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981) Holm, Lorens, ‘What Lacan Said Re: Architecture’, Critical Quarterly, 42.2 (2000), 29–64 10.1111/1467-8705.00286 Holm, Lorens, Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier: Architecture, Space and the Construction of Subjectivity (London; New York: Routledge, 2010) Kennedy, John M., ‘Pictures and the Blind’, Journal of the University Film Association, 32.1/2 (1980), 11–22 Lacan, Jacques, ‘Sign, Symbol, Imaginary’, in On Signs, ed. by Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 203–210 Lacan, Jacques, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. 7, 1st American ed (New York: Norton, 1992) Lacan, Jacques, The Psychoses 1955–1956, trans. by Russell Grigg, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. 3, 1st American ed (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993) Lacan, Jacques, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, trans. by Bruce Fink, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 20 (XX) (New York: Norton, 1998) Lacan, Jacques, Écrits: A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2001) Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. by JacquesAlain Miller, trans. by Alan Sheridan, Reprinted (London: Karnac Books, 2004) Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006)

Problematizing the Screen 89 Lacan, Jacques, Anxiety, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller; Book 10 (X), English edition (Cambridge Malden, MA: Polity, 2014) Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963) Manetti, Antonio, The Life of Brunelleschi, ed. by Howard Saalman, trans. by Catherine Enggass (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, ed. by Claude Lefort, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) Pascal, Blaise, Pensées and Other Writings, ed. by Anthony Levi, trans. by Honor Levi (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) Pluth, Ed, Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject, SUNY Series, Insinuations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007) Saalman, Howard, ‘Early Renaissance Architectural Theory and Practice in Antonio Filarete’s Trattato Di Architettura’, The Art Bulletin, 41.1 (1959), 89 10.2307/ 3047815 Saussure, Ferdinand de, Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Roy Harris (LaSalle, Ill: Open Court, 1986) Serlio, Sebastiano, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture, trans. by Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1996) Sobchack, Vivian Carol, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) Tavernor, Robert, On Alberti and the Art of Building (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) Tunstall, Kate E., Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay (New York: Continuum, 2011) Virilio, Paul, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. by Philip Beitchman (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2009) Venturi, Robert, Brown, Denise Scott, Izenour, Steven, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. 17th print. (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977) Virilio, Paul, The Lost Dimension, trans. by Daniel Moshenberg, Semitext(e) Foreign Agents Series (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2012) Wittkower, Rudolf, ‘Brunelleschi and “Proportion in Perspective”’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 16.3/4 (1953), 275–291 10.2307/750367 Wittkower, Rudolf, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 5th ed (Chichester, West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1998) Žižek, Slavoj, Masterclass on Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction - Day One, Masterclass on Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction, 9 vols (Birkbeck, University of London, 2006) Žižek, Slavoj, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London; New York: Verso, 2012) Žižek, Slavoj, The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014) Zupančič, Alenka, What Is Sex?, Short Circuits (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017)

3

Analysing the Screen Vision and Mediation

This chapter deals with a selection of studies relating to the book’s object in question. Specifically, it examines three projects by architects Diller & Scofidio that question the logic of the screen’s appearance and operation within architecture’s space. The focus is primarily placed on the proposal for a vacation home known as the Slow-House (1989) preceded by a discussion on the moving screen in Facsimile (2004) and the installation Para-site (1989). Before proceeding to their analysis, I should briefly frame and explain the choice behind these moments since the very act of selecting a case study consists in the imagination of the case and actively contributes to the invention of the study itself (Kemmis, 1980: 119). In other words, what is the case that such ‘case-studies’ specifically study; they are studies of which case? Is it the screen’s insertion within architectural space or the screen’s logic and articu­ lation of its possibilities for producing space? A quantitative strategy would dictate to select cases based on their intrinsic interest—for example choose x number of buildings with a screen—and discuss, compare or analyse them in a search for the signified of the screen in each corresponding situation. For example, the multiplicity of projects like Uncle Josh, the Comcast Centre or the Millbank Tower Event are implementations of a technique which pro­ duced a spectacle upon certain conditions like correct alignment of propor­ tions and the discussion stopped on what they show, what is the meaning they successfully represented. In contrast to this linear attitude which can either induce a theory for the case studies in question or deduce a theory from them, I should highlight that a case which directly exemplifies the hypotheses pro­ duced, or verifies the properties assigned to the screen in the previous chapters does not exist in an empirically amenable fashion. Hence, the following carefully selected cases do not deal with an illusory fabrication of space. They focus on the signifying logic of this technique and problematize the screen’s appearance in relation to architecture’s space and human subject. For instance, some of the questions or concepts that will be encountered in the forthcoming analysis are the following. The notion of an impossible view and impossible point of view; the representational difference between a view framed by a window or screen; the limits of seeing and the relation that architecture’s object sustains with external reality or context. In consequence, DOI: 10.4324/9781003344995-4

Analysing the Screen 91 the chosen cases allow for generalization and provide a new testing ground for the theoretical assumptions and arguments to be pursued further. It is worth mentioning how Edward Dimendberg begins his monograph Diller Scofidio + Renfro; Architecture after Images (2013) by explaining why a film scholar would write a book on the work of an architecture studio. Specifically, he argues that due to the screen’s insertion in space ‘images no longer merely document buildings but investigate the visual and spatial realities of the present, as ambitious cinema always has … these architects make contem­ porary space intelligible, playful, and unpredictable by controlling how and what we see and cannot see’ (emphasis original, 2013: 2). Equally, Graham Cairns writes that Diller and Scofidio’s work is concerned with some of architecture’s major theoretical questions and specifically challenges how represented images merge with and replace real experiences (2013: 150). As such, the selected cases by Diller and Scofidio bring forward the apparatus of the screen (recording camera, editing of moving image, technique of projec­ tion) as logic for producing (novel understanding with regard to) architectural space and contribute in part to the systematic case of outlining the potential architectural significance of any space produced by material and immaterial components—of any building with a screen.

Facsimile: Fiction and the Undecidability of Moving Images The first project which deserves to be mentioned in the sequence of cases examining the core of the screen’s logic of appearance as an element of architecture is the installation Facsimile (2004). The intervention consists of a 5 × 8 m wide LED screen suspended from a moving skeleton in front of the glass facade of the George R. Moscone Convention Centre in San Francisco, which broadcasts a combination of live and pre-recorded footage to the public at the intersection of Howard and Fourth Streets. With regard to its historical timeline, Diller + Scofidio started working on the project in 1996 as a competition1 proposal, it was installed in 2004 and unfortunately taken down2 in 2015. Nicholas Olsberg in a short essay in The Architectural Review acknowledges that the mechanics of the installation were compli­ cated and required constant maintenance but ultimately ‘the city soon lost the will either to fix or maintain what it had commissioned and constructed with such effort and allowed it to remain inactive’ (2015: 3). Finally, it is worth mentioning in passing that the Facsimile’s screen found itself at the centre of a bureaucratic debate regarding its classification as element of architecture or artistic supplement since works of art purchased by the city were exempt from state sales tax (Dimendberg, 2013: 102). Interestingly, on May 30, 2003, the State Board of Equalization accepted the argument that the screen served no practical function and being a purely conceptual addition to the museum relieved the SFAC of any tax liability for the purchase of the screen. Beyond such a goal-oriented conception of architecture and closer to the book’s scope, this case brings forward a fundamental notion which sets the

92 Analysing the Screen tone for the more theoretical and critical analyses of the Para-site and the Slow-House that follow. Specifically, it relates to the filmic approach the architects adopted with regard to the screen’s fictive content and the chal­ lenge it presented to the viewer’s visual production of meaning. I should preface the Facsimile’s reading by asking: since it does not aim at producing an illusion, what is the relation that the use of the screen initiates with the existing architecture and what methods are the architects employing to achieve it? In short, it concerns a perceptive ambivalence of a different order, similar to the one encountered by Žižek when exemplifying Lacan’s real, as what resists symbolization, through architecture’s asymmetry of appearance between a building’s inside and outside. As a reminder, he referred abstractly to ‘certain mysterious buildings that you find from the outside they look smaller than from the inside … where the spatiality is broken (and you wonder ‘how can it be?’) … it is this gap of asymmetry where you cannot bring together the two perspectives of outside and inside, which amounts to an ontological enquiry where a new point of view changes our object of study’ (Žižek, 2006, 12:40). This asymmetry is fully operative in the Facsimile, where following the architects’ short description of the project actual building occupants and actual interior spaces are confused with pre–recorded impostors and can be discerned through the process of fabricating and carefully selecting—almost as a director—the moving images of the screen. The project can essentially be considered in a dia­ grammatic manner as a moving3 screen projecting moving images while following the façade’s curved path. As explained in a report4 of the San Francisco Arts Commission (2003) the video monitor is suspended from a traveling armature that glides along the periphery of the glass building and the whole structure moves very slowly along the outer contour of the building’s façade, guided on tracks at the parapet and soffit. A complete round trip lasts 45 minutes. The screen’s projected content is divided into two modalities. Namely, live and pre-recorded transmission but it should be highlighted that Diller and Scofidio regarded sceptically the notion of liveness and systematically undermined it in the installation (Dimendberg, 2013: 99). Nonetheless, the live footage provides two insights. First it presents the apparatus necessary for the screen’s function—which in this case includes two recording cam­ eras and a control room—since the latter does not operate in isolation. Secondly, it outlines the relation the screen sustained with the Moscone Centre which in turn informs the notions governing the production of prerecorded scenes like alignment and speed. Hence, there are two cameras feeding live footage to the screen. The first one is situated at the back of the screen looking backwards and follows its horizontal movement around the building. It slowly scans in a pan motion the space located behind the screen, which is the museum’s pre-function area on the first floor and transmits live the internal function of the building to the street. This camera

Analysing the Screen 93 which resembles the function of a magnifying lens provided the public with a visually distorted intrusive gaze of the building’s internal activity while remaining temporally coherent with the screen’s movement in relation to the existing space. The second camera operates in the opposite direction. It is located on the top of the skeleton that supports the screen and looks towards the San Francisco skyline. In addition, a room on the first floor of the museum hosted a controller which could pan and tilt the camera allowing its field of view or depth of field to be adjusted through movement or zooming in and out accordingly. In this sense, the apparatus of the screen functions as a periscope and provides the public looking at the building with an implied external view from within its space; that is, a view from another point of view. Finally, it should be noted that the live footage from these two sources corresponds perfectly with the speed and direction of the camera’s movement. However, it is the third source of the screen’s moving images, the prerecorded footage, which makes Dimendberg describe Facsimile as Diller and Scofidio’s most cinematic project (2013: 96) since the process behind them was tantamount to making a short film. Specifically, he reports that the architects had actively tried to utilize a filmic methodology as part of the withDrawing Room (1987) installation again located in San Francisco. They collaborated with performers and created a videotape of the instal­ lation but unfortunately the proposal to use video to penetrate the street wall proved too expensive to realize (Ibid.: 49). As such, in addition to the live footage of the two cameras ‘on May 22, 2002, Diller presented storyboard concepts to the Visual Arts Committee of the SFAC, and met with enthusiastic approval’ (Ibid: 99). Specifically, these fictive or impostor videos as the architects described them were staged scenes depicting an office, a hotel, or the everyday choreography of the activities of the janitor and the window washer. They were hyper-banal scenes aiming to draw viewers into becoming voyeurs of ambiguous spatial narratives and were all filmed in a constructed set located in an office building in Bloomfield, New Jersey in 2002 which truly resembled a film production. It involved one hundred actors, a crew of twenty and a daily twelve-hour filming schedule. The following commentary by Dimendberg is particularly revealing with regard to the methods employed for the fictive footage to align both with the Moscone’s façade and the appearance of the live images on the screen for a seamless transition to take place. Production designer Paul Avery built the sets wall to wall within the width between mullions at Moscone … the aspect ratio of the camera and architecture needed to coincide, although the timed coordination of the camera tracking with the forty-five-minute round trip movement by the monitor around the facade of the Moscone Centre necessitated even more elaborate preproduction. A custom dolly was fabricated to travel between five and ten miles per hour past the sets of the hotel rooms and

94 Analysing the Screen office cubicles arranged in a row. The employment of the tracking shot as a device to convey a single continuous space was a significant aesthetic choice that links Facsimile to the work of virtuoso practitioners of this technique, directors such as Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Miklós Jancsó. (Dimendberg, 2013: 101) Following these insightful comments on the fictive footage, I will highlight certain key points with regard to the screen’s role being constituent of the proposed architectural spatial conception and experience. First the impostor videos were not simply filmed in another location where the screen transposes onto the museum’s space another three-dimensional dis­ position and merges two existing spaces together. Rather the architects utilized the off-site location as a film studio to fabricate novel spatial sce­ narios in order to interact with the museum’s spatial perception when viewed from the street. In principle, the constructed set built around the architecture of the museum’s facade not only highlights the precision of the execution but rather portrays how the filmic content of the screen allows architecture to engage a virtual dimension with regard to its context beyond the physical site it occupies. Secondly, the specific filmic techniques described above were used to en­ hance the interplay between architecture and the perceptive ambivalence of its images which appear on the moving screen. In contrast to illusion where the eye and the vanishing point need to coincide so that two- and threedimensions match in proportion, in Facsimile two filmic aspects had to coincide with the underlying architecture: aspect ratio and temporal coor­ dination of the cameras and the screen’s movement. Crucially, the counter­ part to which the fictional content is trying to align is not simply the existing building but rather the already encountered live footage where the screen functions as a magnifying glass or periscope. As evident in the project’s description, while the live image naturally corresponds with the speed and direction of the scanning motion, the pre–recorded programmes are con­ structed to simulate the same speed.5 It is the (edited) alignment or assimi­ lation in a coherent visual whole that produces the ambivalence instead of illusion and initiates the relation between the building’s external appearance in three dimensions and the (seemingly) corresponding internal view. Most importantly, the last point concerns—as in all previously discussed cases which focused on illusion—the point of revelation or retroactive emergence of meaning. It should be highlighted that the fictional footage in Facsimile of does not exist independently of the live recording but is rather assimilated in the whole sequence of the screen’s moving images which switches randomly between the two modalities. In hindsight we are able to distinguish between scenes corresponding to Moscone’s interior spaces and those filmed in the production studio. Yet, to a visitor on the street both appear equally plausible as originating from the existing spatial configuration

Analysing the Screen 95 that the cameras scan, and the screen transmits. In other words, both mod­ alities offer a distorted, voyeuristic but derivable point of view through the screen’s apparatus. Until we move from the street and visit the building all moving images exist as free-floating signifiers and the distinction between truth and fiction, meaning and no meaning, or the illusion of pre-recorded footage and the live transmission is suspended—or arguably nullified. It is in this line of thought that Dimendberg’s concluding comment on Facsimile should be read. Specifically, he writes that ‘the architects constructed a machine for revealing opacity and undecidability as general conditions of viewing architecture … not knowing the status of what one views on the screen becomes a positive virtue, the first step toward knowledge. (emphasis added, 104). This notion of undecidedness in the visual field and its archi­ tectural significance in the screen’s function will be extensively discussed in chapter 4 with regard to Peter Eisenman’s pictorial ambiguity and Alain Badiou’s logic on meaning.

Para-Site: Impossible View and Impossible Point of View The second case which elucidates the screen’s function and properties is another site-specific installation of Diller and Scofidio entitled Para-site (1989). It took place in the Museum of Modern Art and engaged the theme of filtered vision in the museum’s space (Diller & Scofidio, 1994: 163). As the architects explain, it is situated between the institutionalized eye of the museum visitor, looking, and the institutional eye of the museum, looking back (emphasis original, Ibid.: 164). The project extends beyond the designated gallery intro three remote locations within the museum’s circulation system. At each location, video cameras relay live feed back to monitors inside the gallery, where the images are recontextualized into ficto-real episodes. The monitors are aligned along a horizontal median, a shared for actual and fictional viewers, around which the images are reoriented ninety degrees or 180 degrees into fictive space. (emphasis added, Ibid.: 164–5) The three locations mentioned in the quote which are being filmed and then projected in the gallery are: (1) the museum’s main entrance with its four revolving doors; (2) the museum’s escalators which substituted the previous ceremonial grand stair; (3) the Sculpture Garden which is a domesticated exterior space. Before going through them it should be highlighted that the screen in Diller and Scofidio’s work never appears in isolation, or rather is never conceived as a stand-alone independent element. For example, a camera mounted on the ceiling above the revolving doors is recording in planar mode visitors entering the museum while those already inside experience on a screen this (impossible) point of view. As such, the screen is always paired with a

96 Analysing the Screen camera that provides its projected content. This is not a mere practical remark but rather explains how this new element is architecturally implemented and conceived always in combination with a recording counterpart. While this opens up many questions regarding the nature of the projected content—namely, whether is it shown in real time, delayed, accelerated, edited or whether it is portraying real or fictive scenes—it equally attests that the screen’s significance in itself is null, where questions about the type, model or resolution of the screen are secondary with regard to its architectural signifi­ cance and only considered at the practical level of implementation. On the other hand, following Diller + Scofidio the question of its architectural importance is what kind of (moving) images if projected in a certain way within a space are architecturally relevant. As such, all questions to examine the screen from an architectural point of view can be classified in one of the following two interdependent lines of enquiry: i ii

Those that challenge the status of architectural space Those that challenge the status of the architectural viewer

Regarding Para-site’s three main interventions within MoMA’s space, two relate primarily to the status of the museum’s visitors and one to its spatial constitution. I will discuss them in the sequence presented in Flesh (1994), which is still the only available written elaboration of the project provided by the architects. The first intervention regards the entrance of the museum where Diller and Scofidio installed video cameras above the revolving doors recording the visitors entering and leaving the building. The footage was then pro­ jected in real-time to four corresponding screens wedged diagonally into a corner of the first-floor gallery (1994: 165). Following the architects’ ex­ planation, these monitors aimed to offer an ‘otherwise impossible surveil­ lance view of the entry wall. No one entering or leaving the museum can escape this ubiquitous gaze’ (Ibid.). As expected, the most interesting aspect of this intervention takes place in the gallery where the installation enacts a fictive viewer corresponding to the above-mentioned impossible point of view. While the visitors move around the gallery, they realize that the installation includes some generic empty chairs oddly positioned in its space; rotated 180 degrees and placed on the ceiling. These chairs are in fact reserved for the fictive viewer who potentially experiences the space from the point of view of the cameras installed at the entrance where the actual ceiling becomes his fictive floor (Ibid.). Roberta Smith in her review of the installation entitled Architectural Gadgetry in Installation at the Museum of Modern Art published at the New York Times in 1989 highlights how ‘certain situations within the work dictate sight lines or disorient the viewer with illusory and inverted spaces. As one looks into a slanted mirror, a wall becomes the floor; the upside-down monitors and chairs argue for the ceiling as ground plane’ (Smith, 1989). However, beyond the interactive

Analysing the Screen 97 interest of this installation, Para-site should be read as a true architectural investigation, albeit in 1:1 scale instead of a drawing or model. Utilizing the ‘latest high-tech architectural gadgetry’ (Smith, 1989) available at the time it investigated how the nature of architectural space is not limited or rather exhausted at its actuality (MoMA in this case). I call it an investigation because the point was not to simply show something more about it by providing qualitatively different point of views, inviting visitors to explore the space from many angles. On the contrary, Diller and Scofidio confronted the visitors with a multiplicity of impossible viewpoints of the space they physically occupied, which were by definition excluded (as impossible) from the architectural experience of visiting the museum’s building. In other words, at stake was not to see the space differently but question what this space is and how are they positioned within its limits. Despite the ample viewpoints presented by the installation room, none was all encompassing and no matter where one stood it was impossible to see everything, an omniscience that would have required gazing behind one’s back or hanging upside down. If Para-Site explored surveillance, it also investigated the limit of total seeing: the blind spot. (emphasis added, Dimendberg, 2013: 55) This is achieved via staging an architectural play of the gaze where the installation directs what the visitors see but also controls the parts of the space they cannot see. As a result, Para-site brings forward a negative affir­ mation; namely, that within architectural space there is no all-encompassing point of view despite the multiplicity of natural and recorded viewpoints provided. The generic empty chairs, which are essentially a clever and inventive architectural notation like marks on the side of a drawing denote a placeholder for the fictive point of views, which are reserved for the corre­ sponding fictive observer. The chairs being physically involved as threedimensional elements in the installation’s space place the visitor in a position of parasite. ‘Not only because he takes the observation that he does not return, but also because he plays the last position. The observer is last in the chain of observables, until he is supplanted’ (Diller & Scofidio, 1994: 165). It is this interplay of looking and being looked at the leads Roberta Smith to describe Para-site’s atmosphere as titillating; ‘one in which the viewer can feel alternately like a victim and a voyeur’ (Smith, 1989). The second intervention of the installation focuses on MoMA’s double escalators where two cameras placed in front of them—one for each direction—were accompanied by a set of receiving screens in the space of the gallery. The way the screens were placed was very precise. They were positioned side-by-side so that the footage from the ascending and descending escalators was tightly framed almost like a composite collage where ‘the space between the handrails completely fills the screen’ (Diller & Scofidio, 1994: 166). Beyond the voyeuristic component where every visitor

98 Analysing the Screen moving between the ground and second levels will appear on the screens this intervention questions a fundamental aspect of vision in relation to perspective projection and by extension architectural representation. Just like the first intervention there is one chair—referred to as the ‘scissors chair’—which enacts the potentially present fictive viewer of the depicted space. The scissors chair is equipped with a mechanism which allows it to move, or rather extend forward from the wall where it is fixed. When fully extended the eye of the fictional viewer meets the point of view of the actual one. Diller and Scofidio explain what would happen if a visitor could sit on the scissors chair when fully extended. But while the structural lines converge at eye level, a reference to the diagram of classical perspective, the video monitors undermine any single, unified viewing experience. Binocular vision is cut by the blade of the steel carriage into two monocular views, one scrutinizing the body from the back, the other from the front (Ibid.). Dimendberg makes an astute, but also general, remark that the installation utilized video as part of a system of notation intended to explicate features of architectural space where the reality it sought to make available for critical scrutiny took spatial and architectural relations as its object (2013: 56). In this case, video—that is both the recording cameras and the screens—did not scrutinize the limits of vision by bringing forward an impossible point of view like the first intervention but rather the way of seeing; the way a visitor optically relates to the space s/he occupies. Specifically, the recording’s close-up framing alongside the placement of the screens undermined perspective projection and forced the viewer to see the escalator’s movement in a flat orthographic projection. There exist two notions, already introduced in chapter 2 respectively necessary for such a reading to be discerned. First, Heath’s precondition for cinema which as long as it is based on photography it is founded upon the same logic of perspective projection. Secondly, the discussion on the shared history of imitation between painting and architecture via Brunelleschi’s experiment and Holm’s reading of the latter through Lacan that brought forward a relation between three-dimensional space and its two-dimensional repre­ sentation. Namely, determined by two conditions; (1) the viewer’s fixed position; (2) the viewer using one eye, space comes to the subject as an image. As a result, from the point of view of the scissors chair, the viewer sees an image of a previously visited space in a non-perspectival way; which is impossible since the visitors are aware that the space of the escalators is neither fictive nor shown as digitally manipulated. The installation’s staging forces the viewers to arrive at this (impossible) conclusion which takes place only because they have already walked through the escalators and then watched themselves and/or other people doing the same.

Analysing the Screen 99 In geometrical terms, such a parallel or orthographic view of the scene would require the point of view to be placed infinitely away from the represented object. It is this impossibility that renders the Para-site installation an architectural investigation since it (theoretically) forces the viewer to reflect on the optical conditions which make legible the architectural reality to which he is inscribed. The third part of Para-site which focuses on MoMA’s Sculpture Garden follows the same interventional logic but involves three extra mirrors in addition to the triptych of camera/screen/chair. The components function in the following way. In the space of the gallery there is a monitor which receives live footage from a camera (also placed in the gallery) looking outside through the glass wall. On the external side of this wall, there is a surveillance mirror secured on the building’s exterior which ‘reflects into the camera’s lens, the very façade being looked through’ (Diller & Scofidio, 1994: 166). Inside the gallery space, as seen in Figure 3.1, a chair (sliced vertically in half) is placed on the wall denoting the fictive viewer is rotated 90 degrees rendering this wall as his fictive floor. Please note the position of

Figure 3.1 Para-site third intervention. Source: 2023©Photo Scala, Florence, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, USA, Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

100

Analysing the Screen

the chair in relation to the mirrors that accompany it. When occupied the virtual viewer of the sliced chair sees: i ii

The monitor which receives live footage from a camera (located behind him) looking at an external mirror; which reflects MoMA’s façade. A circular mirror that reflects a second mirror’s reflection is placed behind his head which in turn reflects the monitor’s live footage.

On the left side of this rotated and sliced chair of the fictive viewer there is a large mirror6 mounted on the gallery’s wall (that is the fictive viewer’s floor). The mirror is tilted so that the section-cut view of the scene is reflected to appear correctly for the actual viewer of the installation when looking in the mirror. As such, the actual viewer experiences a loss of perceptual coordinates ‘as fictional grade coincides with the datum of the eye’ while the fictive viewer as seen in Figure 3.1 is caught in a ‘closed scopic circuit’ between two mirrors (Diller & Scofidio, 1994: 198). The fictive viewer is not simply looking at an impossible view; that is the view behind his head where he would normally have no access to. The camera looking behind him towards the Sculpture Garden faces a mirror which doubly reverses the view from the first level of impossibility (looking behind me which is an impossible point of view) and renders it into an impossible view; namely from inside looking towards the inside of the building. [The project] complicates the visitor’s gaze by adding extra relays in the chain of scopic circuits already at work in the space of the exhibition … The self-consciousness of looking, at looking, produces a feedback in which the museum itself becomes a museological object of contemplation. (emphasis added, Ibid.: 198) The scopic interplay taking place in this third intervention builds upon (the knowledge produced by) the first two which focused on the revolving doors and the escalators. In fact, a viewer has to pass through the first two moments in order to see it—even though such a staging is never explicitly mentioned in the project’s description. The reading to be discerned from Para-site’s use of the screen’s apparatus regarding the sequential production of knowledge which concerns how an architectural visitor relates optically to the space he occupies; or simply how we see space is the following: i The first intervention provides an impossible point of view. Namely, the top-down viewpoint of MoMA’s entrance. ii The second intervention provides a point of view with an impossible view, a non-perspectival one. Specifically, the view of the escalators as a parallel projection. iii The third intervention provides an impossible view from an impossible point of view.

