Student Name: Sonia Flamberg
Faculty Advisor: Michael Meredith; Lucia Allais
Project Title: To the Point: Scanning and the Coordinated Surface
Subject Decription:
Drawing and the Sensory Apparatus
Updating architectural representation for the post-digital age
Princeton School of Architecture Thesis
Spring 2015
Faculty Advisor: Michael Young
Architects have always produced atmospheres and highly sensorial experiences like texture, color, temperature, and the registration of other figures and bodies in space. In fact, some have argued that these moods and effects are architecture’s primary tools for affecting change in the world--but they have been notoriously difficult for architects, both as objects of design and of discussion. There is a legacy of historical drawing methods that allow viewers to project themselves into represented spaces, be they far away or unbuilt. These techniques of representation require some if not equal commitment on the part of the viewing subject. Theories on the tactile line and the the link between haptic and visual understandings of space describe lines as traces of bodily gestures and projections of expanded fields of touch.
This project seeks to use computational tools to move beyond the photorealistic renderings that have been the hallmark of today’s digital paradigm thus far--that use tropes of the sublime to stun viewers with heavenly rays shining through clouds in shots taken from precarious precipices--and develop a visual repertoire that uses the sensory apparatus of the viewing subject as an instrument to produce haptic and kinaesthetic effects, activating the epidermal eye and transforming the subject from voyeur to voyageuse. It seeks to recuperate the tactile and its intrinsic link to the visual and other senses and move beyond the reading of symbols and referents to a more embodied sense of perceptive reception, attuned to moods, resonances, emanations, vibrations, and ambiances.
