The Euclidean display and overall design of a room inside the MIT museum, Cambridge. Personal archives, 2024
Inside the MIT museum, Cambridge. See how the free standing displays have the same conceptual design as the displays on the wall. Note the shape of the benches as well. Personal archives, 2024.
I have been thinking about current semiology in architectural spatiality. There is a new meaning based in our contemporary digital pre-conceptions, the different options of spatial relationships and representation techniques. We are becoming more skilled at abstracting the external stimuli, hence the qualities of the objects, since we have so much available information and optical devices to select, being the cell phone the most typical example that allows us to see the world filtered through cameras....
Spatial cognition depends on many factors: our culture, our experience, gender, age, social context, etc. I am particularly influenced by long years working on urban morphology with different mathematical software, but this time, I have also felt impressed by my recent visit to MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Harvard museums. The architectural arrangement of the MIT technological exhibition captured my attention as unusual -due to my unconscious expectation of a typical exhibit- . At least in one room, the objects were enclosed by cubes defined by linear lighting. Every cube or rectangular prism, could be seen as a cell. So I missed the interior object in order to recreate the spatiality of the room, or even the wall, since it became a 3D Euclidean construction at a short distance, so pure and strictly mathematical.
Harvard Museum of Natural History. See the many reflections on the glass displays. Personal archives. 2024.
Harvard Museum of Natural History. See the many reflections on the glass displays. Personal archives. 2024.
Of course my mind is ready to understand and digest the contemporary exhibit, but when I visited the Harvard Museum of Natural History, I was walking among glass cells, which is quite different from the other Natural Science museums. All of a sudden, the 3D cells were conforming space, and progressively, there was this feeling of being dehumanized, one is immersed in a multitude of reflections (our own and the animals'), like a in mirror maze; the archaeology becomes part of the fantasy.
Immersive Van Gogh, Los Angeles. Personal archives, 2021.
Immersive Van Gogh and the static experience. Los Angeles, personal archives, 2021.
Somehow, the historical composition in Harvard is a sort of prelude to the imaginary current immersive experiences, like Van Gogh's among so many others, with a substantial difference though, the cells and their contents are tangible, the person walking along the displays is lured by the animals, and the experience is dynamic, interactive, the space is re-created by the circulation towards a point of interest (a window, a staircase, an exit....), while the immersive art is realized with distant projections in an empty building, usually a warehouse, where people stand or sit still and the space is conceived by just one's mind perception of the moving images; the orientation is given by the location of isolated structural elements, like a staircase or columns.
Aerial view of Los Angeles Downtown and suburbs, California. Personal archive, 2024.
The spatial perception becomes completely different when we change the scale or the point of view.
I still remember the first time arriving to Los Angeles by plane, I was wondering where is Downtown? My first impression was the industrial flat areas with so little landscape, all of them rectangles. And a colleague of mine reminded me the great purpose of Los Angeles: the creation of movies in an extended city that sells lots of cars: in consequence, the industrial zoning is quite noticeable.
This year, I had the chance to enjoy the aerial views that I am sharing here, and finally I have seen Los Angeles from above and afar, all blue filtered by the plane window and the residential low areas with lots of dark green. I made the effort to zoom my cell phone camera as much as I could, but for every capture, my impression was that I was looking at a pixelated city. Without history or social input, I was observing the result of Zoning codes, a map created with pixels, quite monotonous, even in its third dimension, and monochrome. While the plane was flying to destine, the view was still a multitude of little cubes and prisms like a projection on the ground where I was not immersed at all. For me was another version of the museums cells experience.
Aerial view of Los Angeles Downtown on the left and suburbs with a huge industrial area, California. Personal archive, 2024.
Antoine Picon, in his article "Anxious Landscapes: From Ruin to Rust" (2000) * on a similar idea, adds the concept of distance and texture, as explained in the following excerpts:
"...the anxious character of many contemporary landscapes is the indication of profound transformations affecting the definition of the subject who contemplates them,..."
"....this is not the first time that the look that we cast over our surroundings has been modified. Each time, such a transformation proves inseparable from a mutation of the ideal image we project of ourselves."
".... one cannot help by be struck by the extent of the mutations that already affect the category of vision."
".... familiar forms seem to give way to luminous effects -scintillations, iridescence, reflections- as well as to textures often based upon contradictory impressions like smoothness, glossiness or graininess. Configurations, both immediately perceptible by the senses and more abstract, substitute themselves for the contours of the world that is familiar. Seen by satellite, Los Angeles doesn't look much different from a section of matter observed in a microscope. The importance of the dominion of lights and textures in the contemporary technological landscape could well originate from this transformation in the categories of vision . Such a transformation leads us to suspend, if only provisionally, questions such as those of "far" and "near." Who tells us that it's Los Angeles we're contemplating, instead of a piece of sidewalk?.... the contemporary urban landscape is organized according to textures that owe more to woven design than to form in a traditional sense."
* From Architectural Theory. Volume II. An Anthology from 1871-2005. Page 595. Massachusetts, 2010.
A partial detail of a tapestry exhibited at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It is similar to an aerial view of a residential neighborhood and a central district. Personal archives, 2024.