Beschreibung
des Entwurfs-programmes |
VISIBILITY AND ITS HIDDEN DIMENSIONS
If something catches the eye, what is next to it will be mechanically less looked at. For a light to appear, it has to emerge from the surrounding darkness. And what attracts the light often leaves its surroundings in shadow. Hence an implacable theorem: the visible is always born from the invisible.
Reflecting on visibility therefore leads us to first question invisibility. What do we not want to see? At home? Around ourselves? In the city? What are the reasons why visibility can be an annoyance? For reasons of comfort, modesty, social decency?
In the field of architecture and town planning, the visible and the invisible play a pas de deux at all scales. The first decision on the visible comes from the architect himself. Does he want his building to stand out? Is it different from its neighbours? Or on the contrary, does he want to blend in with its context? It also depends on the choice of the setting. The Haussmanian buildings were conscious of being part of a whole, ordered by a few strict rules of alignment. However, this did not prevent variations in the way the buildings were distinguished from one another.
What choice should be made in the visible? This is the very question of urban planning. What deserves to be visible? What should be made invisible in the city? Less noble programmes, sometimes deliberately hidden by infrastructure (to take an extreme example, waste disposal sites under motorway slip roads), or linked to secrecy or security (military zones). Contemporary cartography is thus full of blurred areas. But the blurring of Google Street View is also due to a basic rule of privacy, since it applies in detail to the number plates of cars and the faces of passers-by.
Visibility and movement
There are also territories where one does not stop, places devoted to transit and exchange (business and industrial zones, areas near railway stations or airports, etc.). From these places, we can only have a partial vision, but also a vision in movement, a dynamic vision. From then on, they call for an architecture that adapts itself to this new speed of vision, and which opens onto another imaginary world. The history of art is full of these regenerations: the impressionists who revealed a new Paris by painting the "hidden banks" of the capital on the outskirts of the stations; street-art which gives back a cyma value to the gable walls, elements a priori the least worthy of attention in architecture.
Visibility and intimacy
There is a "hidden dimension" (to use the title of Edward T. Hall's famous essay) that concerns our bubbles of intimacy, which vary according to times and cultures. These spheres remain the founding gauge of the human relationship with architecture. At what distance is a vis-à-vis acceptable? At what point does one start to see too much? Where is the boundary between proximity and voyeurism? Here we touch a balance, both intimate and social, between the visible and the invisible. What's more, we are living at a time when the apprehension of these "bubbles" is being altered by the health crisis.
Beyond crises, the flavour of architecture is also to invent subterfuges to palliate certain a priori embarrassing situations. Domestic invention is often haunted by the need to "see without being seen" (moucharabiehs, sunbreakers, blinds...). And on the more global scale of the building, the cladding and the envelope obviously also bring into play this relationship between the shown and the hidden. Finally, in the history of architecture, progress has often been associated with the notions of transparency and fluidity, even if this has led to numerous ambiguities. Fully glazed office buildings do they not induce an implicit "panoptic" type of surveillance (everyone can see everyone, including from the outside). But the nuances of the glass material are such that it is also possible to play with reflections or translucencies, which let the light through but deliberately filter the gaze.
Visibility and illusion
The gaze is, in any case, fallible and to take note of it is also to explore new areas of the visible. The art of trompe l'oeil works on certain productive ironies between painting and architecture (the frescoes in the Hall of Giants in the Té Palace in Mantua, a simulacrum of a building collapse, or closer to us, the "masking" of the Louvre Pyramid by J.R.). This art of camouflage does not always have artistic aims. Just think of the tarpaulins that hide the scaffolding on monuments that are being renovated, and on which the façade of the monument in question is drawn or photographed. Proof of the need to keep the facade of an emblematic building in the field of visibility (and even in the simulacrum mode)!
Visibility and new tools
The change in the way we look at things is also accompanied by an addiction to new tools. The advent of the digital image has had an unexpected consequence: in the cinema, in photography, on television, the nights are sharper! Contours are better defined. Humans seem to have the vision of a cat! While the silver image better restores the density of the night, this darkness is both compact and indistinct, endowed with an enveloping dimension, with the impression that one can get lost in it. A digital night simply makes you believe that you have "dimmed the light" of the day, not that day and night are two opposing reigns.
Let's go even further into the sub-light spectrum and technological innovation with thermal cameras. These reveal new images that owe as much to medical imaging (moving X-rays) as to the Gothic imagination (ghostly silhouettes and moving spectra). Here, secret and invisible, but equally structuring flows are made visible. The cartography becomes more complete.
This is yet another "hidden dimension", that of the structuring of matter. In this respect, the most convincing and poetic scientific and plastic demonstration remains that of the film by Charles and Ray Eames Powers of Ten in 1977. A square of one meter square, then a long zoom out on a square of ten meters square, then a hundred meters square, and so on. Until you reach the scale of the galaxy. End of the journey, then a long zoom in, which proceeds in the opposite direction, until delimiting fields of vision, inside the human body. A back and forth camera movement that goes from multiples of light years to the subdivisions of the angstrom. On arrival, the same astonishment of the gaze before the movement of the planets and that of the molecules. The choreographies of the infinitely large and the infinitely small echo each other, and the certainty that the human figure (the one in the center of the basic square of one meter square) pivots between the two.
This is what is at stake around these "hidden dimensions" of the visible (whether they are on an urban scale, an architectural scale, an intimate scale or even a corporeal scale): articulating the human vision with other visions. Knowing how to confront the contributions of technique while keeping the confidence of our own perception. Remaining aware of the potential of each perimeter of analysis and its observation tools. From there, visibility is no longer just a question of apprehension but also of design.
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