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Expanding the boundaries of architectural

representation

Pari Riahi

To cite this article: Pari Riahi (2017) Expanding the boundaries of architectural representation,
The Journal of Architecture, 22:5, 815-824, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2017.1351671

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Expanding the boundaries of
architectural representation
Pari Riahi
Introduction
In his seminal essay, Robin Evans reminds us that
drawing’s ‘distinctness from and unlikeness to the
things that it represented’ is not as paradoxical nor
as dissociative as it may seem, suggesting that the
‘displacement of effort’ and ‘the indirectness of
the access’ that are coupled with the act of
drawing in architecture define its character to a
great extent.1 Whilst drawings have been the main
medium of representation in architecture during
the past two centuries, other visual modes such as
photography, film and, most recently, digital media
have broadened the horizons of architectural rep-
resentation and shifted the boundaries of architec-
tural imagination, production and dissemination.
Extending Evans’s argument to include other rep-
resentational modes, the capacity of a distinct
medium to carry ideas from conception to realisation
persists as an integral part of architectural practice.2
These media share an internal and an external func-
tion. Internally, they serve as a means of exploration
and notation within the body of the architect’s prac-
tice. Externally, they become a medium for com-
munication to others; holding a record of the work
and designating its boundaries.
The selection of papers republished in the present
volume, which comprises the fourth in the special
anthology series of The Journal from the last
decade (2004–2013), span from the early nineteenth
century to the mid-twentieth century. They present a
diverse set of intentions, methods and visual and
# 2017 RIBA Enterprises
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University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
(Author’s e-mail address: priahi@umass.edu)
verbal evidence by architects and artists testing and
redefining the boundaries of architectural represen-
tation and architecture itself. Ranging in focus from
illustrations in newspapers, to dioramas, axonometric
drawings, bubble diagrams, photographs and critical
writings that influenced the process of image making
in architecture, the current compilation productively
sheds new light on representational devices, pro-
cesses and outcomes.
Staking the boundaries
Demonstrating the endurance of drawing in architec-
ture over the last two centuries, four of the selected
papers investigate the drawn medium, ranging from
anatomical sections in nineteenth-century Paris, to
the axonometric drawings of Dutch Modernism, to
perspectival representations of future cities to be
exhibited in dioramas, to bubble diagrams. Diana
Periton brings to our attention a specific type of
hybrid drawing: illustrations of Parisian apartments
that reveal overlapping sections, perspectives and
episodic narratives (JoA 9:3 2004). The drawings
compose fascinating mixed representations that
simultaneously inform and evoke by juxtaposing
architectural and social narratives of the city,
construction details and infrastructure with arrange-
ments of pictorial display. The resulting images
inform the viewer about the material world, yet also
reveal multiple and parallel narratives that unfold sim-
ultaneously, and straddle the general and the specific.
The tensions between ‘pictorial’ and ‘architec-
tural’ representation, always present in the work of
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architects who engaged with both realms, is the
focus of Richard Difford’s study of Le Corbusier’s
annex in the form of a rotunda to the L’Esprit
Nouveau pavilion, which contained his urban
schemes and two dioramas, each a hundred
square metres (JoA 14:3 2009).3 In these dioramas,
the perspectival views were set to be displayed on
curved surfaces and viewed from the centre of the
rotunda through large openings. The contrast
between Le Corbusier’s Purist paintings and the
aerial perspectives raises the question as to why
the architect chose two distinct modes of presen-
tation: the rational and the experimental. As appro-
priate to the urban scale, the diorama viewer was
carefully orchestrated as a distant and untrained
onlooker, whilst the expectations placed on the
viewing of Le Corbusier’s paintings demanded
more engaged and affective responses.
Parallel projection, as a device that allows for a
representation of the ‘actual space of an object’ as
qualified by Scolari,4 sets the tone for Desley Lus-
combe’s study of Gerrit Rietveld’s inventive use of
drawing in articulating his spatial concepts (JoA
18:1 2013). The elements of the Schroder House
are depicted with transparency and colour-coding
which articulate the functioning and transforma-
tional capacities of the house, and prioritise spatial
logic over the pictorial. The juxtaposition of furnish-
ing and spatial elements in the drawings, the use of
colour and the absence of a preferred viewpoint
come together in creating a representation that
meticulously reveals the spatial potential of the
house together with its daily functions. In fusing
the permanent and the temporal, and highlighting
a complex spatial, material and embodied reading
of the house and the life imagined in it, the architect
makes a compelling case for the drawing to engage
both internal and external realms, cohering inten-
tions, processes and reception of the work.
