QUT Digital Repository: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/

Holt-Damant, Kathi and Wyeld, Theodor G. (2005) Constructs of space : new ways of seeing co-mediated urban environments. In: Holt-Damant, Kathi and Sanders, Paul, (eds.) Proceeding of the AASA Conference : Drawing Together : Convergent Practises in Architectural Education. University of Queensland, Brisbane.

© Copyright 2005 University of Queensland and Kathi Holt-Damant and Theodor G. Wyeld

1

Drawing T ogether : C onvergent pract ises in arch i tec tura l educat ion

AASA 2005

Constructs of space: new ways of seeing co-mediated urban environments Kathi Holt-Damant + Theodor Wyeld University of Queensland

Theme: Urban Theory + Praxis Keywords: Urban space, co-mediated environments, railway corridors

Abstract: In keeping with the theme of the conference: ‘Drawing together’ this paper will discuss a short intensive collaboration between architecture and virtual environment students. The collaboration was a four-week segment of a semester-long architectural design studio where both groups of students explored urban environments through mixed-media and visual images. Complex spatial relationships were reappraised with particular attention given to public/urban space, railway corridors, stations and open space systems. Multimedia applications were used as a vehicle to enable students to gain an understanding of how people actually use public space over how we speculate they might use it. With an emphasis on these seemingly banal environments, students were encouraged to capture those visual images that distilled an experience of space. The architecture students produced a series of one-minute video clips which, when shown in sequence, built a comprehensive physical experience of the environment studied, while the Virtual Environment students concentrated on producing panoramas of the two station precincts. This paper will highlight some aspects of the collaborative process between two similar, but different, design disciplines.

2

Constructs of space: new ways of seeing co-mediated urban environments

Introduction

The Emerging Futures project was presented to AASA 2003 as an intersection of a pilot research project

and a design studio – beginning as a simple but critical collaboration between industry and academia.

Since then the Emerging Futures pilot has grown into a complex design research project funded by the

Australian Research Council.1 After several years of combining fragments of the research into design

studio projects, it became obvious that wider collaborations across discipline areas could be supported.

This year second and fourth year Urban Planning students from the School of Geography Planning and

Architecture, and third-year Virtual Environments (VE) students from the School of Information Technology

and Electrical Engineering were invited to collaborate with fourth year architecture students on a similar

type of design project.2

In keeping with the theme of the conference: ‘Drawing together’ this paper will discuss the short, intensive

collaboration between architecture and virtual environments students. The collaboration was quarantined

to a four-week segment of a semester-long design project. Students from each course conducted an

urban site analysis through visual images – still and moving. Students were encouraged to work as

individuals within larger group structures but did not have to compromise either their own grades or ideas

during the integration.

Project focus

The sites selected for the architectural project were centred on two key railway stations and their

respective corridor precincts: Roma Street and Park Road (Woolloongabba). Each station precinct has

potential significance in terms of transit-oriented development as outlined in South East Queensland’s new

‘Regional Plan 2005-2026’.3

The precincts presented complex gritty urban conditions that rewarded careful analysis and critical review.

Students were directed to explore public urban spaces, railway corridors, and the station buildings for any

visible spatial patterns. By emphasising the everyday, banal environments we normally take for granted,

students were encouraged to distill those visual images that captured an experience of space over a

‘picture’ of space. Multimedia applications were used as a vehicle to enable students to further understand

and evaluate how people actually use public space over how we speculate they might use it:

By [focussing on the] close ups of things around us, [or] by focussing on the hidden

details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious

guise of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the

3

necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an

immense and unexpected field of action…With the close-up, space expands; with

slow motion, movement is extended…4

Siegfried Kracauer, a contemporary of Benjamin, defined the reality of film as capturing a fleeting glimpse,

of a moment in time. He moved the film-set into the street, which became the space for theorising

modernity…through cinema’s ability to ‘record and reveal’5…where the small, unseen details of objects

within crowds, spaces in the city or people on the street were captured.6 Kracauer’s interest in the

‘surface reality’ of the material world, and a manipulative process of editing, enabled people to discover

their world in new ways.7

In parallel the architecture students also conducted a series of mapping exercises as a datum against

which to evaluate their observations.8 The comparison of both analyses (visual and mapping) sets up an

understanding of the city that cannot be glimpsed solely through planning policy, surveys, or aerial

photography.

