on writing on architecture by stephanie white
Mark Dorrian, in Writing on the Image, Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation , investigates how we see certain phenomena through constructed temporal and political lenses. H ow we understand objects, architecture, landscape, cities, power and culture is generally similar; his case studies, which traverse a couple of centuries and much of the world, are each unique with particular complexities. The first essay, ‘The King in the City: the iconology of George IV in Edinburgh, 1822’ has all the lineaments of Dorrian’s project: the entry of George IV (German interloper, King of Scotland by some ghastly slippage of lineage) was staged for the city to see the King, and the King to see the city. It was like the management of one of today’s political campaigns: photo-ops, significant backgrounds, resonant sites. There were subsequent images – etchings, drawings and paintings of this event, its aspect and prospect where an object (a Hanoverian King) is dropped into a view ( the city of James I). The politicised landscape, celebratory, heroic, kilted, was artfully crafted. It could have been done by Lynton Crosby. This is the basic premise of all the subsequent essays – what we see is a function of where we are allowed to stand. From the London Eye and surveillance society, to Dubailand as the air- conditioned inheritor of More’s Utopia , to living in the shadow of any tall building, especially Stalin’s Ministry of Culture, the view down, the aerial view, whether by balloon, airplane, satellite or drone, abstracts civilisation to pattern where details are lost. It is at this omniscient scale decisions are made, at the detail scale is where we live our daily lives. Our very being becomes abstract to ourselves, scenography, quaint, at best of little import. Such views, chosen and crafted often by architecture itself, put us into a place not entirely of our own choosing or understanding. The essays themselves are beautifully written, each a rich education: after a wide-ranging discussion of the way that air, its purity or not, its capacity to hold water or not, its temperature, its ubiquity, has been the site of centuries of utopia-based procedures to manage population, weather and military advantage, the essay ‘Utopia on Ice: the sunny mountain ski-dome as an allegory of the future’ suddenly sharpens on the artificial ski hills of Dubai. For Dorrian, Dubailand is not a ridiculous experiment enabled by petrodollars and irresponsibility to climate change, but rather simply another example of how we feel we can inhabit this world armed with technology and the right to rebuild nature to suit our increasingly worried desires. Dubailand presents us with the image of how it can be done. These are all long essays, a form given at conferences and symposia and generally inaccessible to the wider community outside academia unless collected in a book, such as this one. Each essay stands alone, each addresses the significance of the position from which we view architecture and the city through the image, and how the image places us. The politics of representation reinforces the impossibility of the innocent image, and by extension, the innocence of architecture. And not necessarily partisan politics, but rather the cultural politics of class, power, technology and partisan ambition. The long-form essay gives space to discuss such narratives, for they are not simple, or easily parsed. Short essays such as those found in this journal (this very short and thus inadequate to the task essay, for example), are 1500-word
abstracts to a discussion perhaps not yet written, perhaps fully- formed; they merely signal a wider, more complex discourse. Mark Dorrian’s Writing on the Image is that discourse. It is also an example of the habit of thinking, the habit of thinking through writing, and the habit of writing itself. There is a venue: continual conferences and symposia throughout the world, there is the need to publish, and importantly, there is a length – these are the structures that facilitate thought. Without the venue and the need, would anyone write at all? Of course they would, we all have a great need to speak. How articulate or fluent we are however, is dependent on the armature within which we produce thought.
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In On Site review 31: mapping | photography, Robin Wilson wrote about the kinds of images used conventionally to represent architecture in the architectural press and the dismay and disarray that happens when images of architecture that come from a different photographic sensibility are used. Wilson’s essays have been collected in Image, Text, Architecture , reviewed in this issue on p37. Wilson’s work and that of the reviewer, Jon Astbury, are an extended critique of hoary, vital British architectural journals such as The Architect’s Journal and The Architectural Review . Using the armature of the page size, the layout grid, the fonts, the proportion of image to text, they both have subversively undermined the assumption that the traditional armature of the architecture journal is a neutral venue for the presentation of architecture. Astbury’s project in this issue on p26, ‘Forensic criticism of N Ratsby in The Architectural Review ’, presents a kind of writing about architecture for the establishment press that one can only dream of. Within the conventions of publishing for a professional readership – plans, sections, site, clean description, and cleanly descriptive photographs – he proposes an incomplete and subjective description of what, in this case, is a rather beautiful modernist extension to a Georgian terrace house, an architectural interloper, with the magazine critic as interloper to architecture as a site of human occupation. Forensic criticism: the critic as detective.
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Daniel Fairbrother writes, also in this issue (p32), about two books: White City, Black City by Sharon Rotbard and Hollow Land by Eyal Weizman. After writing Hollow Land , Weizman developed a forensic strategy whereby architecture and planning, and how they are enacted and written, can be subject to an evaluation that lays bare political and metaphorical frameworks that compromise any idea that architecture is some sort of neutral being. This reinforces Mark Dorrian’s thesis of political representation, particularly through the image, often in this globalised media landscape the only way architecture is received.
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