architecture parallax : visual crisis

Hello my name is Victoria and I am a blind architect concerned with visual crisis, blindness as a critique of modernization of vision.

I used to wear very dark glasses to exaggerate my condition; nowadays I use clear glasses to look like an intellectual.

I can not recognize my self in the mirror, I can not recognize myself in architecture.

“How We See Straight Lines”. by John R. Platt Scientific American, June 1960

On the blink of an eye is the moment when one can recognize the completion of an idea’s.

I close my eyes to listen attentively.

My architecture is a mental image, a mental construction that relies between the description of my client and my experience of my senses.

Louis Kahn once said that light was the structure of his buildings and not the actual baring walls.

My gaze exists only through the simulacrum of architecture that has been described by someone else.

Architecture as interface addresses the relation between vision, blindness and invisibility which is the representation of the invisible.

To understand architecture dimensionality I must embrace its structure, I must listen to its hisses, its aromas and its echoes.

Fantasy is only a desire to see with your eyes closed.

The world of appearances has disappeared and I practice the inaccessible realities as vision is an instrument of blindness.

I can look directly at the sun since I’m already in absolute darkness. My life is a darkroom, I am a darkroom. I sense the sun by its thermal effects.

What I see is what you let me see.

Having a need for architecture constructs amounts to creating an internal mirror, in other words, a speculum mundi which expresses the collision of our attitude towards the reality that lies outside our body. The desire for images is consequently the work of our interior which consists of creating, based on each one of our valid points of view, a possible and acceptable object for our memory. We can only see what we know: there is no vision beyond my knowledge. The desire for images resides in the anticipation of our memory and in the optic instinct which seeks to appropriate the world's splendour - its light and darkness.

The act of vision is the ability to see details.

But if I am by a window looking out during the winter I could think that the day outside is warm only because the radiator is warm and it would shift my senses.

The creation of architecture renders the blind more "visible" to the seeing.

What you actually see is what you have actually preconceived.

Schools of photography, cinema, fine arts, design and architecture would be well-advised to establish forms of collaboration with the blind in order make the visual field more intelligible for those who see. In its illusory limitlessness, the experience of vision is structurally idiotic: the seeing are profoundly blind to their own blindness, and interaction with the physically blind is the natural antidote for this chronic condition. Few experiences are as visually enlightening as the description or architecture for, and with, a blind person.

If you thought I am blind, what is it that you can’t see.

The relations between art and architecture and blindness is a paradox, a confrontation between the sense of sight and our vision of the world.

Vision is an apparatus of authority.

An experience of vision is an absence of sight, an ocular incapacity. There is no straight line in nature and thus in architecture. It is only a cultural invention, cultural learned knowledge.

I depend on others to make architecture. They have to describe the landscape or whatever it is in front of me or what ever they whish to be built. Other people tell me what they see and I act accordingly. I have to listen to the physical gaze of those who serve as mediators between their insight and vision and my own inner reality.

Nothing around has changed only what you wish to see has changed.

Freud proposes that blindness is a symbolic substitute for castration. He also suggests that castration is the determining factor in subjective formation and the civilizing process as a whole. If so, the nature of all cultural formations in general can be gauged on the basis of the relation they maintain with blindness and the invisible. The question then is not what can be said about blindness from the various locations of culture, but rather what blindness has to say about such locations.

People who use their eyes to receive information about the world are called sighted. Sighted people are accustomed to viewing the world in visual terms. In many situations they will not be able to communicate orally and may resort to pointing or other gesturing. Subtle facial expressions may also be used to convey feelings in social situations.

Calmly prepare the sighted person to his or her surroundings by speaking slowly in a normal tone of voice.

Questions directed at the sighted person help focus attention back on the verbal rather then visual communication.

Sighted people cannot function well in low lighting conditions and are generally completely helpless in total darkness. Their homes are usually very brightly lit at great expense, as are business that cater to the sighted consumer.

People that can see are generally are afraid of darkness, architecture can be without light.

The theoretical measured space is the distance between what you are expected to see and what you are actually seeing.

To understand architecture you must collide with it.

19th century products and objects for the blind to use, mediate and extend their senses in the sighted architectural world, incorporate the use materiality in relationship to the senses of the body’s representation. Recent products and objects substitute the senses with voice and sound mediation, transforming the private space to a public space, and occupying silence.

VISUAL CRISIS

We are all blind, except the blind who can teach us again how to see, how to sustain attention.

We see too much. There is no end of seeing. There is too much to see. If we do nothing else we see. We live in a culture so filled with things to be seen that visibility is what determines the being or non-being of objects, experiences, identity. There is so much to see, and rarely an offer, hardly ever the offer of a space or a time for looking. Even less the offer of a space or time where one needn’t look at all, but rather.........

Alice Boa Vista a public relationship professional once lost her vision temporarily, she became blind for 7 months, out of a sudden, and then she regain her vision. High tension causes the optic nerves to contract and the pressure to build at the back of the eyes, causing physical blindness. A visual crisis.

In Ancient Classical Greece, eyesight was believed to form a screen. Reality moved behind the screen of the visible, flowed underneath the surface of appearances. The Blind, like Tiresius in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, were the ones who could in truth see.

Can you know architecture by perspective?

What if you are blind?

Depth of field?

What if you are blind?

What the points of reference are when there is no perspective or depth of field?

Light?

What if you are blind?

How does time pass when there is no light?

Can you know architecture except by colliding with it?

How do you see?

What do you see?

What do you expect to see?

What do you think you are seeing?

How to think, articulate, represent another ordering system not based on vision, not dependent upon this visual singularity, not based on sight as the singular verification of reality and not viewed from one point of view?

When a blind person says "I imagine", it means he or she too has an inner representation of external realities.

PARALLAX

The inquiry of the Parallax theorem originated within the collapsed depth of field of the metropolis of Sao Paulo. No grid, de-centralized planning, a crash of diverse architectural constructions and private interest. Here my senses were disoriented. My architectural historical references were toppled. My body, as it is traditionally conceptualized, perceived, represented -- became provisional, an epiphenomenon.

The depth of field collapsed, no distance, no projection, no past, no future.

How to think, articulate and represent another ordering system not based on a centralized viewing position, not based on the singular vanishing point?

The ancient methodology of parallax is a methodology for discourse, the model for apprehending the found phenomenon in space and time.

Point A and Point B are not the only architects conceiving of a space (a place). Point A and Point B are not the only people who enter, traverse, inhabit or exit this space. The Parallax as methodology called for more than a finite alphabet of Points. The Parallax as methodology envisioned an environment seen by Point 1 through Point N, which is to say by any and all people who might describe it. Any number of people add their testimony to the comprehension of the space. We can begin to imagine a process of collective intelligence. Collectivity of intelligence. Without hierarchy, the comprehension of the space is more than monocular, more than binocular, more…….in the midst of

If you can't see it, invent it.

alexander pilis  2004