Defying a fixed gaze, Rietveld’s axonometric draw-
ings become representational structures through
which one may reimagine the different modalities
of light, movement and inhabitation.
Whilst orthographic, parallel and perspectival pro-
jections depict spatial relationships that exist in
potential or actual correlations with built artefacts,
other forms of drawing such as diagrams can reveal
the creative process. Searching for precursors to
architectural bubble diagrams, in another selected
paper Paul Emmons examines precedents in the
natural sciences and, in particular, biological chains
of being and their transformations (JoA 11:4 2006).
Situated in that context, architectural diagrams are
understood as part of Modernists’ concerted
attempts at understanding organisational and
systematic networks in more connected ways. More
particularly, in reminding us that the potency of the
diagram is an imaginative device and a powerful
metaphor, the research draws attention to the pro-
ductive gap between an abstract concept and its geo-
metric and programmatic interpretation. This reading
leads to the emergence of broader themes that
resonate with developments that go beyond the
bubble diagram and which may be profoundly rel-
evant to contemporary investigations in architecture.
Drawings compose a powerful articulation of the
formation and development of thoughts and inten-
tions in architecture. Photographs, on the other
hand, capture built space as subject and artefact.
Claire Zimmerman’s investigation of the photo-

graphs of early modern architecture describes the
radical effect of this medium on the work it docu-
mented and ongoing debates in the field of pho-
tography (JoA 9:3 2004). Studying the
photographs of the Tugendhat House, which
resulted from possible collaboration between the
photographer Rudolf de Sandalo and the architect
Mies Van der Rohe, Zimmerman offers insight into
an altered spatiality within this house. Here both
the tool (the wide-angled lens) and the outcome
(the photographs) jointly become active agents in
transforming the spatial modalities of the house.
The unique character of the photographs empha-
sises the space, fuses surfaces and negates the
depth and placement of architectural elements.5
They thereby arguably transform rather than faith-
fully represent the house, for here representational
tools and techniques alter the house’s phenomenal
and spatial characteristics, and exhibit the power
of the media over one’s imaginative comprehension
of a building.
Two of the articles focus on the theoretical under-
pinnings that in turn changed representational
methods and process. Laurant Stalder’s investigation
of Reyner Banham’s ‘New Brutalism’ essay brings to
focus the author’s intention of proposing a frame-
work within which contemporary architects might
articulate their differences with Modernism (JoA
13:3 2008). This new architecture’s attempt at
becoming a process of ‘image making’—aiming to
make a memorable work—transformed the con-
ception of form and the vocabulary that articulated
it. By focussing on topics such as topology and its
effect on circulation or infrastructure, Banham
demonstrated how the concept might affect not
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the overall picture of architectural form, but rather
the various transformations pertaining to those cat-
egories. This correlation between the scientific
understanding of organisms and their environment
resonated with Modern architectural expression.
The shift allowed architectural projects to move
from objects to systems, networks and organisms,
and therefore significantly transform the processes
of thinking about and representing architecture.
Whilst Banham’s work articulates a structure for
the protagonists of New Brutalism, Erich Mendel-
sohn’s grapplings with the concept of landscape,
as framed in Jeremy Kargon’s paper (JoA 18:1
2013), are seen as critical in his architectural work,
his observations (represented in photographs) and
his later writings. As such, Mendelsohn’s words,
photographs, sketches and projects all become
instrumental to an understanding of the built and
natural environment, articulating notions of an
‘architectural organism’ that belongs to a larger
entity. Here one is exposed to the architect’s shifting
attitude: exploiting photography, sketches and built
form to frame and articulate landscape, and to
realise spatial qualities not particularly well conveyed
through the media in which he had previously
heavily invested.
Drawing lines, framing views, forming
concepts
Through this temporal and representational breadth
of investigation, each of the selected papers shifts
our received understanding of architectural
representation across two centuries. If we return to
nineteenth-century France, Periton’s explication
forms a new historical conception of the popular
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Pari Riahi
sectional drawings found in illustrated newspapers,
guides and didactic histories of Paris.6 By invoking
Benjamin’s notion of panoramic literature as a simul-
taneous distant and close-up view, as well as
Balzac’s interest in looking at a distance to see the
whole while maintaining the ability to see up close,
Periton expands on the conceptual and visual
relationship between the overview and the detail
in these drawings. She suggests that, as the panora-
mic scope moves from the general to the specific,
section lines become universal cuts: one of any
number of possibilities that capture and explore
the space of the street. Pointing to the dual nature
of the section-perspective, Periton argues that the
drawings both draw the viewers in (through the per-
spective) and hold them back (through the section),
collapsing and extending the viewer’s distance from
the scene. Micro-narratives add one more layer,
further expanding the depth and elongating the
time-space continuum that is at work.