Analysing the Screen 101 The fact that Diller and Scofidio focused their attention on carefully crafting scenarios which confront the visitor with potential deadlocks involved, or rather inherent, in the act of vision is not accidental. The motivation should be read alongside Lacan’s stance on language as elabo­ rated in the previous chapter. Namely, investigating errors, jokes and slips of the tongue allows us to better understand the mechanisms which allowed their emergence in the first place and their effect on the uttering subject; instead of being disregarded as faults or accidents of the system. Specifically, the architects mention William S. Burroughs’ notion of the machine that can be best understood by observing its modes of dysfunction and extrapolate that their installation ‘slips into the museological apparatus to get a better look, viewing its glitches from the inside (1994: 198). At this point I should address a crucial remark about the installation which also relates to the following case study of the chapter. Specifically, while the screen as the object of study of the book has been portrayed as a new technologically enabled phenomenon this installation involves the use of screens from the 80s no larger or significantly different than the TV monitors Paul Virilio was discussing in his texts. In other words, Diller and Scofidio did not use in the space of MoMA Virilio’s prediction referred to as the wall-screen. Yet this should not be seen as a drawback or limitation of Para-site. On the contrary it shows that while larger and better resolution screens enabled a new architectural spatial conception (as this book is making the case) the constituent moves of such space were already inherent or inscribed in the representational logic of architecture; only now spatially manifested with the newer and larger screens. Equally, it should be acknowledged that just like Facsimile, the installation of Para-site had no immersive component, provided no spatial illusions and certainly produced no spatial ambiguity for the viewer in the sense of questioning whether what s/he sees is real or not; that is contemplating whether s/he is witnessing a space or an image of space. Para-site’s contribution focused on the ways a viewer visually relates to the space it occupies and the limits outlining this experience. Finally, the theoretical discussion of chapter 2 where architec­ ture is (potentially) able to represent itself finds its practical counterpart in Diller and Scofidio’s work as seen in the following insightful reading by Dimendberg which highlights the self-reflexive nature of the installation. Specifically, he claims that ‘unlike most architectural exhibitions in museums that seek to evoke absent buildings through the use of photo­ graphs, plans, and models and often suffer from what Diller called a lack of ‘cultural reciprocity’, Diller and Scofidio attempted to use the museum to exhibit itself (emphasis added, 2013: 53–54).

The Slow House: The Question of Mediation Following the discussion on the Para-site installation, the book will now examine in depth another project from Diller + Scofidio. It regards a

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commissioned private vacation residence entitled the Slow House in the town of North Haven on Long Island. Dimendberg explains how the architects came in contact with the client Koji Itakura, a Japanese real estate investor. Steven Holl had designed two residential dwellings for Itakura, who later approached architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien for a different perspective. Rather than decline their services directly, Itakura asked them which other architects they admired and then contacted Diller and Scofidio, with whom he became friends (2013: 66). Diller + Scofidio worked on the proposal for weeks with the help of a Cooper Union student named Victor Won and presented the final design to the client on January 30, 1989. Dimendberg reports that the usually silent Itakura ‘pronounced it too beautiful for words, causing the normally con­ trolled Diller to break out in tears (ibid.). While the story itself is interesting for providing some background context to the project I would only like to highlight that this meeting took place while the architects were working on Para-site which positions the project in a timeframe that Diller + Scofidio was (still) actively investigating the representational principles of architec­ ture as seen for example in the previous section. The self-reflexive aspect of vision exemplified in MoMA’s installation is now followed by a house which examines the very act of seeing by challenging the viewer to reflect on the ontological difference that separates an ocean view framed by a window and the same view recorded and projected on a television screen. As Beatriz Colomina describes, the screen is suspended in the space so that the image is superimposed onto that of the window in order to explore the gap between these two systems of representation; questioning the very status of the view (emphasis original, 1991: 23). Before examining what is at stake in this juxtaposition of window and screen, between a framed and a recorded view with regard to their repre­ sentational mode there are three reasons which render the Slow House as a particularly insightful case study in the developing argument of the book. First, it is an architecture project in the traditional sense, where a client commissioned an architect for a building proposal; in contrast to a clientless proposal motivated by the architect’s research interests or a scheme conceived as part of a competition. Secondly, the screen is not inserted within architecture’s space at a later stage following the completion of the project which precludes any distinction of the resulting space to be classified as before or after the addition of the screen. Adding the screen to an existing building is exemplified in the cases of the Para-site installation in MoMA’s space or the Comcast building’s lobby. On the contrary, the screen in the Slow House was already present from the beginning of the design process and conceived as one of the constituent elements of its space. Finally, the project is an homage, or at least a direct reference to Paul Virilio evident in

Analysing the Screen 103 the footnotes of the project’s written description in Flesh where the archi­ tects refer specifically to Virilio’s sequence of architectonic elements being mutated by new technological innovations which were discussed in the first chapter of the book. Specifically, they attributed to Virilio that he was the first to relate ‘the television screen (the architectonic of the electronic) and the automobile windshield in “The Third Window” (1981)’ (1994: 224). I will begin this critical analysis of the Slow House by presenting the architects’ concluding remark which encapsulates the project’s theoretical gravity and positions it accordingly in the discourse of architectural rep­ resentation. Specifically, Diller and Scofidio write that: ‘if a window frame turns any view into a representation, collapsing depth onto the surface glass, the framed ocean view in the Slow House is no less “mediated” that the “technologized” view on its TV screen.’ (emphasis added, 1994: 248) So, the project brings forward a negative affirmation regarding the two views. While the view framed by the window and the recorded one shown on the screen might differ in several ways the one is not less mediated than the other. In a rather straightforward way, the Slow House poses one question regarding vision and the two different views it contains: how is the viewer seeing, through a means or directly? This question and the architectural consequences it entails will be approached by distancing the Slow House from the very principle it uses in order to question its representational logic; namely, perspective projection. This distancing is essential to be understood since the project’s argument that both views are equally mediated rests upon the axiom that ‘a window frame turns any view into a representation’ hinting its reference and logical dependence on perspective projection from the Renaissance onwards where perspective was literary conceived and taught as looking through a window. It was the tool to represent the external world, which as mentioned in chapter 2 prior to Alberti external world was synonymous with reality since there was no tool to symbolize it. First, it is important to note once again that the use of the screen in the Slow House is devoid of any aspiration towards mimicry or illusion. The television screen electronically reconstitutes the portion of the image that it blocks. The ‘view’ is thus grafted together in two representational modes’ (1994, 226). In principle it creates a view-within-a-view7 similar to Rene Magritte’s paintings like The Human Condition (1933) or La Lunette d’approche (1963) but with a unique exception; the views are not identical to each other. Art Historian Eric Wargo explains how The Human Condition’s perceptive illusion ‘also quite overtly calls to mind Alberti’s famous metaphor of the picture plane as a window’ (Wargo, 2002: 50). The Slow House is situated, or rather begins to function beyond this level since it disregards the use of perspective’s principles as solely reserved for the

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production of illusions. In a sense it bypasses mimicry by positing the framed view as equal to Alberti’s frame while the recorded view of the horizon is seen concurrently with, and compressed against, its Albertian counterpart. What is important for Diller + Scofidio is the relation of the two views and the split separating them. A visitor of the Slow House is neither like the character of Uncle Josh where a change of position would reveal that he got duped by the image of a virtual dancer nor is considering (even under certain conditions) the view from the window frame and the one depicted on the screen as interchangeable. This dismissal of illusion precludes by extension the existence of (but also the search for) implied point of views suggested by the view itself. This notion was investigated by Diller + Scofidio in Para-site where screens would show the space of MoMA from previously unimaginable or physi­ cally impossible to occupy point of views. The same holds not only for Magritte’s impossible views but even for buildings like Teatro Olimpico which equally use perspective in order to produce a lifelike appearance or image out of a distorted space. Regarding Magritte’s painting-within-apainting Wargo notes that it urges the viewer to move around in order to ‘see behind the easel picture, a desire perpetually thwarted by the twodimensionality of the painting as a whole, which effectively enforces the true point of sight’ (2002: 54). This verifies that the success of the painting rests on its illusory dimension since: we are forced to infer, because we cannot confirm it, that from any other point of view than the precise one taken, there would be no ‘illusion’ and thus the work would be nothing special—just a picture of a picture. (emphasis added, Ibid.: 54) While this is correct for Magritte’s painting, The Ambassadors, or illusions in general which turn the painting into a peephole, the Slow House’s visitor is free to look behind the tv screen or move around the space without disturbing the enquiry on seeing which is at stake in this project. The Slow House begins by admitting that it is merely showing a view of a view. Yet the way it is staged is particularly revealing about how we (architectural viewers) relate to any architectural view as viewing subjects. Having out­ lined the distance that the project sustains from mimicry and illusion a second remark should be made regarding another property of perspective projection that the Slow House is equally undermining. That is, the content of the view itself. It could be argued that Diller + Scofidio chose to frame and record one of the least perspectival, almost flat views to demonstrate the gap between the two modes of representation. The view is simply comprised of two surfaces (water and sky) and a dividing line (the horizon). First, when confronted with such a view the viewer can neither locate a point of view, nor assign a

Analysing the Screen 105 vanishing point. By extension, this results in a lack of deducible geometric intervals (progressing into depth towards the latter) which order the relative size of elements usually appearing on a perspectival representation. Finally, there are no objects present to populate the field of vision. Brian Rotman’s insightful definition that a perspectival image “makes ‘a deictic declaration’—namely, ‘this is how I see (or would see) some real or imag­ ined scene from this particular spot at this particular instant in time’ (1987: 19) supports for the moment this lack on two fronts. First, the points mentioned above result in a view devoid of any characteristics underlying the geometrical construction of a perspective projection between a space and its image; and vice versa. Instead, the viewer is confronted with a distilled pure abstract frame divided by a horizon line. Secondly, the notion of time is equally challenged in the Slow House since the content of the TV screen is not always projecting live footage but can appear as edited, delayed or even looped. These two points should be regarded neither as a limitation nor as evi­ dence that the project is avoiding or refuting perspective projection. On the contrary the Slow House should be read as an effort to showcase the activity of seeing where it presents to the viewer the ocean view (framed and recorded) as a placeholder of any perspectival view where the rules (of perspective) apply. If at first there is any doubt regarding the relation that the project is initiating with regard to perspective and the viewer insists on looking for a vanishing point to understand the view, to ‘get it right’ the architects have already in place an apparatus which reassures that the view functions as intended; that is, the rules of perspective still apply. The camera which records the view seen through the window frame serves as a reminder that what we see in the tv screen is definitely ‘in perspective’ (since a camera cannot record differently). To put it simply, as a viewer if you don’t find a difference between the two framed and recorded views when using the eye, you turn to the machine to be provided with one. Thus, even though you cannot locate any leading lines or a vanishing point you know they must exist or be operative in the image you see which as already es­ tablished is not really different from what the viewer sees through the window frame. Similarly to Plato’s seminal quote8 on Alcibiades’ soul which Socrates explains it functions as an eye: it sees but it cannot see itself only if looking at another eye to find what he presumes is sight, the Slow House replaces the second eye with a screen. Closer to the book’s investi­ gation, Lacan’s teaching on anamorphosis (another challenge to correctly locate the vanishing point) which was shown to be the rule of perspective instead of its exception, elucidates the Slow House’s aim: to show the architectural visitor how we see—in perspective (we are always in perspective)—even when confronted with the two seemingly different rep­ resentational modes. As Alex Bremner rightly notes the Slow-House’s sig­ nificance can only be considered in relation to a deeper understanding of the nature of perspectival projection and claims that the project still remains a

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‘somewhat enigmatic gesture of architectural thought and invention’ (2000; 108,105). Analytically there are three steps to approach the phenomenon staged in the Slow House’s living room in relation to the two views, or rather the one split view, it offers to the visitor. The steps outline in a sequential manner the notion of difference separating the screen and the window frame where a set of strong differences turns into a minimal difference until finally eliminated with regard to their immediacy. The first step is the one of naïve comparison. Consider a visitor which enters the space of the Slow House and encounters the framed window view juxtaposed with the recording of the view depicted on the screen. At this level, s/he is caught in the dilemma of identifying the real view and dis­ tinguishing it from its mediated version. Namely, the viewer is questing whether ‘is this a space?’ or ‘is this a representation of space?’ since s/he considers the screen as artificial and the window view as the real thing. The distinction between natural versus recorded is sustained almost like a trick that tries to imitate the outside view. The second step is the one of minimal difference which stems from the previous state of comparison. It can be read as a twist to Brunelleschi’s ex­ periment which showed us the geometric conditions for an image to appear as space since in the Slow House the viewer sees on the TV screen an image which corresponds very well to a two-dimensional representation of the three-dimensional (framed) view. Yet, due to two reasons already explained above a minimal difference between the space and its recorded image or representation prevails. First, there is a geometric lack of a vanishing point and objects within the field of vision to fully superimpose between space and its image. Secondly, the footage is sometimes on purpose slowed down, fastforwarded or even the transmission does not take place in real-time. As such, a weak difference or blurring between the two representational modes exists which can be neither neglected nor position the Slow House’s motivation into the realm of mimicry. However, we should not diverge and compare the screen with the frame in an effort to enumerate all possible differences; an activity already exhausted by the previous step of naïve comparison. If that were the case it is certain that the architects could have chosen another view to fabricate a spatial illusion where the difference would not be minimal. If the Slow House was framing for example an urban scene populated by many objects such as moving cars, people, buildings, etc. the viewer would succumb to differences and focus on their comparison. For example, s/he could notice a moving car that is visible from the framed window but has not yet been shown on the tv screen. Diller + Scofidio knew that in such a view the viewer would resist the claim (that both views are equally mediated) and reply ‘but no, how can you say that … look at all those differences; they are obviously different’—the blurring would not work. On the other side of this argument is Brunelleschi’s carefully staged ex­ periment to make a space and its image superimpose. Imagine Brunelleschi’s

Analysing the Screen 107 experiment taking place in a forest or remember that the clouds are pur­ posely excluded from his demonstration as not amenable to the question of perspective representation. Equally, one of the reasons that made Brunelleschi choose the Baptistry as the site for his experiment was that the building was symmetrical along y’ axis. Thus, the reversal of sides in the specular image would not be noticed by the viewer. The Slow House is a very sophisticated experiment to show the viewer something s/he takes for granted. In other words, while the camera footage was never challenged as such, the way architecture relates optically to its context simply by framing it certainly is. Diller + Scofidio put forward the thesis that if the screen has any architectural significance it concerns the relational positioning/place­ ment of the screen within space; namely, juxtaposed with the framed view and the gap separating them. While placing the screen on the ceiling or in another room so as to transpose or bring inside the external world might be impressive or entertaining it misses the point. The third step of analysis concerns the dialectic principle of seeing. The previously perceived (minimal) difference between the two representational modes is according to the architects eliminated with regard to the seeing subject, which to use their terminology it experiences immediately two equally mediated views. The remaining part of this section will be devoted to ex­ plaining how ‘the framed ocean view in the Slow House is no less “mediated” that the “technologized” view on its TV screen’ (Diller & Scofidio, 1994: 248). In other words, it will show how the Slow House effaces the difference in mediation. For such an exposition we need to momentarily refer to two notions already developed in the second chapter of the book. Namely, dif­ ferentiality and suture as part of the symbolic before transposing them into the visual realm of perspective and the split view of the Slow House. Consider the example that Lacan used with the bee’s dance. The limi­ tation was that their dance could only denote the distance from the hive to the food source where more figure-eight moves meant the food is further away. The dance cannot neutralize its content in order to declare itself as something else; and that is the limitation of the 1:1 paradigm of significa­ tion which describes a state of affairs the possibility of which is (already) inscribed in the object it refers to. In other words, the bee’s dance lacks the dimension of self-reference or what Lacan calls the second meaning (silent) in contrast to the propositional one where language, the exchange of sig­ nifiers, never simply transmits content but simultaneously always renders how we relate to this content. I say something but what matters is the backward reference to the act of saying. What matters is not the message (content) but the delivery of the message (act). Another crucial property of language being self-reflexive is the ability to lie. Not simply produce false content but lie by telling the truth—or produce a false-false in contrast to the bee for example. Like the famous Freudian story of the two Jews mentioned in chapter 2 where one lies by telling the truth (about the

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destination of his trip), exemplifying how a phenomenon can tell the truth precisely by presenting itself as a lie (Žižek, 2014: 103). This notion was equally developed in the visual realm of painting via the tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasios which frequently appears throughout Lacan’s teaching. His notion of a genuine signifier as ‘a signifier that signifies nothing’ allowed us to correlate this conception of nothing (emptiness or lack) to the symbolic as non-all in both linguistic and visual registers where representation signifies the absence of what is represented. As a reminder both paintings produced by Zeuxis and Parrhasios are lying but in a dif­ ferent way. The painted curtain in Parrhasios’ painting signifies the absence of a real curtain which fools Zeuxis because the curtain is not there. The difference—similar to language’s ability to lie by telling the truth—is that the veil is blank: in other words, it is a blank. Parrhasios’ painting is not lying because it is not representing anything—the veil as signifier represents nothing. Whereas the painted grapes signify the absence of a presence as real grapes, the painted veil is still a painting which signifies the presence of its absence as painting (Holm, 2000: 43). Returning to the Slow House, the screen exists in two modes. As an ele­ ment physically present in front of the window which puts it in a relation to other elements of the space but also exists or rather appears as content. It shows the recorded footage of the view which puts it in relation to the context of the house or simply the outside view. Initially, it might seem that the first mode where the screen is standing in space blocking part of the framed view undermines the effectiveness of the second one. Let’s fast forward from 1989 and assume that in the future a screen could be seamlessly integrated on the surface of the window frame. With the push of a button, it could be turned off and then the ‘real’ external view would be revealed through the window. How could a viewer tell the difference in this scenario between the two views? S/he couldn’t. The point that Diller + Scofidio are trying to make is that crafting such a scenario misses the point. In fact, the project aims to show that listing all the differences separating how the two views appear does not matter—since both are equally mediated. In this sense I propose that the Slow House can be regarded as the optical equivalent of the linguistic ‘I am lying to you’ … telling the truth via a lie. This sentence finds resistance at the semantic level of meaning, or fol­ lowing Lacan the statement is considered paradoxical if we do not separate the (unconscious) subject of enunciation [énonciation] and the (conscious) subject of statement [énoncé]. Specifically, we do not know if the ‘I’ of statement is telling the truth about the enunciation of lying. As Lacan ex­ plains in seminar XI ‘If you say, I am lying, you are telling the truth, and therefore you are not lying, and so on’ (2004: 139). Yet, he clearly states that ‘I am lying to you’ is a perfectly derivable and well-formed expression. It is quite clear that the I am lying, despite its paradox, is perfectly valid. Indeed, the I of the enunciation is not the same as the I of the statement,

Analysing the Screen 109 that is to say, the shifter which, in the statement, designates him. So, from the point at which I state, it is quite possible for me to formulate in a valid way that the I – the I who, at that moment, formulates the statement– is lying, that he lied a little before, that he is lying afterwards, or even, that in saying I am lying, he declares that he has the intention of deceiving (Ibid.). Consequently, is the subject lying, or is he telling the truth? He is lying at the level of statement which semantically produces a paradox but at the level of enunciation the subject is telling the truth about a lie; whose inverted form is ‘I am deceiving you’. In the Slow House ‘I am lying to you’ means the framed view is showing the viewer the real thing, that is the lie. But by showing the real view as mediated (or framed) this is the truth; the real thing is always mediated. The architects (try to) show the mediation itself, once through the camera and once through the frame, by presenting for simultaneous reception the initially conceived real frame and the cer­ tainly mediated one the project manages to eliminate the difference between them. In other words, Diller + Scofidio show the architectural viewer that recorded and natural (views) are arbitrary distinctions. Yet, how can you show something which is impossible to show? That was the challenge that the Slow House responded to: namely, to show seeing. This being impossible, the architects staged to show the impossibility itself. While the first step of comparing the two views has been covered, one of the potentially strongest arguments a sceptic could raise against the devel­ oping line of thought is their ontological difference. Simply, one is elec­ tronically made out of what Virilio referred to as the cathode ray tube while the other exists in the natural world. However, the Slow House’s point of critique to rebut the statement is deeper. It equates not what they are but how they appear and (equally) relate to the viewer as mediated by almost eliminating the symbolic as the realm of differences which distinguishes them. Diller + Scofidio showed the viewer something symbolic (a framed and recorded view) and took away what renders them as such—the set of all differences from the level of naïve comparison—by presenting the minimal gap/split between what the viewer initially thought as immediate (non-mediated/natural) and the certainly symbolic (mediated) counterpart represented in the screen. By presenting a placeholder of a view lacking the geometrical clues for the viewer to proceed with an attentive comparison the architects tried to show what holds together the symbolic as the realm of differences of any architectural view which is the vanishing point. The price to enter the field of vision in Brunelleschi’s case was to acknowledge a blind spot while occupying a certain position to see (the image of space with space superimpose) correctly. Namely, position the eye opposite the vanishing point. The Slow House shows the blind spot’s equivalent in the very act of seeing, confronting the non-difference between the two views, between looking through a frame and looking at a screen.

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This affects not so much the perceiving subject or eye, but the nature of the view/viewed object. Brunelleschi explained how we represented an object of external reality while Diller + Scofidio made the case that once framed, it is already represented for the viewer. Being represented means to appear, to be inscribed in a symbolic network of differences. Following chapter 2 on the conception of a sign between Saussure and Lacan, what characterizes the symbolic (of language or per­ spective projection) is the differential nature of its elements. As a reminder, the differential nature of the symbolic as a field of differences means that regarding its elements and their properties ‘every presence arises only against the background of potential absence’ and consequently ‘we can talk about the presence of absence as such’ (Žižek, 2012a: 427). As such what ties together or sutures the signifying series is a reflexive signifier (usually referred to as the master-signifier) which has no determinate meaning, no signified. It is solely responsible for the meaning of all other elements that appear in the symbolic network, or view in our case. In its filmic appro­ priation by Oudart suture outlines how a shot firstly perceived as objective is reinscribed or allocated as subjective (belonging to the point of view of a person in the film) in the next one. Equally Žižek (2012b, 7) elaborated that the ultimate threat regarding suture is not that of an objective shot that might not be allocated to some protagonist within the space of diegetic fiction but ‘that of a point-of-view shot which will not be clearly allocated as the point-of-view of some identifiable protagonist, and which will thus evoke a free-floating gaze without a determinate subject to whom it belongs’ looking back at, putting it into the picture. That is the gaze of an impossible subjectivity that cannot be located within the diegetic space. In Lacanian terms this gaze is threatening because it undermines the function of any signifier appearing on the screen which ‘represents a subject for another signifier9’ and approximates the one master signifier which repre­ sents the subject for all other signifiers and itself has no meaning or signi­ fied. This is important because similarly to Diller + Scofidio, it allowed the book to make the case that the screen’s significance lies beyond its illusory capacities, which are in fact taken for granted. On the contrary the ‘ultimate threat’ regarding the screen would be to never reveal its spatial illusion … if that were the case there would be nothing to be ‘sutured’, no posited Absent One to be concealed, no space to be signified by the twodimensional illusion and the three-dimensional space. Or simply, a subject would not be represented by a signifier to other signifiers. Accordingly, every viewer is represented by a point of view to other point of views, where some are possible and some are impossible as seen in the Para-Site instal­ lation while the vanishing point is the ‘point’ that sustains this multiplicity of views. In this terminology, we are always in perspective is a statement equivalent to the architects’ claim that both views are equally mediated. That is the reason why I highlighted that blind people can also relate to the differential symbolic network, or simply put they can understand perspective

Analysing the Screen 111 and depth. Specifically, with regard to Alberti the immediacy attributed to vision was reversed in Lacan’s understanding of perspective where he posited that it is a matter of space not sight. In other words, it is not an empirical question; and by extension you do not need sight to have a vanishing point. Leading to the counter intuitive statement that space seen through (the act of) seeing is not the real (immediate) space. From an architectural perspective we do not get access to (knowledge of) space through sight but through its representation, through the formalization of drawings and models or in the case of the Slow House even through framing it. The Slow House did not eliminate the symbolic but rather showed what holds it together. How? By choosing to frame and record an ocean view which effectively lacks a vanishing point Diller + Scofidio undermined the mechanism for comparing or judging the differences (what is included/ex­ cluded) that separate the two views. In other words, consider what is that a viewer cannot see, or needs to be sutured, when looking through any window frame? Nothing in particular that is why s/he neither contemplates about the meaning of the view nor questions whether it is seen in a correct way. Yet, we know that if we took a photo through that frame or tried to draw the view as seen through the window, we would posit a vanishing point so that all elements appearing within its field would be correctly or­ dered. This implied geometrical/spatial order is undermined when the viewer looks through the Slow House’s frame, while the recorded view acts as a reminder of its underlying existence. The architects showed in a con­ crete sense the split between the framed view and the screen—i.e. a whole view is a split view—as a negative (namely, to have a view, you have to lose something, acknowledge a blind spot) open-ended field. Finally, the showing is deemed dialectic because as visitors we don’t know which view pretends to be what, or rather we do not know which part of the whole view we see directly or through some means of mediation. Now we come full circle regarding Diller and Scofidio’s rebuttal of immediacy associated with the sensorial experience. The condition for per­ spective is the limitation of the field of vision where there is no outside of the symbolic. In other words, perspective is conditioned upon the rupture of a complete visual field or the split of a whole visual relationality between the subject and external reality (between the viewer and the Slow House’s framed view) without being mediated. Mediated by what? Alberti called the neces­ sary mediation to represent the world a veil, while Lacan named it a frame. It’s crucial to grasp the nature of the reality of space as a threedimensional space if we are to define the form that the presence of desire takes on at the scopic level, namely, as a fantasy. The function of the frame, the window frame I mean, which I tried to define in the structure of the fantasy, is not a metaphor. If the frame exists, it’s because space is real. (emphasis added, Lacan, 2014: 283)

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If the frame exists, is because space is impossible to signify, and the former’s function allows access to three-dimensional space through its twodimensional image ‘collapsing depth onto the surface glass’ as Diller + Scofidio (1994: 248) write. Equally the frame brings forward that between two and three dimensions there is some remainder which cannot be fully collapsed, completely sutured or wholly inscribed in its limits. The retroactive movement is situated between the imaginary (three dimensions) and symbolic (two dimensions) where following Lacan the duality should be grasped in order to show the gap between an object and its representation constituting, but also separating them, which is the real (of) space—similarly to the bar separating the signifier from the signified, the frame is mediating three and two dimensions. Consider a viewer in the Slow House constantly shifting his attention between the framed view and the recorded one on the screen, which is not that of representation, nor that of signification’ (Zupančič, 2017: 58). To repeat, ‘the signifier in fact enters the signified—namely, in a form which, since it is not immaterial, raises the question of its place in reality’ (Lacan, 2006: 417). Following Alberti’s veil, Brunelleschi’s drilled panel and Lacan’s frame the Slow House’s screen significance is universal precisely because there is no one place where the experiment can take place; it functions everywhere, in every world that includes a human subject and an external object whose relation is mediated by the act of vision. As a result: […] space is not a feature of our subjective constitution beyond which the thing-in-itself would find, so to speak, a free field but rather that space is part of the real. (Lacan, 2014: 282–3) What Lacan is arguing in this quote in relation to the developing line of thought on the case of perspective is that space should not be seen as a container filled with objects but as part of the real which is unknown, not symbolized. Yet, objects appear to the subject, and their appearance changes—is admissible to the question of knowledge—based on the space they appear and the position from which they are viewed. In other words, for a subject to see, but also for something to be seen, it must exist in a network of differences/degrees that regulates how much you see and how much it appears depended upon one single and untenable omnipotent (God’s or vanishing) point of view which is reserved for infinity in the codification of perspective projection. The importance of space as logical, instead of a physical a priori container containing objects is a crucial Lacanian insight. Briefly, Lacan’s stance against a priori categories reverses, or feature of subjective constitution, reverses for example the hierarchy of the ideal as a priori (of Man or Father) over particular instantiations as posteriori (of different actual men that will never be the Man or the Father). On the contrary, the ideal is considered a result of the particular not being the ideal; the idea of Man is the result of man not being the Man.