Theory: constructs of space

Since any analysis of urban environments relies on an understanding of morphology, this project was

underpinned by two theories of space perception. The first, by August Schmarsow, whose early theory

from 1890s German aesthetic theory realigned architecture with early phenomenology, where the

individual subject (beholder) was emphasised in the overall construct of space.9 The second, by Bernard

Tschumi, who attempted to articulate the relationship between form and space in his text on the

‘architectural paradox’ of 1970.10

Schmarsow argued that architecture could not be understood except from within, and so distinguished

between the spatial idea and the spatial form of architecture. For Schmarsow, space was more than

shelter it was a ‘playroom’ (Spielraum) that it incorporated the tactile, mobile, and visual aspects of

space.11 Furthermore this idea of Raumgestalterin (creatress of space) was a composite idea that

combined the viewer’s ‘sense of space’ (Raumgefühl) with their own cultural ‘spatial imagination’

(Raumphantasie) and the object of ‘spatial creation’ (Raumgestaltung).12

Bernard Tschumi’s emphasis on the paradox of architecture suggests that architecture needed to be

understood (and therefore formalised) through both the physical conception (pyramid) as well as through

the spatial experience (labyrinth).13 In drawing out this distinction – between form and space, and

perception of space over place – raises a difficulty that many architects and students have in quantifying

space in any meaningful way. Philosopher, Elizabeth Grosz, proposes that:

4

We do not think of spaces but at best allow ourselves to utter ‘places’, in a gesture to localization. Space seems to resist this kind of pluralisation: it asserts itself as continuous, singular and infinite.14

Schmarsow’s earlier explanation of space as a composite entity provides a useful construct for

architects/students to translate the fusion of ideas in their complex urban images. Similarly, Elizabeth

Grosz’s favouring of ‘space’, over ‘place’, reinforces the alignment with phenomenology and resonance

with contemporary philosophers such as Michel de Certeau.15

De Certeau’s clear distinction between space and place explores everyday movement and experience in

space and time.16 De Certeau further describes a ‘narrated history’ as one that creates a ‘fictional’ or

unreal space.17 These types of fictional spaces are also presented to us in cinema; like history, they can

be real spaces with real events, but more often they are simply a ‘narrated history’ fabricated by the

director and cinematographer. Such narrated histories take place in fictional spaces that are constructed

for a particular effect. In the same way urban architecture may narrate its own histories through its

contamination with other discourses, such as philosophy, literature, linguistics, art, science, mathematics,

and more recently computer programs. The creation of fictional space in architecture, called ‘virtual’ here,

achieves distinction from the real space it is modelling. Space, in this context, is dependent on a

subjective experience where levels of perception vary between subjects, the time of day, and the rate of

occurrence (duration).

Praxis: videos

In the Practice of everday life, Michel De Certeau describes the many and varied daily trajectories that

people take going about the business. In doing so, he argues, their paths of movements through space

project an unseen text. Their responses to situations allow individual to make their mark on the urban

landscape regardless of the regulations imposed upon them – he distinguishes between strategical and

tactical trajectories.18 It is these invisible trajectories that the urban analysis is interested in revealing.

At this point the schism between theory and practice is narrowed, and the site of the studio becomes the

territory for exploration. Alex Selenitsch believes the image we make (or construct) is part of the process of

navigating patterns:

The images we make as artists, even the most minimal – especially the most minimal

– are complex, and although a work of art supports many simultaneous readings, this

is not the same thing as the endeavour to represent simultaneous states, or make

artworks which model this condition. In the end (or rather the beginning) it is a

question of navigating through writing, music, painting, film or architecture. All of

these realms have different physical constraints, appeal to different sensual orders,

5

and have specific techniques to bring the explorastion of the simultaneous: qualities

such as suspension, overlay, transparency, and absence.19

German architect, Heinrich De Fries, maintained that pictures, through cinema, become a series of spaces

that unfold in time these spaces, contained movement or action that was frozen in time.20 Working with

these ideas, the students extensively edited the still/moving images to produce short one-minute videos

that unveiled the urban condition in a new way, and highlighted how people actually use urban space.

Fig. 1. Brad Cornish: Interior of Roma Street Station, 2005, Still from video clip, University of Queensland, Brisbane. (Photo: Urban research collection, ARCH4200, University of Queensland).

Fig. 2. Christian Duell: Interior experience of South Bank Busway, 2004, Stills from video clip, University of Queensland, Brisbane. (Photo: Urban research collection, ARCH4200, University of Queensland).

Fig. 3. Wesley Kelder: Underpass at South Brisbane Station, 2004, Stills from video clip, University of Queensland, Brisbane. (Photo: Urban research collection, ARCH4200, University of Queensland).

Fig. 4. Julie Ann Harbord: Roma Street Station experience, 2005, Stills from video clip, University of Queensland, Brisbane. (Photo: Urban research collection, ARCH4200, University of Queensland).

Fig. 5. Andrew D’Occhio: Information area at Roma Street Station, 2005, Stills from video clip, University of Queensland, Brisbane. (Photo: Urban research collection, ARCH4200, University of Queensland).