For Periton, these hybrid images reveal the
anatomy of the metropolis with ‘didactic intent’,
bestowing on them ‘mimetic and analytical poten-
tial’. The sections unfold to inform at two distinct
levels: narrating stories of the inhabitant’s lives and
telling the tale of the architecture that organises
them. Periton identifies these drawings as a series
of ‘codified, spatially articulated, panoramically
conceived’ representations. She argues that their
juxtaposed narratives of the interiorised domestic
life—unravelling simultaneously —bring together a
series of imagined visions for the metropolitan
dweller. Harnessing the generic and the particular
by way of the extended view and the detailed
interior, and tying it all together through micro-nar-
ratives, the drawings reveal part-descriptive and
part-suggestive representations of the city.
Kargon provides a new interpretation of Erich
Mendelsohn’s negotiations with landscape in the
context of the built and natural environment.7 He
argues that Mendelsohn reversed the romantic
relationship between landscape and the architect’s
vision by framing it as a primarily artificial, abstract
and geometrical element.8 Kargon suggests that
the increasing abstraction of spatial geometry and
greater technical or material determinism, were
both essential in engaging with Mendelsohn’s
interpretation of landscape as a source of the archi-
tect’s emotion. He notes that Mendelsohn’s
interpretation of mimesis shifted in the 1920s by
replacing the visual formal analogies with a systema-
tic approach to form, resulting in understanding the
building as an organism. In tracking Mendhelson’s
attitude towards landscape, Kargon relates this to
a general interest in the organic in Germany, and
refers to his exchanges with Frank Lloyd Wright on
the matter. He reminds us that for Der Ring archi-
tects the notion of the organic emanated from a
process by which form might be developed.
Kargon suggests that the concept of organisms
was extended from that of an individual architecture
to the complex setting of the urban landscape,
where function and dynamics found resonance
and gained relevance in the multi-cellular structure
of the city. He then refers to Mendesohn’s thinking
about the city in which a system of focal points
come to constitute the very fabric of space, where
the city of the future becomes an organic agglom-
eration of the most contrary elements, and buildings
become constituent elements of a spatial

continuum. Kargon suggests another shift in Men-
delsohn’s attitude towards the landscape that was
found in the domestic, in particular in designing
his own home which allowed him to ‘compose
with nature’. Emphasising the fact that on his visit
to Greece, at Ozenfant’s insistence, Mendlesohn
changed his attitude by becoming reluctant to
capture the landscape in either drawing or pho-
tography, Kargon explains that Mendelsohn’s later
acknowledgement of the natural environment’s reci-
procal effect on architecture leads to an alternative
grasp of a building’s relationship to its surroundings.
Richard Difford’s examination of the panoramic
city-scapes of the Plan Voisin and the Ville Contem-
poraine in the Pavillion de L’Esprit Nouveau reveals
another facet of representational complexity in Le
Corbusier’s urban projects.9 Difford suggests that
the dioramas were created to help visitors share Le
Corbusier’s vision; their type (dioramas and still-life
painting), placement and setting rendering them
particular visual experiences that were instrumental
in bringing his vision to life. By referring to Le Corbu-
sier’s intent in wanting to root the experience in the
‘mind, heart or the physiology of our sensation’,
Difford argues that the dioramas were used to
accentuate the visual experience and make it tangi-
ble. Since for Ozenfant and Le Corbusier painting
primarily gave order to sensation, Difford’s conten-
tion is that the viewer’s proximity to the still-life
paintings raised sensations other than those experi-
enced in gazing towards a distant horizon in the
case of the panoramic dioramas. Also, he suggests
that in separating the frame from the image in the
dioramas, Le Corbusier might have meant to
acknowledge the full extent of the vision, creating
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a layered set that takes into account all factors
from the material relief of the foreground to the
distant image.
Difford further adds that liberating the images
from arbitrary frames and fixed viewpoints aligns
with Le Corbusier’s and Ozenfant’s objections to
the conventional perspectival presentation,
especially since the views are set to encourage the
viewer to look not in, but out to the edge and
towards the distant scene. He contests that even
though the two modes of representation are so
different in form, they represent ‘opposite ends of
a gradually shifting scale extending from infinity to
close at hand’. This reveals the architect’s awareness
of the nature of vision and experience and his
attempt at responding to them, resulting in bringing
the visual experience to the fore and attempting to
harness the physiology of sensation.