Analysing the Screen 113 Consequently, for Lacan the example attains more importance than the concept which exemplifies, because only through the example—through its failed representation or méconnaissance—we can think of, and about, the concept; of space, for example, which is neither a feature of our subjective constitution, nor a content filling container. Rather space is (part of the) real, of that which cannot be symbolized even as a container. The tension is thus not situated between the concept of space as being filled with objects and the objects themselves, but rather a tension between the formula (as formalization, symbolization, how it is represented) and form. Regardless of the content, there is tension already within the level of the form itself, between the articulation of space and the enactment of its appearance. Let’s consider a formulation of space, think of a mathematical formalized notation or an architectural perspective drawing. For instance, x − y^2 = v which is selected at random, P + (v + w)=(P + v) + w which concerns a geometric transformation in Euclidean space, Brunelleschi’s painted panel, or the Slow House’s split view. While different on the epistemological level they share the symbolization of space—rendering some unknown parts as known. When in front of such a formalization is the mathematician or the architect claiming that ‘this is a space’ or ‘this is a representation of space’? What is such a formalization or symbolization? Following the container analogy—the conception that Lacan challenges—external world stands for the placeholder that objects will fill, and the drawing or equation describes a state of affairs or establishes a correspondence with it. But how do we retroactively move from the container to the formalization since the former is the origin of, precedes, the latter. Against Lacan the argument is the following: it is not space, but rather the formulation that is part of the real—consequently outlining the move from what is the real (the formula or drawing) to that which is not the real (space). However, only because we write the formula, produce the drawing, look through Brunelleschi’s drilled panel towards the perspec­ tive drawing, or flicker our gaze between the Slow House’s two views we can see the space as such, understand it, attain meaning, etc. and most impor­ tantly learn something new about it. The price to pay, or in formal terms the precondition, to see external reality (space) in a certain sense in Brunelleschi’s case of closing one eye is equivalent to understanding, and grasping the meaning, of the mathematical formalization. His experiment in Florence showed the geometrical hole between two and three dimensions (between image and space), while Diller + Scofidio showed the topological one between immediacy and mediation by presenting perspective and simultaneously undermining it. Only after ‘getting the picture right’, understanding the formula or witnessing the Slow House’s juxtaposition you see space in a new way—render something already there from unknown to known. So what? Formalization’s relevance could be questioned in the following way. The majority of people, including myself, do not fully or intuitively understand mathematical formalizations. Equally we all walk in the street or visit buildings without being equipped with an apparatus similar to

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Brunelleschi’s. In other words, is this knowledge unnecessary to understand the phenomena or is it unnecessary for the phenomena to take place? Of course, the latter. In Lacan’s words ‘Il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche’, or in short, there is cause only when something doesn’t work (2004: 22). These remarks act as a reminder that we should not get blinded, or meth­ odologically get carried away by the notion of relevance. The book is not assuming the responsibility of determining the Slow House’s split view relevance of encountering two equally mediated views any more than Brunelleschi’s experiment determined the relevance of closing one eye to see the specular image correctly10. Nonetheless, Diller+Scofidio managed to show something about how we see and how we represent, instead of what we see and what we represent when framing or recording an architectural view. As Žižek explains Lacan’s object a with regard to suture “there can be not only ‘no interior without exterior’, but also ‘no exterior without interior’ … in order to appear as a consistent Whole, external reality must be ‘sutured’ by a subjective element, an artificial supplement that has to be added to it in order to generate the effect of reality, like the painted background that confers on a scene the illusory effect of ‘reality’”(2012b: 9). The Slow House demonstrated that the existence of a vanishing point—to have a point of view—is not an empirical question but rather a matter of mapping space logically. Finally, the gap separating the two views or representational modes is the subjective element constitutive of objective-external reality which escapes meaning (is not amenable to a process of comparison) and renders both of them equally mediated for the architectural viewer.

Notes 1 ‘After screening a national pool of sixty-two candidates (which included Jenny Holzer, Anish Kapoor, and Nam June Paik) and narrowing this to a short list of six teams, the selection panel interviewed D+S on January 14, 2007, and awarded them the commission on January 22. On June 15, the architects signed a contract with the art commission to design and implement the project’ ( Dimendberg, 2013: 97–98). 2 The decision of the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) took place on September 8, 2014. 3 See video of the moving screen, uploaded by Diller + Scofidio: https://vimeo. com/93656145 4 The report can be accessed in the following link in pdf format: https://sfgov.org/ arts///sites/default/files/Documents/sfac/Visual_Arts_Committee/July_18_2012/ Facsimile_Description.pdf 5 Short text on architect’s website, accessed here: https://dsrny.com/project/ facsimile 6 Diller and Scofidio justify on a footnote the choice for this specific mirror: ‘optical mylar, normally used in medical applications, produces a near perfect reflection, unlike the crude double-image of a glass mirror’ (1994: 166). 7 The one view they present includes both the frame and the screen while the two are not equal or identical. It should be noted that the camera does not represent

Analysing the Screen 115 a point of view that the viewer could occupy because it is located outside the house at a heigh of approximately 7m. However, this difference is overlooked as insignificant due to the nature of the depicted scene. 8 The actual quote in the dialogue between Alcibiades and Socrates is: “Then if an eye is to see itself, it must look at an eye, and at that region of the eye in which the virtue of an eye is found to occur; and this, I presume, is sight”. ( Plato, 1975: 133). 9 Instead of representing something for someone which was Saussure’s definition of a sign. 10 Likewise, the next chapter will not focus on the relevance of Michael Webb’s demonstration that the vanishing point and the point of view exemplify two different notions of infinity but rather show how it was achieved through an architectural investigation based on drawings.

References Bremner, Alex, ‘Re-Activating the Docile Body: A Critical (Re)View of Diller and Scofidio’s Slow House’, Architectural Theory Review, 5.1 (2000), 104–122 10. 1080/13264820009478391 Colomina, Beatriz, ‘Domesticity at War’, Assemblage, 16 (1991), 14 10.2307/ 3171160 Diller, Elizabeth, and Ricardo Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994) Dimendberg, Edward, Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2013) Holm, Lorens, ‘What Lacan Said Re: Architecture’, Critical Quarterly, 42.2 (2000), 29–64 10.1111/1467-8705.00286 Kemmis, Stephen, ‘The Imagination of the Case and the Invention of the Study’, in Towards a Science of the Singular. Essays about the Case Study in Educational Research and Evaluation, ed. by Helen Simons (Centre for Applied Research in Education, University of East Anglia, 1980) Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Alan Sheridan, Reprinted (London: Karnac Books, 2004) Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006) Lacan, Jacques, Anxiety, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller; Book 10 (X), English edition (Cambridge Malden, MA: Polity, 2014) Olsberg, Nicholas, ‘Bad Screen Resolution: DS+R’s Doomed Sculpture’, The Architectural Review, 6 January 2015, 3 Plato, Plato: In Twelve Volumes. 8: The Statesman. Philebus. Ion, trans. by Harold North Fowler and W.R.M. Lamb, The Loeb Classical Library, 164, Reprinted (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975) Rotman, Brian, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero, Language, Discourse, Society (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1987) Smith, Roberta, ‘Architectural Gadgetry in Installation at the Museum of Modern Art’, The New York Times, 21 July 1989, section C, 30

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Wargo, Eric, ‘Infinite Recess: Perspective and Play in Magritte’s La Condition Humaine’, Art History, 25.1 (2002), 47–67 10.1111/1467-8365.00302 Zupančič, Alenka, What Is Sex? Short Circuits (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017) Žižek, Slavoj, Masterclass on Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction – Day One, Masterclass on Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction, 9 vols (Birkbeck, University of London, 2006) Žižek, Slavoj, ‘“Suture”, Forty Years Later’, in Concept and Form, Volume II: The Cahiers Pour l’Analyse and Contemporary French Thought, ed. by Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (London: Verso, 2012a), pp. 145–164 Žižek, Slavoj, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London; New York: Verso, 2012b) Žižek, Slavoj, The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014)

4

Questioning the Screen Architectural Limits of Representation

Following the collection of discerned properties and assumptions relating to the observation of the screen through problematizing its mode of appear­ ance (chapter 2) and analysing three case studies illustrating its rationale (chapter 3), this chapter offers an in-depth analysis regarding their archi­ tectural significance and the screen’s role in architecture’s production of meaning once inserted in its space. Specifically, the properties in question as discerned from the previous chapters are: (i) suspension of meaning; (ii) truth and fiction (illusion); (iii) impossible point of view and viewpoint; and (iv) and the relation of the vanishing point and point of view. Hence, why is it architecturally significant, or in other words what unknown part of architecture’s signifying process is being demonstrated when a visitor en­ counters the ambivalence of real and pre-recorded footage; when trying to comprehend whether the images on the screen are real or fictive; or when s/he sees a space from an impossible point of view. This chapter aims to show that such conditions included in the screen’s logic of appearance—that is perspective projection—can be examined as logic for producing instead of representing space. As mentioned in the introduction of the book those properties and hypotheses are not empirically amenable and cannot be ver­ ified in the reading of a singular case. They can solely be demonstrated since they aim to show the inherent limitation of the screen’s mode of appearance that allowed their emergence in the first place as productive formulations or negative affirmations. In consequence, this chapter will read them in crossreference to three carefully selected canonical and well-established moments within architecture’s literature that deal precisely with the notions under examination, albeit in a different context. Crucially, the cases that follow do not include the element of the screen but rather examine the core properties of the screen’s mode of appearance as already outlined by the previous chapters and allow us to make a case for their architectural significance in a retroactive manner. These are, Peter Eisenman’s House I, Brunelleschi’s experiment and Michael Webb’s drawings for Temple Island which will be shown to operate at the limit of architecture’s production of meaning and by extension able to position the study of the screen in the sequence of their shared logic. The examination begins by taking at face value the following seemingly DOI: 10.4324/9781003344995-5

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innocuous, almost rhetorical, questions each corresponding to one of the above-mentioned cases. Accordingly, what happens and why is it architec­ turally significant when: i I place my eye at the hole of Brunelleschi’s drilled panel? ii I suspect that some of Peter Eisenman’s columns are not load-bearing and wonder why are they there. iii I realize that Michael Webb tried to draw the impossibility of depicting a perspective drawing from the point of view of the vanishing point? Before discussing each individual case, I would like to explain the choice behind these cases whose reading will transpose the validity of the discerned properties to the screen’s function, or in the sequence of the above questions they will equip the study to respond to why and under what circumstances is it architecturally significant when I encounter a screen within a threedimensional space or a space produced by material and immaterial com­ ponents? As will be shown in detail these three moments are able to ex­ amine the limit from representing to producing meaning and provide novel ground for generalization on architecture’s signifying process because they: i are universal (can take place everywhere, not determined by a specific site or situation) ii are not goal oriented; involve no proposed design as its primary aim iii delineate a novel relation between architecture’s subject and object

Peter Eisenman and the Rhetorical Figure The idea regarding the suspension of architectural meaning is introduced by Peter Eisenman through the notion of the rhetorical figure through a lin­ guistic mechanism which produces undecidable propositions (2004). Based on a set of five minimal signifying units {a, t, c, s, i} he tests how a series of permutations result in a certain word or phrase formation. As he explains, such combinations usually produce representational figures; words associ­ ated with a fixed meaning. That is ‘act’, ‘cat’ but also ‘act is’ and ‘cat is’. At some point this process recombines the fragments into ‘cactis’ which is something that looks like a new word. Eisenman designates ‘cactis’ as a rhetorical figure which stands for its own absence because, in simple terms, it does not correspond to a designated signified. As such, the results of combining {a, t, c, s, i} are separated into two groups and portrayed as opposite to each other. They can either contain meaning (representational figures) or be meaningless (rhetorical figure). In Eisenman’s words this distinction is founded upon the different way each case relates to the notion of absence (of the meaning they represent).

Questioning the Screen 119 i

ii

‘The representational figure stands for something outside. So, there is also an absence. But this absence is about, it is outside, it is not contained within the is’. ‘The rhetorical figure, like the cactis, stands for its own absence—it does not refer outside—its own absence is’ (2004: 205).

There are two underlying relations at stake here which should be made clear. Either not having a signifier or having no signified. It is not a question of de­ cidability (or absence of meaning) but rather a question of formation—how is meaning produced. Certainly, ‘cactis’ has no signified and we don’t know what to make out of it upon the first encounter, but it is a well-formed expression rather than gibberish syntax like ‘csctai’. Thus, the point of meaning or signified depends on whether the statement of ‘cactis’ is true (T) or not true (NT), beyond its correct well-formed syntactical formation. The diagram in Figure 4.1 by Alain Badiou (1969) demonstrates the es­ sential operation of any logical system—like the system of language—which produces and then separates statements as valid or invalid, i.e. as consistent or inconsistent with the rules of its formation. Signification is achieved via three mechanisms—concatenation, formation, derivation—while the whole system is completely indifferent to what the meaning of a word is. It is only examining the mechanisms for producing it.1 The primary mechanism (M1), the mechanism of ‘concatenation’, pro­ duces arrangements of a discreet set of elementary marks or letters, as a sort of combinatorial ‘alphabet’. Consider for instance all the possible combi­ nations of the letters used in the English language similarly to the popular boardgame Scrabble, or in Eisenman’s case {a, t, c, s, i}. Secondly, the level of ‘formation’ (M2) is the level of syntax where ex­ pressions are considered acceptable (well-formed) or rejected as ill-formed. To pursue our linguistic analogy, at this second level we might distinguish

Figure 4.1 Mechanisms M1-4. Source: ( Badiou, 1969).

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between syntactically valid (though not all necessarily coherent or mean­ ingful ‘sca’ ‘cat’ ‘cai’) sequences of words, as opposed to random series of letters ‘ctsi’. The third level (M3), the mechanism of ‘derivation’, allows us to dis­ tinguish which among the well-formed expressions—provided by M2—are derivable and which ones are not. As expected, there are many well-formed expressions that are not derivable. M3 selects a subset from the number of well-formed expressions distinguished by M2— ‘cat’ is distinguished at this level from ‘sca’. In other words, ‘sca’ is a well-formed expression at M2 but not derivable at M3. From a grammatical point of view both ‘cactis’ and ‘cat’ are syntactically correct. What is missing, (absent or undecidable) is the semantic component of M3. Crucially, Eisenman is not clear on the relationship between the rhetorical figure of ‘cactis’ and the combinatory system out of which it emerges. Is there a logical rule, or a set of rules, determining the output of such combinations? Either a word like ‘cactis’ is an error of the system as opposed to outputs like ‘cat’ or the set {a, t, c, s, i} inherently produces certain undecidable statements. You cannot have it both ways. While it may seem clear at this point, it is crucial to point out that a fully autonomous linguistic system with no ambiguity—as complete universal language—is impossible. The classical definition of the absolute consistency of a system, according to which at least one well-formed expression is not derivable within it, desig­ nates precisely this minimal requirement (Badiou, 1969: 4). That is, a perfect division between meaning and no-meaning is impossible—or as we discussed through Lacan the symbolic is ‘non-all’. In case an extra assurance is required for linking Badiou’s highly formalized exposition to a seemingly subtler psychoanalytic conception of language, it is also worth mentioning MerleauPonty’s view regarding the constitutive role of sense and non-sense in relation to ab-sense of meaning—whose phenomenological work has already been mentioned in chapter 2 as complementary to Lacan, instead of contradictory. In the working notes of Visible Invisible, he similarly tries to emphasize how the visible and the invisible should not be considered as covering the whole of an embodied subject’s perceptual world. ‘Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not the contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework (membrure), and the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible, it appears only within it … one cannot see it there and every effort to see it there makes it disappear, but it is in the line of the visible, it is its virtual focus, it is inscribed within it. (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 215) The comparisons between the invisible and the visible are not comparisons [not a correspondence of features], they mean that the visible is pregnant with the invisible, that to comprehend fully the

Questioning the Screen 121 visible relations one must go unto the relation of the visible with the invisible (ibid.: 216). Returning to Eisenman, the duality of representational and rhetorical figure is applied beyond the domain of language to the one of architecture. He builds upon Scott and Venturi’s canonical distinction—from Learning from Las Vegas (1977)—between the duck and the decorated shed where the duck is considered as representational and the shed as rhetorical figure. Therefore, the duck refers to a signified while the shed’s meaning is sus­ pended and constantly sliding until someone literally puts a sign on it. Yet, their distinction is a matter of situating absence within each of them since—as Eisenman states—in the representational figure absence is about while in the rhetorical figure its own absence is. In the representational figure the lack is negative—the duck functions as an imaginary idea where the referent is actually representing the object. In the rhetorical figure there is a placeholder of not having something. The meaning is never fixed or determined—as long as there is a sign ‘eat’, ‘cinema’, or ‘__’ the function of the shed is appropriated accordingly. In Badiou’s diagram the rhetorical figure ‘cactis’—as a new word—marks in the system not the lack of a term which would satisfy a relation but a relation lacking in M3 (derivation). If the question of ambiguity or nomeaning is at the level of M3, then the rhetorical figure, the non-identity of the duck necessarily exists in M2 as a well-formed expression. There is a relation lacking between the form and the use. On the other hand, the representational figure, or the duck, maintains a closer relation to the physical object. It is a lower form of signification, akin to a child’s speech or animal mimicry like the bees’ dance discussed previously. In these cases, the location of absence is immanent, is contained—it is lacking relation (to its referent). Thus, we should not be surprised that Eisenman calls it an illu­ sion, being closer to its imaginary object what is missing is not the actual duck but the signifying process itself. In consequence, Eisenman chooses to frame the distinction in terms of outside and absence. He claims that the representational figure stands for something outside while the rhetorical figure, like the ‘cactis’, stands for its own absence—it does not refer outside (2004: 205). Thus, the duck in Las Vegas similarly to Saussure’s tree stands or refers to something outside by representing it, while the decorated shed’s meaning is also determined by the outside but in a different way. Certainly, it does not refer outside but its meaning is externally constituted by a naming operation: putting a sign on it. In fact, we are presented with two different notions of ‘outside’. A physical outside is operative at the representational figure where difference is immanently represented by a similarity relation to an external referent. A metaphysical outside operates at the rhetorical figure where the difference is transcendently produced outside by a relation towards the external signi­ fier. As previously discussed, Lacan showed—by shifting the attention away

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from Saussure’s conception of sign—that is not just that the word creates the thing, but it creates the difference in the thing itself since both restroom doors are identical. Lacan’s use of the signifier ‘ladies’ or ‘gentlemen’ cre­ ates a symbolic efficacy, a real difference in the world evident in the user’s behavior towards the object. Regarding absence and the gap of meaning between the duck and the shed Eisenman writes: ‘a representational figure represents a thing in its absence while a rhetorical figure contains its absence, that is, it contains its open-endedness’ (2004: 205). Yet, we should highlight that Eisenman’s motivation for utilizing linguistic devices such as the rhetorical figure is to write texts other than the approved ones of architecture and by extension other than texts of presence (2004: 206) In both language and architecture there are sets and subsets of signs, where letters compose words and words sentences while elements form structures, which in turn compose buildings (Preziosi; 1979a). ‘This means that its units (of language) … are subject to the twofold condition of being reduced to ultimate differential elements and of combining the latter according to the laws of a closed order’ (Lacan, 2006: 418). Nonetheless, Eisenman’s focus is to question the rules of combination by insisting on what separates the meaning of the duck and the shed. I posit, echoing the linguistic analogy, that these two examples are operating under two paradigms of signification, as seen in Table 4.1. The rhetorical figure is symbolic because difference comes from the sig­ nifier (‘eat’ in this case designates the shed as a restaurant) rather than the object. It questions the certainty of knowledge towards the object and unsettles the fixed correlation of the sign to the outside reality signified. Regarding the shed as rhetorical figure, theoretically whatever sign you place on top of the shed is a placeholder for meaning, completely detached from the physical properties or attributes of the object. It is simply because it says so. The duck follows an imaginary signification where the sign is taken as object and language is utilized as tool of communication. Think for example of René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (1928) depicting a pipe followed by the phrase ‘this is not a pipe’. Just like no one thought it was a real pipe, Scott and Venturi did not need to put a sign ‘this is not a duck’ on their representational figure. The duck is equivalent to Zeuxis’ painting of grapes that managed to fool the birds via an imaginary

Table 4.1 Two paradigms of meaning Duck

Decorated Shed

representational figure imaginary (identity and similarity)

rhetorical figure Symbolic (difference and repetition)

Questioning the Screen 123 identification. In hindsight, the distance separating the representational duck from the rhetorical shed sums up the distinction between Saussure and Lacan’s conception of a linguistic unit and the use of language. As such, a new word or architectural object (which is Eisenman’s aim) can emerge only through the rhetoric—or combinatoric in his terms—treatment of language and by extension the rhetorical paradigm of architectural signification. That is the place where absence, and ambiguity of meaning are designated as productive. In simple terms, meaning is operative in the rhetorical figure in the following way. The signifier desig­ nates the object’s identity. Yet, as Lacan often repeats ‘any genuine signifier is, as such, a signifier that signifies nothing’ (1993: 185). Being exempt from a one-to-one correspondence with an external ‘real’ referent and account­ able for designating meaning the signifier is what allows the condition that Eisenman calls open-endedness (2004: 215). Therefore, why is openendedness (or undecidability) not to be found in the imaginary paradigm of identification, or the duck? Because, as already demonstrated, if that was the case it would always be possible to lie by substituting a false reference for a true one. Because there is always at least one2 signifier that escapes the above strict association of object and referent and exposes its inherent shortcoming. However, in architecture things are a bit more complicated as Eisenman points out. ‘The act of opening a door does not necessarily involve any interaction with the sign of a door; it may only involve the door itself as a pragmatic instrument of entry. Thus, the door is a complex sign since it is at once object, signal of entry, and a basic entry. Virtually all architectural elements fall into this complex category of sign’ (2004: 215). Admittedly, elements like the door are not just signs but also functioning objects and certainly the distinction between a wooden, glass, narrow or colour-painted door matters. Still, does this differentiate them from the logic governing Lacan’s previously mentioned example of restroom doors? I claim that such distinction is untenable. Lacan wanted to show how the signifier creates a difference in the real thing. Hence, the simplified example of the doors, which in fact look the same and function as identical and exchangeable objects. But in his line of thought attention should not be focused on the signifier’s content such as ‘ladies’ or ‘gentlemen’ but its form. Sometimes it is a drawing, a colour or a material. As long as we are in the symbolic order, everything is a signifier, and we can no longer distinguish between the object and the sign. That is how Eisenman’s opening quote ‘the rhetorical figure, like the cactis, stands for its own absence’ (Ibid.: 205) should be read. The proposition ‘once operating within the symbolic there is almost no object’, is the equivalent of saying that the rhetorical figure as object stands for its own absence. Among Eisenman’s work the best project which exemplifies this point, I argue, is in fact the first house he designed after starting his architectural office3. Specifically, I refer to House I (1967–68) also known as Barenholtz

