Word & Image in
Architectural Representation

There is a problematic relationship between that of the printed word and it's companion images. If a picture is worth a thousand words,  then how many volumes could be filled by those cropped out of a photo? Similarly, words can be used with great fervor and tenacity, whole  crowds can become so in awe and entrenched in rhetoric that they forget their basest human merits. 

Words and images are not mutually exclusive, but their ethical combination should be a heavily considered and rigorously regarded  practice if their powerful potency is to be acknowledged and respected. The pairing of word and image must recognize their inherent  agencies. They must be transparent, allowing the reader access to the underlying intent of a work. With the journalist's mandate as their  guide, the word and image should be deployed as tools of the public, striving to enable their readership with the knowledge necessary to  make informed decisions, privy to all inherent intents and underlying agencies. 

Architecture and the aesthetics go hand in hand, used as propaganda to prey upon the eye's ability to forget its place as one of the many  human senses integral to experience. The eye's prioritization in western ontology has forced architectural practice to be subservient to  the  economizing principles of capitalist gains; relying on the aesthetic beauty of a project rather than it's ability to provide social good for it's  intended environment. The Radical, Anarchist, Utopian, Anti-aesthetes, in their attempt to resist the anesthetizing power of the aesthetic,  are cannibalized by the capitalist systems they wish to protest. The inevitable march of time and shifting zeitgeist subsumes their resistance,  repackaged into the anodyne, marketable resistance-kitsch for consumption of the emerging, 'alternative', consumer. 

The binaries found within the Capitalist/Utopian divide are inherently unproductive and work ultimately in favor of the Capitalist agenda. If  architecture wishes to regain it's principled practice, serving the public as intermediary between form and human experience, then it must  begin a process of a 'slow divestment.' As an act of architectural protest, the profession and it's built works can serve the public by it's  retreat into the foreground; giving its publics new forms and methods for living free of the economic and social spatial-sieve which bisects  our communities. Architecture can blend these divides, connecting previously disparate communities and creating a society where protest  is a practice that is common place, banal, everyday, and exhilaratingly mundane. 

Submission to / Architectural Adjacencies Studio Zine

Published / Fall 2013 

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