6

Praxis: panoramas

In addition to the ‘moving image’ that the architecture students were working on, the VE students

introduced an enriched form of the panorama – a complex, but still, interactive image. Although the

concept of panoramas is not new, their role in design studios is usually quite minor, and often one of

collaging smaller images together. Nigel Westbrook’s research on the panorama of Constantinople by

Melchior Lorichs draws attention to the very early role that panoramas had in documenting urban

development:

We usually associate panoramic representation with the 19th century fascination with

the emerging industrialized metropolis, but the genre has a much longer history.

Leatherbarrow notes Alberti’s method for surveying a city…He thus (re)introduced

the survey, and a calculated relationship between horizon and topography, utilizing

an instrument of his own devising. This method of description was far from

neutral...and was to transform the very perception of reality.21

Theory: panorama process:

The VE students constructed several panoramas of each site. Into these complex images, smaller video

sequences were inserted. For the first time both still and moving images were viewed within a single file or

‘image’ as an interactive exhibit.

The panorama proved to be a useful device to knit together visual fragments as a seemingly continuous

space. Although in reality, these elements or fragments do not exist in isolation, but the panorama sets up

a reconstruction of the space that you can navigate at will:

• One is real;

• One is photographed;

• One is reconstructed which we navigate again.

Since we were more interested in de Certeau’s view that a space is only achieved once it is activated by

people, the panorama needed to portray many glimpses into frozen movement in space. This process is

different to the snapshot – firstly, because of the wide format and secondly, through the interface which

provides for a self-directed narrative/spatial experience.

Panorama Movie/Video joiner/bridge

Fig. 6.

7

Fig. 7. Sequential

Fig. 8. Labyrinthine

Fig. 6, 7 & 8. Theodor Wyeld: Panorama process, 2005, diagram, University of Queensland, Brisbane. (Photo: Urban research collection, ARCH4200, University of Queensland).

The students visited the site at different times to capture as many activities as possible. Two different

approaches emerged from this study: snapshot joined to make a whole; and the seamless panorama.

Both tell a different story about the producers and the way the space is perceived. In the first we see the

architectural elevation as urban experience and in the second we see space as a product of the

panoramic process itself. A subset of the elevation view is the sectional view. A view, which is in reality, is

impossible but exhibits an architectural extrapolation of the spaces they encountered. The elevational view

and the sectional view re-formatted as a panorama suggest a space-time journey projecting a view not

possible in reality. This study has demonstrated that there are different types of spatial experience. We

have only mentioned three but there are more.

Fig. 9. Eliza Morawska: Sectional Elevation panorama of Park Road Precinct, Woolloongabba, 2005, Photographic stills, University of Queensland, Brisbane. (Photo: Urban research collection, ARCH4200, University of Queensland).

8

Fig. 10. Tony Loong: Panorama of Park Road Station, Woolloongabba, 2005, Photographic stills, University of Queensland, Brisbane. (Photo: Urban research collection, ARCH4200, University of Queensland).

Fig. 11. Brad Cornish: Internal panorama of Roma Street Station, 2005, Still from video clip, University of Queensland, Brisbane. (Photo: Urban research collection, ARCH4200, University of Queensland).

Conclusion

When our perceptions about the world around us are altered by new ways of thinking we may experience

what can be described as, a paradigm shift – a perceptual transformation where familiar things are seen

differently. New paradigms force researchers to change their thinking. It is these changes in understanding

that permit new paradigms to emerge. While the exercise described here does not include a paradigm shift

as such, it does demonstrate a transition to a deeper understanding of a technology and its potential

application in a group setting. The outcomes were, nevertheless, profound enough for both participants

and teacher to transform prior understandings of what the technology could be used for and to become a

new, essential, component of the curriculum.

The aim here was to present some aspects of the collaborative process between two similar, but different,

design disciplines. In the first instance, this collaboration raises issues of boundary demarcation, and in

the second, what could be reasonably considered research through design. The issue of whether design

research could, or should, be considered equivalent research to the humanities or sciences was first

raised at the 2003 AASA conference in Melbourne.22 Li Veit-Brause had discovered in her research that a

bifurcation in methodological knowledge had occurred as early as the 1890s, that demonstrated:

…history or historical method…[had] tried to emulate the sciences with a shared

commitment to induction, objectivity, and impartiality…[and consequently how]

boundary demarcation between academic disciplines is a two-way reciprocal

process.23

9

Very usefully for design disciplines, Veit-Brause’s research suggests that our efforts in design research

could and should be argued according to different criteria, which avoids trying to emulate the sciences with

regards to ‘induction’, ‘objectivity’, and ‘impartiality’. This being possible, then a lively crossover between

disciplines should ensure that the ‘boundary demarcation’ becomes the respected, collaborative ‘two-way

reciprocal process’ she advocates.