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Pavilion which was a project for a private gallery to showcase a collection of antique toys built as an addition to the existing residence of Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Barenholtz on the corner of Rosedale Road and Galbreath Drive, Princeton, New Jersey4. House I inaugurated the series of renowned projects like House II (1970), House III (1971), House IV (1970), House VI (1975), House X (1975) or House El even Odd (1980) that followed throughout Eisenman’s early career. While much has been written about these projects (Hendrix, 2006; Luce, 2010; Hays, 2010; Luscombe, 2014; Djalali, 2017) most of Eisenman’s writings and published articles have been combined in Inside Out (2004) and Written into the Void (2007) which together form a collection of his selected writings ranging from 1963 until 2004. Analysing the House series is well beyond the scope of this study. However, their overarching motivation and theoretical context should be mentioned in order to position what is at stake in the following discussion on House I. Specifically they encapsulate Eisenman’s plea against the modernist conception of architectural sign and its paradigm of meaning production exemplified by the motto ‘form follows function’. As Mario Gandelsonas explains in the introduction of House X such a convention ‘said much about the origin of signs but little about their nature; it proposed ‘new words’ but no rules for their combination, no grammatical framework for their use … ultimately, the ‘functionalist’ sign differed little from its classical counterpart; shapes were derived not from function itself, but from other disciplinary references—from machine technology and Cubist aesthetics—in order to suggest a functional meaning (emphasis original, 1982: 7–8). In consequence, Gandelsonas considers Eisenman’s work to address the limits of architecture’s signs specifically with regard to the process of their articulation. As such the aim of the House series can be distilled in two parts. First, the houses were an effort to make the elements of architecture self-referential and secondly, develop a process that could produce this self-reflexive condition without referring to the formal con­ vention of modernism (2004: 215); in other words, dislocate architecture’s signifier from its signified. The rhetorical figure was precisely such a device of dislocation that will now be encountered spatially in the use of structural elements in House I, which was ‘an attempt to conceive of and understand the physical en­ vironment in a logically consistent manner, potentially independent of its function and its meaning’ (2004: 29). The house is conceived as a structural assemblage of beams and columns whose articulation and logic of permu­ tations like the set of {a, t, c, s, i} is generated through a set of progressing axonometric diagrams presented in the original explanation of the project. However, the equivalent result of ‘cactis’ is a three-dimensional articulation of columns which concerns the core of architecture’s suspension of meaning and the subject’s perceptive ambivalence with regard to the space occupied. Upon closer inspection, it can be inferred that some of the columns, spe­ cifically those in the entrance scene do not belong to the space’s structural

Questioning the Screen 125 system and are not fulfilling their functional requirement of being loadbearing. They are not functional, but they seem to be, which for Eisenman ‘once this is understood, a first step has been taken to unload, albeit in a primitive way, their structural meaning’ (Ibid.: 30) and in consequence they purely signify they are signs of architecture (Ibid.: 215). This inconsistency or pictorial ambiguity is supposed to make the architectural viewer wonder ‘what if they were not there?’ House I and this seemingly rhetorical question contains crucial insights with regard to the screen’s investigation and its production of meaning beyond fabricating illusions (of space). In a similar manner to approaching other deadlocks presented in the book like the drawings of the Winnebago tribe or Alberti’s concept of concinnitas, Eisenman positions this indeterminacy or undecidedness as inherent in the logical approach of the resulting articulation when explaining why the columns should not be simply cut off at the top since they are not supporting any weight. It would stop the suspension of meaning and provide the columns with a signified. ‘It would do the opposite of what is intended … it would give the column a further meaning by obviously calling attention to itself as a non-supporting column, whereas it is supposed to be merely one mark or a primitive ele­ ment in a formal scheme’ (Ibid.: 30). Finally, before outlining the architectural significance of not revealing the illusion, of not assigning a signified to the columns a final remark should be noted. Eisenman himself admitted that the exploration of linguistic analo­ gies and specifically conceiving architecture as an autonomous system has failed. ‘The search for essence and autonomy was none other than a search for an ultimate centre and truth, and therefore contradictory to the effort to dislocate architecture from its metaphysic of centre’ (Ibid.: 221). His aim was to try through the transformation of form to produce autonomy and grasp what the real wall or the true column of architecture is. It was the dream of a complete universal language, architecture’s symbolic dimension in this case. ‘The attempt at autonomy was a dream of illusory presence, of the denial of absence, of the “other.” Were autonomy possible, there would be no reason to undertake the process at all’ (Ibid.). Ascribing autonomy to the rhetorical figure, overlooking its non-identity as a well-formed expres­ sion at the level of syntax, presumes its separation from the broader sig­ nifying process of language. That was its failure. Secondly, while the investigation of the rhetorical figure and the surplus of signification (col­ umns which are not columns) was a failed experiment, it still showed that a limit of architecture’s symbolic articulation exists, and architects should challenge it if novelty is to be introduced in the field. Hence the hypothesis that the screen as element of architecture can function beyond representing space through its content but rather produce spatial meaning has been positioned with regard to the property of sus­ pending meaning; where the illusion is a signifier of producing space instead

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of the signified which once revealed meaning is suspended. In other words, the screen is able to operate beyond the imaginary level of showing (an illusion). Utilizing the signifier of illusion and its significance in architec­ ture’s production of spatial meaning will be examined in the following section, while the fabrication of undecidable moving images will be tested in chapter 5 through a series of design experiments.

Brunelleschi and Eisenman Regardless of Eisenman’s failed attempt to portray architecture as a whole and autonomous system his pursuit of reaching the limit of symbolic artic­ ulation, from representing to producing meaning through models and drawings should not go unnoticed. I will examine—through a close reading of Brunelleschi’s apparatus and Eisenman’s House I model (1967–68)—how and under what circumstances these instruments as methodology are able to show what is not yet available to the question of architectural knowledge. Approaching this limitation which is immanent to the symbolic mechanism itself is formally defined by Badiou—in relation to Lacan’s psychoanalytic treatment—as a de-monstration. I will proceed to show that the screen’s contribution lies precisely in its capacity to make architectural space a demonstration, contributing a new point of support towards the hypothesis that the screen turns architectural space in a model of its own articulation. But what does ‘demonstration’ mean exactly? ‘Demonstration’ means that the real is not what is shown or monstrated [ce qui se montre] but what is de-monstrated [ce qui se dé-montre], that is the undoing of the showing. (Badiou, 2018: 169) There are two aims. First to show how not all models are equally operative in the architectural process distinguishing those which monstrate and those capable of de-monstrating. That is separating models which act as a substi­ tute for a building from those questioning either the symbolic rules of formation—Eisenman’s House series—or certain fundamental conditions of architecture—Brunelleschi’s interrogation of its spatial condition of occu­ pation. Secondly, exhibit how models of the latter category are in fact demonstrations and solely capable of reaching the limit of architecture’s process of signification; which in Eisenman’s work concerns the line of inquiry of the rhetorical as opposed to the representational figure. It should be noted that Michael Hays portrays this shift as one from architecture’s actual to potential. The pursuit for the limit of meaning production is defined by moving away from the one-to-one paradigm of signification where architecture’s form has its referent in ‘say, the human body, traditional constructions or some performed classical system of meaning … external to the architectural sign’ (Hays, 2010: 55). Yet, since language is not conceived

Questioning the Screen 127 as an autonomous or complete system of representation, Lacan posits that meaning has two meanings. A propositional and a silent (or unsayable) one. The first meaning covers reality as what is possible to knowledge. The second one brings forward the real while not being opposite to what can be known (as unknowable) since it can be demonstrated or shown to the subject. ‘Thus, the real differs from reality. This is not to say that it’s unknowable, but that there’s no question of knowing about it, only of demonstrating it’ (Lacan 2001a: 408). It is surprisingly reassuring to find an equivalent line of thought in Damisch’s first chapter of The Origin of Perspective, just before disputing the thesis that perspective has become archaic and its time has passed. The idea of two meanings arises in Damisch to resolve the following deadlock. While a viewer only sees a certain part of the world at any time, elements inaccessible to vision can be accessible by shifting his/her position or via an explanation—in the form of a drawing, or a photograph—attesting to occupy another point of view similarly to the Para-site installation. Beyond the literal or metaphorical nature of such displacement, Damisch agrees that there is no outside of vision if conceived as excluded from its domain5 but agrees that the firmly established rules of perspective as a tool of representation contradict such a notion. The problem then is how to distinguish that which is perceived from that which is represented. What we cannot speak about we must pass over is silence: but can’t we try, if not to show it (‘Don’t look at my finger, look in the direction in which it is pointing’), at least to derive some sense of it, in such a way that language might articulate its silence, and discourse gain access to it?.’ (emphasis added, 1995: 34) A preliminary structure which explains the difference between these two meanings as paradigms of signification but also positions the shift from one to the other within architecture is presented in Table 4.2. It is the function of the vector that will be demonstrated with regard to the screen’s per­ formance in architecture’s space. Table 4.2 Meaning representation and meaning production Imaginary Representational figure Duck Monstrate Sign Mimicry Mis-en-scène Space

→

Symbolic Rhetoric figure Decorated Shed Demonstrate Signifier false-false Mis-en-abyme Image of space

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Lorens Holm accurately refers to Brunelleschi’s case as model or demon­ stration. The latter’s apparatus asked the architectural subject (or user) to occupy a space by viewing its image while being completely indifferent to specific architectonic elements or communicating a design proposal. Holm portrays it as a machine for thinking about basic architectural principles. ‘Nothing could be more basic to architecture that the spatial conditions of occupation. The demonstration declares the primary relation that an occu­ pant has to a space takes the form of the view’ (Holm, 2010: 104). Most importantly, what was meant to be the representation of a scene includes the scene as an integral part of its representation, or ‘the model is occupied in a way which replicates the occupation of that which it models’ (2010: 105). Similarly to the case of Zeuxis and Parrhasios, the notion of represen­ tation, and the way it functions, is key in distinguishing between the two paradigms of signification. Within architecture a model is usually thought of as the substitute for a building, it represents an object. Its architectural significance varies in degree, as the model might be a scale replica of a house shown to potential buyers or a technical detail addressed to a team of construction experts. Nevertheless, the model is a scene within a scene, it represents an object—it monstrates. To the question ‘what is a model?’ we respond: the artificial object which explains all the empirical facts under consideration (model as substitute for a building). But to the questions what are the criteria of explanation? What is the true model? The immediate response is: the true model is the one that accounts for all the facts’ (Badiou, 2007: 84). A model enabling a demonstration such as Brunelleschi’s does not represent the object but the subject. Akin to the psychoanalytic act it represents the emergence, or the intervention of the architectural subject being inscribed in the register of perspective projection—which is marked by nothing, literally the hole in Brunelleschi’s panel. Thus, the question becomes what does this nothing, or emptiness in the symbolic represents? In Brunelleschi’s case it represents the architectural viewer, who realizes that space comes to him as an image—after closing one eye and placing the other at the hole drilled through the painted panel. However, ‘an epistemological problem surges up against every proposition struggling to describe the difference and the relation between model and empirical reality; against every enterprise knotting together ways of thinking that which, in the model speaks of its object; and against every placement, outside the model, of the thing whose model it is’ (Badiou, 2007: 82). Brunelleschi’s aim was not to show a complete juxtaposition of image and space and challenge the viewer to detect a discrepancy but rather show how such an effect (including the errors of the sky and the symmetry along the x-axis) can be produced. Consequently, in order to represent a subject, rather than an object, the symbolic’s emptiness is a necessary condition—it anticipates the viewer, something is literally taken out to allow room for the subject’s emergence. While looking at the panel’s specular image the demonstration of the real becomes a negotiation at the limit of architecture’s spatial

Questioning the Screen 129 conditions of occupation. We are well aware that outside reality is not perspectival, we don’t see the way we draw, or following the previous ex­ position on the Slow House both framed and recorded views are equally mediated; nonetheless space comes to us as an image and the hole while demonstrating this condition reminds us that we have left the imaginary and entered architecture’s symbolic as subjects at a cost—closing one eye. The undoing of the showing is the undoing of external reality as an image by blocking it. It is a very physical6 demonstration. First, external reality is blocked by the back side of the drawn panel which allows only one point of view, the hole. Then the mirror is placed opposite to the hole in order to restrict even further the view of reality once the viewer’s eye is in position. The placement is an impossible choice, the necessary price required to be inscribed in architecture’s symbolic reality. Damisch claims that this placement prescribes limits to vision so that the viewer no longer perceives an exterior reference point and must make do with those available to him in the painting (1995: 379). In fact, the mirror (reflecting the painting) as the point of mediation between reality and the viewer is completely scale-less, but at the same time, the sole scale of reference to proportionally match the image of the three-dimensional Baptistry building. The act is the demon­ stration of the subject’s real, which in architectural terms stands for the subjective aspect of occupying a space. That is the gaze or being a viewer. Describing the panel’s physical hole as symbolic emptiness amounts to two propositions. The first one, denies its operation outside the symbolic—it is another way of stating that there is no hole, no vanishing point, no anamorphosis and most importantly no subject positions in ‘reality’. Thus, the hole—as placeholder for the subject—is missing from conventional scale replicas which are presented as whole or complete and meant to be observed as objects which monstrate (rather than demonstrate) an equivalence to their corresponding real or imaginary building. The second one, affirms the impasse of symbolization but also shows the hole qua emptiness as the limit of meaning or the exception within the symbolic that cannot be signified. I consider it important to highlight that the subject supposed to ‘fill’ Brunelleschi’s hole is completely indifferent to aspects of the architectural experience usually associated with subjectivity—such as occupational comfort or aesthetic taste. His case reminds us that we cannot separate object and subject but only delineate a relation between them. This relation appears minimally at the case of monstrating models and maxi­ mally in his apparatus. Excluding the affect of space reveals how nonsubjective occupying the subjective position is. On the contrary, in Lacan’s terms it is the unconscious subject portrayed as objective relationality between subject and object that is at stake in Brunelleschi’s demonstration. That is how the relationship between subject as viewer and the building of the Baptistery should be read. As mediated by the image-producing mech­ anism of the subjective gaze. In other words, there are no objects in reality that we gaze or grasp, but we partly produce them using models which

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de-monstrate. That is the ‘true model’ of the unconscious that allows the observer/viewer/analyst of the facts to produce some new knowledge about the reality which the facts are describing—on the contrary, monstrating models aim at an objective representation of reality as factual as possible. An expected point of critique within architecture might be the following. Brunelleschi’s apparatus does not address architecture’s form nor the combination of its elements. Furthermore, it is completely detached from any kind of a building proposal—in contrast for example to Eisenman’s House models. While this proposition is true, it misses the point of the developing line of thought. Brunelleschi’s apparatus being a ‘true model’ accounts for the criteria selection of the empirical elements portrayed in the demonstration—namely external reality as the image of Baptistry. The similarity with Eisenman’s models consists in identifying the ‘hole’ to filled in by the subject in each case. The emptiness in Eisenman is a lack in the symbolic order of signifying elements like columns, doors or planes which appears to be complete in the approved texts of architecture. The viewer, in House I for example, will identify (hopefully) this gap at the limit of sig­ nification upon realizing that certain columns do not fulfil their function of being load-bearing; thus, asking the rhetorical question ‘what if they were not there?’ (2004: 215). In this manner House I allows a re-articulation of the conditions of possibility for the empirical reality. The point is not to discern a one-to-one correspondence between the scale model and its cor­ relative proposed architectural object. On the contrary, the aim is to bend the different combination of elements which then transcribe some criteria for the empirical object. Both Brunelleschi’s and Eisenman’s models push the viewer to make a decision, affirm the impossible choice of occupying a subject position in the space of architecture. Certainly, there is a great qualitative variance between how the two cases enforce the filling of the gap in the symbolic. Brunelleschi forces you to see reality from one point and with one eye closed while Eisenman does not compel the subject’s emergence so fervidly. Their interventional capacity is a matter of degree which nonetheless follows the same logic of subjective emergence. In Brunelleschi it is almost maximal. A viewer will not see space as an image if refusing to place his eye at the hole or misunderstands how to use the apparatus altogether, for example, puts a finger through the whole or tilts the mirror. In Eisenman the degree of subjective constitution is rather minimal but still a precondition for the viewer’s inscription—minimal because it relies on several presuppositions. For instance, it requires an architecturally competent viewer equipped with structural knowledge to realize why certain columns do not support any weight. Before this recognition of limit, the model is monstrating a relation to an empirical object. It simply shows us one like the Slow House is initially only showing a view of the ocean. Once the impasse of meaning regarding the symbolic order of architectonic elements occurs the model demonstrates the subject’s real, an inherent impasse in the logic that allowed their articulation. Or in this case

Questioning the Screen 131 something about columns which until now resisted the question of knowl­ edge. It shows the structural limits of monstrating which results in expanding the symbolic order of architecture. The limit of ‘what if they were not there?’ is at once inscribed by shifting a potential architectural proposition to its actuality (investigating columns which appear to be columns but do not function as columns) while at the same time displaced as a new limit. When architecture is argued to be an autonomous symbolic system is that precise displacement of limit that is either overlooked or denied while aiming at a complete classification of all true architectural propositions, i.e. meaning of meaning which is impossible. Following this line of thought, I would like to momentarily return to The Ambassadors painting. It should not be seen as offering two points of view nor two places from which we can see the painting. On the contrary what the viewer encounters is two qualitatively different positions contained within its signifying process. The imaginary one which monstrates the painted scene and a symbolic one which demonstrates the former’s limit and reminds us that is not whole. Brunelleschi’s hole and the point of view from which the distorted skull becomes legible share the same underlying logic. They are a precondition for the demonstration to occur. Anamorphic images are a signifier for absence and emptiness, because they demand to find the point where the hole would be and occupy it. Eisenman wanted through his House models to make the case that there is an equivalent ‘hole’ or emptiness in architecture’s process of symbolic articulation. To do that he aimed towards the limit of its constitution via modelling different combinations of elements—mainly structural ones like beams or columns. However, he did not focus on expanding our under­ standing of these elements. He was not interested in showing different types of columns nor how a column functions in different settings. Formally, it could be written as not pursuing a relation from one to many. On the contrary, Eisenman pursued a quest from one to the Other aiming to make an architectonic element signify nothing (2007: 3). Only in this sense, questioning or even transgressing the presuppositions—such as architecture needs to provide shelter, or a column supports a certain weight—governing the approved texts of the discipline is possible as he aimed. However, Eisenman’s limitation can be summarized in one proposition. He wanted to fill the hole of architecture’s symbolic register in order to render it complete, or autonomous in his terminology. Even though there exist several critics of his work like Douglas Murphy (2012; 111) or Nadir Lahiji (2018; 128) there are two points which should not go unnoticed. First, he was aware that there is a hole in architecture’s symbolic order even though the attitude of occupying this emptiness proved a failed experiment—as he openly admitted (2004: 221). Secondly, regardless of his motivation, Eisenman’s work is positioned at the limit of symbolic articulation—even for the wrong reasons—and that is very important in itself and the current investigation of architecture’s limits.

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Architectural reality in Brunelleschi’s demonstration is of an image. If there was no image but a real space there would be no perspective, no architectural symbolic order that can be formalized. In 1453, being in a preKantian universe, Brunelleschi could not have articulated the emerging subject position in these terms. To the best of my knowledge, the first to draw this connection at least within architecture is Lorens Holm (2000; 2010) and Hubert Damisch (1995)—both via Lacan. Before the invention of perspective, the visual world was reality. What you saw was what you got. With the invention of perspective and the identification of the visual field with its representation on a twodimensional plane, the visual world becomes imaginary, with the screen screening a reality we know not. It took 500 years after the invention of perspective for psychoanalysis to invent a subject which was adequate to this condition. (Holm, 2000: 48) The book positions the screen in this sequence of subjective emergence which take place through the architectural de-monstrations of Brunelleschi regarding the spatial subject and Eisenman as an instance of interrogating the limit of architecture’s symbolic. Continuing this line, what real is the screen bringing forward, which emptiness or void is identifying for the subject to emerge by occupying it? It is this question that will drive the following design experiments in the following chapter. Brunelleschi invented the spatial subject position which was formalized as a tool for artists to paint. Architects used this tool as Lacan reminds us in order to represent architecture, not only in drawings but in buildings where surfaces were painted with scenes matching the space as an illusion. For instance, as seen in chapter 2, we find images like the one in Villa Farnesina which appear to be a space and are concerned with the real effect of the virtual. Entering upon a specific point the living room appears to be almost two times longer and a window overlooking nature seems to be at the end. Last but not least, this tool allows for spaces which appear or pretend to be an image, which is another way of saying that their most notable attributes are to be seen in their image. Among such exceptions Lacan himself dis­ cusses Palladio’s Teatro Olympico as a space being preoccupied with the virtual effect of the real. The following passage from Ethics reflects how painting and architecture (which is rarely mentioned in his teaching) share the common pursuit of emptiness. One learns to paint architecture on the walls of architecture; and painting, too, is first of all something that is organized around emptiness (precisely what Brunelleschi demonstrated). Since it is a matter of finding once more the sacred emptiness of architecture in the less marked medium of painting, the attempt is made to create something that

Questioning the Screen 133 resembles it more and more closely, that is to say, perspective is discovered. … From the moment when perspective was discovered in painting, a form of architecture appears that adopts the perspectivism of painting. Palladio’s art, for example, makes this very obvious. Go and see Palladio’s theatre in Vicenze, a little masterpiece of its kind and in any case instructive and exemplary. Architecture submits itself to the laws of perspective, plays with them, and makes them its own. That is, it places them inside of something that was done in painting in order to find once again the emptiness of primitive architecture. (Lacan, 1992: 136) Perception puts the viewer in relation to objects while representation positions the subject in relation to images. The same distinction holds for materialized architecture like Teatro Olimpico conceived through the symbolic order of perspective. Equally, the logic behind Eisenman’s work is identified in his models instead of his buildings. Notably, on the process behind the House series he finds support by quoting Hal Foster to describe the transformations taking place in the models. ‘It is an architecture which generates its own house. It is a process that represents itself in order to become its own representation’ (2004: 149).7 In House El Eisenman leaves no doubt as to where the focus of his investigation lies but also where would the truth of architecture be situated—namely, not in the building. The model is ‘so self-reflexive that it exists not as an object but merely as its own representation. There is no object now, merely the representation of one. This becomes the ‘truth’ of architecture (Ibid.:149). It should be noted that the screen beyond its operative logic of appearing, is part of the building’s repertoire situated among other elements. It is placed in the object that Eisenman forcefully challenged as the real object of archi­ tecture and shifted attention to its model. The overlap is crucial. Eisenman’s work was the model. It was the place where he investigated the permutations of architecture’s signifying units until a certain, sometimes questionable, limit was achieved. Only once the modelling process came to a halt a larger copy of the model was constructed in building form. Thus, his pursuit of emptiness was situated in the model. However, the screen necessitates that the logic of de-monstration is transposed into the building; nullifying rather than obfuscating a distinction between model and object. The screen has the capacity to render a building as the model of its own demonstration. Regarding Eisenman it could be argued that maybe he was too restrictive in his distinction and thus forced to accept that there was something outside of the model. A model as a model of reality (replica) simply monstrates but also presumes that reality is fixed, given or already determined while the model is a changeable and undetermined part. Models which de-monstrate are not founded upon the presupposition that there is a determined back­ ground reality to be represented and treat both levels as indeterminate. If we want to represent it, we have to accept the malleability of the model as a

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method in process. Brunelleschi’s lesson was that once looking through the hole there is no empirical reality, nothing beyond the image, only models. Holm insists on this point: ‘the lesson of the demonstration that holds for architects is that the exterior that architecture articulates is just another interior. Just more architecture and perspective. And the exterior to this space we cannot visualize. Visual space has another side as it is not orga­ nised for vision and lies beyond its reach. It is Other to the space we inhabit visually’ (Holm, 2010: 124). As such we could provisionally refer to the space revealed if the viewer in Brunelleschi opens both eyes as outside. It is a space we have no knowledge of, but it exists, it is always there; while to formalize it, to be inscribed in the realm of its represented signifiers you have to accept to close one eye and look through the hole. The real as resisting symbolization or being prior to it is what cannot be looked from the hole as perspective, it is the space not accessible to knowledge through this point of view. Consequently, the screen’s arrival in architecture’s space is breaking the barrier between the object and model that was until now situated outside and between them. In Brunelleschi case, even though every space comes to the subject as an image, the model showed precisely this condition where the undoing of the showing allowed the subject to emerge as viewer. It allowed him/her such intervention by providing them with a perspective, or point of view, within the same symbolic space, i.e. the hole of the drilled panel. In other words, Brunelleschi showed us how we see space—even though it was always like that, it had to be demonstrated. The subjective intervention as previously discussed is a matter of degree. In any case—from minimal to maximal—from understanding why Eisenman’s columns are not columns to placing your eye in the hole of Brunelleschi, revealing the illusion is the point where the subject emerges. Their equivalent architectural insights might be of different breadth and as previously discussed with regard to the Slow-House’s negative affir­ mation that the recorded view is no less mediated that the framed one it is not in the book’s scope to determine their relevance. Yet they can be compared structurally due to the fact that they share the same logic of emergence—as I hope this chapter has shown. What is enough to determine them as such, to recognize them retroactively, lies in identifying how the subject’s real is demonstrated. In Brunelleschi it was the outside of the symbolic in the visual field. In Eisenman it was the limit of articulation of the symbolic detached from the building as object and situated in the model as part of its conception. The subject of the former demon­ stration looks at reality differently and that of the latter articulates something—architectural elements—in reality differently. The only postulate, common to even identifying such architectural dem­ onstrations, originates outside of architecture and has already been en­ countered several times in different forms. That is, Lacan’s ‘non-all’—the symbolic is not complete, every logical system produces undecidable prop­ ositions, there is no metalanguage, there is no meaning of meaning etc. The

Questioning the Screen 135 screen displaces the building as object. Not in Eisenman’s way where atten­ tion is shifted towards the model as the place where the dislocation of the symbolic articulation occurs. On the contrary the screen displaces the object by making it its own model. Architectural space becomes a de-monstration of its own fundamental conditions. The spatial condition of its occupation (demonstrated by Brunelleschi) and the logic of its symbolic articulation (demonstrated by Eisenman) overlap. This intersection refers to the screen’s effect towards the architectural subject and object being operative as a tau­ tology. Claiming that the screen turns the building into a model or that it enables the subject to inhabit a model are two equivalent propositions. Certainly, we are facing different subjects, thus showing different notions of real. Brunelleschi’s demonstration showed how the subject views space. Eisenman’s how the subject articulates space. The screen’s shows how space is displaced for the subject—either through the construction of the image as space or potential subject positions. It is a conflation of these two demonstrative modes. It affects both subject positions, expands their actuality providing more points of perspective and also multiplies the representation of space as image. In case it does both—I will test this through the 5th chapter’s design experiments—then there is at least a minimal degree of subjectivity ascribed to the object of architecture. The screen as part of the space’s image changes itself based on the object it meets, where object in this case is the traditional subject of architectonic experience i.e. the user. If we ascribe subjectivity to the building, it is the screen that meets the object of the viewer, where he finds himself being the object of a performance given by the building itself. Finally, we should be cautious, the screen in architecture is not a substitute for reality—it cannot be nor is interested in doing so. Comparing it with immersive technologies such as virtual reality headsets misses the point. Its value as element is in showing something more of the symbolic reality and its inconsistency at the limit of symbolization. The point is not to discredit the illusion nor expect the impossibility of a complete deception. The quest is not towards articulating what the meaning (of illusion, architecture, film) is but rather how it is produced—as such it does not rest on a perfect realism able to fool the subject. The point is not to trick the viewer, such a pursuit ignores Brunelleschi’s con­ tribution who never provided the multiplicity of viewpoints but affirmed them—or to be precise they were only imagined by the possibility of being out of place. When looking through the hole his model demonstrates that while occupying a space you are also a viewer. Certain instances in architecture’s corpus promote this kind viewership. These are the spaces that Holm describes as perspectival, spaces whose most salient features are manifested in their image and the positions of viewer and occupant coincide. Thus, when visiting Teatro Olimpico, or the Palazzo Rucellai, viewing the space from a certain point equals looking at the photo of the space taken from the same point of view. Illustrated in an analogy with Brunelleschi’s model, the screen is not equivalent either to the Baptistry, or the mirror, or the drawn panel of the Baptistry. I claim that it merges the drawing and the mirror which allows the demonstration to be spatial

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Figure 4.2 Behind the view. Exploratory drawing on the multiplicity of elements behind the picture plane. The drawing focuses on the difference between elements which are included in the space the view represents and those who appear within its limits. Original A2. Source: By the author.

and most importantly not restricted by the hole. The screen performs the multiple subject positions which in effect transform the object—it is not a view within a view, but a space within a space (Figure 4.2).

