Representation

Definition

Representation names the relationship between a sign, image, or form and what it stands for — a foundational question in art history, semiotics, and architectural theory. Gombrich analyzed pictorial representation as a process of schema-and-correction, neither pure mimesis nor pure convention. In architecture, representation takes multiple forms: the building as symbol (the duck), the building as sign-carrier (the decorated shed), the plan as representation of spatial order, and the drawing as representation of the yet-unbuilt. The relationship between architectural representation and built reality is a persistent site of theoretical tension — from the Renaissance treatise to parametric script.

Key Thinkers

• E. H. Gombrich — Art and Illusion; the psychology of pictorial representation.
• Charles Sanders Peirce — the symbol as conventional representation.
• Robert Venturi — architecture as representation through denotative and connotative symbolism.
• Alan Colquhoun — typology and representation in architectural form.
• Jean Baudrillard — representation named as one of "the two great unanalyzed forms" of the imaginary of political economy: "the analysis of the form representation (the status of the sign, of the language that directs all Western thought)… escaped Marx," and "This remarkable phantasm is confused with that of representation, in which man becomes his own signified for himself" (The Mirror of Production, Preface, pp. 18–20). See mirror-of-production.

Related Concepts

• perception — the interpretive process that makes representation meaningful.
• symbolism — conventionalized representation in architecture.
• semiotics — the study of sign systems and representation.
• typology — representation through formal precedent and type.
• The Mirror of Production — the figure pairing representation with production as the imaginary through which "the system of political economy comes to be reflected… and reproduced there as the determinant instance" (Preface, pp. 19–20).
• Determinant Instance — what the discourse of representation is reproduced as: the reflected system's claim to be the determining instance.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/venturi-1977-learning-from-las-vegas
• source-notes/hawthorne-2023-fifty-years-learning-from-las-vegas
• source-notes/jameson-1983-postmodernism-cultural-logic-late-capitalism
• Rethinking Histories of the Interior (Rice 2004/2006) — the constructivist claim from the primary text, with its full doubleness frame: "the interior's spatial and imagistic senses do not map directly onto each other. As we learn from Baudelaire, the imagistic sense of the interior is not simply transparent to its spatial sense. This presents problems for conventional ways in which the evidence of the interior is gathered to reconstruct and interpret historical conditions of domesticity" (p. 287); the interior "not simply spatial, but… equally an image-based phenomenon" (p. 285); the OED's birth-definition already doubling the room with its picture; the interior-view genre as the imagistic sense's dated history (born, flowered, dead within a century); and Praz as the transparency error's case — rendering "the idea of visual representation across many genres transparent to spatial conditions of domesticity," thereby authorizing "a transhistorical and essentialised view of the domestic interior." See doubleness, interior-view.
• (Re)constructing Histories (Hollis 2018) — Charles Rice's constructivist claim: "Visual representations of interiors are not simply transparent to spatial referents, even if such spatial referents exist; representations construct interiors on a two-dimensional surface as much as practices of decoration and furnishing construct interiors spatially" (Rice, p. 19); against Pile's survey, which presents photographs "as if they were transparent evidence of the interiors depicted." Hollis's corollary: architecture and the interior are themselves "systems of representation" — "Interior architecture exists as much in its own histories as in built artefacts."
• Quadrature (La Coe 2018) — the constructive power of representation taken to its architectural limit: Pozzo's quadrature is painting that constructs interior space, "extending interior space through the joining of the real and the fictitious" — representation not depicting an interior but completing one. See quadrature.
• Inside out (Webb 2018) — Rice's constructivist claim enacted by a painter-architect: Webb's Henley painting solidifies "the air within the cone" of vision and extracts it "like an ice core," so that "the contents of the cone become components of an interior space and the wall of the cone a window to the nothingness beyond" — a representation that does not depict an interior but manufactures one, extractable and sectionable.
• Inside Looking In: The Prospect of the Aspect (McClure & McClure 2018) — the experiential relocation of the looking-words: prospect (pro-, "forward") and aspect (ad-, "to, at") from specere, "to look" — the vocabulary of the looking traditions rebuilt as lived spatial condition rather than picture system. Where La Coe's and Webb's representations construct interiors, the McClures' prospect of the aspect is what remains when the looking is inhabited — "the looking at the looking from" — and their exemplar figures are named accordingly: "cones of vision, major and minor axis, and spatial continuum." See prospect-of-the-aspect, perspective.
• The waiting room (Hedges 2018) — the temporal limit of representation: "Plans, sections, and elevations are horizontal-vertical slices in a moment of time, a representation of space rather than time. What of the attempt to draw time…?" The waiting drawing answers as a marking of time ("A seized drawn moment is an attempt to possess time"; "Making the drawing becomes a way of seeing time; a spatializing of time"), and the working drawing gains a second representational function: "Sheet No. 24 can also be seen as a decorative surface that exudes an atmosphere that the viewer of the drawings is meant to experience… Drawings are atmosphere simulators, and even the most abstract lines produce sensuous, unpredictable effects" — representation not only constructing interiors (Rice, La Coe, Webb) but simulating their atmosphere and holding their time. See waiting-drawing.