1 The broad inter-disciplinary base of the project means that additional discipline areas can easily be supported. The ‘Emerging Futures Project’ is: a study of railway corridors, transit-oriented development, transport strategy and threat management to combat urban sprawl and congestion in SEQ. The project is funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), along with two Linkage partners: Queensland Rail and Queensland Transport (2005-2007). The research team comprises:

• Dr Kathi Holt-Damant School of Geography Planning and Architecture, UQ; • Professor Phil Charles, Centre for Transport Strategy, EPSA Faculty, UQ; • Dean, Dr Mark Wigley Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, New York; • Associate Professor Modjeh Baratloo School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, New York; • Dr Peter Chalk, RAND Corporation, Los Angeles.

2 4th year architecture: ARCH4200 http://www.gpa.uq.edu.au/courses/ARCH/4200/?ccode=ARCH4200 [last accessed, 06 December 2005]; Virtual Environments: IENV3305 http://www.uq.edu.au/study/course.html?course_code=IENV3305 [last accessed, 06 December 2005]. 3 South East Queensland Regional Plan 2005-2026, Brisbane: Queensland Government Office of Urban Management, June 2005. 4 Walter Benjamin, in Anthony Vidler, Warped space: art architecture and anxiety in modern culture, Cambridge [Mass.]: The MIT Press, 2000, p. 114. 5 Miriam Hansen in Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997 (1960), p. ix. 6 Miriam Hansen in Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. xvii. 7 Miriam Hansen in Kracauer, pp. xxix – xxx. 8 The method of drawn urban analysis was melded from three particular perspectives: Geoffrey Broadbent, Emerging concepts in urban space design, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990, pp. 79-86 & pp. 158-210; Mario Gandelsonas, The Urban Text, Cambridge [Mass.]: The MIT Press, 1991; and Roger Transik, Finding lost space: theories of urban design, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1986, pp. 97-123. 9 August Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung, in Harry Francis Mallgrave & Eleftherios Ikonomou [trans. and eds.], Empathy Form and Space, Problems in German Aesthetics 1873 - 1893, Santa Monica [LA]: The Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, 1994 (1893). 10 Bernard Tschumi, ‘The architectural paradox’, Architecture and Disjunction, Cambridge [Mass.]: The MIT Press, 1994, pp. 27-52. 11 Cornelis Van de Ven, Space in Architecture, the evolution of a new idea in the theory and history of the Modern Movements until 1930, Amsterdam: Van Gorcam Asen, 1980, p. 90. 12 Schmarsow, Empathy Form and Space, p. 287. 13 Bernard Tschumi, ‘The architectural paradox’, 1994. 14 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘The future of space: towards an architecture of invention’, Architecture from the outside, Cambridge [Mass.]: The MIT Press, 2001, p. 116. 15 While de Certeau’s definition of space expands French spatial theory of the 1960s and 1970s, it perhaps unintentionally aligns itself with German aesthetic theory and later German phenomenology. 16 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley [LA]: University of California Press, 1984, p. 117:

‘…I shall make a distinction between space (espace) and place (lieu) that delimits a field. A place is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of co-existence. A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it…in short, space is a practiced place.’

17 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 79. 18 Spatial decisions imposed by planning authorities De Certeau calls strategic and place-based; responses by individuals against what is imposed by regulations he considers tactical and time-specific. Refer to: De Certeau, Part III: Spatial Practices, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley [LA]: University of California Press, 1984, pp. 91-130. See also: Kathi Holt-Damant, ‘Co-Existing realities: spatial practices’, in Thomas Leeser, & Kathi Holt-Damant [eds.], The architecture of navigation, Melbourne [Vic.]: RMIT Publishing, 2001, pp. 42-48. 19 Alex Selenitsch, ‘The simultaneous through and through and through and’, in Leeser & Holt Damant [eds.], The architecture of navigation, p. 56. 20 Henrich De Fries, ‘Spatial organization in film’, 2002, R. Woodhouse, pp3-4. De Vries, H, ‘Raumgestaltung im Film’ (‘Spatial organization in film’) Wasmuths Monatshefte fur Baukunst, R Woodhouse [trans.], University of Queensland, 2002 (1920-1921), pp. 63-82. 21 Nigel Westbrook, ‘Viewing the other: the panorama of Constantinople by Melchior Lorichs’, Celebration, Proceedings of the 22nd Annual conference of SAHANZ, Napier [New Zealand]: SAHANZ 2005, p. 373. 22 Kathi Holt-Damant, ‘Emerging Futures: Brisbane’s railway infrastructure explored’, AASA 2003 Design Research Conference Proceedings, Melbourne: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/39710/20040510/www.arbld.unimelb.edu.au/events/conferences/aasa/papers/index-2.html [Last accessed 06 December 2005]. 23 Irmline Veit-Brause, ‘Scientists and the cultural politics of academic disciplines in late 19th century Germany: Emil Du Bois-Reymond and the controversy over the role of the cultural sciences’, History of the human sciences, 14, 4, London: SAGE Publications, November, 2001, p. 33.