Sophia Journal

Interdisciplinary research reorienting the perceptions and understanding of Modern architecture and landscape heritage through an enriched documentary utilization, namely of photography and film

2024-01-14T15:09:51+00:00

“ [When] I am taking a photograph, I am conscious that I am constructing images rather
than taking snapshots. Since I do not take rapid photographs it is in this respect like
painting which takes a long time where you are very aware of what you are doing in the
process. Exposure is only the final act of making the image as a photograph.”¹

Thomas Struth

With this 8th Volume of Sophia Journal, we are continuing our third thematic cycle “Landscapes of Care” and our interest is to understand and explore through diverse visual practices, with a specific interest in photography and film, how the physical environment is understood and shaped by a diverse field of study, practices and cultures. This means, besides other things, to better understand the relationship between culture and space and to explore how culture, beliefs, behaviours, and practices, interact with and shape the physical environment of different territories and their architectures, cities and landscapes, as well as to acknowledge
contemporary discourses and usages of landscape concepts².
As we had already explained3, the concept of landscapes of care has increasingly been adopted by diverse areas of study, from health geography to the arts and architecture. It allows us to comprehend architecture, city and territory as living and inclusive organisms, constituted by multifaceted landscapes with complex social and organisational spatialities, as well as exploring the concepts of space and place for care within a transdisciplinary research environment.

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Types

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The pieces in this section share an interest in the typical and in the ways in which photography
can be used to provide evidence of that very typicality. Photography’s capacity to record
evidence has been central to its practice and theory from the outset, founded on the premise
(and the promise) of an indexical relationship between the thing recorded and the record made.
Of course that relationship could always be distorted, manipulated or fabricated by technical
means – with increasing ease and regularity in the digital era – but even such distortions would
only serve to point up the dominant assumption of fidelity, of the photograph simply recording
and conveying the facts. This is not to say, however, that such photographs would lack aesthetic
quality or conceptual interest. Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s seminal 1977 publication ‘Evidence’
enduringly demonstrated this through a careful selection and sequencing of photographs
culled from numerous government agencies and research institutions. Nominally objective, the
pictures were unfailingly strange, sometimes surreal, sometimes disturbing and often forlorn.
These were, as Sandra S. Phillips notes in her essay for the revised edition, ‘photographs made
for the purpose of record’, but by virtue of what they deemed worthy of recording, and how that
record was composed and framed, much was revealed, both about the unavoidably expressive
capacities of the medium and about the prevalence of scientific and technical development
which typified the era.¹

Photographic evidence operates in distinct but related ways in each of these four pieces.
There is a shared affirmation that the making of photographs serves to confer significance and
value on something hitherto overlooked, ignored or misunderstood. In Jasna Galjer’s carefully
considered essay, she traces how the Kravica Children’s Health Resort in Croatia - a striking
piece of socialist-era architecture by Rikard Marasovic – is being reframed in terms of its cultural
meaning and value through photographic and filmic projects. Despite, or perhaps because of,
being neglected and in disrepair, the complex demands to be incorporated into the collective
consciousness, to allow its past to be reconciled with a potential future. This is as much to do
with its overt formal properties as its layered history in use, both of which are captured in the
photographic and filmic projects which Galjer discusses.

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Places

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In this panel, focusing on place in terms of Landscapes of Care, Richard Wiliams, Sotiria Alexiadou with Vassilis Colonas, and Joao Gadelho Novais Tavares examine urban architectures through a shared aperture of film, thereby showing an engagement with the historical, spatial and ‘social production of space’.1 The temporal dimension of film opens up for analysis of the places of their individual studies in historical, real-time and fictitious dimensions, showing how visual images contribute to understandings of the care of places and peoples. Lars Rolfsted Mortensen’s photographs of dams in the Swiss Alps raise broader questions about place and our need for care of the landscape. The photographs present us with the ambivalence of sublime infrastructures that are both destructive and removable interventions in Alpine ecosystems but vital for green energy.

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Processes

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There is a big gap between the abstraction of an idea and its concrete implementation. This gap is filled with processes that imply the taking of actions to help achieve a tangible result, and there is a myriad of ways these actions can follow through. Photographic and filmic methodologies shape work through the processes of doing informed by gestures in the photographic and filmic operations on site and in the later editing phase¹ by which an understanding is changed into a story, an idea in a final visual and/or sequential form.

