ARQ 80 | Representations | Ediciones ARQ

ARQ-80-Ingles

English versions of the following articles are available online

Title: The Multiplicity of Al Mansur’s Baghdad
Author: Martino Tattara. Professor, Berlage Institute, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Abstract: Just like Sol Lewitt’s precise instructions, architecture reports and specifications can be a mighty representation resource: a design matrix described in rigorous words can warrantee vitality and long-life to a project and its guiding principles.
Keywords: urbanism – Irak, persian cities, history of urbanism, planning, survey
[read more…]

Title: Architecture as Propaganda. A Look at the History of Spanish Architecture
Author: Ana Portales. Professor, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain. / Maite Palomares. Professor, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain.
Abstract: The recent history of Spain shows how architectural images were powerful and convincing ideological tools: representation is a proper vehicle to disseminate ideas.
Keywords: architecture – Spain, drawing plans, representation, reconstruction, architecture and politics
[read more…]

Title: Cartographic Representation as the Production of Knowledge. Theoretic Reflections Regarding the Creation of the Map of Santiago in 1910
Author: Germán Hidalgo. Professor, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile. / José Rosas. Professor, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile. / Wren Strabucchi. Professor, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
Abstract: Can a mere drawing produce knowledge? The elaboration of a map that portraits an old city –one that doesn’t exist anymore– tells about that natural condition of architectural practice.
Keywords: urbanism – Chile, territory, Santiago, survey, urban landscape, plans
[read more…]

Editorial. Representations

In an attempt to compile, connect and publish a collection of perspectives on one of the architectonic discipline’s most important aspects – representation, this 80th edition of ARQ magazine laterally approaches an issue central to architecture: the relationship between time and space. There is a permanent tension in architectonic practice to move forward, project and anticipate: anticipate uses and habits which must be given a home, anticipate relationships between preexisting and new buildings, anticipate how a structure is to age well and anticipate by visualizing a building that is yet to exist. The most obvious of operations, like the creation of instructions for new buildings using drawings and texts, involves the ability to anticipate an upcoming reality.

Moving over to the other end of the timeline, representations can also be linked to retrospective motives that tend to appear on calmer, more deliberate fronts: review of and reflection on the professional exercise itself, the creation of a register based on already existing architecture, study and research of plans, drawings, models and photographs that others have left behind or the creation and selection of images capable of communicating the agenda that informs a construction.

Given this tension between future and past, and unable to resist the temptation to simplify, one could say that professional architects tend to come together around the project in anticipation, while academics tend to concentrate on what reflection and curatorship have collected regarding that which already exists. Still, ARQ’s editorial project wishes to affirm that architecture has the potential to reunite anticipation and retrospection; that, in fact, it can only exist at the point of overlap between these two forces.

Made for a client, for a builder, for public opinion, for a studied reader or one caught off guard, more or less pictorial, purely technical, bi-dimensional, tridimensional, even incorporating the latest animation and video techniques, representations occupy a critical place in the exchange and transfer processes that architecture stimulates. This edition is dedicated to representations and the impulses that they generate at both ends of the timeline spectrum.

The way in which something is represented directly indicates the cultural place from which architects considered the project. The result of this relationship, which reaches beyond the visual components, is not one bit innocent.