The main question of this research was to understand how future mid-rise massing(s) along the Queen East corridor will change our perception of the street. Human perception at the spectator level has been instrumentilized to investigate the additive process of building mid-rise skylines. Different states of being are portrayed here where red is the background in which the street is treated as an already painted canvas. What we see on exhibition here is mood, drama, personality and all other characteristics that when in effect, make an urban setting readable to the spectator The techniques used here are primarily based on alteration of photos taken from eye level to simulate everyday interactions with the city. So axonometric drawings and other massing studies became secondary to perspectival studies. This angle of framing inevitably captures subjective interpretations that can be overlooked in conventional urban studies.
The German Jewish art historian Erwin Panofsky uses the term “intimate effect” to describe the such setting: The position of the sight point, … strengthens the impression of a representation … a representation which owes to precisely this perspective arrangement a large part of its peculiarly 'intimate' effect. My investigation in these sets of images was an attempt to understand the language of these images in an abstract manner. I then compiled my findings into the final composite that we see here. By reducing the street to abstract images, in fact we’ll be able to translate the objective reality of the street into Index – let’s call it a fingerprint that we can identify the street with it – so the index became my design medium instead of objective data.There are many narratives that can be extracted from these images, but first I wanted to explore the elements that defined the index. Massing, landscape, and dynamic objects, they all contribute to the overall image. The position I’m taking here is one that of a sight point, strengthening the impression of representation determined not by the objective law of the architecture but by the subjective standpoint of the spectator.
There are two parallel design techniques that I derived from the process above: compilation of mass and compositions of façade elements. The former is modifying the image based on mass articulations as we can see in these exercises. The later is the regeneration of façade based of existing information and a system of variety. They are both reconstruction techniques of the Image where Image is treated as the source of information. Also, they both contribute to creating Narratives that could exist in the realm of memory. What we see here is a compilation of fragments of memory, things that we have access to in present time – not too far in the past and not too far into future. The relief and design of the city reveals itself to us through the lens of vision. Our perception of the context is purely a human experience that we try to capture and Index-ify by means of photography and/or other mediums available to us. The use of any medium will instantly process the experience of objective reality into the realm of human perception and memory, where a degree of alteration is not only inevitable, but necessary. This is where imagination comes into play to orchestrate these fragments of memory into a collective whole.
I observe the city as an alien explorer that has just discovered the ruins of ancient Rome. Every motif and sculpture have a story to tell and we should hear it before we delve into predetermined stylistic conclusions. A catastrophe has left us a vast vocabulary of artifacts to study and be fascinated with. Architects and urban planners are heirs to the language they find within those ruins. Dramatization of the context is not a conscious attempt, but rather a synthesis of memory and objective world. The language of the city will appear more clearly to us when context - which is the ever-decaying fabric of the city - is de-neutralized. Somewhat like understanding the catastrophic events of time and trying to build upon them. The city is no longer uninhibited or deserted when the reductive process of nature is reversed to an additive process of varying elements. The city will not be just inhabited but understood as a natural habitat that requires constant human intervention. This state of being is ever changing, which keeps the city from returning to nature.