Questioning the Screen 137

Michael Webb and Two Names for Infinity Perspective as an Order Relation Between the Void (Ø) and Infinity (ω) Temple Island is a project that Michael Webb has been working from 1987 until the present day. This section will examine it in detail because it holds profound insights on the logic of perspective and its most fundamental notions. Namely, the nature of the vanishing point and the point of view. There exist two interesting characteristics regarding this body work which should be immediately noted. Firstly, it consists only of a series of drawings and secondly, it was a self-motivated clientless effort to ‘capture’ the landscape of the Henley Royal Regatta (a rowing event held annually on the river Thames) using perspective projection involving no proposed design or material intervention in the site. However, at stake has been more than a mere representation or depiction of the scenery as clearly stated by Webb when introducing the project in Two Journeys (2018). ‘To capture is also to intervene; to take possession of, not in the real estate sense of owning title or even of occupying it militarily, but instead through the grokking8 of a subject that drawing it brings’ (2018: 150). Before examining closely the drawings of the Temple Island, two already developed notions relating to the logic of perspective projection should be briefly repeated. The first one concerns The Ambassadors painting and the status of the two points of view offered by the depicted scene. In fact, as elaborated in chapter 2 the painting should not be considered as providing two points of view nor two places from which it can be seen. On the contrary, what the viewer encounters are two qualitatively different positions contained within its signifying process. The imaginary one, which monstrates the painted scene and a symbolic one, which demonstrates the former’s limit and re­ minds us that it is not whole by precluding a complete imaginary identification—which happens when the skull, which was already there, is revealed to the viewer. Brunelleschi’s hole and the point of view from which the distorted skull becomes legible share the same underlying logic. They are a precondition for such a demonstration to occur. Consequently, ana­ morphic images have been defined as a signifier for absence and emptiness, because they attest to the existence of a point of lack—or hole in the symbolic—and demand the subject to occupy it, which once occupied produces the latter’s visual reality which in turn is not complete. The second notion regards the three components of structural necessity operative in Brunelleschi’s demonstration and by extension in the logic of perspective projection (Hays, 2017: 92). Namely, i a found object (the Baptistry), ii a registration plane through which the object is viewed (drilled panel) iii a relay device (mirror)

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When discussing Wittkower’s reading of the experiment there was an implied tautology concerning the relay mechanism situated between the viewer and the object of the Baptistry because using a painted panel and a mirror, or two mirrors facing each other, would achieve a correct but also identical pictorial representation. Grasping their difference necessitated an examination of each individual process instead of judging their output—which is seemingly identical. As discussed, the subject’s impli­ cation in the case of using two mirrors is null since there is no space reserved, as a placeholder, for its emergence between two wholly identical specular images of outside (external) reality. The truth value of such images rests on a complete equivalence of features between an object and its representation. On the contrary, using the codified rules of perspective projection to paint a wooden panel and combine it with a mirror exposes retroactively the limits of how the subject views a space, through its image, beyond any particular scene represented, because something always resists symbolization—as seen, for example, in Brunelleschi’s mirror where the clouds could not be represented in the painted panel—more precisely in Lacanian terms, the imaginary identification is never complete or the symbolic is non-all. Equipped with an understanding of how The Ambassadors offers one point of view (or more) to be seen and gaze back at the viewer but also the importance of the mirror in Brunelleschi’s experiment for retroactively determining the vanishing point we can now turn to Michael Webb’s work in order to examine the logic, and relation, between these two points—namely, the point of view and the vanishing point. I argue that Webb’s drawings amount to proving the above-mentioned gap between them as constitutive in the symbolic order of perspective projection, which emerged in this book as a result of introducing Lacan to reading the phe­ nomena of representation and perspective. In other words, I claim that Webb constructed in Temple Island a visually drawn edifice in order to arrive through his own methodology, established on trigonometry and perspective projection, to a statement equivalent with Lacan’s ‘every picture is a trap for the gaze’ (2004: 89). That is—discerned through my own study—in every picture the point of the beholder and the vanishing point while located at infinity, or being non-finite, are not identical nor sym­ metrical, but in fact of different infinite magnitude. Thus, taking a proposition—every picture is a trap for the gaze—whose formulation was possible only after, and due to, Lacan’s teaching on the symbolic and the subject’s emergence, as a renewed hypothesis will allow Webb’s series of drawings to function as its own verification. The starting point is to question the premise, analyse it structurally and identify what it would require proving it. As such, why was according to Lacan every picture a trap for the gaze? For the reason that there is always included within it something not shown (or that cannot be shown). This something exists due to a gap, or rupture as seen in Figure 1.2, between the level of

Questioning the Screen 139 imaginary identification and symbolic inscription where a qualitative dif­ ference exists between seeing and being seen, between the eye and the gaze. Accordingly, I will show how Webb effectively transposed these two terms in their geometrical equivalents and tried to show the difference separating them. Michael Webb was fascinated by the following fact regarding perspective projection. A finite and measurable three-dimensional object is represented in two dimensions by a system founded upon, and between, two points located at infinite distance. His exemplary object for the project Temple Island was the Henley Royal Regatta course measuring approximately 2000x25m. It was a site containing all pertinent attributes and character­ istics for a rigorous study of perspective projection. Specifically, its shape was long and rectangular, it included smaller objects (rowing boats) moving in straight lines along its path and finally equidistant flag posts were situ­ ated in a symmetrical manner on each side of the river—essentially marking in a two-dimensional drawing (or photograph) the progressing intervals of perspective projection. Webb was intrigued by the impossibility of retro­ actively determining from a perspective drawing the location of the van­ ishing point and the point of view of the beholder. As seen from the following quote the aim was to critically examine their assumed, or pre­ supposed, symmetrical relation. A quaint fact of perspective projection is that the location of the beholder cannot be determined. He, or she is at an infinite distance from what is being beheld. The same applies to the location of the vanishing point, for it too is at an infinite distance from what is being beheld. So, it might reasonably be surmised that there exists a sort of symmetry between the location of the beholder and that of the vanishing point (emphasis added, 2018: 153). In a lecture9 on February 15, 2019 Webb posed the question ‘what is the nature of what is outside of the picture?’ while discussing the drawing shown in Figure 4.3, Henley Royal Regatta Landscape as a Dot Matrix. Admittedly a question that resonates with a psychoanalytic tone. Lacan in seminar VII, a few pages after his only formal commentary on architecture and its representation, discusses the proposed coinage extimacy, which combines the prefix ex (from exterior) and the French word for intimacy, intimité. A neologism that Lacan designates as—the central place, as the intimate exteriority or ‘extimacy’ that is the Thing (1992: 139)—accurately reflecting the way in which psychoanalysis problematizes the topological opposition between inside and outside. The following quote from seminar VII serves as a reminder, but also assurance, that Webb’s question is attuned to Lacan’s investigation of the visual field yet proceeding from a distinct point of departure.

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Figure 4.3 Henley Royal Regatta Landscape as a Dot Matrix, by Michael Webb. Source: Painting constantly in progress. Image kindly provided by Michael Webb, after adding some last touches (2022).

That’s a trap one must not enter. [That is, judging a painting or picture by its deceptive and illusory capacity—to be fooled that an object represented is the real one] Of course, works of art imitate the objects they represent, but their end is certainly not to represent them. In offering the imitation of an object, they make something different out of that object. Thus, they only pretend to imitate. The object is established in a certain relationship to the Thing and is intended to encircle and to render both present and absent (commentary in brackets added, Ibid.: 141). What appears in the right half of the depicted circle in Figure 4.3 is an effort to draw, in a theoretical manner, the reverse of the left-hand-side pictorial

Questioning the Screen 141 representation. Hence, the left part of the drawing represents what is seen from the point of view of the beholder while the right part signifies what someone would see if possible, to be situated at the vanishing point looking back at the latter’s point of view. The incentive behind this task should be read in the following way. To transpose the notion of outside, as inaccessible to vision—or what cannot be known as foreign to the question of knowledge—inside the picture. That is, at least at the level of motivation, the closest an architectural example comes to the idea behind Las Meninas (1656). It is almost as someone would draw the room in Velasquez’s painting from the point of view of the mirror—to show how the room appears from the (outside or external) position to which vision has no access (which nonetheless is posited in the painting’s picture). Webb did not aim to represent an object—such as the landscape, the river or the boats—from a qualitatively different point of view neither to display something more about it. On the contrary, the intention was to show the object from the only unattainable point of view; an act of immense sig­ nificance for examining the logic of the system which allowed it. The proposition of drawing a perspective from the point of view of the van­ ishing point should not be taken lightly, even if executed approximately as a proof of concept. Equivalent to Brunelleschi’s experiment which demon­ strated something fundamental about the spatial condition of architecture’s occupation—namely, space comes to the subject as an image—or in Eisenman’s rhetorical use of columns which were not (load bearing) col­ umns and in turn revealed something fundamental about the symbolic articulation of architectural signifiers—specifically, their use is not whole nor exhausted—I will proceed to show that Temple Island demonstrated something fundamental about the very logic that architecture uses to rep­ resent its objects and on exceptional cases itself.10 The demonstration begins in two dimensions. Specifically, a perspectival postcard of an old Grand Challenge Cup race where the vanishing point of the picture can be retroactively inferred by observing converging lines, such as the riverbank or the sequence of flag posts, found in the image and ex­ tending them. Subsequently tracing these extended lines results in a re­ constructed diagram of the Regatta course as seen in Figure 4.4, which supersedes the postcard as the object of investigation. The presupposition of the diagram’s logic should be highlighted. “The perspectival image of an object is constructed off its orthographic plan and elevation—a fact sug­ gesting a strong graphic connection between the two representational sys­ tems. [Figure 4.4] shows the plan moved into position so that it adjoins the perspective in such a way that LINE 1 (the finish line) in the plan projection aligns with LINE 1 in the perspective projection, and LINE 24 in the orthographic plan projection (the start line) with LINE 24 in the perspec­ tive” (Webb, 2018: 175).

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Figure 4.4 Diagram of the Regatta postcard in plan and perspective. Source: By the author.

Questioning the Screen 143 Juxtaposing and aligning the plan of the Royal Regatta (planar projec­ tion) alongside its 23 regularly distanced intervals11, with the line which stands for the course of the race, from start to finish, in perspective (per­ spectival projection) is an insightful move in Webb’s on-going investigation. It allows to establish the rate at which the intervals in perspective diminish. Precisely, by referring to Figure 4.4 ‘the amount that each interval in the perspective projection diminishes in length can be ascertained graphically by constructing diagonals (i.e. a diagonal from point BU1/Finish Line to the midpoint of LINE 2 and then extending it until it intersects with the diagonal line BE and the newly created point BE2, and so on)’ (Ibid.: 175). Based on this point (BE2) a new diagonal can be drawn towards the mid­ point of LINE 1 whose extension would intersect with BU0 (camera’s point). Similarly, a line from the other endpoint of LINE 2, that is point BU2 can be drawn passing from the midpoint of LINE 1 until reaching BU0 (camera’s point). Yet, as Webb explains both these lines will never meet the point of the camera because both lines BE2-BUo and BU2-BUo are parallel to the lines VP-BU1 and VP-BE1 accordingly. Thus, he comes to the real­ ization that the point of the camera—or the point of view of the beholder in general—is situated at an infinite distance from the object which it is photographing. The core of Webb’s investigation is contained in the fol­ lowing line of questioning. There is a sort of inverted symmetry here: a domain of infinite line distension around the location of the camera, and of infinite compres­ sion around the vanishing point. I am interested in the degree of foreshortening of the intervals. Might there be some arithmetic or geometric progression that determines their apparent distance of each other (emphasis added, p.177)’. Indeed, there was a formula to determine the interval foreshortening, re­ ferred to by Michael Webb as the Hickey Formula, after Professor Margarite Hickey12 who helped him apply some ‘plain old geometry, but iterated’ as she explained to me in a recent email13 correspondence. The formula which requires the inclusion of the vanishing point, derives from the triangles formed by the intersection of the diagonals and the added lines where once the length of an interval in perspective projection is known then the length of the next one could be calculated. Figure 4.5 is a sketch that Webb sent to Hickey in order to explain what he suspected. It shows a right-angled triangle with a vertical height of 25 equal intervals. A parallel line to the base is drawn at point 13 and another line from the point o is drawn through the midpoint of the line at 13. Where this line intersects the hypotenuse of the main triangle it defines the position of a new horizontal line at an approximate height of 17. At this point Webb iterates as shown so each horizontal line position is defined by repeating the

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Figure 4.5 Michael Webb, sketch I early notes and sketch by Michael Webb on the logic of perspective projection.

process through the midpoint of the previous line (Figure 4.6). Besides this sketch there is a graph showing the vertical position of each horizontal line on the vertical axis, and the order number of the line on the horizontal axis. ‘Michael drew this for me very quickly and thought it would converge on an integer, which seems inevitable because it must stop iterating when it

Questioning the Screen 145

Figure 4.6 Michael Webb, sketch II Sketch by Michael Webb measuring the actual distance between the progressive perspective intervals derived from perspective.

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runs out of a defined triangle’ (Hickey). The generic solution for estab­ lishing the next (horizontal) line position and the length of a given interval using the length of the previous one, suggests ‘a mathematical journey from the first interval to the last’ (Webb, 2018, 179). This method was applied by Webb for all 23 intervals contained within the start-finish line in order to measure the actual distance between the progressive perspectival intervals, which is relativized or simply in per­ spective. Crucially he arrives at the conclusion that ‘the continuous dis­ carding of intervals means that the scale of each successive diagram can be enlarged’ (emphasis added, 2018: 179). As such, the sketch in Figure 4.6 should be read in the following way. It explains why within perspective, measurement is not as important as proportion since an object will theo­ retically always appear correctly (from one point of view) as long as it diminishes or increases proportionally to the successive order of intervals—determined by the point of view and the vanishing point. In formal terms, the constancy of an object’s appearance (from one point of view situated opposite the vanishing point) is maintained irrespective of the varying measured intervals as long as proportion is preserved (according to the interval’s numerical rate of change). That is the rule, or order, of per­ spective projection that determines how an element which belong to it ap­ pears (is represented in its picture) conditioned, as previously mentioned, upon three structural components—i. the element or object itself, ii. a reg­ istration plane, iii. a relay device. The primacy of proportion (over mea­ surement) is also highlighted by Rotman as the sole historical aspect of perspective that ‘does require elaboration, if only because it is a constituent of the system itself: the centrality and practical importance of proportion, the growing preoccupations with arithmetical rations, among the merchants, architects, artisan scientists, and painters who formed the audience of Brunelleschi’s demonstration’ (1987: 16). He specifically refers to transitivity or the ‘rule of three’ being the simplest arithmetical formalism underlying perspective’s logic where ‘if the portion of A to B is the same as that of C to D, and if A, B, C are given, then what is D’ (ibid). Finally, Rotman specifically highlights the importance of the vanishing point for ordering the propor­ tional appearance of objects since ‘proportion and the ability to instantly calculate it do not by themselves add up to a system of linear perspective: one also needs a point of projection from which all rations are determined’ (Ibid.: 17). This proposition is essential to the developing argument. It allows to delineation of the property of each of these constitutive components and further examines not the logic of perspective (how it functions or represents objects) but perspective as logic or ‘the network of relations that determines appearing in the situation of multiple-being’ in Badiou’s definition (2014: 167) when discussing in abstract terms the difference between two possible networks of such relations—particularly, an equivalence relation and an order relation—applicable to any set or world containing one, or more ele­ ments, which appear in it according to certain rules (Figure 4.7).

Questioning the Screen 147

Figure 4.7 Proportion and scale in an image. Digital drawing on the role of pro­ portion that determines the appearance of elements on the picture plane. Source: By the author.

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The ‘network of relations’ is what determines the difference of an object’s appearance to other objects also appearing or included in the situation. It is what allows us to compare, evaluate or simply say that an object is more or less different from another one which belongs to the same space of repre­ sentation by composing a scale of measure of the more and the less—that is proportion as the result of the progressing intervals in the case of per­ spective. According to Badiou ‘the simplest abstract form of such a power is the order relation, which makes it possible to say that the element β is ‘greater’ (or situated ‘higher’ in the scale of comparison, or has a superior intensity etc.) than another element δ’ (2014: 171). Comparably to the three presupposed components of perspective projection, a relation between elements is defined as an order relation if it follows axiomatically three dispositions: reflexivity, transitivity, antisymmetry. Reflexivity concerns the relation of an object to itself. It is expressed as (β ≤ β) and can be read as ‘β is smaller than or equal to β’. Following Badiou’s explanation ‘we could even say, ‘smaller than’ or ‘greater than’. These are only ways of speaking (orally). The essence of the order-relation is comparison ‘in-itself’ (Ibid.: 173). Thus, the property of reflexivity posits that within an order relation every object has a self-degree of identity or an element β is always identical to itself. Transitivity concerns the relation between elements as a chain of reasons. It is expressed in the following way: [(β ≤ δ) and (δ ≤ π)] → (β ≤ π) and can be read as ‘if β is smaller than or equal to δ, and δ is smaller than or equal to π then β is smaller than or equal to π’. Similarly, for intuitive convenience it can be read as ‘if β is identical to δ, and δ to π, then β is identical to π’. Antisymmetry concerns the relation between non-substitutable elements and its notation is the following: [(β ≤ δ) and (δ ≤ β)] → (β = δ). As Badiou explains “in the (order) relation that β maintains with δ, the element β can change its place with δ only if the two elements are rigorously ‘the same’. The order-relation is in fact the very first inscription of an exigency of the Other, insofar as the places that it determines (before ≤ or after ≤) are in general not exchangeable” (emphasis added, Ibid.: 172). However, to fully apprehend the order-relation, we should briefly discuss it in comparison with a more primitive relation which posits a rigid identity and exchangeability between objects. That is, an equivalence relation which primarily differs from an order relation on the third axiom of anti­ symmetry, where it is replaced by symmetry. For example, in the game of chess any two pieces of the same value, such as bishops, are completely identical and can be substituted or exchanged between them without dis­ turbing the rules of the game—which would not be the case in an order relation. Closer to our terms, this issue of exchangeability was equally encountered when discussing the implied tautology between using two mirrors or a mirror combined with a painted panel in Brunelleschi’s ex­ periment. One can now properly designate the former pair which functions on symmetry as an equivalence relation. The subjective implication, or gap,

Questioning the Screen 149 between two identical specular images is null while their truth value is conditioned upon a complete equivalence of features between an object and its representation. On the other hand, a mirror and the drilled painted panel indicates the difference separating the imaginary from the symbolic level in the logic of perspective as an order relation. Yet, as Žižek explains, this difference is not solely a relation of disjunction but rather ‘implies the connection of the imaginary and the symbolic and thus a thesis that is separated from perception: the image is a screen for what cannot be seen’ (2012: 501). Thus, when demanding the viewer to become a subject by closing one eye and to look through the panel, it attests ‘the very first inscription of an exigency of the Other’. The two sides of mirror-drawing and framed object are neither sym­ metrical nor identical. The back side of the drawn panel initially blocks, or restricts, part of the unmediated (or ‘real’) view. There is an immediate regulation of appearance which determines the anti-symmetry (or unexchangeability) between object and image—in contrast to the symmetry of an equivalence relation like chess where pieces of the same value can be substituted for one another. This is not the case in Brunelleschi’s experi­ ment because the thing that creates the order is the mirror; or more pre­ cisely the vanishing point located at an infinite distance solely seen—retroactively determined—in the mirror. The homology between perspective as logic and representational system is outlined in Table 4.3. Consider an object presented in a world. It is three-dimensional and empirically amenable to measurement. When someone wants to photo­ graph it (like Webb’s exemplary postcard) the object’s status shifts to being represented in this world, based on the structure of perspective projection which determines the object’s appearance on the frame—or the picture plane in case of a perspective drawing. As such, at the level of three dimensions, we are dealing with something presented (what Badiou’s pre­ vious quote refers to as ‘multiple-being’), while at the two-dimensional level of perspective we are encountering something represented (how the pre­ sentable appears). Michael Webb’s assertion regarding Figure 4.6, that the scale of each successive diagram can be enlarged irrespective of measure­ ment, is equivalent to affirming that within perspective, proportion con­ cerns the logic of appearance of the object not its ontological status. Table 4.3 Perspective as logical and representational system Order Relation

Perspective Projection

Reflexivity Transitivity

Object Registration plane

Antisymmetry

Relay device

Every object has a self-degree of identity Maintenance of scale over progressing intervals Identically represented objects are not exchangeable

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Questioning the Screen We must therefore admit that what governs appearing is not the ontological composition of a particular being (a multiple), but the relational evaluations that determine the situation and localize this being within it. They are not ontological. (Badiou 2014: 167)

At this point we are equipped with all theoretical tools required to demonstrate—instead of describing or suggesting an explanation of—Webb’s contribution and the significance that his drawings regarding the progressing intervals hold for the study of architecture’s representa­ tional logic. To recapitulate the distance between the intervals as seen in perspective can be: i calculated from the drawing in two-dimensions ii shown to be converging towards the vanishing point, located at an infinite distance iii shown to be diverging towards the beholder’s point, located at an infinite distance The demonstration will proceed in the following way. If perspective’s logic is postulated as an order relation—and by extension if it attests to the first exigency of the Other, if it precludes a complete imaginary identification and posits a lack in the symbolic, or finally if every picture is a trap for the gaze—we have to show that within perspective anti-symmetry prevails. In fact, the drawings of Temple Island depicting the difference between the point of the beholder and the vanishing point serve exactly this purpose. Antisymmetry in the case of perspective projection functions on the unexchangeability of the depicted elements due to the different nature of the vanishing point and the point of the beholder. It is the lesson taught from Webb’s analysis of the postcard in Figure 4.4 where two objects separated by a finite and measurable distance when represented in perspective con­ stituted by two infinite points appear to the viewer as a proportionate image. The point is not to assume the impossible mimicry or be fooled by the image. Anti-symmetry demands not being completely duped that the object and its represented ‘truth’ are to be conflated. In Lacanian terms the statement can be expressed as the eye that sees, and the eye seen (even though ontologically both are ‘eyes’) are not the same. Michael Webb tried to question the symmetry between those points and test to what extend they are reversible, exchangeable or, in simple terms, if they cancel each other out. However, that is not the case. Regarding the painting in Figure 4.3 he writes: ‘I have however, moved my easel, as it were, from the apex of the cone of vision … in so doing, voids have opened up behind objects in the landscape visible to the beholder located at the vanishing point’ (2018: 193). The resulted voids appeared in Webb’s drawing to exemplify the price of seeing; namely, not seeing (in a whole

Questioning the Screen 151 imaginary way) since in the field of sight the subject fundamentally (due to perspective) acknowledges some dead spots. Or, more precisely, that is the irreversibility in the scopic field where subjectivity is to be thought of as negativity. The subject emerges where/when there is some rupture in the symbolic order or a placeholder of a specific point of view (or perspective) awaiting to be occupied—like the second point of view inscribed in The Ambassadors where the distorted skull exemplified that the only way to get the image right is to get it wrong. Following Webb this occurs because what appears as represented in his drawings—the thing that you ‘get’—is not the object, but the perspective itself since the aim was not to produce another image representing the Royal Henley Regatta. As Cook explains ‘the movement of a boat is along a straight stretch of that river is the key to his proposition regarding the spaces behind the trees. The tantalisation of the unseen’ (2008: 30). The painting in Figure 4.3 doesn’t represent an object, but rather portrays the way of seeing and the logic of representing any object through the order of perspective projection. Additionally, it explains how every finite object is represented in a scale-less way determined by proportion— superseding measurement—between the vanishing point and the point of view each located at infinity. Or simply, the perspective representation of the finite is caught between two infinite points which are not identical. Webb’s draw­ ings affirm within the field of architecture, without being his primary aim, the formal distinction between two orders of infinite; a converging for the vanishing point and a diverging for the point of view of the subject. Looking at perspective as logic through Badiou’s notion of the order rela­ tion provides a fundamental insight regarding this statement on the graphic (or geometric) affirmation of two infinite points. In a lecture at the European Graduate School entitled ‘Infinity and Set Theory: Repetition and Succession’ (2011) Badiou begins with the fol­ lowing notation in order to discuss the current understanding of infinity, which is solely a negative one, albeit in two forms. That is nothingness as purely negative and that which negates the limit—is without limits. Nothingness (Ø) 0, 1, 2, 3, … Infinity

