The Reproduction of Ankara Apartmanları through Instagram: Digital Representations and Architectural Discourse

Verbal drawings, as a particular drawing category of drawings, are discussed in this paper about its history, qualities, and what kind of role they could play in the design communication of contemporary landscape architecture. The definition of verbal drawings arises from the observation and reading of Rupestrian art and its process in making drawings and paintings. Rupestrian art was the first human written communication prior to the emergence of words and spoken communication. For this reason, Rupestrian art drawings and paintings are not just images to be seen; above all, they are texts to be read. They are written drawings using pictograms, ideograms, and psycho-ideograms to compose images with a specific grammar and syntax. These written images have three qualities: a sense of immediacy, a sense of beauty, and a sense of lightness. Representing human activities in particular environments, Rupestrian art drawings are not only the first landscape representations but also the early representations of the act of mapping, opening a connection between the art of cartography and the art of verbal drawings. Using examples, this paper explains the importance of ancient and modern mapping arts in connection with the discourse of contemporary landscape architecture by demonstrating how the senses of immediacy, beauty, and lightness help contemporary verbal drawings compete with the neutral, beautiful, quickly produced and consumed digital representations nowadays. In the end, the text proposes a confrontation between Umberto Eco's concept of "open work" and verbal drawings — Verbal drawings might be intended more like "open frameworks" than "open works." It is a concept that considers verbal drawings able to accept new ideas for extending their meanings and significance throughout the design process.

Architectural representations do not merely realize the transmission of intervened information between the architect and his audience. Through the growing importance of representation and the use of digital means of expression, which is obviously met in contemporary architectural discourse, one can safely suggest that in certain cases the information is created rather than treated or consumed through the procedure of digital representation. The issue raised is of far greater range than just the replacement of traditional means of representation. One can already trace definite signs of a new communicative entity, profoundly based upon the use of digital means, alongside the classic body of architecture. This new essence is the result of architectural representation, in its autonomous interpretation, when it creates the meaning and the information that initially was assigned only to transmit. All these special conditions are more effectively reflected into a new concept, this of ‘high code architecture’. ‘High code architecture’ implies and presupposes the existence of an additional inner mechanism that creates it. The procedure of emancipation of the architectural representations is rather incomplete without the validity of an associating mechanism between the representation itself and the represented object. This phenomenon can be studied through a diagram of de-materialization and reinstallation of architecture. This diagram is materialized in three distinctive stages: 1. The architectural object is de-materialized through various representations and procurations via digital, figurative and print media to finally become an image. 2. The images, as representatives and/or substitutes of an architectural object, re-materialize and form a kind of architecture that is of ‘abstracted perception’ and free of theoretic and ideological weights. 3. An array of morphological types, ‘iconic pictures’ is created, that form the base of the so called ‘high code architecture’.