• Technologies: The spatial agency of digital praxis (Carraher 2018) — the digital-representation paradox: 3D modeling, 4D simulation, and BIM allow "drawing types that are not dependent on Euclidean modes of seeing through Renaissance perspective, Cartesian grids, and descriptive geometry" — and yet, per Allen (quoted), "the same software often present their architectures within a perspectival frame and an orthographic coordinate system," so the techniques "too often produce exquisite objects that represent formal and material complexity, but that produce rather simple, cave-like interior space and undefined relationships to external conditions." The medium's own aphorism: William Mitchell's "architects 'drew what they could build, and built what they could draw'" — representation's productive power (cf. Rice, La Coe, Webb) doubled by its constraining power: what cannot be represented will not be built.
• Lines of Enquiry (Spankie 2018) — representation's limit case: an interior that conventional drawings cannot capture. Spankie's relocation thesis — Freud's consulting arrangement survived summer villas and the move to London because "the arrangement can be more accurately described through the relationship of its parts rather than by conventional design drawings"; "Referring to contemporary discussions on topological thinking, Freud's interior architecture is capable of being compatible with a number of extensive qualities, such as distance, area, or volume – and one could also add style – while retaining its function. For this reason, it can be picked up and recreated." The model for such representation is Freud's own mind-diagram: "Not directly representational, it refers to temporal sequence rather than spatial arrangement, separating out function instead of form" — with Freud's scaffolding caveat ("do not mistake the scaffolding for the building") and the chapter's closing challenge: an occupied interior that reveals "clues to the motivation and structure of the interior that are very different from the traditional design process, providing challenges in terms of representation." Against Rice's constructed interiors and La Coe's constructed illusions, Spankie poses the interior whose true drawing would be a diagram of functions and relations. See occupant-as-designer, psychoanalytic-setting.
• A pirouette on the orthographic hinge (Weinthal 2018) — representation's most institutionalized register audited for its temporal limit: orthographic projection as "the unifying form of representation" — "the fundamental drawing system in interior architectural design for grounding a project in true measurement" — whose rules are "distilled to fundamentals that are unarguable," and whose cost is the object interior design exists to design: "the drawing requires that the form being recorded hold still, as if being drawn for a still life. This works for static elements but is unaccepting of the temporary and fleeting. This matters not so much for architecture, but it matters in interior design, where the practice is responsible for designing the temporary and fleeting." The chapter's probes — the pirouette that "fracture[s]" the system "at approximately one inch above the plan view," Pavlova's stage-light, Callaghan & Palmer's space-shapes — are attempts to make the moving body representable ("the precursors to current motion capture technology"), with the licensed fiction of the dotted line as proof the system can change its rules ("a moment of disbelief is already inherent in the orthographic drawing"). Where Hedges answers drawing's time-limit with the waiting drawing (time marked by hand) and Spankie with the topological diagram (function instead of form), Weinthal answers with movement documentation — and with the demand that it enter "the professional construction document set." See orthographic-projection, temporality, light-tracing, space-shape.
• Toward the immaterial interior (Jacobus 2018) — representation displacing material: the graphic surface's new depth. "In projects like the Eberswalde Library by Herzog and de Meuron, the physical materiality of an exterior building surface disappears through a new graphic reading that hybridizes concrete and glass into a single unified envelope. Graphic surfaces have existed throughout the built environment's rich history; however, many contemporary examples seem to eliminate the physical material entirely in favor of the new depth of readability in the graphic itself… A multitude of examples like this exist in interior architecture, wherein a graphic field replaces what would otherwise be read as physical (and knowable) material." And the neoclassical interior as the representational interior's first appearance: "were but a picture of a former age… Their very physicality was denied by their lack of locality. More photograph than building." Where Rice's representations construct interiors and Pozzo's join truth and illusion, Jacobus's graphic field replaces the material the representation once stood before — representation not depicting a building but becoming its substance. See dematerialization, law-of-cladding, quadrature.
• Interiors as global constructs (Hadjiyanni 2018) — representation's constitutive register shifted from image to room: "Interiors can be positioned as what Stuart Hall calls 'a form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak'" (Hall 1990, p. 237, quoted) — the interior itself as the representation, its walls, colors, and motifs constituting the subjects who speak from it. Where every other entry here concerns representations of interiors (Rice's constructed images, Pozzo's quadrature, orthographic systems), Hadjiyanni's register makes the inhabited interior the representational medium: Mexican traditional "patterns, colors, and motifs that adorn interior walls become an opportunity for dialogues around the process by which a color palette came to be associated with Mexicans – and the implications of that association." See postcolonial-identity, global-constructs, cultural-constructivism.
• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — representation as the second great unanalyzed form of political economy's imaginary: "It is further clarified (despite the exegetical prowess of structuralist Marxists) that the analysis of the form representation (the status of the sign, of the language that directs all Western thought)… escaped Marx"; and "These are the two great unanalyzed forms of the imaginary of political economy that imposed their limits on him. The discourse of production and the discourse of representation are the mirror by which the system of political economy comes to be reflected in the imaginary and reproduced there as the determinant instance" (Preface, pp. 19–20). Representation is thus not a problem representation can solve: "This remarkable phantasm is confused with that of representation, in which man becomes his own signified for himself" (Preface, pp. 18–19) — the alternative being the symbolic, which does not represent (see symbolic-exchange). See mirror-of-production, determinant-instance.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).
• source-notes/drobnick-2006-volatile-architectures
• source-notes/macken-2018-documenting-interiority-inhabiting-duration