It can be read as nothingness precedes the series of finite numbers which comes before infinity. The process of numbers, the form of positive ex­ istence, continues without limits, like the progressing intervals of perspec­ tive between the point of view and the vanishing point. In fact, perspective projection follows the exact same logic on a structural level and can be exemplified in the same diagrammatic manner. Camera or Point of View Finite Objects Vanishing point

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Finite numbers and the intervals of perspective projection continue along their process in a similar way. Just like each new interval is constructed of information present in the previous interval, to pass from N to N + 1 we take the entire set of elements from N and add the previous name of that set itself. Let N be the number of terms. For example, N = {0, 1, 2} equals N = 3 because there are three numbers (0, 1, and 2). N = {0, 1, 2} N1 = {0, 1, 2, N}

The successor N1 contains all elements included in N as well as the name of its predecessor, where N is the name of the first set of numbers. A new unique name (N1) substitutes the previous one (N). As Badiou explains in the lecture ‘you place one element after all of the others within the new set which is uniquely the name of the set which came before. And what is this name, in the first instance? It is a name of nothingness Ø’. By naming the empty set, nothingness, we arrive at the One (1) and consequently the operation of naming continues in order to obtain Two, Three etc. 1 = {Ø} 2 = {Ø, {Ø}} 3 = {Ø, {Ø}, {Ø, Ø}}} …

‘One’ would be the counting of this empty extension, ‘two’ would be the counting of this counted empty extension, and ‘three’ would be the counting of the counting this empty set. This iterative procedure indeed returns to satisfy the iterative or successive structure of arithmetic pro­ gression (Tho, 2013: 36). This progression, the operation of succession through naming, introduces something new, rendering the set of finite numbers, not a pure repetition. As a result, number ‘Two’ is not reducible to the number ‘One’ even though the number ‘One’ is within the set of the number ‘Two’—and the number ‘One’ is not within the set of the number ‘One’. In other words, ‘Two’ is the operation to ‘succeed’ twice. Therefore, a number is always the result of a repetition, but it is not the result of a pure repetition of the number itself. Rather, it is the repetition of the operation of succession—it is the successor which repeats. Regarding the finite as a mixture between novelty and repetition, whose succession is a creative repetition allows us, as Badiou explicates to approach our first definition of the infinite. The first name of infinity is thus virtual infinity. The infinite is the space of repetition itself. If we can endlessly repeat the operation of succession, then we can say that the space of the infinite is without limits. In other words, if we

Questioning the Screen 153 know that repetition is without limits then there must be a space for that repetition which is itself without limits. And so, we cannot know the creative nature of repetition without claiming that there is something which is without limits. (Badiou, 2011) Closer to our terms, the vanishing point (as virtual infinity) posits that the infinite does not exist except as an absence of limits to the finite. First, concerning its non-existence, it can only be determined retroactively from the two-dimensional level of the represented finite objects. Secondly, re­ garding the absence of limits, it is the place where all perspectival intervals converge, until it becomes impossible due to practical limitations to keep drawing them. Theoretically we could keep enlarging a drawing or pho­ tograph ad infinitum for the graphic succession of intervals to continue. Yet, this conception of the virtual infinity reduces the infinite to the absence of limits for the finite, in a way that it is always at the service of the finite and not an affirmation of something which exists itself. For Badiou this is a compromise to think of the infinite as—what exists inside the finite as its negative necessity via the law of succession—an internal law of the finite. If we decide that we want to go beyond … we must affirm the existence of something infinite and not only the infinite as the pure absence of limits in the service of the insistence of repetition within the finite realm. (Badiou, 2011) Thus, Badiou’s developing line of thought is aiming towards a positive notion of infinity by affirming the existence of a term that does not succeed. Such a term would be foreign to the operation of repetition because the repetition of the finite could not produce something infinite. For instance, the right-hand side of Webb’s painting in Figure 4.3, shows by approxi­ mation how strange it would be to draw an image from the vanishing point, being the only unattainable point of view. That is the only point that cannot be created out of the progressing intervals—while at the same time all intervals converge to it, therefore described as unreachable or unattainable. For such a term, external to the capacity of repetition Badiou proposes the following matheme. ¬ E(x) [(Infinite = S(x)]

It reads in the following way: there does not exist one x where the infinite is the successor of x—or simply, the infinite does not succeed. This kind of infinite is named ‘omega’ using the symbol ‘ω’. As such, we obtain the following notation where ‘there is no x for which ω is the successor of x.

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In this case, the symbol of negation (¬) does not amount to a negative conception of infinity. It is not a negation of limits (as in virtual infinity) but the negation of succession—a negation of the operation which sustains the creative repetition. Badiou explains14 that if something infinite exists then the first infinite must be in the form of an interruption of repetition. By rejecting or disturbing the process of repetition—of the finite—it finds itself radically outside the continuation of the operation of succession. Consequently, Badiou’s initial diagram can now be revised to include ω and extend the notation to the case of perspective. (Ø) 0, 1, 2, 3, … ( ) Point of View (Ø) progressing intervals Vanishing point ( )

Omega, or the vanishing point in perspective projection—being the first infinite outside of repetition—provides a response to Webb’s initial enquiry ‘what is the nature of what is outside the picture?’ but also attests to why we can even conceive such an external position from within our symbolic universe of finite repetition. Two ways of treating the non-finite have been delineated. Namely, as no limits and no succession. The first one concerns repetition where the succession of naming or the progression of the per­ spectival intervals using the Hickey Formula can continue without limits. The second one is not situated within repetition nor is the result of its operation. The notion of omega, similarly to the vanishing point which cannot be found among the presentable objects but only inferred retro­ actively from their two-dimensional representation, is beyond the possi­ bility of the finite. What then creates anti-symmetry within perspective projection? That is the relay device, for instance the mirror in Brunelleschi’s demonstration, which shows how perspective is constructed around the vanishing point where the mirror’s function necessitates the observer’s eye to coincide with the position of the vanishing point determined retroactively from its twodimensional reflective surface. Yet, as already mentioned in ‘real life’ there is no vanishing point and its retroactive inference made Lacan designate it as object a in the visual field, the subject’s object-cause of desire to understand the picture—what the viewer always looks for, instead of looking at. As Lorens Holm notes, for Lacan object a manifests itself spa­ tially as the vanishing point, that nothing which organizes the visual field (2010: 65). Closer to this chapter’s line of thought, Žižek equally explains how the vanishing point (as object a) is at once external but also responsible for framing the endless set of empirical objects—like the infinite numerical succession or the progressing proportional intervals.

Questioning the Screen 155 The transcendental object is external to the endless series of empirical objects: we arrive at it by way of treating this endless series as closed, and positing an empty object outside of it, the very form of an object, that frames the series. It is also easy to discern a further homology with the objet petit a, the Lacanian object‐cause of desire: the latter is … an empty object that frames the endless set of empirical objects (2012: 472). It should come as no surprise that Webb’s diagrams in Figure 4.6 demon­ strated the vanishing point to be commensurate with omega (ω) as beyond the possibility of the finite repetitions. Therefore, as long as anti-symmetry is maintained within perspective the radical move is not a new point of view towards the object but either to break the mirror, or in general invent another relay mechanism. More formally, since the relation cannot change the object the aim is not to change the relation but initiate or create a new one. Which is what Brunelleschi did by installing a different relation between the viewer and the object, where the latter came to the former as an image. Or what Lacan’s frame situated between the eye (as organ) and the gaze (as subject) demonstrated in the visual field where the image is a screen for what cannot be seen. It’s crucial to grasp the nature of the reality of space as a threedimensional space if we are to define the form that the presence of desire takes on at the scopic level, namely, as a fantasy. The function of the frame, the window frame I mean, which I tried to define in the structure of the fantasy, is not a metaphor. If the frame exists, it’s because space is real. (Lacan, 2014: 283) If you break the mirror, or stop looking through the hole in Brunelleschi’s panel, instead of seeing better you find yourself back into ‘blindness’ of unsymbolized reality—however, nothing changes practically besides the negative affirmation in such a realization. The black voids in Webb’s drawing stand for this blindness, the space inaccessible to symbolization. It should be highlighted that this space should not be attributed to a limitation of the viewer’s perspective—like The Ambassador’s skull that necessitated another position to be occupied for its reveal—but are an inherent limita­ tion of perspective projection as a system of representation. Again, in Lacanian terms, the symbolic is non-all. To repeat myself, that is how the relay device should be structurally understood. It creates an anti-symmetry of sides which did not exist before. Yet, we have to differentiate between one point of view and the transitivity of different proportions in its per­ spective as a new point of view. The issue at stake is to understand how the move from symmetry (as equivalence relation) to anti-symmetry (as order relation) takes place—or in other words, how to account for the subject and the un-exchangeability of

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the depicted elements. In any single perspective constituted between two infinite points, between the vanishing point and the point of view, the order maintained in all scales is the same one—namely, proportion determined by the progressing intervals conditioned upon the frame of representation. Thus, as long as we follow the rules of projection an object will always appear the same—proportional constancy—even if its position shifts closer or further from the observer in three dimensions. Henceforth, why is per­ spective so often associated with its illusory capacities, and most impor­ tantly why is it (the proportional progression of intervals) called an illusion? Because symmetry (exchangeability) persists—as illusion—as being able to interchange something from different orders of scale … which is an illusion. In other words, as viewer you don’t know from which interval the rep­ resented object appears, if only provided with a perspective projection—not accompanied by a planar one. Proportion determined by the rules of per­ spective is the index of how one element appears as identical to itself. Proportion concerns the logic of appearance of being, not its ontological status. Therefore, are all a’s in Figure 4.8 substitutable, since the appear­ ance of the represented object will not change? The intervals present an order relation—where the illusion is to see it as an equivalence one—where the object’s appearance in different proportional intervals is not being ex­ changeable between them. Illusion is thus the condensation of scale, which in architectural terms, it prevents the viewer to see the object qua object since s/he is fixed to the point of view—and can only see its relative size in proportion. Usually, illusion is attributed to tarhe confusion between the drawn/ depicted object and its three-dimensional ‘real’ counterpart, like the drawn grapes of Zeuxis, discussed in chapter 2, which were so perfectly repre­ sented that attracted even some birds. Yet the system is able to produce

a’’’ a’’ a’ a

Figure 4.8 Perspective and exchangeability of elements. Source: By the author.

Questioning the Screen 157 such illusions because it functions on the exchangeability of different scales into a unified appearance. I claim that this productive capacity of per­ spective could be named objective illusion since as Lorens Holm accurately notes ‘for the subject, the perspective is not an objective view but a uni­ versal form of subjectivity. It is the form of view which says that every view is subjective’ (2010: 23). The moment you try to represent an empirical object, you posit a van­ ishing point and situate the object’s representation in the picture’s plane of inscription—what Alberti referred to as the veil, or Lacan called a frame—itself being a snapshot of the finite and countable intervals whose progression is without limit. The subtle remark not to be overlooked con­ cerns the temporal localization of the vanishing point within the con­ struction of perspective projection. It can only be found, created and retroactively inferred when the viewer looks into Brunelleschi’s mirror or examine closely a photograph (or drawing) like Webb and extend the converging lines observed on its surface. Logically the relay device between the object and the viewer precedes the vanishing point. All possible positions of sight must envision or imagine the impossible omnipresent to attain point of view. That’s the effect of anti-symmetry, where if the two sides of Webb’s drawing were to coincide, the symmetry would essentially preclude seeing, or attest that the subject always sees and is seen to the same extend. However, following the distinction of the eye and the gaze, or the difference between the vanishing point and the point of view we can affirm that this is not the case. As discussed in relation to Brunelleschi and the universality of his experiment, even though it hap­ pened in Florence, it necessitates no particular localization, it functions everywhere, in every world that includes a human subject and an external object whose relation is mediated by the act of vision. There is no one single, omnipotent (God’s) point of view, which is reserved for infinity in the codification of perspective projection. One can now grasp, through Webb the notion of this infinity and explicitly name it omega (ω)—or the point where all intervals converge—the place of all finite repetitions of the proportional intervals. As a proof-of-concept Webb tried to draw the point of view from this infinite point and tried to depict not how the viewer sees but rather how s/he is seen. I call it a proof of concept because it is precisely an approximation of a point of view the subject cannot identify with—in contrast to all other point of views within the same perspective order as the two qualitative positions enacted in The Ambassadors. You cannot identify with the vanishing point, that is the axiom that breaks the order (of the finite progression of intervals) and renders perspective an order relation instead of an equivalence one. This line of thought renders Michael Webb’s work as an impenetrable line of defence against even the most determined critics of intersecting Lacan’s psychoanalytic teaching with architecture’s representational logic and the constitution of its subject. What was until now an analogy between

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psychoanalytic discourse and the visual field where notions emerging from the former such as desire, gaze, Other or negativity were applied on issues relating to methods of artistic representation—such as perspective projection exemplified through cases like The Ambassadors or Teatro Olimpico—is now transposed as an equal and homologous logical system operating under different terminology. For instance, Lacan’s work, espe­ cially during seminars VII and XI, predicated that every image is a trap for the gaze, or more precisely, in every image there exists something which obstructs a complete imaginary identification resulting in a lack to be filled in by the viewer to become a symbolically inscribed subject. Webb tried to show precisely this lack in every image, the gap between the point the beholder and the vanishing point, the empty set (Ø) and omega (ω) or between the imaginary and the symbolic. By demonstrating how these two points—to be seen and see—are qualitatively different, his seminal painting in Figure 4.3 introduces within architecture, via its own logic of represen­ tation, the exigency of the Other. And, the intersection between them which is never free of disparity is what Lacan formally designated as the real—where the being of an object and the appearance of an object do not coincide but intersect. The only point of critique that could be made concerns the visual con­ vention and character of Webb’s drawing. Specifically, inscribing one point of view within perspective and the (impossible) point of view from the vanishing point within a circle. As if they should be read to convey a unified whole while their purpose is to attest exactly the opposite—the nonsymmetry or un-exchangeability of both these two non-finite points which are qualitatively distinct. Yet, the critique could only go that far since Webb essentially tried to symbolize the un-symbolizable, the only point of view we cannot identify with.

Notes 1 For an in-depth explanation of Badiou’s graph in Figure 4.1, see Tzu Chien Tho (2013). 2 For instance, think of the set of all traffic signs. It includes many subsets such as warning, direction, information sings. They all communicate either a precise state of affairs in the surrounding environment or command a specific action. The only exception, the sign that is not formally included to any of the subsets while still belonging to the set of road signs is the exclamation mark ‘!’. It is a pure utterance of ‘danger’ or ‘be aware’ without specifying neither what to do nor the nature of peril. In fact, according to the Highway Code, this sign must be accompanied by an additional information plate specifying the nature of the danger. It is a sign of material undecidability operative only after all the logical signs have been exhausted. In architectural terms, what would be the equivalent exceptional sign placed on the decorated shed? Which element of language can show that meaning is beyond the semantic code? Which word would show how the object is undetermined and its identity it totally dependent on the sign? I suspect that would be ‘to rent’.

Questioning the Screen 159 3 Eisenman’s trajectory can be briefly outlined in the following way: After com­ pleting his PhD at the University of Cambridge (1964) he returned to the US and started teaching in Princeton. Equally, he founded both the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York and the influential journal Oppositions, and began his architectural practice ( Keller, 2012: 131) 4 This description is based on the archival file of the project in the Centre for Canadian Architecture (CCA) which also informs that the architect of the original residence is unknown. Accessed here: https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/archives/380476/ peter-eisenman-fonds/387751/projects/388250/barenholtz-pavilion-house-i 5 ‘There is no vision that is not accessible to some possible description or desig­ nation, as well as simultaneously ascribable to a given distance and a given point of view as the very condition of vision’ ( Damisch, 1995: 34). 6 Regarding the reality of the model Holm writes that Brunelleschi’s demonstra­ tion was different from traditional scale replicas. While it is more abstract, it is also more real: instead of wood modelling masonry, images of views model views. This realism is unavoidable for a model that models the conditions of realism in representation (2000: 231). 7 The original quote by Hal Foster Pastiche/prototype/purity: ‘Houses For Sale’ ( 1981). 8 A word invented by Robert A. Heinlein in his 1961 cult classic: Stranger in a Strange Land. It means to understand thoroughly and intuitively ( Webb, 2018: 150) 9 Hearst Lecture Series, 15 February 2019, College of Architecture and Environmental Design, Cal Poly 10 As noted above, the contribution primarily lies in showing how the two points—point of viewer and vanishing point—while located at infinity, or being non-finite, were not identical but in fact of different infinite magnitude. 11 Dividing the line into 23 intervals was according to Webb an arbitrary decision. ‘But how many lines in between the start and finish lines should there be? A little dickie bird told me that there should be 22; which would mean 23 intervals of equal length between the lines […] I have no idea why or how I came, not by, but up with the 22 lines (2018: 175) 12 Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts College of Art and Design 13 Wednesday, 19 June 2019 14 I would advise the motivated reader to see Mediation Fourteen, The Ontological Decision: There is some infinity in natural multiples, in Being and Event ( Badiou 2005: 150–160).

References Badiou, Alain, ‘Mark and Lack: On Zero’, trans. by Zachary Luke Fraser and Ray Brassier, Cahiers Pour l’Analyse (10.La Formalisation, 1969) http://cahiers. kingston.ac.uk/pdf/cpa10.8.badiou.translation.pdf Badiou, Alain, Being and Event, trans. by Oliver Feltham (London; New York: Continuum, 2005) Badiou, Alain, The Concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics, Transmission (Melbourne: re.press, 2007) Badiou, Alain, ‘Infinity and Set Theory: Repetition and Succession’ (unpublished Lecture, European Graduate School, 2011) https://egs.edu/lecture/alain-badiouinfinity-and-set-theory-repetition-and-succession-2011/

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Badiou, Alain, Mathematics of the Transcendental, ed. by A.J. Bartlett (London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2014) Badiou, Alain, Lacan: Anti-Philosophy 3, trans. by Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018) Cook, Peter, Drawing: The Motive Force of Architecture, AD Primers (Chichester [England]: Wiley, 2008) Damisch, Hubert, The Origin of Perspective, trans. by John Goodman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995) Djalali, Amir, ‘Eisenman beyond Eisenman: Language and Architecture Revisited’, The Journal of Architecture, 22.8 (2017), 1287–1298 10.1080/13602365.2017. 1394350 Eisenman, Peter, Eisenman Inside Out: Selected Writings, 1963–1988, Theoretical Perspectives in Architectural History and Criticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004) Eisenman, Peter, Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) Foster, Hal, ‘Pastiche/Prototype/Purity: “Houses For Sale”’, Artforum, March 1981, 77–79 Gandelsonas, Mario, ‘From Structure to Subject: The Formation of an Architectural Language’, in House X, ed. by Peter Eisenman (New York: Rizzoli, 1982), 7–31 Hays, K. Michael, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde, Writing Architecture Series (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2010) Hays, K. Michael, K. Michael Hays: aparició́ n y materialidad = appearance & materiality (ARQ ediciones, 2017) Hendrix, John Shannon, Architecture and Psychoanalysis: Peter Eisenman and Jacques Lacan (New York: Peter Lang, 2006) Holm, Lorens, ‘What Lacan Said Re: Architecture’, Critical Quarterly, 42.2 (2000), 29–64 10.1111/1467-8705.00286 Holm, Lorens, Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier: Architecture, Space and the Construction of Subjectivity (London; New York: Routledge, 2010) Keller, Sean, ‘The Anxieties of Autonomy: Peter Eisenman from Cambridge to House VI’, in Atomic Dwelling: Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture, ed. by Robin Schuldenfrei (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2012), 127–148 http://site.ebrary.com/id/10578189 Lacan, Jacques, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. 7, 1st American ed (New York: Norton, 1992) Lacan, Jacques, The Psychoses 1955–1956, trans. by Russell Grigg, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. 3, 1st American ed (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993) Lacan, Jacques, Autres Écrits, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, Le Champ Freudien (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001a) Lacan, Jacques, Écrits: A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2001b) Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Alan Sheridan, Reprinted (London: Karnac Books, 2004) Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006)

Questioning the Screen 161 Lacan, Jacques, Anxiety, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller; Book 10 (X), English edition (Cambridge Malden, MA: Polity, 2014) Lahiji, Nadir, Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) Luce, Kristina, ‘The Collision of Process and Form: Drawing’s Imprint on Peter Eisenman’s House VI’, Getty Research Journal, 2 2010), 125–137 Luscombe, Desley, ‘Architectural Concepts in Peter Eisenman’s Axonometric Drawings of House VI’, The Journal of Architecture, 19.4 (2014), 560–611 10. 1080/13602365.2014.951064 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, ed. by Claude Lefort, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) Murphy, Douglas, The Architecture of Failure (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012) Preziosi, Donald, Architecture, Language and Meaning: The Origins of the Built World and Its Semiotic Organization, Approaches to Semiotics, 49 (The Hague, [Noordeinde 41]: Mouton, 1979a) Rotman, Brian, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero, Language, Discourse, Society (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1987) Tho, Tzu Chien, ‘The Void Just Ain’t (What It Used To Be): Void, Infinity, and the Indeterminate’, in The Structure of the Void, ed. by Mladen Dolar, Gregor Moder and Aleš Bunta (Ljubljana: Filozofski Inštitut, 2013), 27–48 https://ojs.zrc-sazu. si/filozofski-vestnik/article/view/3252 Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, 17th print (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977) Webb, Michael, Michael Webb Two Journeys, ed. by Ashley Simone (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2018) Žižek, Slavoj, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London; New York: Verso, 2012)

5

Demonstrating the Screen Undoing the Showing

This chapter will present four experiments in the form of physical models which investigate the main properties that the book has discerned with regard to the element of the screen in a sequential manner. The progression of the models will demonstrate a shift already discussed at length as part of the text’s theoretical exposition. Namely, from interrogating the logic of perspective to considering perspective as logic. As a reminder, the discerned properties in question which are considered here as a renewed and fertile ground for experimentation correspond to seminal cases that the book has analysed and relate to perspective projection being the screen’s mode of appearance with architecture’s space. Via Brunelleschi’s experiment, I have discussed the conditions necessary for an image to appear as space but most importantly the subject’s implication in such a production of meaning where to have a perspective a blind spot needs to be acknowledged; or in Lacanese symbolic is non-all. Secondly, the screen’s capacity to produce illusions was examined through Eisenman’s notion of pictorial ambiguity of columns which are not columns, like Lacan’s example restroom doors, showcasing how their meaning is not exhausted, architecture’s language is not closed; or formally that there is no meta-language. Thirdly, through the analysis of Michael Webb’s drawings the symbolic register of perspective was logically shown to be constituted between two points at infinite dis­ tance, yet of different magnitude. Their asymmetry was distilled by Webb’s impossibility to draw a perspective from the point of view of the vanishing point. In what follows I will explore, as a proof of concept, how the screen progresses from using the logic of perspective to project images and con­ struct the appearance of space as part of architecture’s object to demon­ strating perspective as the logic for producing space and questioning the nature of architecture signifying process.

Logic of Perspective The model shown in Figure 5.1, provisionally referred to as Library Model initiates a dialogue between two and three dimensions and the logic of perspective projection that determines how a space is represented in an DOI: 10.4324/9781003344995-6

Demonstrating the Screen 163

(caption on next page)

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image and how an image is able to assume the value of space. The front part seen isolated in Figure 5.1 is constructed in 1:25 scale and portrays a typical reading space populated by objects like a bookshelf, a chair and a table and is equipped with a window that frames an external view. In principle, it stands for the space the architectural subject moves around and the space whose openings frame what we see. At some point an image is projected on the wall, or a large enough screen is installed on its surface showing another study space with a drawing board and a bookshelf; essentially acting as an extension of the initial reading space. In a similar manner to the projection of Uncle Josh, when the scale figure (Figure 5.2) looks at the screen or through the opening in the wall it can genuinely consider that the projected image assumes the value of space because they are proportionally aligned to the three-dimensional space of the reading room it currently occupies. The relation of dimensions is of interest here, or simply how we get from one to the other. That is, perceptively deriving a two-dimensional image from a spatial configuration, and implying a three-dimensional space from an image. Once a fresco is painted, a moving image projected, or screen inserted on the wall of the library the logic of perspective determines how and when such a surface could appear as space. This logic which goes unnoticed operating literally behind the scenes—before the condensation—is here modelled in three dimensions and displayed so it can be examined. It goes unnoticed because the viewer usually encounters it only once it comes at a halt, or formally when the condensation, the intersection with the viewing plane, Alberti’s veil, or the frame shown in the model takes place. Yet, a condensation of this manner which depicts the elements within the (symbolic) space of perspective is not unique and does not exhaust its possibilities. For instance, the drawing in Figure 5.3 explores the multiplicity of elements which once intersected with the picture plane could theoretically provide the same two-dimensional result; appear as identical with each other relative to the same point of view. In other words, derivation of meaning is by definition relative since it rests on the eye and the vanishing point to coincide for meaning to emerge. As Lacan said such a coincidence is in fact the exception to the signifying rule or mechanism of perspective. The main point to highlight is that the frame (literally) determines the object acting as an intersection of the perspectival space which is implied and developed logically in the model with the actual three-dimensional space that the scale figure occupies. Žižek reminds us with regard to Lacan’s

Figure 5.1 Library Model I. Overview of the model and the front part of the threedimensional space seen in isolation. Source: By the author.