The need for good ideas due to the growing challenges presented by climate changes, imposes serious thinking around actual ways of doing relevant contributions to help ‘heal a broken world’. Photographic and filmic work processes can support that purpose embedding specific site experience methodologies open to the passage of time and the changes it encompasses associated with the landscape we have inherited. Exploring a place or a landscape and working with what is found through movement: walking, driving, flying, the editing of footage, the study of photographs, films, or selected material, reveal changes to specific landscapes and possible readings, interpretations, and understandings of those changes. Such actions and processes have a long tradition in artistic practices transecting land art, landscape architecture and environmental studies^.2

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Oases in the grid

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The essay investigates the Milanese street-front gardens of post-WWII middle-class housing. Spread around the city by hectic developers, these gardens reflect specific cultural- al, political and social conditions of Italy’s industrial capital during the economic miracle.

Street-facing gardens are an essential feature of modern middle-class condominiums. They reflected the modernist urban vision of a park-city and the Milanese tradition of the street facade; they encapsulate the bourgeois culture with its urge for representative decorum and the freedom of architectural experimentation; their image was used as a marketing tool in real estate advertisement but also as an argument in negotiation for the building licence. In Post-WWII Milan urban nature radically changed its connotation: from a hygienic device, it transformed into a status symbol, and the Milanese started to take care of gardens precisely because of their decorative importance. Even though they are private, they are designed to be looked at from the street, and therefore they make an important part of the everyday urban experience.

Beyond their speculative nature, the gardens of Milanese condominiums transformed the urban landscape, bringing density together with well-cared nature into the city streets. The essay explores this phenomenon through a series of distant and close-up views as if following a wandering gaze through the streets of the city.

Cover image: Condominium in Piazzale Bacone, arch. Gustavo and Vito Latis, 1968

The Infrastructural Sublime

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Dams in the Swiss Alps are at once engineering marvels, dramatic man-made artefacts, crucial nodes in far-reaching infrastructural systems, and destructive interventions in alpine ecosystems. The essay explores the contradictory nature of dams in the Swiss Alps through the author’s photographs and the experience of the infrastructural sublime. By focusing on the coming together of rockface and cast concrete shell within the images, the dams appear as distinct naturecultures interwoven with the flows and forces of the alpine landscape. Using the sublime as a lens to describe the aesthetic experience, the essay proposes the possibility of gaining environmental consciousness and humility of the vast impact of dams, through the encounter of the infrastructural sublime.

Cover image: Lars Rolfsted Mortensen, Dixence I from the series “Infra/Super/Structure”, 2017, 128 x 160cm inkjet print

Walking the Table: Caring-with landscape

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Walking the Table is an experimental project that develops a relationship of care, registering and becoming conscious of subtle changes within an Australian landscape. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s ideas of ‘making-with’1 and Tim Ingold’s concept of ‘thinking through making’2 this visual essay explores ideas of relational care within a rapidly altering landscape and how one may become an attentive participant, moving with a changing landscape as a practice of care. Understanding ‘landscape’ to be a layered entanglement of systems, materials and inhabitants (more-than-human and human) movements and projections that are influenced by the past and present, the role of the photographs and two forms of text is to weave three different layers of conversation that are relational and form an overall narrative.

Photography is used to capture the process of a dialogue emerging between the walker and the landscape, facilitated through the camera and the table when walking the table around the site. Landscape and care is an ever-evolving relationship that requires attentiveness and participation. When a relationship with a landscape is built over a prolonged period of time, revealed are the drastic differences in scales of temporal shifts that landscapes undergo, formulating an ongoing dialogue between the landscape and the inhabitant of that landscape.

Cover image: Shadow 11, Noticing an unusual shadow of a tree branch I looked up. What we humans botanically classify as an Ulmus species had a strange growth on its smaller branches. Unknown to me whether the tree has wing-bark disease or is a cork-winged Elm, after this discovery and unsure whether the Elm was sick or not, each time I passed by, I would check on the tree.

Unsettling in Norrland

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This research uses film, photography and projection to analyse the changing space of Northern Sweden (Norrland). This peripheral region is one of the most rapidly reconfiguring spaces in Europe, with on-going programmes of corporate and state investment to exploit space and natural resources for settlement and extraction.

