The Space Within. Notes on the Architectonics of the Mirror

Abstract

Since the Renaissance, perspective drawing has been established as the most ‘objective’ way to represent a ‘subjective’ point of view; it is precisely through the reflective surface of a mirror, as the space in which the self can be objectified, that such invention takes place. The apparent contradiction of an ‘objective subjectivity’—which most of modern science builds upon—can be properly investigated only if such space of ‘speculation’ is addressed as an excluded, invisible element of a triadic setting. The paper will then try to look at modern ‘rationality’ as a ‘projection’ arising from such exclusion and externalisation—to inspect the space of the mirror as an architectonics of information. It will do so by looking at a range of examples—from architecture to philosophy, art and literature—in which this third is consciously questioned, or where it is instead ‘invisibly’ at work. The outline of such a “transcendental topology” will then perhaps provide the tools to address in a novel way notions such as the one of learning: not as the accumulation of ‘objective data’, but rather as the ability to make a clean slate, a tabula rasa, while still ‘remembering’ (or ‘encrypting’) the dispositions of what is activelybeing forgotten. Furthermore, such insight might also help to consider digital contemporary techniques such as architectural rendering not in opposition to a so-called ‘analog’ method, but rather in the common convergenceof the two (Schmitt’s complexio oppositorum); the metaphorical reading of ‘computational space’ as a new kind of ‘mirror’ in which forms are formalised and encoded(we could perhaps say “in-formed”)might therefore be a way to cast a ‘bridge’ between the discreet and the continuous.