Open Questions

• How does digital modeling change architectural representation — from depiction to simulation? Carraher's chapter (via Allen) sharpens the question: digital tools promised non-perspectival drawing types, yet default to "a perspectival frame and an orthographic coordinate system" — is the cave-like interior a failure of imagination or of the software's inherited geometry?
• What is the relationship between typological representation and architectural autonomy?
• If representations construct interiors rather than record them (Rice), what follows for the evidence base of interior history — can a history of interiors ever be written "from" its images, or only against them?
• Rice's primary text adds the OED's doubleness: "interior" defined from birth as both the room ("esp. in reference to the artistic effect") and "a picture or representation of the inside of a building or room." Is representation therefore not a later problem for interior history but the interior's constitutive other half — and does the interior-view genre (born and dead within one century) mark the imagistic register's only period of explicit practice? See doubleness, interior-view.
• Pozzo's quadrature is representation that occupants inhabit and that their bodies traverse ("reveals and destroys" the effect): does the interior tradition's constructivist claim (Rice) already contain an embodied viewer — and does quadrature supply the missing bridge between representation and inhabitation?
• Webb's ice core makes the constructivist claim literal — the depicted volume extracted as a solid interior with a sectionable geometry. Is every perspectival representation already such an interior in potentia ("examined independently"), and what would it mean to build the extraction rather than only draw it?
• Weinthal's audit relocates the question from what representation constructs (Rice) to what it refuses: orthographic drawing "keeps the space clean and objective rather than muddy with the ephemeral shoes of people walking through it." Is representation's temporal exclusion a defect to be fixed by rule-change (her dotted-line/anamorphic programme), or the very marker of the architecture/interior-design boundary — architecture documents what holds still because architecture is what holds still?