Desley Luscombe’s article10 on the Schroder
House explores Gerrit Rietveld’s use of axonometric
technique as a vehicle for investigating complex
architectural concepts. Primarily focussed on two
of Rietveld’s drawings for the house,11 Luscombe
associates them with the ‘pseudo-architectural’
paintings created in collaboration with Theo van
Doesburg and Cornelius van Eesteren. She argues
that those drawings were particularly influenced by
their author’s interest in scientific explorations of
mathematical geometries of the natural space and
its perception, resulting in mathematically and scien-
tifically based abstract studies. By qualifying Riet-
veld’s drawings as ‘technical illustrations’,
Luscombe argues that they are fundamentally tech-
nical and didactic dissociations of the building from
the ground plane or its adjacent neighbours.
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Further, the visibility of the architectural elements
beyond the foreground, suggests a revelation of
the dynamics of a four-dimensional space: a space
that can be understood but not experienced. Lus-
combe observes that Rietveld’s juxtaposition of the
abstract geometrics of the space with the fitments
and furnishings, and the mathematical coordinates
to the curvilinear figurative representations, create
dualities in the drawings that make them more
poignant.12
In combining the ‘valued’ with ‘lesser valued’
elements, and ‘recognisable form’ with ‘abstract
geometrics’ she argues that Rietveld breaks with
the technical accuracy of axonometric drawing in
order to draw attention to the correspondence or
equivalency of all spatially determined elements in
architecture. Interrogating the visual components
of the drawings, Luscombe identifies Rietveld’s
use of dashed lines as a method to record potential
spatial changes as well as to place controls and
limits within the building’s formal composition.
She suggests that his use of colour to identify
similar functions and locations strikes a balance
between rationality and expressive spontaneity,
and grounds the house as a ‘living’ reality, where
colour and form are both compositional elements
and phenomena to be experienced. In short, Lus-
combe proposes that while Rietveld was influenced
by the formulations of Dada and de Stijl, and their
interest in scientific and mathematical discoveries,
through his axonometric drawings he channelled
complex and relational notions of spatiality,
material contingency, spontaneity and temporality
into his design and reconciled them through the
act of drawing.
Emmons searches the connections between
images of the body and the world by investigating
the early manifestation of bubble diagrams in archi-
tecture, discussing the influence of the functional
network on their development through the early
twentieth century.13 During that period the body
underwent a major transformation from a closed
entity, which protected itself against germs, to a
porous network of immunological reactions, a shift
that Emmons identifies as that of morphing from a
‘“hygienic fortress” through its ‘protective skin’ to
that of a ‘porous membrane’” responding to a
variety of infiltrations. He suggests that this meta-
morphosis in health is synchronous to that of the
buildings—transforming from fixed bodies to more
complex functional networks—by identifying flexi-
bility and interconnected systems as the root for
understanding both body and architecture. By study-
ing illustrations of the biological chain of being and
their shift to maps, Emmons argues that the trans-
formation implies moving from a single order to a
complex multiplicity of relationships, and coincided
with the change in room distribution from within a
unified body to constellations of rooms from which
to construct the architectural body.
He expands on one of Le Corbusier’s drawings
from 1929 as the earliest diagram of this sort and
goes on to consider Percy Nobbs’s writings of
1936. Emmons suggests that both architects share
the primary idea of the bubble diagram employed
in relation to biological theories where the diagram
with a singular chain—a straight axis to line up the
succeeding functions—is then rearranged for func-
tional connections. In referring to Le Corbusier’s
definition of the bubble diagram as ‘a continuous

line, whereupon the interplay of the necessary areas
and their proximities can be discerned’,14 Emmons
argues that Le Corbusier and his contemporaries
were committed to an architecture that was both
experimental and expressive, and points to the mys-
tical as a possible source of inspiration for Le Corbu-
sier’s architectural diagrams.
