Page 68 - META

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ISSN 2309-0103 www.archidoct.net
Vol. 7 (2) / February 2020
to juxtapose a physical object and a painted one and merge the painted environment with the actual environment of Maser (Treviso). The realism of the frescos painted by Paolo Veronese in 1:1 scale create the illusion of the real window on the wall in a first level reading while in a sec- ond level this allows him to insert a mythological narrative in the paintings that creates a second level of thinking of the context, the villa, the owners and the history in which they wish to em- bed themselves. Contextual self-awareness is the name of the game here; Veronese and Palladio monitor the experience of the sala by opening it to the natural and the mental context by using architecture as a looking device.
Based on the above, in this essay we are suggesting that metarepresentations were not invent- ed in a particular historical period. They are a way of thinking on representations and they are distinguished as either content-aware metarepresentations, based on a value system (a way of a higher level thinking on representations), or context-aware metarepresentations that resemble the monitoring of a system (thinking on the way we use to represent objects, think- ing on how a representational system works ). Making these assumptions is very crucial in the meta-understanding of the theories and practices within architecture through the function of representation.
2 Architectural practice and representations
Based on the above, in this essay we are suggesting that metarepresentations were not invent- ed in a particular historical period. They are a way of thinking on representations and they are distinguished as either content-aware metarepresentations, based on a value system (a way of a higher level thinking on representations), or context-aware metarepresentations that resemble the monitoring of a system (thinking on the way we use to represent objects, think- ing on how a representational system works ). Making these assumptions is very crucial in the meta-understanding of the theories and practices within architecture through the function of representation.
The issue of representation and its relevance to architecture is crucially affecting architectural practice, especially in the digital and post-digital era when architectural representations as plans, sections, elevations, renderings, walkthroughs etc are not only produced by architects but by other practices too and commonly even by not specialized actors who have access to software that offer similar products. The use of CAD (Building Integrated Modeling especially) by different disciplines is blurring the line of demarcation of the roles of the various actors involved, and is calling for reinstating the social and professional role of the architect with regard to parame- ters such as originality, authorship and interiority. With a consciously reductionist approach to artistic nature of architecture, for the sake of the argument, architecture is here discussed as a science or rather as a field (Schumacher, 2016) that defines the role of the architect not only as the specialist that generates the preliminary or final drafts towards the built form, but also as the synthesizer and supervisor of inputs offered by various domains. This might be potentially prob- lematic as it seems like an “over-easy mixing of discourses” (Leach, 1997) but it is very common for architects to function both as a filter and as a mirror of society in translating different sourc- es of information into spatial qualities. This is also justified by the inclusiveness and openness, inherent in the timely (Spiridonidis, 2004) education of architects as a way to appreciate other disciplines’ specificities involved in the creation of the built environment. The effective mediating skills acquired, also attribute to architects a social superiority that confirms their role as versatile, hence diachronic as it has been recently reaffirmed in the digital turn. A turn that has radically
Meta(re)presentations // Antonis Moras