Architectures of the Dirty Real: Projects of Affective Real-ism in Architectural and Landscape Culture
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2020
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| Filename | Description | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01front.pdf | contents and abstract | 369.55 kB | |||
| 02whole.pdf | thesis | 29.5 MB |
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NO FULL TEXT AVAILABLE. This thesis contains 3rd party copyright material. ----- This thesis examines the persistent, if largely obscured, discourse that has positioned architecture in relation to the ‘real’. ‘Realism’, ‘reality’ and ‘the real’ are terms that have all been used to articulate various positions within architectural culture. These discourses of ‘real-ism’ accelerated during the period of globalisation and after 9/11. At the same time, a parallel visual language has been employed alongside these discourses, and sometimes independent of them, that has similarly been marked by its own highly consistent codes for signifying ‘reality’ in relation to architectural and landscape architectural production. This thesis seeks to demonstrate how ‘real-isms’ in various forms have installed themselves as significant, albeit often unstated, conceptual and aesthetic codes within recent architectural culture. It begins with an examination of the foundational discourses of realism in the nineteenth century and the related visual media and aesthetic sensibilities developing alongside them, before moving on to key articulations in architectural texts and the architectural and landscape culture of images at vital moments across the twentieth century. Finally, it analyses the crescendo of discursive and visual real-isms in architectural and landscape culture around the turn of the twenty-first century. Beyond conceptual and aesthetic codes, the thesis makes the claim that the architectural ‘real-isms’ have also established affective codes – codes of collective yet subjective, psycho-emotional, supra-linguistic effects and responses; visceral resonances; bodily and experiential intensities – that have played a role in establishing many of the unstated practices and appearances of contemporary architectural and landscape culture, especially around the theme of rapid urban change. Ultimately, the project argues that tracing a history of the discursive and visual usages of real-isms in architectural culture positions us intellectually to engage more effectively with formulating positions on the fundamentally architectural premise that ‘everything’ is real (or natural or actual) 𝘢𝘯𝘥 everything is ‘constructed’, and that affective and aesthetic experience are inextricable from scientific and political ‘realities’ – entanglements at the root of some of the central conceptual problematics of our age.
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