Laurent Stalder15 investigates the words of Reyner
Banham’s essay on ‘New Brutalism’, written in 1955,
to assess his interpretations of the methodology and
how these influenced new notions of image (infor-
mational, topological, etc.) in architecture. He
expands on Banham’s investigation of topology and
its ‘qualities of penetration, circulation and inside
and out’, arguing that while Banham’s use of top-
ology as an abstraction of the circulation system is
removed from its abstract mathematical definitions,
his reference to the sciences lends an objective basis
to architecture. He further suggests that the
concept of topology allowed central design issues
such as circulation or infrastructure to be explored
scientifically, independent from the overall
context.16 Stalder argues that, consequently,
Banham’s recourse to ‘topology’ or ‘connectivity’
aligned new systems of classification in natural
sciences with contemporary issues such as large-
scale prefabrication, complex programmes, technical
installation and appliances and the growth in traffic.
Stalder contends that this shift from the architec-
tural object to the architectural system, which was
rooted in the post-war period’s penchant for
diagrammatic illustration, is equally evident in archi-
tectural representations. He suggests that beyond
the claim to newness, the main intention was to
demonstrate that beyond technical, constructional
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or functional stipulation, architecture was also the
‘image’ or ‘symbolic expression’ of a society that
defined itself in scientific terms. Stalder concludes
that the debates on New Brutalism had no intention
of abandoning art or form, despite the terms used
such as formlessness or anti-art; rather, he argues
that the objective was to present an adequate
‘image’ for the new conditions of British post-war
society. Banham’s formulations may not have
resolved the historic oppositions between ‘core and
cladding, structure and form, truth and truthfulness’,
but they were instrumental in updating their relation-
ships and opening the way to further investigation.
Claire Zimmerman focusses on the visual impli-
cations of architectural photographs in Modernism
through investigating professional photographs of
Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat House, built in
1928–1930.17 Studying the ‘alternate spatiality’ of
the photographs, that were widely circulated to
present a particular image of the Modern, she
points to the use of wide-angle lenses and the trans-
formed dimensional appearance of the space. Zim-
merman notes that the Tugendhat images make
the house appear much lower and longer, distorting
the foreground and bringing elements in the middle
and background into apparently closer proximity to
one another. She argues that the published
images, which sacrificed the sensorial and phenom-
enal qualities of the space, primarily became visual
tropes to represent the project. She reminds us
that the disconnect between what is seen and
what is experienced in space, constantly works
against our actual knowledge of the function and
behaviour of the lens, and contributes to the
primacy of the picture over the space.
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By evoking cinematic movement and the charac-
teristics of the wide-angle lens, Zimmerman
suggests that our bodies could not possibly inhabit
the ‘deep space’ depicted in the photographs of
the house without being utterly transformed. This
new space, she suggests, is one that is ‘of the
surface of architectural representation’ and orig-
inates from a perspectival system, yet is inhabitable.
Zimmerman qualifies the space depicted by the
photographs as one that is empty and contains
only the most abstract of figures, devoid of the
objects of inhabitation, and tinted black, white and
grey, with a prominent foreground and a distant
density in the background. She argues that the
photographs were instrumental in enabling the
‘dreams of a Modernist abstract’ to enter the archi-
tectural realm by separating the space of perception
and that of the phenomenal experience.
Views to an expanded field
Architectural representations of all types have con-
tinuously moved between the status of artefacts
and the delineation of processes,18 while maintain-
ing their role as the intermediary between thought
and action in architecture. As such, the production
techniques of the media under investigation in this
special issue are directly linked to the production
of fragments, installations or buildings, and their
performance over time. Revisiting the papers pre-
sented in this volume is provocative since they
span a wide range of representational processes
prior to the development of digital tools. Over the
past few decades the ubiquity of the internet and
engagement of new digital platforms has coincided
with rapid transformations of representational
methods employed in the production and depiction
of architecture.19 Older tools and techniques have
arguably receded in current practice; however, as
these papers demonstrate, there is still a pressing
case for nuanced scholarly interrogation, both to
add new knowledge and to provide an historical
counterpoint from which to question the over-deter-
mined and injudicious renditions of architectural
ideas and artefacts today, and thus reclaim some
of the subtleties of the representational space that
Evans identified as crucial to the meaning, pro-
duction and reception of architecture.
Whether in examining different forms of drawing,
in devising the theoretical boundaries that would
support such endeavours or in depicting architec-
tural spaces through photography, the papers in
this anthology make a case for a multilayered
space of representation: one that is distinct from
the space of architecture and yet which affects and
reconstructs it continuously. Alberto Pérez-Gómez
suggests that ‘creativity’s playful deployment’ is
only enacted when architects are willing to engage
their personal imagination.20 Revealing the real
and imagined, the introverted and exposed, the
ephemeral and the permanent, the precise and the
poetic, through lines, points, colours, surfaces,
lenses and sentences, these papers collectively
allude to a profound and challenging investment in
representing architectural ideas.