Demonstrating the Screen 165

Figure 5.2 Library Model II. Implied space seen through the screen’s frame. Source: By the author.

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Figure 5.3 Multiplicities and inscription. Drawing exploring how an infinite number of multiples gets condensed on the picture plane of perspective projection and appear identical to each other. Original A2. Source: By the author.

Demonstrating the Screen 167 non-all that in visual terms the proposition there is no metalanguage equals that the frame itself is always being framed by part of its content. ‘At this level, the impossibility of metalanguage equals the impossibility of a neutral point of view enabling us to see things ‘objectively,’ ‘impartially’: there is no view that is not framed …’ (Žižek 2008: 18) The motivation of this first model is not to show how to fool the viewer in the library but rather portray what else potentially the resulted image and implied space could have been. It is an approximation of perspective’s sweet spot where objects could align with the point of view, where the implied space resides. The Sweet Spot is in fact a painting by Michael Webb that investigates the region of perspective that makes sense and the area that is distorted. The derived spatial meaning is only a part of the progressive perspective projection that expands infinitely in both directions. Specifically, Webb defines the sweet spot as the area whose width measures one progressive interval being neither stretched (towards the vanishing point) nor compressed (towards the point of view) (2018: 196). This is why the components are seen as being in a transit of scale suggesting that the square planar areas (Figure 5.4) could substitute one another if modified accordingly. In other words, each of them could if enlarged proportionally could replace the depicted imaginary drawing room without disturbing the illusion created. In relation to The Ambassador’s skull, an explanation could be provided to show the distortion necessary to make it appear when walking to the right of the painting. That is, to illustrate the vanishing point from which the skull acquires its meaning or appears correctly. In this case the stakes are higher or at least different. The model shows the implied/potential space that exists behind the frame when we posit a van­ ishing point but eventually gets condensed and only one version appears to the viewer as actual. Regarding the screen in the library, while it could simply be substituted for a surface, it reveals—once taking away the screen or lifting the wall that accommodates it—the logic that determines how the space would appear. All we see is the sweet spot once the proportions are in place while the rest of the constructed components imply not what it is, but what equally it could have been. Admittedly, the model is not serving a proposi­ tional purpose whose value can be examined as a functional scheme of architecture. Its critical dimension lies elsewhere since its purpose was to conceive of an adequate vocabulary and expression necessary to investigate but also communicate the notions in question in the form of a threedimensional model. By removing the part of the library which denotes architecture’s three-dimensional space, it literally shows what is ‘behind the scenes’ once the screen is inserted in the space of architecture reminding us that the condensation and its rules account also for (the production of) space beyond the one determined by the frame. The model presents the duality of

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Figure 5.4 Planar progression in perspective. These work-in-progress photos illus­ trate the shift in the proportion of a space marked by the square as it progresses in the space of the fabricated perspective. Source: By the author.

Demonstrating the Screen 169 virtual and actual elements on the same terms within its space and initiates a dialogue regarding their relation and process of derivation between them. As will be shown below, it is this relation or process of condensation that will be examined as being constitutive of architecture’s inhabitable space.

Suture and Retroaction: Layered and Recursive House The following two models continue from the previous experiment where the frame of the screen determined the appearance of the object within space but introduce some additional knowledge acquired from the analysis of the SlowHouse. As a reminder, this case study managed to drive the screen away from its capacity to produce illusions by nullifying the difference between the framed and recorded view of the ocean. Specifically, it demonstrated that both are equally mediated with regard to the viewer’s eye; who might initially wonder upon encountering their juxtaposition is this the real ocean or is this a representation of the ocean? However, it should be admitted that the rest of the functional spaces of the project such as the bedroom, the kitchen or the study area were indifferent to the superimposition of the screen with the window’s frame and the relation the architects staged with the external view of the house. As a result, the following models take the condition which occurs in the Slow-House’s living room at face value and try to transpose the already valid question of mediation within their space. They aim to examine how and to what extent the proposed spaces can be architecturally and practically implicated in the condition of the Slow-House’s viewer. The Layered House, depicted in Figure 5.5, consists of a series of spaces overlooking, one through the other, the same final framed external view of an ocean. The sequence starts from the entrance lobby equipped with a drawing board which overlooks all other spaces and terminates in the living room where behind the TV screen lies the last framed opening of the house. The model presents itself as a perfectly practical scheme that accommodates most functions usually encountered in a one-bedroom house. The unique feature of this experiment is the dividing wall between adjacent spaces. Each partition (equipped with an opening, a screen and a camera) enacts the same super­ imposition of two views—a recorded one and a framed one—by providing an opening to the following space and a screen showing a recorded version of the same view. In other words, the viewer of every room when facing forward always sees a framed view of the spaces lying ahead which themselves frame the final external view of the ocean. At the same time, this view gets projected on the screen overlayed with the framed opening of each dividing wall. Essentially, if considering every space and wall in isolation we are presented with the condition of the Slow-House literally applied into a new functional space such as the kitchen or the study room. However, the existence of the previous view within the succeeding one suggests that when the apparatus of the Slow-House is orchestrated in a sequence, the resulted experience of the visitor changes dramatically from a simple repetition.

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Figure 5.5 The Layered House. Source: By the author.

As mentioned earlier, if the last space is considered in isolation we are essentially dealing with the same condition as the Slow-House, with one exception. That is, how the architectural visitor gets there; both physically and visually. In the Layered House you can walk and experience all the following intervals—which are functional spaces filled with objects—that produce what you already see framed and recorded, while as you continue deeper in the house you encounter them anew. In this model the screen shows the viewer what comes after until in the end s/he is left with a window and a screen. This articulation of succeeding spaces creates a constant perceptive tension between how a space appears (on the screen) and how it is physically articulated (once visited). The multiplication of the framed/recorded view is opposite to the condition of the Slow-House; especially regarding its direc­ tionality. The latter’s critical take on perspective involved the subject’s arrival to the living room via a curved path that carefully eliminated any direct visual contact with the final view. The movement was only considered as anterior to the juxtaposition, which was fixed, immobile and rather absolute—an ex­ emplification of a theoretical point that both views are equally mediated. The condition encountered at the end of the Slow-House is now multiplied. For example, Figure 5.6 shows the view corresponding to each space of the house

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Figure 5.6 Layers of the house. Overview of the spaces and framed views from each progressive dividing wall. Source: By the author.

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from the entrance onwards. Once you occupy a layer of the house, part of it like the view in this case is created by components that are not physically present yet. You continue and you encounter them the more you move for­ ward. Most importantly, the more you move, the more you inhabit the house you realize that every space is caught in the flickering of a framed view and a recorded view (and their superimposition), but part of this view involves the succeeding space of the house. As such, in the Layered House where the juxtaposition is multiplied and inhabited by ascribing movement between the two notions of recorded and framed views, the idea becomes spatially rela­ tivized and continuously unfolded by the perspective of the space. The effects of this newly introduced idea of movement are illustrated in more depth by the following model entitled the Recursive House. This experiment explores how the house can be practically implicated in the production of the previous condition between a recorded and a framed/ natural view. Specifically, it addresses this point through a prolonged living space that gets recorded and then folded when projected on the corner of the walls of the next room. As seen in Figure 5.7 there are two projections taking place in this model. First, the living area of the house is recorded in a pan motion from left to right which then gets projected at the corner of the reading room which resides in the front part of the house. The projection is aligned with the window of that room so that the space seems to accom­ modate via an illusion the previously encountered living room while of­ fering two different kinds of views to the outside. One framed through the window and one recorded depicting the views as seen from the living room. Finally, the reading room at the front end of the house, including the projections on its walls is recorded and projected on the entrance lobby of the house (Figure 5.8). As a result, this image which is produced by recording both three-dimensional elements and two-dimensional projec­ tions is the first view a person encounters upon entering the house. As expected, the point of interest does not simply lie in these moments of projection and their illusionistic capacity. Hence—let it be noted here—the model makes sure the visitor does not get completely duped by the pro­ jections via a tilted mirror installed over the entrance lobby. The role of the specular image, as seen in Figure 5.8, is to assure the architectural subject that no matter how immersive the projections look, they cannot correspond to the actuality of the room currently occupied since a space with check pattern floor tiles exists behind the screen. The crucial architectural con­ dition that this sequence of recorded and projected spaces produces lies elsewhere. When you enter the house as architectural subject, at first you think you know what you see and by extension what kind of space you are occupying; a lobby with a framed view of the outside. Later as you make your way through the unfolded living room towards the rear reading room—where the former is projected—you realize how the previous view was constructed to appear as such. You recognize the architectural retro­ action at play. It is essential to highlight that similarly to The Ambassador’s

Demonstrating the Screen 173

Figure 5.7 Recursive House. Source: By the author.

skull the space was always there (as the mirror suggested) but the point of revelation did not reside in the same picture plane even in a distorted matter. The point of revelation, the emergence of meaning or the desire to understand the image is met when physically traversing the space that follows, which is the most important constituent of the implied space you just saw being projected (Figure 5.9). Formally, the distortion is constitutive to the perspective, it is not a distortion of a perspective. The distortion is original, but the visitor does not see it at first. For this to happen a demonstration is required, whose

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Figure 5.8 Recursive House Entrance. Source: By the author.

Figure 5.9 Recursive House Living room. Close-up framing of the camera recording the house’s living room which then gets projected in the room located at the front of the house, which in turn gets re-recorded and projected at the entrance wall. Source: By the author.

nature will be negative as it will aim to undo the production of space which was just witnessed—visually implied and physically occupied. Such a neg­ ative retrospect is achieved by moving in the house starting from the en­ trance going through the living room and arriving at the study. Like the cinematic concept of suture, one space does not simply follow the next one but rather is signified by it. However, this interplay of signification is possible only after introducing movement to the idea of the Slow-House.

Demonstrating the Screen 175

S

S’

Figure 5.10 Simplified graph of desire. Source: Redrawn by the author.

The physical aspect of this movement concerns the viewer’s experience when literally moving between the articulated spaces that has already been delineated. The logical dimension of the movement and its effect on architecture’s signifying process presented in the model can be read through a well-known Lacanian schema. Namely, the Graph of Desire, which was first introduced in seminar V (2017) as the way to examine the signifying process ‘by means of this crude image of the quilting point’ (2017: 8). It is a topological1 metaphor that serves to show ‘where desire is stated in relation to the subject defined on the basis of his articulation by the signifier’ (Lacan 2006: 681) (Figure 5.10). The condition encountered in the Recursive House can be oper­ ationalized logically on Lacan’s graph by shifting the focus from significa­ tion in speech to signification in vision—by extension considering the scopic field and showing the model’s retroactivity in action. In speech the emer­ gence of meaning in a retroactive manner concerns the exchange of enun­ ciations as signifiers where I address my interlocutor and say something, but I only mean what I said when I realize what this signifier means. For instance, if I begin a sentence, you will not understand its meaning until I have got to the end. It’s completely necessary—this is the definition of a sentence—that I say the final word for you to understand what the first was about. (Lacan 2017: 9) As such, the graph of desire can be read in the following way. It portrays two arrows and two intersections, or rather a horizontal vector of signifi­ cation from left to right and a curved vector of the subject’s desire and implication in the signifying process from right to left which intersects the former in two points. The horizontal vector begins from a signifier (S) that is either a linguistic unit or an image, and its duration describes the process of signification to a meaning (S’). It holds a diachronic function that can be found in a sentence ‘insofar as a sentence closes its signification only with its last term, each term being anticipated in the construction constituted by the

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Figure 5.11 Recursive House second projection. ‘Making-of’ photos of the house’s entrance scene. The living room is projected in the room located at the front of the ground floor, which itself frames an external view. This landscape is condensed, recorded and projected anew at the entrance. Source: By the author.

other terms and, inversely, sealing their meaning by its retroactive effect’ (2006: 682). The curved vector exemplifies the subject’s desire to under­ stand the meaning of the signifying chain. Simply put, it is the line that shows how meaning gets fixed or sealed from the multiplicity of potential meaning that signifiers carry. As Lacan stresses ‘it is the line of rational discourse, into which a number of reference points or fixed things are already integrated. These things can only be properly grasped in this case at the level of the usage of signifiers, that is, at the level of what concretely, in the use of discourse, constitutes fixed points. As you know, they are a long way from corresponding univocally to a thing. No one single semanteme corresponds to one single thing’ (2017: 10). It is important to note that because the two vectors progress in opposite directions, their two inter­ sections are equally reversed with regard to each other (Figure 5.11). Crucially, the moment the eye sees something is marked at the first intersection of vectors from the right. This intersection corresponds to the projected view in the entrance lobby (Figure 5.8), which although being first for the architectural viewer’s eye (horseshoe-shaped vector) is second for the vector of the signifier, the act of signification that produces the per­ ceived image (of space). As Lacan explains, if we start from the bottomright part of the graph ‘the first point at which it meets the properly

Demonstrating the Screen 177 signifying chain is what I have just been explaining to you from the point of view of the signifier, namely the bundle of usages’ (2017: 10). The bottomleft part of the graph corresponds to the architectural moving subject, which is split, depended on the gaze or the vanishing point that is aligned to resulting in a retroactive production of space. In other words, it is relativ­ ized in space which in Lacanian terms means to always have an Other, or as discussed via Brunelleschi’s case to see, to have a perspective means that you need to acknowledge a blind spot. Lacan explains that this vector is synchronic and more hidden, while its structure brings us to the beginning. What does it mean that the curved vector brings you back to the beginning, especially in relation to the space of architecture? Consider you just entered the lobby of the Recursive-House; you need to go forward which in reality (you have just experienced) is backwards. In the model the spaces are articulated in such a way that their physical disposition alone does not account for the visitor’s experience of occupying it and moving along the elements presented within its limits. The immaterial apparatus of the screen which includes the recording cameras as well as the projected moving images is a constituent of the spaces produced, while signification rests upon experiencing their sequential and architectural order. This retroactive dimension was lacking in the Slow-House because there was no physical movement. Instead, the argument was exhausted at the alignment of the viewer’s eye with a missing vanishing point in the recorded view and a lacking one in the framed one. As such, Diller & Scofidio managed to argue against what the book described in chapter 3 as the level of naïve comparison where the viewer ponders whether one view has the role of being a signifier while the other acts as a signified. The point of their superposition was that both are equally mediated with regard to the viewer’s eye. In relation to Lacan’s graph of desire, the Slow-House can be read as the left intersection of the two vectors where the viewer sees two views and is initially caught in questioning which one is the true space and which one its representation. This is precisely the logical move exemplified in the physical movement in the space of the Recursive-House: no matter where you go in space, but also irrespective of the order you visit different parts of the model what you encounter is more and more perspective; regardless of meaning or not. Perspective is always relative equals the proposition that there is no outside of perspective, but perspective as symbolic is non-all.

Perspective as Logic In the last two models, the screen was an inherent part of the architecture’s experience while operating as a layer on top of the building’s physical disposition. When the projections or the screens were turned off, the models were still denoting a functional space while lacking the virtual dimension with regard to its generated spaces and the relation with the external view.

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Nevertheless, the development of the three-dimensional spatial articulation was concurrent with the screen’s performance in the design process of the proposed spaces. In other words, the models utilized perspective projection—being the architectural mode of appearance of the screen—for the production of space delineated above in the Layered and Recursive House. The following experiment comes full circle from the previous models that showcased the logic of perspective to examining perspective as logic. “We call ‘logic’ the general theory of appearing or of being-there, that is the theory of worlds or of the cohesion of what comes to exist” (Badiou 2009: 587). The book has characterized the screen on numerous occasions as ontologically distinct or unique with regard to the rest of the threedimensional elements of architecture’s repertoire. Perspective projection and its constituent rules have been shown to be the logic that governs how the screen is able to exist through its image within architecture’s space. In other words, the logic of perspective describes the screen according to its appearance within the space of architecture and not according to its ontological composition. That is because, as Badiou explains, appearing (in space): is ‘a dimension of multiples which is not that of their being qua being (covered by ontology), but that of their appearances in worlds, or of their localization (or being-there)’ (2009: 579). Thus, the following model is not a representation of space like a minia­ ture replica of a physical proposal that could exist on a 1:1 scale. Perspective as logic means to treat the space of the model as logical instead of physical: to construct (by approximation) a system between two theo­ retically infinite points where the progressive intervals determine how objects within it appear when intersecting the plane of inscription, or how signifiers attain their meaning when an image of space is formed. Finally, it requires demonstrating the screen’s role and capacity within such a system (Figure 5.12). Hence, the model begins from a rectangular wooden base which mea­ sures 30 × 120 cm. It is essentially an abstract topos, zone or placeholder simply awaiting the rules that would determine how elements would appear in such a world. The second step is to posit a vanishing point and physically construct a perspective around it. It is the point or master signifier which regulates the relative change of the objects’ proportion. Moreover, it keeps all signifiers floating and breaks the symmetry of direction by fixating perspective to a point that every viewer’s eye needs to meet and acknowl­ edge a blind spot—in order to see. Following the analysis on Webb’s drawings, it is the only omnipresent point of view within the symbolic of perspective but also the only one that is unattainable for the viewing sub­ ject. The third step, concerns the point of (emergence of) meaning, which by definition contains a temporal dimension. Think of Alberti’s veil or Lacan’s point de capiton. For example, a mechanism equivalent to those that render possible the retroactive meaning of a sentence, the skull’s momentary

Demonstrating the Screen 179 revelation or the suspension of meaning between cinematic frames until the sequence is completed. This is precisely the role of the screen and the projected moving images in this model which function in a self-reflexive manner. The model’s demonstration starts by fabricating a three-dimensional perspective projection from a sequence of elements, spaces and spatial fragments that would normally appear in a housing scheme similar to those presented in the previous models. These include a bookshelf, a wall with a window, or a carpet with two chairs denoting part of a living area. Depending on the point of view from which we look at the threedimensional model this initial perspectival arrangement is either portrayed as an organized progressive sequence or as a cluster of unregulated elements from various orders of scale. The band running along the middle of the model should be read as a notation (Figure 5.13). It delineates the plan of the house in a preliminary manner. It draws the viewer’s attention to the spaces residing in the main perspective whose activation by the rest of the perspectives in the form of projections is imminent. Equally, as all elements appearing within its limits are of the same scale (1:50) it provides a refer­ ence point that elements of different scales do exist in the model and certain mechanisms like the strip and later the screen exists to unify them together (Figures 5.14–5.16). After creating the main principal progression, the next step is to film the constructed space of perspective in three distinct cinematic modes which involve a moving camera. A miniature industrial endoscope which is cap­ able to pan, rotate or zoom in the model is used in order to record the perspectival space accordingly. The way the obtained footage is utilized is crucial. The three recordings are projected back onto the main perspective intersecting it at three points creating three new perspectives as shown in Figure 5.17. The resulting condition is the following. Elements of the main perspective are now included in the extended space of the three new ones while themselves are also constituents of the initial perspectival progression. Secondly, the three novel perspectives by definition necessitate a correctly aligned point of view. They are depicted by the three sitting figures posi­ tioned outside the model that would look at the perspective from another point of view as seen in Figure 5.17. They function similarly to Diller & Scofidio’s empty chairs at the Para-site installation which were reserved for an implied or virtual observer with one sole difference. The empty chairs in MoMA showed certain potential or impossible positions from which the space could be viewed if occupied. They were impossible in the empirical sense since they literally could not be reached being positioned too high for a human person to reach or even located at the ceiling. While the importance of a space’s floor becoming the ceiling for a fictional viewer has been discussed it should be highlighted that such points were situated within the limits of the space that rendered them impossible to occupy. On the contrary, the implied observers corresponding

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Figure 5.12 A perspective of perspectives (side view). Source: By the author.

Figure 5.13 A perspective of perspectives (top view). Source: By the author.

to the three projections are by definition logically impossible to reach for the viewer situated within the main perspective of the model—because there is no outside of perspective. Consider Tschumi’s famous paradox where ‘you cannot inhabit a space and question the nature of space at the same time’ (1994: 41, 47). Specifically, while inside a cube we only see three surfaces and a corner at any time but imagine or deduce from other points of view the nature of the object. Once, again this seemingly architectural conundrum should be approached from its originary point; that is

Demonstrating the Screen 181

Figure 5.14 A perspective of perspectives (sketch). Early drawing exploring the intersection of different perspectives into a unified indeterminate space. Original A2. Source: By the author.

self-reference. In fact, it is not a complication but rather an axiom as seen previously through Lacan’s impossibility of the mirror stage to see myself seeing myself. Tschumi’s problem is not one to be resolved but recognized as a structural necessity in the signifying process of architecture, where the

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Figure 5.15 The space of perspective(s). Drawing behind the motivation of the model. It explores the space produced by multiple perspectives and hints to the possibility of another point of view that gazes at the resulted multiplicity. Original A2. Source: By the author.

Demonstrating the Screen 183

Figure 5.16 Confusion of scales and visual meaning. On top we see elements from different orders of scale which comprise the main perspective. At the bottom, the space of the perspective is relativized when it appears as a coherent space from one point of view. Source: By the author.

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Figure 5.17 Visual observers. Source: By the author.

screen performs this impossibility in a spatial way, without-by definitionresolving it. It is not a limitation of space itself determined by the choice of form or materials. It is a negative affirmation which means you cannot occupy a position external to the (symbolic) space you are inscribed, or in Lacan’s terminology, there is no metalanguage, or following Webb the impossibility of drawing a perspective from the point of view of the van­ ishing point. Even if a scale figure would be physically moved to the posi­ tion of the fictive viewer it would be a matter of choice to define how it appears. Either is situated differently with regard to the depth of field of the main perspective; hence, its relative size should change. Or correctly posi­ tioned to appear in the same size in another perspectival space; therefore, its appearance is externally determined by another vanishing point. In prin­ ciple, the same holds for all elements modelled. To repeat, the choice

Demonstrating the Screen 185 concerns the point that regulates their appearance, from which they make sense or not. They can be read as being part of one perspective, or as will be explained below situated in a state of perceptive ambivalence at an inter­ section of perspectives. Thus, the model depicts a space created out of multiple recordings. It shows the production of space by multiplying the logic of producing (the image of) space. A multiplication which occurs at the intersection of the main perspective with the recorded modalities (pan, rotate, zoom) of its progression when projected back on the surfaces of its elements. These three intersections combine the free-floating elements of the main perspective with a corresponding projection to produce, for as long as the recording lasts, the appearance of a space. As a proof of concept, a living room is implied when elements align with the panning shot, a kitchen area is sig­ nified via the rotation of the camera and a bedroom is denoted through the recording that zooms in. When examining the model, the viewer encounters zones that make sense and others that don’t because as Eisenman formally wrote the condition under examination is an architecture that generates its own house (1982: 40) (Figure 5.18). Crucially, these zones of meaning are not determined by the visitor’s physical position like the skull of The Ambassadors, which is concerned with what is shown or hidden from a particular point of view. On the contrary, meaning is dependent on the moving images of the screen. For this reason, the screen is purposely playing in a loop all footage recorded in different modalities (pan, zoo, rotate) to enact a constant glide of signifiers that only momentarily activate space and intersect correctly with the threedimensional elements of the model. Showcasing precisely in three dimen­ sions, in a spatial logic, where the plane of inscription, the condensation that took place in the Library Model or simply the point of meaning emerges. It is a process that represents itself in order to become its own investigation. In this sense the gaze of the camera is considered as one of the functions that the space of architecture serves since the space is not only

Figure 5.18 An architecture that generates its own house. Source: By the author.

