From Page to Place and Back Again
Listen again to Dr Meg Boulton's lecture entitled 'From Page to Place and Back Again'
We invariably associate Architecture with buildings, but it is noteworthy that we often encounter architecture through the medium of two dimensional representations as well as in three dimensional structures.
These two-dimensional buildings commonly act either as a supplement to a lived three dimensional structure, providing details of its hidden lives or inner workings, but frequently also allow us to experience a facet of a building which no longer exists, or was never built.
This lecture considers the imaginary spaces and fictive spaces presented by two dimensional drawings. These drawn structures often enable us to visualize, to experience, and encounter a space which would, in life, be 3 dimensions without being present in the structure itself. Two dimensional representations of architecture, whether plans, drawings or photographs, all serve to give an impression of the building they represent. It is possible to get a sense of the building through its representation on paper -- indeed sometimes it is possible to get more of a sense of the entirety of a building through its two dimensional representation than is possible from its architectural actuality.
This lecture examines the invisible traces and histories of buildings that more usually remain invisible; looking at invisible Cities and invisible architecture which do not exist in actuality moving from Late Antique churches, to lost medieval buildings, to Italo Calvino's fictive cities, and Thomas Demand's created spaces to ask how these images actualize space; raising questions about the nature of image and actuality, surface and plane.