The image of architecture and the architecture of images

Fuori salone Milano 2016 ArKstudio

The image of architecture and the architecture of images

The work and research of ArKstudio is fourmed around a design principle based on the idea that architectural design can be conceived and developed from the decoding of the design sub strata, which is constituted by what the contemporary visual culture has allowed to be defined “collective imagination”.

Such sub strata presents itself like an historic and cultural stratification, resulting therefore, by its very own nature, both different and substantial in every single architectural theme that has been developed and still to be developed.

Understanding the rhetorical value of the representation of a project, allows one to recognise its position amongst symbolic communicative interactions of which the physical world within which we move is constructed.

In the digital area, the methods of production and use of images are many and varied, and today, like in the game of Chinese boxes, an image will always lead back to other images arising from other sources, other periods, other cultures with different representation techniques. Our way of seeing reality and projects in the process of being realised, has become the complex resultant of an accumulation throughout history of all of these images; from prehistoric cave drawings to the digital image of today, many ‘geologic-imago’ layers compose our contemporary visual landscape.

The installation by ArKstudio at ACMA centre in Lambrate, tries to physically realise in a tenuous architectural space, this interpretation of the contemporary design culture. An “improvised”  and temporary exhibition of more than 1000 images taken from the visual social network Pinterest, using the tag …architecture representation…, paired with texts specifically written by well-known architects and philosophers including João Nunes e Michael Jakob, suggest a reading, absolutely not univocal, of the complex theme of collective imagination (filtered, or may be consolidated, from the use of current technologies and media) and of its frenetically changing influence on the conception, the performance and the physical construction of contemporary architectural design.

Bjorn Klingenberg ArKstudio 2016 ©

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