Physical Spaces
Absence in Concept, Absence in Space: The Implications of Park and Public Space Renderings
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rasul Mowatt
As we conceive of public space, what is present in our conceptions? What is added and what is left out? The aim of this paper presentation is to question the nature and role in architectural park and public space renderings and how they may serve as an early sign or intent to gentrify and displace/replace one population with another. Spaces in urban locations have steadily found ways to erase people, particular people of color. Waves of Gentrification since the 1970s have resulted in dramatic demographic shifts in vibrant cultural destination in various cities with examples of displacement. New Urbanism has been an approach that has sought to make cities smaller with a focus on decreasing the need to commute from one location to another, but this has resulted in people of color not being as welcomed in those new urban centers through loitering laws (and “stop and frisk”). The latest is trend of cities is towards “Placemaking” that centers on urban planning initiatives on public spaces that seem to either erase histories of color or celebrate their contribution in absence of their presence. Humans have a strong sense of Place, especially feelings for the distinctiveness of particular places. Whether this meaning-inscribed Place is of the built, natural, or virtual environment, Places reflect our histories, beliefs, ideals, backgrounds, and policies. By examining the intersections of Race with other categories of difference, such as ethnicity, gender, economic class, sexual orientation, and ability, the intent here is to foster an ability to engage in self-reflection on how racial and ethnic differences/disparities have shaped social backgrounds, everyday lives, and even imagined futures in built, natural, and virtual environments. The above stated aim is to confront the pervasive nature of Race and ethnicity via prejudicial thoughts and discriminatory actions through the development and presentation of park and public space renderings that may have precipitated the erection of structural inequalities in society and environmental policies. Further through a visual analysis of those renderings can we begin to find ways that Place meanings can be confronted, reconciled, or even redeveloped to imagine a very different, conciliatory, and mutually positive interaction between categories of Race and “Otherings”. Thus, rather than focusing at length on any one racial and ethnic group, the presentations offers an analytical frameworks to promote comparative thoughts and discussions between nine selected cases of architectural renderings at different locations and Places of meaning in the built and natural environment.
The Objective Portrait of an Industrial Picturesque
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Peter Victor King
This photographic project examines the nature of the industrial landscape as a hidden urban condition. The hypothesis is there is an urbanism that is seldom seen, yet remains intricately part of our collective urban life. The idea is there exists an accelerated and invisible geography of an industrial frontier – an urban typology defined as an "infratecture." The scale and complexity of these landscapes force a convergence in architecture and infrastructure so that the two are no longer separate, but coalesce into an urban form defined by efficiency, pragmatism and industrial logic. It is an upstream urbanism – a hidden frontier that our relationship is subsumed and surrendered. It represents the ironic loss of the city and the primacy of the metropolis. The project uses the architectural elevation as a heuristic mechanism in rendering industrial objectivity. The architectural technique of orthographic projection adopts the panoramic mosaic as a mapping tool in the construction of the image. The resultant work conforms to orthographic principles, giving the impression of a telecentric projection, yet questions its relevance in the representation of objective reality. By its reduction into a dimensionally objective rendering, the form of the architectural image may not necessarily offer greater objectivity to the urbanscape, but instead raises insight to the limits of photographic representation.
The Art of Apocalypse: A Blakean Take on Some Contemporary Painting
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Russell Prather
I am a visual artist reflexively drawn to paradox: driven by a desire to blur boundaries—between painting and sculpture, the abstract and representational, subject and object. This talk, considering both my own and other artists’ work, attempts to explain why. My own pieces are visually volatile renderings of simple forms and ordinary objects made by painting multiple layers of transparent polyester film, aligned and suspended on rods from the ceiling. With the layers’ alignment constantly in flux, viewers must repeatedly reassess and reconfigure what they are perceiving: from certain angles the pieces appear solidly extended in space, from others flat and compressed, from yet others they seem to fold into space and disappear. The paper suggests this elusive and ambiguous physicality is “apocalyptic,” in a sense demonstrated in work by 18th-century poet/artist William Blake, for whom apocalypse is a psychological experience of both destruction and revelation. If the pieces seem two- or three-dimensional, abstract or figurative, ephemeral or enduring, coming together or coming apart, it is because they strive to confound viewers, by rendering the categories we use to make sense of things we see relatively useless. But ideally, from this bewilderment also develops a state of concentrated curiosity liberated in some measure from ingrained habits of looking and thinking. For Blake this kind of experience—paying careful attention to incomprehensible things—is both a “Wilderness,” and an “improvement of sensual enjoyment,” one that might even prove instructive and salutary beyond gallery and museum walls.
