In the first part of the book, we looked at how designers write about movement and address it in their built work. This part circles back again to focus largely on the designer, emphasising the means employed to analyse and communicate the experience of movement, but, of course, any discussion of movement after the event requires some means of representation, which might include texts about walking and travel, written choreography or reels of film. Oral or written descriptions, sketches, projective drawing, models, film, computer rendering and animation: each provides the designer or witness with specific insights into the experience and communicates their intentions. Each form of representation is partial: it comes with limitations and favours a particular point of view. The bird’s-eye perspective provides a holistic overview that can be intuitively understood, whereas the plan sacrifices this intuitive understanding of space for consistency and precision in measurement. The creative use of tools for representation always requires an understanding of the medium, of its limitations and of the relation between the medium and the thing represented. Robin Evans was a keen observer of this difference between drawing and building:
I was soon struck by . . . the peculiar disadvantage under which architects labour, never working directly with the object of their thought, always working at it through some intervening medium, almost always the drawing, while painters and sculptors . . . all ended up working on the thing itself which, naturally, absorbed most of their attention and effort . . . The resulting displacement of effort and indirectness of access still seem to me to be distinguishing features of conventional architecture considered as a visual art.1
According to Evans, this indirectness of drawing is also its strength as a tool for design, the means by which the drawing ‘imparts significant properties to the thing it represents’.2 At the same time, the specific limitations of drawing or any other form of representation are an opportunity for confusion and misinterpretation. The distance between the representation and its object is particularly clear in the case of movement and the experience of movement. Unlike the building or the landscape, movement is not a static object: it exists only in the experience or in the effort of describing it. Description is a form of memory, a way of holding together the discrete moments involved in the experience of an artefact, a building or a landscape. The types of representation discussed in this book each present particular aspects of movement, retaining traces of essentially ephemeral experience.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the development of forms of drawing and modelling that use geometric sophistication to provide a precise, reproducible version of the building in three, or sometimes four, dimensions. The rise of descriptive geometry was a nineteenth-century phenomenon, providing a means of presenting a measured view of the building as a series of planes unfolded on to a surface. Descriptive geometry offered previously inaccessible precision in the geometric description of the future building or landscape and seemed to close the gap between the representation and its object:
Only after the 19th century and the systematization of drawing methods could the process of translation between drawing and building become fully transparent and reduced to an equation. The key transformation in the history of architectural drawing was the inception of descriptive geometry as the paradigmatic discipline for the builder, whether architect or engineer.3
As the techniques of understanding and communicating built form became more precise, the translation from representation to building became consistent and rule-based. The idea of equivalence between representation and reality, whether achieved by descriptive geometry or by the use of computer-aided drafting and modelling tools, is a phenomenon enabled through the development of a science concerned with communicating and analysing the future building. The perceived equivalence between the model and the thing modelled is particularly true of contemporary digital representation and implies tacit assumptions about the power and instrumentality of projective drawing. The computer has become a great translator and producer of representation. Capable of generating plan, section, elevation, sketch, perspective and animated fly-through from the same underlying 3D geometry, it blurs distinctions through the ease of generating what were formerly distinct techniques, kept separate through the crafts involved in their making. If the point of view of each type of representation is partial, concealing as much as it reveals, there is a benefit in reclaiming the differences that have always been understood as the basis of design as an art. Each of the articles in this part takes on some aspect of this task, by specifying and clarifying the opportunities afforded by oral description, the section, physical models, film and virtual reality, and simulations. It is a major point of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of man: that the medium itself conveys a message and determines to a large extent how the content it conveys is received.
The work of British artist Richard Long offers one example of the importance and limitations of representation for understanding and communicating movement. Long’s work has, for many years, focused on walking in the landscape, using multiple media to communi -cate aspects of walks taken by the artist. The walks are described using text, photographs, maps and gallery installations, all of which record them as a means of measuring and under -standing the landscape.4 We have the artist’s word for it that he in fact carried out all the walks presented, with the geometric precision implied in the maps and texts; and we have the artist’s photographs as a record of sculptures built along the way. This way of working allows the artist to describe actions whose result potentially persists over time, such as moving stones, or actions that are entirely ephemeral, such as the linear trace of repeated footsteps in the grass. In all cases though, the walk itself remains inaccessible to the viewer, who must rely on Long’s text, photographs, maps and installations to communicate the actions performed. If we compare our imaginings of Long’s walks with those poetically described by Robert Macfarlane in The Old Ways, to take a good recent example, we realise the extent to which these are different kinds of record, but also that the written narrative has lost none of its power, despite the alternatives.5
When it comes to buildings, perception tends to be influenced by the means of representation that was required for construction. However, practical building preceded the appearance of drawn or written documentation, and cultures still exist where oral communication is the primary means for transmitting information about particular buildings and the experience of inhabiting them. In Chapter 4.1, the oral building culture of the Dong people in South West China is described, and it makes a convenient bridge from the social theme of Part 3, because house-building involves a long series of rituals. These inscribe and reinscribe the house in local consciousness, and we see how even the building components are given special significance. For the purposes of Part 4, however, it shows the possibility of building as a social event without architects, and without a set of drawings done in advance, and how, therefore, it is thought about differently. The house is understood more as the result of a procedure, inevitably sequential, than as a predicted and completed entity, and it also becomes an expression of the varied roles and relationships of those involved in making it.
