IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION A

Abstract

Architectural representation, over the past 500 years, has developed into a sophisticated visual language for exploring and communicating form, materiality, and spatial qualities. However, this visual emphasis results in an oversight which is becoming increasingly problematic in our era of resource depletion and climate crisis: that architecture is equally constituted of invisible energetic phenomena including conduction, radiation, evaporation, and convection, that are sensed through the skin rather than perceived through the eyes. This essay argues that architectural representation must expand its capacities to engage these invisible, energetic, tactile aspects of the built environment. The essay grounds this argument in recent neurological research and the writing of Rudolf Arnheim and Robin Evans. It establishes that architectural representation has a deep biological bias toward the visual rooted in how the human brain constructs models of the world through vision. It examines the historical privileging of the visual in architectural theory by contrasting Vitruvius’s thermally centered origins of architecture with Alberti’s emphasis on visual form. And then explores this tension in a more contemporary context presented by Luis Fernandez-Galiano, who discusses architecture as material and energetic organizations that are designed and experienced both quantitatively and qualitatively. Two hypotheses guide the research: first, that quantitative representations of energy dynamics could help architects design more energy-efficient buildings; and second, that qualitative representations of tactile experience could elevate thermal sensation to the status of an aesthetic design consideration. These hypotheses underpin an expanded pedagogical approach to architectural representation, demonstrated by example drawings, that renders the invisible visible.