The images are part of an archive of the moving of buildings, a common practice in the region. Buildings are moved in relation to changing environmental conditions and now urban land values and global property speculation. It is understood to be a distinct process of what David Harvey has described as “remaking capitalism’s geography”¹

Images analyse the material conditions, ideology and power in this frontier economy. The project considers an architecture of de-growth², challenging ideas of the expanding urbanisation of Norrland. As land values and modes of occupation change, buildings are displaced from the urban centre to increase occupation density through speculative investment. This process displaces social space and previous land formations. The city of Kiruna has been entirely displaced by expanding mine workings. The practice of relocation also has the capacity to shift large-scale historic architectures, as a distinct form of caretaking.

In this moment of new waves of investment in mining and forestry, of urbanisation of parts of the region, predicated on an underlying and largely uncontested agenda of ‘development’, the archive offers other conceptions of space and architectural production.

The images consider the wrenching of a house from its location and moving it to another location, documenting this process of detachment. It records the re-arrangements of space between land and building. Displacement is illuminated through projections to unsettle, by superimposing architectures onto previous conditions. Keywords: Unsettling, de-growth, relocation, house-moving, displacement.

Cover image: Robin Serjeant, “Midwinter projection inside the house.”, Degernäs, December 2021, Film stills

Changing the Image: Photographic Investigations on the Anonymous Modern in Aachen, Germany 1970-1989

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In the 1970s and 1980s a certain kind of anonymous architecture emerged in West German cities of the former Bonn Republic which is currently confronted with the risk of demolition, stemming mainly from the lack of recognition and care. These buildings have played a significant role in shaping the character of today’s typical West German cities, thus holding a crucial place in the identity of these urban and suburban areas. Therefore, this paper focuses on the concept of photography as a visual preservation method, using the city of Aachen as a representative example of an average-sized West German city. The objective is to enhance the appreciation of this neglected cultural heritage, both in terms of sustainable urban planning and potential inclusion in the canon of architectural history.

Ways of seeing architecture and landscape in the voids of presence

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The article examines the multi-layered roles of photography and film in “cultural translation,” representing architecture and landscape as a mediated place of conflicting visions, meanings and experiences. Taking the concept of the “production of space” as a starting point, it aims to contextualise the mediatory practices of photography and film by means of analysing the case study of a multifunctional building – the Krvavica Children’s Health Resort – designed in the 1960s by Rikard Marasović on the Adriatic coast of Croatia (formerly Yugoslavia). Focusing on an analysis of three paradigmatic examples of visual practices, the photographic series by Wolfgang Thaler (2011), the episode Mysterious Object in the Pine Forest filmed as part of the documentary series Slumbering Concrete (2016), and the experimental film A Record of Landscape without Prehistory by the artistic duo Doplgenger (2020), the article explores how photography and film communicate quality, in particular how mediated representations (re)create current interpretation and understanding of the intertwined heritage of modern architecture and landscape. Examining aspects of recording the site from different perspectives, a series of questions arise when addressing the issue of space, focused on its role in reshaping meanings, memories, emotions and experiences, narrating not only what architecture and landscape are but also what they could become and how they might be constituted in the context of different cultural identities.

Other Interpretations on Tower H

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The essay ‘Other Interpretations on Tower H’ is the result of a keen interest in exploring the multiple interpretative possibilities concerning a specific abandoned residential building in Rio’s Barra da Tijuca district. Tower H was part of modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer’s ‘Centro da Barra’ project (1969), developed in this up-and-coming neighbourhood at that time. The research for this text began in 2021, while the tower was under structural inspection. As a result of it, I identified ‘ambiguous’ and ‘open’ aspects of the building that relate to Ignasi de Solà- Morales’ terrain vague concept. The recent demolition of the tower’s sealing surface and the subsequent excavation of a landfilled area next to the tower have changed the city’s perception and memory fluxes of the building: from the past to the present; from closed to exposed interiors; from covered to excavated landfilled sand that was buried since the tower construction. All of this brings back memories of the neighbourhood’s landscape not only during the presence of this imposing building but also prior to its existence. A photographic experiment promoted a tactical experience inside this enigmatic architectural object. Additionally, it analysed displacement operations from the last two years, allowing new interpretations on this landmark.