In Chapter 4.2, Kamni Gill looks at the ability of section drawings to communicate experience of movement in the landscape, in particular sequential sections drawn each in close proximity to the next. Sections immediately convey an understanding of scale in relation to the upright human form and, unlike the plan, explore a discrete moment in space and time, rather than expressing a complete overview of the whole. As Gill points out in her discussion of Enric Miralles’ drawings for the Igualada cemetery, the sequential section is used, not only to present a prescribed path as a sequence of stills, analogous to a film, but also to reveal the whole simultaneously, through subtle variation in each section. In the work of Mathur and da Cunha, the section is a way to describe boundaries that are always in flux, capturing the ambiguous nature of this landscape through drawing.
The physical model offers another means of presenting an interlinking series of spaces in terms of movement. Cornelia Tapparelli, in Chapter 4.3, looks at several recent buildings by Herzog & de Meuron and the role of physical models in imagining and communicating complex possibilities for movement. Unlike the drawing, physical models present the build -ing in three dimensions, but still require skill and imagination to explore the possibilities for movement. Concentrating on the models displayed in three monographic exhibitions, Tapparelli describes several distinct roles of the model in design for the experience of movement.
The medium of film appears to offer straightforward verisimilitude in its presentation of movement as captured by the camera. As described by Patrick Keiller in Chapter 4.4, the very early history of cinema was characterised by short films that presented the world as it lay before the camera, without narrative editing. This phenomenon was identified as the ‘cinema of attractions’ by Tom Gunning, who states that, ‘It is precisely this harnessing of visibility, the act of showing and exhibition which I feel that cinema before 1906 displayed most intensely’.6 Keiller cites the example of the ‘phantom ride’, a popular genre in the first decade of the twentieth century. The camera was attached to a moving vehicle such as a train, carriage or boat, continuously filming the passing scene without montage and without narrative. Keiller explained how he tries to catch something of this directness in his own films. His criticism of montage has to do with the way that, in conventional cinema, one is caught up, not only in the artificially produced narrative beloved of producers, but also in an entirely contrived filmic space, blending real locations with studio interiors and welding together actions shot weeks apart.
The last three chapters of Part 4 focus on computational media as tools for communicating and analysing movement. Architectural drafting and modelling software tends to mimic directly the procedures and conventions of hand drawing and modelling, concealing the unique contributions of the computer and creating an illusion of continuity between hand-drawing and digital techniques. Although CAD software and 3D modelling applications such as Rhinoceros are based in part on nineteenth-century conventions of projective geometry, they also introduce new computational methods for thinking about and working with the elements of architecture. The ability to model form using NURBS curves allows designers to model free-form geometry with a level of control that was impossible before the development of a mathematical description for this type of curve and a computer algorithm allowing the designer to work with the geometry in real time. Where computer programming is used to create bespoke software for and by designers, it is possible to go even further in pushing the boundaries of representation with methods specific to the computer.
In Chapter 4.5, Nishat Awan describes a project that documents the experience of migrant populations in London, using the computer as a tool for discovering relationships within complex networks. Using bespoke software, she analysed a series of walks in a London neighbourhood taken by members of its Kurdish population, describing movement of her subjects from the scale of the street to the geopolitical movements of migrant populations. These movements are described in terms of a network of relationships, a mathematical abstraction created in the computer that results in a new kind of visual representation. Such computational methods record the use of space and negotiation of relationships that traditional means of representation could not encompass, which implies the possibility of a dynamic understanding unrelated to traditional methods of recording architectural space in plans, sections, perspectives, etc.
In Chapter 4.6, Mark Meagher considers more broadly the contributions of the computer to the designer’s understanding and communication of movement. Like drawing, the digital model is a tool of understanding and an abstraction that allows work on the imagined future project. Unlike drawing, though, the software used to access and manipulate the digital model is usually designed to reduce the distinction between representation and building. Conventions of architectural animation based directly on film techniques have been used extensively to convey the visual experience of moving through a building or landscape and have been expanded through the practices of gaming. ‘Virtual reality’ offers a range of techniques for creating a sensory experience of digital worlds, and ‘augmented reality’, with data for the other senses, allows an increasingly compelling overlay of digital information about the physical world. Simulation underlies most of these techniques, providing computational tools that anticipate many aspects of the built reality. The most effective techniques in terms of understanding, though, are those that deliberately expose the complex artifice of computational representation and make its inner workings accessible to the designer.
Not infrequently, the digital model runs up against current limitations of simulation in terms of real-time representation of material properties in response to the environment. According to Phil Ayres in Chapter 4.7, one response to such limitations is to build a physical model that is reciprocally linked with its digital representation. The digital model, according to Ayres, is best understood through its links with a material model that embodies the physical properties and relationships of the digital representation, an idea that he calls ‘persistent modelling’. This concept of enhancing digital models through live feedback from a material model has been tested by Ayres in a series of installations that substitute messy reality for the solipsism of a purely simulation-based approach.
Together, these articles propose a future for communicating movement, one that recognises the unique difficulties of working with and understanding movement as a designer and highlights the particular affordances provided by each technique. Although the importance of digital tools cannot be ignored, their limitations need to be considered and offset by the introduction of new and traditional means of representation.
1 Evans 1997, p. 156.
2 Ibid., p. 189.
3 Pérez-Gómez, A., ‘The historical context of contemporary architectural representation’, in Ayres 2012, p. 21.
4 Long 1991.
5 Macfarlane 2012.
6 Gunning, T. (1986) The cinema of attraction: Early film, its spectator and the avant-garde, Wide Angle, vol. 8.3, no. 4, pp. 63–70.