"Architecture of Images": An Investigation of Architectural Representations and the Visual Perception of Three-Dimensional Space

Abstract

At the end of the millennium, architecture faces diverse challenges. Its identity as a science and an art dealing with physical space needs to be redefined in the electronic era. The complexity of information space, which often takes over physical space in our daily lives, will broaden architecture's role-once well defined-in the shaping of the physical environment. Our sense of space and time in a place is not determined as much by the physical space we occupy as by the remote places connected to us by the web of communications. Telecommunications extend our existential space far beyond our physical space. Telephones and televisions are the most common devices of such sensual extension, removing the object of our perceptions from the house or street we occupy and bringing our ears and eyes to places thousands of miles distant from us [2]. Interwoven with these conditions is another phenomenon contributing to the transformation of traditional architecture: that of the reduction of architectural and urban space to a series of images. Today's city streets, buildings and homes are not merely a collection of sidewalks, walls, floors and roofs. In other words, they are more than the physical, threedimensional elements of which they are composed. The visual communications giving life to our cities and homes happen through light and images, both of them divorced from the solidity and three-dimensionality of the media traditionally used by architecture. Electric lights, billboards, liquidcrystal displays and neon signs in the urban space and TV and computer screens in domestic space are all legible expressions of the fragmentation of the three-dimensional solidity of our living environment, which loses its identity as a result of the ascendancy of two-dimensional images. The forms of these ephemeral architectures are often expressions of the