The Role of Modernity, Media and Communication in the Critical and Transformative Potential of the Everyday Space

Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine

Abstract

It is impossible to consider that architecture relies solely on its own systems of representation because space always comes through images. The history of architectural representation testifies that modern media of photography, film and TV are a relevant component of its historical evolution. It means that we trust camera as a model of a faithful reproduction of a reality and the possibility to represent this reality in our collective cinematic imagination. Likewise, presenting recorded spaces on screen means that film becomes a vast intellectual archive of the daily practice of urban space, the changing society and material culture. In this way, film presents evolving conceptions of architecture and urban spaces. Curiously, what happens in reverse is that the screenic environment has redesigned architecture, at least the way we think of architecture. Therefore, to talk about architecture is to talk about the screen as space-framing device in the media environment. This post-Cartesian space of mediated vision remains within the delimited bounds of a frame, on a screen. Starting from Beatriz Colomina’s discussion of ‘the history of the modern window as a history of communication’, the understanding of space will be problematized through the theoretical transfiguration of ‘window’ into the ‘screen’. I will deal the synthesis of the opposite modern subjectivities in the transition between inside and outside space. I act from the belief that these modes of communication will dissolve the sharp line of inhabited, practised and lived space, earlier elaborated by Lefebvre and Soja.