Notes and references
1. R. Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and
Other Essays (London, Architectural Association Publi-
cations, 1997), p. 154.

2. Drawing, in its many forms, has systematically played
that role for architecture from the Renaissance
onward. However, other modes have permeated
the files of architecture over the course of the past
centuries.
3. Le Corbusier, Cité Frugès and Other Buildings and
Projects, 1923–1927, Le Corbusier Archives; 2,
volume 2 (New York, London, Garland Publishing,
Inc. and Fondation Le Corbusier, 1983), pp. 163–
204. Amongst the drawings for the Pavillion de
l’Esrit Nouveau, there are a few that show in detail
the setting for the dioramas.
4. M. Scolari, Oblique Drawing, A History of Anti-Perspec-
tive, Introduction by J. S. Ackerman (Cambridge, Mass.,
London, The MIT Press, 2012). In the ‘Elements for a
history of Axonometry’, Scolari argues that Leonardo’s
use of parallel projection in the Codex Coner was
based on an intentional use of parallel projection
over the perspectival one.
5. It is important to point to the contrast between the
Tugendhat photographs, which exclude recognisable
signs of inhabitation, and the Schroder House draw-
ings, which manifest traces of daily life and the func-
tioning of the house.
6. D. Periton, “The ‘Coupe Anatomique’: sections
through the nineteenth century Parisian apartment
block”, The JoA, 9, 3 (2004).
7. J. Kargon, “Critique of an ‘Artefactual’ landscape: Erich
Mendelsohn’s engagement with the built and natural
environment, 1919–1931”, The JoA, 18, 1 (2013)
8. Mendelsohn’s picture books, which contain his photo-
graphs of Russia, Europe and America, act as visual nar-
ratives reflecting on Europe’s architectural
development and present his views on architecture
and its surrounding environment.
9. R. Difford, ‘Infinite horizons: Le Corbusier, the Pavillon
de l’Esprit Nouveau dioramas and the science of visual
distance’, The JoA, 14, 3 (2009).
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10. D. Luscombe, ‘Illustrating architecture: the spatio-tem-
poral dimension of Gerrit Rietveld’s representations of
the Schroder House’, The JoA, 18, 1 (2013).
11. The primary drawing investigated is the inv.nr. 004 A059,
Rietveld Schröder Archive, Centraal Museum, Utrecht.
12. Luscombe further argues that those attributes set Riet-
veld’s work apart from that of other early modern
architects who adhered to rationalism and articulated
clear hierarchies of exterior/interior, structure/space,
formal composition/surface finishes.
13. P. Emmons, ‘Embodying networks: bubble diagrams
and the image of modern organicism’, The JoA, 11, 4
(2006).
14. Le Corbusier, CIAM-2 1929, The Radiant City, Pamel
Knight, Eleanor Levieux, and Derek Coltman, trls
(New York, Orion, 1967), p. 30.
15. L. Stalder, “‘New Brutalism’, ‘Topology’ and ‘Image’:
some remarks on the architectural debates in
England around 1950”, The JoA,13, 3 (2008).
16. Stalder refers to the work of D’arcy Thompson on
growth and form, with numerous plates illustrating
various morphological transformations, and argues
that he attempted to convey the relationship
between the forms of organisms and the environ-
mental forces that affect them and to define the
effect of those forms on the volume or the surface of
growing organisms.
17. Zimmerman reminds us that the Tugendhat house
coincided with Mies’s office design or construction of
the Esters and Lange Houses, The Fuchs addition to
the Perls House, the German Pavilion at Barcelona
and the Heneke House Addition.
18. M. Carpo, ‘The Demise of the Identical: Architectural
Standardization in the Age of Digital Reproductability’,
29 Sept 05, REFRESH. First International Conference on
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Expanding the boundaries of
architectural representation
Pari Riahi
programs/archives/2005/refresh/docs/conferences/Mar
io_Carpo.pdf
19. Mario Carpo and Antoine Picon both argue that
changes in technologies are not solely responsible for
the shift in architectural representation: M. Carpo,
Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing,
Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Archi-
tectural Theory (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press,
2001); A. Picon, Digital Culture in Architecture, An
introduction for Design Professionals (Basel, Birkhau-
ser, 2010), p. 9.
20. A. Pérez-Gómez, Built Upon Love Architectural
Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (Cambridge,
Mass., London, The MIT Press, 2006), p. 214.