Fourteenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Architects are surface makers. Images are our products, inhabit our mental universes, represent our theoretical landscape. The rendered image, a catch-all term for computer images, virtual models, collages and other prefigurations, is architecture’s bottom-line product, and it is a slim, thin piece of paradox: we are ever better at creating these images, but in a visually overloaded world seem ever more easily fooled by the promises that such images entail. The result is a ‘TANTRIC URBANISM,’ an effortless implosion of interior, building and city, as planned, narrated and hyped by media, developers, architects and its users. These images of our interiors, buildings and hoods shine so brightly that their realized versions always disappoint. We excel in consuming the rendered reality in such a way that the places in which we live seem only remnants of a lesser reality. When we collide with the limits of this delusion, face to face with drywall and concrete, we ask the question: is the realized render more real than its unrealized counterpart? Did our two-dimensional dreams really wash away our three-dimensional needs? Have we rendered or are we being rendered? In this tantric study, our built environment is rediscovered as a realized rendering, and I present the tools developed in action research via performance and teaching projects that enable us to scratch or pierce that materialized, rendered surface.