Lecture date: 2011-03-25
‘Tell, Don’t Show’ at Symposium
Literal Transcription:
MARINA LATHOURI: Now, I would like to introduce our first speaker, Mario Carpo, who is an architectural historian, who has extensively written and researched the relationships between architectural theory, information technology, media, and technologies of architectural representation. Mario is currently professor at the Georgia institute of technology, and also Vincent Scully visiting professor of architectural history at Yale University. Before that, he was visiting professor at a number of European and American Universities, and also a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, at the Getty Research Institute, and at the Clark Art Institute. Mario was also head of the studies at the CCA, Montreal, between 2002 and 2005, he has written and published extensively, his most recent publication is ‘The Alphabet and the Algorithm’ (released last week), ‘Architecture in the Age of Printing’ (2001), a commentary on Leon Battista Alberti’s Descriptio Urbis Romae, and also he has written and published a number of essays on architectural representation, which have been published in various magazines, such as Perspectives, Projections and Design, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Log, Grey Room, Architecture D’Aujourd’hui, Arquitectura Viva, Architectural Design, and so on. The title of his talk is ‘Tell, Don’t Show: On Scripting and Scribing and the Almost Inevitable Demise of Digital Images.’
MARIO CARPO: Thank you, Marina for the generous introduction. I received a title—Writing and Critical Thinking in Architecture—and an assignment for this talk: to articulate the role of writing in the realm of contemporary architecture and culture. I would like to start from a particular, specific aspect of the matter, just a little thing, a technicality, almost, but one which I think it is crucial to our understanding of the present time and revelatory of the major shift, now underway, in the media at our disposal, to write about architecture. I would like to consider, briefly, the relationship, that we, architectural writers, entertain with architectural illustrations—the topic was already mentioned, of course—with the images that are meant to accompany our writings. To accompany, I say: that might not be the right word. Companionship implies some mutual affection, and any architectural writer knows that the relationship between our texts and images is often not so friendly. How many times are we asked by publishers, or editors, to eliminate pictures which we think we need, or to add images we do not need? And we will argue: our readers will never, ever need. Yet publishers or editors have the last word on this. How many times we would desperately need images, which we cannot publish because of the insurmountable amount of copyright issues. We all have—I presume—horror stories we could tell on this—I have some myself, which I should keep for the coffee break. Yet this tyranny of architectural images of the copyright orders is in historical terms only a recent development. There were no coffee table books in the Middle ages, and no illustrated magazines in Classical antiquity. Cicero’s wife, I think her name was Terentia, did not read Architectural Digest. In fact, from the beginning of historical times and until the sixteenth century, images of architecture were an absolute rarity. There were not many of them around, and no wonder those that did exist were so lousy, that there was not much to do with them anyway. For most of our collective past, until the Renaissance, architecture evidently existed, but architecture images did not. This may suggest that architecture can exist without the mediation of images. And, as architecture could do without images so often in the past, well, perhaps it could do without images again in the future. And, I would argue, it just might.
The modern power of images, including architectural images, started, only in the Renaissance. With the almost concommital invention of two cultural technologies, that seem to be made for one another. Geometrical perspective, as defined by Leon Battista Alberti, and printmaking. Around 1435, Alberti’s geometrical perspective defined perspectival images as the indexical trace left by beams or rays of light onto a physical surface, the picture plane. (Shows the very famous interpretation by Albrecht Dürer). Alberti’s book, of course, had no illustrations at all, which is a bit strange for a book which is about perspective. The technical term Alberti used in this context, was actually not a beam of light, but a rocket. In Alberti’s theory, visual beams are rockets that hit the picture plane, and when they do, the impact leaves a trace. (Shows another interpretation, a
