Deeply Superficial

Abstract

Through an exploration of the architectural aperture, this thesis seeks to abandon a representational understanding of the image and restore a more performative one. Architecture’s imageability – its capacity to create vivid and operative mental images – oscillates between two tendencies: the need to reflect a contemporary world view, and the desire to produce altogether new ways of seeing. Architecture’s history could be summarized as an endless cycle of the latter’s ossification into the former. In general, our recent paradigm is in a rut of representation. Whether we are championing the discipline’s political efficacy or acquiescing to the forces of capital, the architectural image is either pushed so far into the background as to be insignificant, or it is fetishized into an icon.

This thesis defines a performative image as one which engages the user in a conceptual flip from the experience of space to the perception of an image, where depth momentarily snaps into perceived flatness. By examining the architectural aperture and focusing it onto the quotidian aspects of our lives – collecting and collapsing the world into fragmentary and simultaneous images – Deeply Superficial seeks to blur the distinction between subject and object, and collapse the relationship between publicity and privacy.