SUN, LIGHT AND THE ARCHITECTURAL SPACE

READING ASSIGNMENT 2
ARCHITECTURE, REPRESENTATION AND THE CLIMATE

Student: Thomas Busch

Projections are the architect’s means to negotiate the gap between ideas and material: a series of evasions,
subterfuges and ruses through which the architect manages to transform reality by necessarily indirect means.

-Stan Allen

The representation it is located in between the two poles in which architecture moves: theory
and practice. On the one hand, it shows in the clearest way possible the abstract world of ideas and
how these develop into a project. When seeing any drawing of an architectural project we can glimpse
the points where the author puts the emphasis, and thus understand this individual point of view of
the world. On the other hand, there is a purely practical function, where representation functions as a
language to communicate the geometry, materiality and construction of a building; a constructive plan.
While there is no architecture without representation as Evans points out, one should also
consider the secondary condition of this, as explained by Allen:

“[…] the representation can be more or less accurate, but it will always be secondary, a shadowy simulation of
reality”.

For this reason, it is in the transfer between the abstract project to the concrete project (from
the sketch to the constructive plan) that the project enters its bigger state of crisis. The project idea
must be strong enough to resist the transfer to reality. This is why a good project is one that is able to
show in a synthesized manner the problems it propose; without complicating but also without over
simplifying the problem.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALLEN, Stan. 2008. Practice: Architecture, Technique & Representation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.