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designed around the notion that is being looked at and recorded by a camera like the previous two models but is rather activated or signified by it. This function of the screen allows us to approach the core of the matter which is self-reference. We saw previously how the Renaissance frescos allowed Lacan to des­ ignate them as the first instance that architecture was able to represent itself (on the surface of it walls). Such cases like the drawings inside villa Farnesina were defined as self-referential because when a visitor would enter such a space, s/he would encounter a perceptive gap, tension or split between what the space is and how it appears. Crucially, the illusion of the depicted space (in contrast for example to the photorealistic grapes in the case of Zeuxis and Parrhasios) included the expectation of the viewer. Yet, these self-reflexive renditions were possible and took place only after the architectural space was completed. Now the screen is not only present in the process of architecture (like the Layered and Recursive House) but most importantly transposes this process within the building—the logical pro­ duction of its space. Therefore, the spaces that appear in the model should not be considered as the snapshot of a process that came to a halt and materialized at a later stage, but rather as a constituent of a properly undecidable process. For example, Figure 5.16 shows first such an indeterminate condition or visual noise of elements and secondly the moment where the space of the resulting kitchen area is derived when the footage of the moving camera in pan motion is aligned with the corre­ sponding elements of the perspective projection. This condition can be thought of as the inverse of the Library Model which showed how the screen’s frame determined the object or the implied space’s appearance. Most importantly, it indicated the potential capacity of what lies behind or rather before the condensation on the plane of inscription. On the contrary, this model is not presenting what happens behind the scenes but rather challenges this territory as the actual space architecture’s subject inhabits. What is at stake in the intersection of per­ spectives allowed by the screen concerns a negative affirmation? The pro­ duced space is neither a finished nor frozen object but is still in process—of becoming. Or simply, the screen allows architecture not to provide an object as its output but rather a process. What the scale figure in the model inhabits, or the place it is localized within, is the production of space that Webb referred to as the sweet spot of perspective or what Badiou situates as the undecidedness between the M2 and M3 levels of linguistic meaning, which is determined by the screen conditioned by moving images it projects. The function of the screen in producing those intersectional spaces reveals that architecture should be considered neither as an autonomous nor as a close-ended process where every proposition can be categorized as being true or false. In the SlowHouse if a stubborn visitor would challenge the question of mediation between the two views, Diller & Scofidio would direct him/her to the

Demonstrating the Screen 187 screen. Similarly, in this model if a viewer resists and questions the un­ decidedness of the space as a finalized proposition the model itself through the perceptive gap demonstrates how the apparent spaces are constantly produced. This gap only seems to be closed in conventional windows (not juxtaposed with a screen), spaces (not produced out of material and immaterial components) and miniature models which function as replicas of a building. If the screens and the projections are turned off or completely removed the rest of the model’s element appear almost free-floating in (the space of) perspective lacking the perceptive mechanism that fixes them in place and proportion to appear as a unified whole. With regard to the subject there is no visual and logical guide to follow in order to determine what is included as part of the space. A pivotal moment in the theoretical exposition of the book was Lacan’s reversal on Alberti’s conception of perspective, especially with regard to the vanishing point. As seen in chapter 2, for Alberti the price to utilize the system of perspective to represent external reality is to close one eye—by consequence the viewer could never be out of place. In contrast, Lacan considered this practical conception as an exception instead of the rule of perspective being precisely anamorphosis. Paradoxically, in the space of the model when the screens are turned off there is nothing out of place because there is no mechanism to determine which element is rightly positioned or appears correctly. This lack results to an inability to guarantee meaning, and to distinguish between true or false which remarkably is the exact opposite condition of perspective. In other words, the model’s function is inverse to the one of the first models of the library where once the frame is lifted what remains, or rather what is revealed is the process before the implied space is shown on the screen. There is nothing finished, no con­ densation (of the meaning) and no frozen object. It is a process which momentarily provides a derivable spatial configuration. The model dem­ onstrates at once how the screen aligns elements into a unified whole that makes sense for the viewer, and secondly how there are always within the logical/symbolic space of perspective parts which are not yet amenable to the question of knowledge, to verifying their meaning or spatial disposition simply because they are not yet relativized, not in perspective. What happens then when we have this process of projection and artic­ ulation (encountered in previous models) not imposed on an object? What is the architectural significance of examining this process not simply without an object, but as object? This shift, being the driving force of the model in question, resulted in a constructed field of signifiers or elements according to the rules (of appearance) of perspective projection. It is not a model of a real space, there is no one-to-one correspondence of features with a building in a larger scale that could potentially be constructed. It is a principle; it is constitutive of space exemplifying the self-reflexive potential and impossible production of space. That is because self-reference has nothing to do with identity (how an element appears) but rather it is a

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property of belonging (in the space produced). Self-reference concerns the screen, and its mode of appearance within the space it resides, represents and produces. In contrast, the self-reflexive question does not relate to the human subject which stops at the level of retroaction seen in the previous models where spatial meaning is revealed as it progressively visits and inhabits the space (whose image was) initially encountered. What makes this new element of architecture unique is the following property. The screen exemplifies how for architecture self-reference is a spatial distinction where the constructed elements are part of something to which they refer. Peter Eisenman describes in the essay Representations of Doubt: At the Sign of the Sign (2014) how other arts, philosophy, literature or painting managed to break decisively the relation between their subject and object. ‘In modernism the dominant mode of reading was an attempt to have the object refer not to a reading subject, but to its own condition of being’ (2014: 145). However, that was not the case with architecture since ac­ cording to Eisenman it remained narrative and representational; not only in its buildings but also in its form of representations like drawings and models (Ibid.). In consequence he states, that ‘a form of representation that no longer, like perspective or axonometric, sees the object as a represen­ tation for a subject, has yet to be proposed’ (Ibid.: 146). Finally, a few pages later Eisenman also describes the reason or rather the inherent limitation of architecture that restricts the emergence of such a representational con­ ception; namely, scale. Scale has always been the crucial axis which has linked the object of architecture to its subject. Could there be an architecture which was non-scale specific, and if so, what would be the nature of its model? (2014: 148) The shift from studying the rules and mechanisms of perspective to produce images which appear as space to examining perspective as logic I hope has demonstrated precisely the nature of such a model. In contrast to the pre­ vious experiments presented the first thing you experience upon close inspection of the last model is disorientation—instead of a space or image whose constitution or meaning you try to understand—which crystalizes the intermediary domain between meaning and no-meaning. Although due to the function of the screen sometimes the process in question aligns and condenses the relative scale of elements in the model’s space such moments do not exhaust the course of signification between the eye and the space; they are an exception. The model illustrates a perspective that keeps on changing constructed upon other perspectives which themselves are derived from the previous one being filmed in different modes, instead of an ex­ ternal view or space. What the subject sees, is literally the first perspective from another perspective—or point of view, while always being situated (from) within its space.

Demonstrating the Screen 189 In the logical space of this model, potentially everything—every set of elements from distinct orders of scale—can make sense. Due to the function of the screen, modelled components like windows and columns do not function as openings and structure but rather as signifiers of openings and structure. The model shows the showing, the self-referentiality allowed by the screen, which is beyond retroaction to achieve condensation or meaning like the models in the previous section. Now we come full circle. From the logic of perspective in painting to represent external reality to painting within a painting, followed by perspective (painting as space) within a space and finally to perspective as logic for producing space—all due to the novel ontologically distinct architectonic element that is the screen.

Note 1 I describe it as topological because Lacan explains that: ‘It’s impossible to rep­ resent the signifier, the signified and the subject on the same plane. This is neither mysterious nor opaque’ ( 2017: 9).

References Badiou, Alain, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. by Alberto Toscano (London; New York: Continuum, 2009) Eisenman, Peter, House X (New York: Rizzoli, 1982) Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006) Lacan, Jacques, Formations of the Unconscious: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans by Russell Grigg, (Malden, MA: Polity, 2017) Tschumi, Bernard, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994) Webb, Michael, Michael Webb Two Journeys, ed. by Ashley Simone (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2018) Zizek, Slavoj, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 2008)

Conclusion

At this point the fundamental role of this new element of architecture, which in fact belongs to an apparatus including recording cameras, moving images and the screen or projecting surface can be succinctly outlined. The screen is able to act as logic for producing spatial meaning, or as technique for producing space like Virilio rightly predicted in his plea for a new Alberti or Brunelleschi to deal with the screen’s condition. Secondly, it is not restricted to showing illusions but spatially performs the suspension of architecture’s signified equivalent to language’s production of undecidable propositions. Thirdly, it questions the very nature of architecture’s view and relation to the topological notion of outside between immediacy and mediation, where the subject’s fundamental activity of seeing through a frame (of a window or a screen) is always through some means. Furthermore, it challenges the core of the relation between architecture’s object and subject by fabricating inaccessible points of view and positing the existence of impossible vanishing points with regard to the space occupied which brings forward an unimagined or impossible gaze. Last but not least, the screen exemplifies architecture’s self-reflexive capacity where material and immaterial components are part of the spatial conception to which they refer and produce. It is able to unify the architectural object with its process which usually precedes it and in some extreme cases, as seen in the design experiments, proposes architecture’s signifying process as object. It is crucial to highlight that most of these remarks are not intrinsic to the element of the screen. In fact, the book went to almost great lengths—from the use of outdated tv monitors in the projects of Diller and Scofidio to Michael Webb’s seminal drawings on perspective projection—in order to showcase that such properties were already underlying or inherent to architecture’s conception and representation of space which relate both to the discipline’s object and subject. This point is imperative in grasping the book’s contribution but also position its response to the overarching research question relating to the screen as a newly inscribed element of architecture. The uniqueness of the study concerns the way it constructed the case in order to outline how the screen exposes certain fundamental

Conclusion 191 aspects of architecture’s (production of) spatial meaning even irrespective of the screen’s involvement in some cases, which nonetheless the former was shown to demonstrate once inserted in its space. Due to the lack of a systemic study of the screen as element of architecture this book epitomizes neither the case of applying a theory to an object where a hypothesis can be verified by analysing its data or properties nor the case where a theory can be extracted by examining the object’s current state of affairs. On the contrary the screen’s properties and architectural implications were discovered by linking previously unrelated works correlated initially by one condition. Namely, the tension between image and space, between the immediate reality of space and the reality effect of its projected images as discerned by the few accounts which have already acknowledged the screen. In other words, to even produce or conceive the proposed hypotheses the book had to construct a frame of surveying its capacity to fabricate (the image of) space beyond illusions which fool the architectural subject and their function halts upon revealing the trick. Hence, based on the axiom of its mode of appearance, it problematized anew architecture’s representational paradigm and the notion of self-reference evident in the codification of perspective projection from the Renaissance onwards through Lacan’s conception of the symbolic register; where perspective is posited as being not an empirical matter, not a matter of sight, but rather a logical mapping of space. This shift was crucial because it allowed us to look beyond the screen’s signified or the phenomenon of illusion which can be categorized as true or false and focus on the logic for fabricating the appearance of space irrespective of the final output’s verisimilitude. Moreover, it equipped the book with a fundamental postulate. Lacan’s logic of non-all where architectural reality, with regard to the subject, is not represented but rather produced through the act of formalization or symbolization. An attitude equally present in the design experiments which functioned as a proof of concept and from a methodological point of view there exists no criteria to determine a telos. On the contrary, such investigations opened up a way to think architecturally, or rather through architectural means, about the new spatial condition that the screen brings forward and they should be considered as an invention instead of discovery—what is invented is not an object or form but a method that exposes the hidden logic of their production (of space). Hence, the screen’s study turned by definition into an examination of the fundamental components and universal operations of this representational paradigm and most importantly their role with regard to the production of meaning and the subject’s emergence where architecture’s object is no longer conceived as a set of elements but rather as a representational system of differences. Specifically, I refer to the vanishing point and the point of view, the eye and the gaze, scale and proportion, truth and fiction, presentation and representation, inside and outside, and finally the inherent limitation of a complete symbolic order which brought forward the distinction between

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meaning, no-meaning and suspension of meaning. Following Badiou, ‘I am telling you once again: if we truly understand how ab-sense is different from non-sense, we’ll have truly understood the real’ (2018: 77) or the part of reality which cannot be represented in propositional form but only demonstrated. Based on the analysis of the above-mentioned notions the screen’s undoing of the showing, or demonstration, discerned which part of architecture’s symbolic is inaccessible to knowledge—during the former’s spectacle whose logic it spatially performs—through a series of architectural negative affirmations. For example, nothing changed in our reality after Brunelleschi’s demonstration while everything changed once we closed one eye and realized that not everything can be symbolized and to see space, to have a perspective, to become a subject you have to lose something or acknowledge a blind spot. Nothing changed after realizing that some of Eisenman’s columns were not really columns, but everything changed by denying that their potential signified as signs of architecture’s articulation has been exhausted. Nothing changed when we gazed at the ocean view of the Slow-House overlayed with the same recorded view on a screen, but everything changed once we realized that as architectural subjects, we see both views through some means—one is not less mediated than the other. Nothing changed when we looked at the strange voids that appear in the Temple Island drawing, but everything changed when proving geometrically that the point of view and the vanishing point, the point we see from and the point we are being seen, while both located at infinity are not identical. The screen changes everything and nothing. That is the true essence (of undoing the showing) of its architectural demonstration, which exposed and questioned some of the most salient features of the spatial conception to which it is now constituent.

Concluding Remarks and Further Research I will now offer some final comments from a detached perspective which concern two elements of the book beyond the screen’s demonstration and the delineated response to its significance as element of architecture. Namely, the theoretical apparatus and the subsequent limitations, readings and analyses that were developed for the demonstration to take place. I will begin with an epistemological limitation of the theoretical framework. That is, the conception of perspective that the books discussed, explored, and challenged was based on western literature with regard both to philosophy and architecture. This was evident from the introduction where the screen’s insertion within architecture was logically positioned by Virilio in the sequence of the Renaissance frescos and the ability of architecture to represent itself. Nonetheless, I suggest that the works of Thouless (1931), Beveridge (1935), Edgerton (1994) and Scolari (2012) are good starting points for further research into the phenomenon of perspective projection with regard to non-western sources. This limitation could hypothetically

Conclusion 193 be extended further—not solely beyond the screen but also beyond perspective—to Lacan’s work on the subject and the symbolic of language. Specifically, I refer to Lacan’s relation with Japan and his notorious claim in the preface of the Japanese edition of Écrits that everyone who resides in this language is essentially unanalysable (2001; 498). I only disclose it here for the motivated reader interested in this lesser-known side of Lacan’s work and recommend Blondelot & Sauret (2015), Shingu & Funaki (2008), Cornyetz & Vincent (2010) as initial points of dialogue between the two sides. In the course of outlining the screen’s logic of appearance and then investigating how it can be used as logic for producing space the book offered several key readings that should not go unnoticed even to readers that remain indifferent to the phenomenon of the screen. The expositions on Brunelleschi’s experiment, Eisenman’s House I, Webb’s drawings for Temple Island, or Diller & Scofidio’s Slow-House were conceived, selected, and carefully positioned to serve as sequential points of support to the object in question. Going through them the reader encountered a recurring affirmation that captures what was at stake in the book. There exists an architectural way of thinking about universal notions like vision, absence, mediation, or infinity, architecturally. That is, it is possible to investigate such notions and actively contribute to their domain of knowledge which exists independently of our discipline via the architectural means of articulation like models, drawings, or buildings. To fully grasp the implications of this statement I would like to refer to Lebbeus Woods’ short article Taking a Position (2015) where he discusses the role of theory in our discipline. He writes that while architects are not born theorists it is important to note that some of the world’s best architects were surrounded by critics and professors who followed their work and engaged actively with their projects (2015: 6). Specifically, he mentions that ‘innovative architects were lucky to have Lewis Mumford, Sigfried Giedion, and Manfredo Tafuri, and, more rarely, Michael Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida. The theories that the theoreticians spun around their works enabled a wide discourse to develop, elevating architecture to a form of knowledge, lifting it out of the venal chatter of the marketplace. Sadly, those critics and professors have died, leaving a conceptual—and critical—void’ (2015: 6). I believe these readings and expositions are particularly timely given the extreme rise to popularity of AI generated images by software like Midjourney. Reinier de Graaf criticizes architecture which strives for uniqueness and originality over the common and overlooks the generic in favour of the specific as being condemned to a losing battle. ‘Contemporary architecture is like a dog chasing its tail, reinventing itself every decade, every year, every month, every week, with every new Internet post (2017: 72). Specifically, he challenges us to a quick Google search that will unfortunately highlight our similarities more than our differences and

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claims that ‘there is no point in trying [to be original]: whatever is designed, a quick Google search inevitably returns similar projects, algorithmically aligned. What we thought was a first has a following even before it is finished; emulation precedes the original’ (commentary added, 2017: 72). On the contrary, the cases presented in this book are not bound by a novel way of layout, construction, composition, form, or material but rather reach the limit of architecture’s symbolic articulation. Their originality and significance lies elsewhere. They showed an impasse of symbolization and demonstrated architecturally how a visual or spatial real emerges in the realm of a drawing, model or building proposal. Crucially, they bypass or rather operate beyond the google assessment proposed by de Graaf. Certainly, if you google a ‘Hamptons house overlooking the ocean’ you will find several windows with a magnificent view but a search towards ‘house staging the impossibility of seeing’ will leave the algorithm perplexed. Finally, the framework necessary to outline these expositions in a formal and systematic way is equally important to the demonstrations themselves. This was achieved by positing a shift in our attention towards the examination of the screen’s properties. The shift I am referring to is the following: the passage from examining how something functions (how we count, how we draw, how we follow a set of certain rules) to questioning the function itself and by extension the very conditions of possibility for its occurrence. Consider for instance the intuitive process of counting where, apart from mathematicians, no one actually questions or reflects on the logic of this operation despite using it almost daily. The sequence of naming (the empty set), its intuitive usage and application while explaining why ‘five’ comes after ‘four’ or why five is not reducible to four, says nothing about what a number like five is. This questioning was approached regarding the symbolic register where Lacan asserted that language is not a tool of communication even though most of us utilize it in such a way, or in other words, language is not an exchange of signs with rigid correspondences to external referents. Hence his shift on the psychoanalyst’s role in practice. S/he should not focus on what the analysand’s words mean (subject supposed to know), but examine how they are constitutive of his/ her subjectivity. The book transposed this shift to the visual symbolic of perspective projection being the screen’s mode of appearance in architecture’s space and enquired not what a screen means, but rather how it can mean anything of architectural significance—and managed to bring forward certain fundamental notions of the discipline’s representational capacities and production of space. However, such an approach is far from being complete or finished; actually, it can only continue to develop and mature. Founded primarily upon the work of Lacan and Badiou which exemplify an analogous shift of perspective towards the question of the subject and the question of being accordingly, the book has limited itself to (demonstrate) only one aspect of architecture’s symbolic and focused on the scopic field as logical matter and the relation between two and three

Conclusion 195 dimensions. It was a sincere attempt to question the theoretical, philosophical and psychoanalytical synergies (not boundaries) between projections, walls and surfaces and between two and three-dimensional representations delineating the spatial logic that holds them together. Yet, I believe there exist architectural demonstrations which operate at the limit of architecture’s symbolic and produce some new knowledge about the reality that their corresponding facts are describing that are not spatial but of sociological, linguistic or historical nature. Having outlined what a demonstration consists of, how it can be retroactively identified as such and defined the criteria (they are universal, not goal-oriented, delineate a novel relation between architecture’s subject and object and examine its articulation as logic) for a work (model, drawing, building) to operate at this limit, I hope that such an approach can be utilized as a lens to discern more cases of equivalent magnitude beyond the visual realm. In other words, this attitude of investigation towards an object of study can be generalized and transposed to architecture’s symbolic in order to demonstrate cases that share the same outlook towards the ontological question of meaning and expose their corresponding inherent impasses in the logic of their articulation. Hence, similarly to the scopic demonstration of the screen, adopting a similar attitude will permit one to enquire what is architecturally significant from a linguistic, historical or social perspective and become a reference point within the discipline’s pursuit for meaning not so much for providing an answer but rather delineating in a methodical way the conditions of its possibility.

References Badiou, Alain, Lacan: Anti-Philosophy 3, trans. by Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018) Beveridge, W.M., ‘Racial Differences in Phenomenal Regression’, British Journal of Psychology. General Section, 26.1 (1935), 59 Blondelot, Xavier, and Marie-Jean Sauret, ‘Japanese and Lacanian Ways of Thinking: An Invitation to Dialogue’, Japan Review, 28 (2015), 173–189 Cornyetz, Nina, and Keith Vincent, eds., Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture, Routledge Contemporary Japan Series (London; New York: Routledge, 2010) de Graaf, Reinier, Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017) Edgerton, Samuel Y., The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Cornell University Press, 1994) 10.7591/97815 01734182 Lacan, Jacques, Écrits: A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2001) Scolari, Massimo, Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective, Writing Architecture (London, England; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012)

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Shingu, Kazushige, and Tetsuo Funaki, ‘“Between Two Deaths”: The Intersection of Psychoanalysis and Japanese Buddhism’, Theory & Psychology, 18.2 (2008), 253–267 10.1177/0959354307087885 Thouless, Robert H., ‘Phenomenal Regression to the Real Object’, British Journal of Psychology. General Section, 21.4 (1931), 339 Woods, Lebbeus, Slow Manifesto: Lebbeus Woods Blog, ed. by Clare Jacobson, First edition (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015)

Index

absence 12, 24, 33, 49–51, 77, 118–123 Alberti, Leon Battista 42, 57–64, 71, 103, 111, 178, 187 The Ambassadors 66, 69, 73, 80, 131, 137, 157, 172 anamorphosis 5, 47, 66, 67, 70, 129, 137 antisymmetry 148–150 axonometry 188 Badiou, Alain 14, 80, 119, 121, 146, 148–154, 178, 186, 192 Benjamin, Walter 34–37 Bremner, Alex 105 Brunelleschi, Filippo 11, 23, 28, 58, 65, 80–82, 106, 109, 113, 126–135, 154, 157, 177 Burroughs, William S. 101 camera obscura 47 Chaitin, Gilber 73, 75 Colomina, Beatriz 102 Comcast Centre 36, 37, 47, 102 Concinnitas 58, 59, 62–64, 125 Cook, Peter 13, 151 Damisch, Hubert 33, 63, 64, 68, 80–87, 127, 129 Debord, Guy 38 decorated shed 76, 87n2, 121, 122, 127 demonstration 14, 81, 85–87, 114, 126, 128, 131, 133–135, 150, 173 Derrida, Jacques 9, 87n1, 193 Diderot, Denis 65, 80 differentiality 70, 76, 107

Diller and Scofidio 11, 90–94, 101, 102, 104–113, 179, 186, 190 Dimendberg, Edward 91, 93, 95, 98, 101–102 Eagleton, Terry 31, 75 Eco, Umberto 7, 75 Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia 68 Edgerton, Samuel Y. 192 Eisenman, Peter 9, 43, 44, 118, 120–126, 130–135, 188, 192 Euclidean Perspective 64 Evans, Dylan 30 extimacy 80, 139 Facsimile 1, 91–95, 101 false day 43–45 Filarete 58, 81, 82 Fink, Bruce 6, 29, 33 Foqué, Richard 13, 14 Fort-Da 33, 75 fresco 2, 4, 46, 71, 164, 186, 192 Freud, Sigmund 33, 75, 107 Friedberg, Anne 2, 21–30, 36, 46–47 Galerie der Gegenwart 39, 41 Gandelsonas, Mario 124 gaze 8, 66, 67, 69, 71, 83–85, 97, 110, 129, 138, 157, 177 Gibson, James J. 77, 79 Graaf, Reinier de 193, 194 graph of desire 175, 177 Hays, Michael 126, 137 Heath, Steven 25, 67, 98 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 27

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Index

Hickey, Margaret 143, 154 Holm, Lorens 22, 37, 70, 77, 128, 134, 154, 157 Holography 45 House I 123–126, 130 illusion 5, 26, 32, 39, 47, 51, 71, 73, 77, 85, 86, 103, 104, 125, 135, 156 imaginary order 25, 30, 31, 50, 67, 74, 78, 82, 112, 121–123, 131 infinity 12, 112, 115n10, 138, 151–154, 157 Itakura, Koji 102 Kennedy, John M. 65 Koeck, Richard 37–41 Kojève, Alexandre 27 Lacan, Jacques 3, 5–9, 27, 29–32, 57, 64, 66–75, 80, 83–85, 108, 113, 114, 127, 134, 139, 150, 157, 175, 193 Lahiji, Nadir 34, 131 Levi-Strauss, Claude 6, 79 Lotringer, Sylvère 41 Lynch, David 44 Magritte, Rene 103, 104, 122 Manetti, Antonio 81 mapping 3D 38–40 mediation 11, 12, 107, 109, 111, 113, 129 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 6, 8, 27, 28, 64, 120 Metalanguage 8, 73, 134, 167, 184 Metz, Christian 3, 48–50 Midjourney 193 Millbank Tower 39, 90 mirror stage 21, 27, 29–32, 47, 69, 181 misrecognition 30, 33, 51, 77, 113 montage (urban) 38 Moscone Convention Centre 1, 92, 93 Murphy, Douglas 131 Musser, Charles 22 objective illusion 157 objet petit a 83, 155 Oedipus complex 31 Olsberg, Nicholas 91 Orbison, Roy 44 order relation 137, 146, 148–151, 155, 156, 157

Oswald, Mathias 39 Oudart, Jean-Pierre 23, 24, 25, 110 Palazzo Rucellai 62, 71, 135 Pallasmaa, Juhani 8 Panofsky, Erwin 3, 59 Para-Site 11, 16, 90, 95–97, 99–101, 110, 127, 179 Parapraxis 27, 28 Pascal, Blaise 77 perception 28, 29, 36, 38, 40, 48, 49, 51, 64, 65, 79, 133, 149 phenomenology 8, 9, 26, 27 Plato 6, 105 Pluth, Ed 6 point of view 11, 16, 24, 25, 48, 52, 90, 95, 97, 98, 100, 104, 110, 114, 134, 141, 151, 154, 157, 179, 182 Proust, Marcel 3 reality effect 5, 15, 21, 22, 33, 41, 46, 57 reflexivity 148, 149 Renaissance 2, 3, 10, 46, 62, 64, 86 Representation 23, 26, 42, 45, 75, 78, 85, 87, 106, 111, 113, 122, 133, 149, 157, 188 rhetorical figure 118, 122–125 Rotman, Brian 105, 146 Roudinesco, Élisabeth 27, 29 Santa Maria Novella 63 Saussure, Ferdinard de 7, 74, 75, 76, 121 Scale 21, 22, 129, 146, 149, 151, 156, 167, 179, 188 Scolari, Massimo 192 self-reference 49, 76, 107, 133, 181, 186 semiotics 7, 75 Serlio, Sebastian 62 set theory 151, 152 Shobchack, Vivian 27, 33 shock effect 34, 35, 36 sign 73, 74, 75, 86 signified/signifier 25, 28, 31, 49, 74–77, 95, 108, 110, 112, 119, 123, 175, 185 Slow House 101–109, 113, 114, 130, 170, 177 Smith, Roberta 96, 97

Index 199 Soulages, Pierre 14 Strong, Richarld Charles 34–38, 47 Suture 23–25, 76, 110, 111, 114, 174 Teatro Olimpico 70, 71, 104, 132, 135 television screen 21, 38, 42, 102, 103, 169 telos 14, 191 Temple Island 137–141, 150 Transitivity 146, 148, 149, 155 trompe-l’oeil 62, 65, 71, 72 Tschumi, Bernard 1, 2, 180, 181

Venturi, Robert 76, 121, 122 Villa Farnesina 71, 132, 186 Virilio, Paul 2, 41–47, 58, 101, 103, 190, 192 Vitruvius 59 void 132, 137

Undecidability/undecidedness 13, 16, 91, 95, 123, 125, 186, 187

wall-screen 2, 46–47, 101 Wallon, Henri 29, 31 Wargo, Eric 103, 104 Webb, Michael 118, 137–146, 150–158, 184, 186 Winnebago tribe 79, 84, 125 Wittkower, Rudolf 59, 70, 71, 138 Woods, Lebbeus 193

vanishing point 33, 51, 64, 67, 71, 103, 114, 146, 150–158, 167 Veil 64, 66, 71, 73, 77, 83, 111, 112, 157, 178 Velásquez, Diego 141

Zeuxis and Parrhasios 66, 71, 73, 77, 108, 122, 156, 186 Žižek, Slavoj 6, 9, 23, 28, 29, 76, 78, 79, 92, 110, 149, 154, 164 Zupančič, Alenka 29, 76, 112