ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a speculative theory of architectural images. In today’s highly mediated visual landscape, physical buildings often appear only as fleeting iterations in a shifting sea of representations, whether in the algorithmic architectures of Greg Lynn, or in the carefully manipulated images of Philipp Schaerer’s Bildbauten series. While buildings have always been linked to their representations, and vice-versa, such chains of mediation have usually privileged the object for its concrete reality, relegating intermediary images to the role of documentation. And yet, architecture can never quite shake the lingering suspicion that it cares more about images than buildings. In spite of certain artisanal and phenomenological reactions, this has never seemed truer than today. Does an architecture defined by the images it produces endanger the agency of the physical objects around which it is supposed to be centered? On the contrary, this chapter argues that one of the fundamental roles of a building is the production of its representations, and that architecture’s greatest source of agency lies in its ability to generate multiple iterations from a single presence.
