Animating the Archive

April 3, 2014–May 16, 2014
Matthew Allen MArch '10, curator

With advice from Preston Scott Cohen MArch `85, Gerald M. McCue Professor in Architecture and assistance by Sophia Panova

Representation has typically sought to remove the “look” of the technology that produced it. After all, it is usually irrelevant which software was used to create a plan or a rendering. But this representational scrubbing doesn’t always happen. Sometimes, whether deliberately or not, we are allowed a glimpse of the tools and techniques with which an image was produced. This is what usually happens when a representational medium is new and its use has not been perfected and routinized. Schools, as testbeds of new techniques, therefore often produce many such images. This exhibition makes visible some of the technical regimes at work in the last decade of student projects at the GSD. It shows how the limitations of production and mediation contribute positively to the design process and prop up particular myths of the designer.

On the back wall you will find all of the images collected between Fall 2001 and Spring 2011 as part of the end-of-semester upload of selected student work.

Key images from this period are being projected. They are organized by theme and ordered choronologically, presenting a set of narratives of the development of software-derived representational techniques. They are correlated with short analytical texts analyzing the impact of these technical regimes on the concepts and ideologies at work in student production.

Matthew Allen is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto