ABSTRACT
As makers of images, architects and artists know that seeing and imagining are intimately related. Although seeing concerns objects that are external to the mind and imagining pertains to objects inside the mind, both acts merge freely in the imaginal lives of artists and architects as they simultaneously set to sculpt their forms, shape their artistic preferences, and craft their artistic gaze. Architects and artists know that an image is more than what they see and more than what they imagine but rather the ways in which they see and imagine. They also know that between received images and making new images, their artistic gaze alternates between seeing as and seeing in, inheriting meanings and projecting meanings onto the world of images.2 Like Marguerite Yourcenar’s hero Wang Fo, who preferred the images of things to the things themselves, they may come to prefer a landscape veduta to the very natural landscape it depicts.3 They may come to prefer a portrait to the immediate perception of a personage. Their artistic subjectivity becomes a mediation between the real and their aesthetization of the real.