São Paulo’s Minhocão on Film

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This paper concerns the cinematic representation of São Paulo’s Elevado João Goulart, a 3.5km elevated expressway close to the historic centre of the city, popularly known as the Minhocão. Built during the boom period of Brazil’s dictatorship, the Minhocão opened to traffic in January 1971. Controversial at the beginning of its existence, it has been partially rehabilitated, a process in which film has been important. The paper describes three general modes of the Minhocão’s depiction on film: in the first it represents a generalised fear of the modern city, in the second it is a normal part of the landscape, and in the third it is a form of aesthetic occupation. Key films discussed include Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), directed by Hector Babenco (1985) and the documentary Elevado 3.5 (Maíra Bühler, Paulo Pastorelo and João Sodré 2006). The paper responds to Sophia’s Landscapes of Care theme by showing how over time film can, over time, help rehabilitate seemingly irredeemable infrastructure.

Unclaiming the natural waterfront landscape: Thessaloniki’s manmade east waterfront

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This article focuses on the transition of the natural landscape of Thessaloniki’s east waterfront to the artificial urban landscape that draws a straight line between water and land, while noting the developing rigid homogeneous multistorey buildings as a background image of the city in contrast to the former porosity and architectural variety of the late 19th-early 20th century mansions. The transition is captured either as a commentary on the new landscape or as a memoir of a lost era by cinematographers, such as Takis Kanellopoulos in his film “Parenthesis” (1968) and Theo Angelopoulos in his film “Eternity and a Day” (1998) and photographers of the 1960’s such as Socratis Iordanidis and Yiannis Stylianou.

Cover image: Theo Angelopoulos, Populated manmade waterfront, Film still, Eternity and a Day, Thessaloniki, 1998

Foz Velha: The creation of an image of permanencies and transformations

2024-01-16T11:16:40+00:00

The present proposal uses the television documentary Foz Velha (1975)¹, from the series As Pedras e o Homem (1973-1976), produced by RTP (Rádiotelevisão Portuguesa²), as a means to understand the image that is linked to the territory of Foz Velha, in Foz do Douro (Porto). Aware of RTP’s will to promote culture and its ability to condition the viewer’s perception of a certain theme, object or space, we intend to analyse this phenomenon at Foz Velha in the aforementioned documentary, to which contribute the script, the selected shots, and the chosen soundtrack. This intermediality helps determining the sensorial and affective experience of the space. It is noteworthy that the study of this urban area has been focused on the architectural and urbanistic characterization that occurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, associated with the character of villeggiatura inherent to Foz, lacking a holistic view of the transformations that occurred from the second half of the twentieth century and the perception that is being linked to it. In this sense, the documentary will be analysed through the identification of the places filmed and the survey of associated architectural, urban and social characteristics, as these are pointed out both visually and discursively throughout the documentary, as well as considerations, which are made regarding what is considered to be authentic as opposed to contemporary practices. The existing heterogeneity of Foz Velha will also be characterised through the examination of existing typologies, the materials used, and the ornamental elements of the façades, as well as the size of the plots and urban transformations, displayed at different moments in the documentary. In this way, relationships can be established with the different moments of paradigm change in Foz. With the association of Foz Velha with the idea of an old town, marked by a devout community, with strong links to fishing practices, living a simple and serene domestic life, the documentary makes it possible to trace the profile of the area under study in the 1970s-80s, a period marked by radical urban change, understanding the buildings existing at the time and identifying typologies, materials and elements used. Through comparison with the present day, it is also possible to assess subsequent constructions and interventions in the buildings.
The research also allows us to understand the perception of contemporary buildings as a poor quality architectural conception that de-characterizes the territory, justifying that «it is hurting the harmony of Foz Velha with awful buildings that mean nothing and care little or nothing to conserve the trait of local architecture»³ [00:12:43 - 00:12:58].

Cover image: Visual contrasts in Foz Velha, 1975 (Source: Arquivo RTP. Caria, José, dir. As Pedras e o Homem: Foz Velha [documentary, digital]. Portugal: RTP, 1975, 00:13:50)

White buildings, Red Dust: Brasilia in Ektachrome Colour

2024-01-16T11:45:09+00:00

Brasília’s red dust is everywhere. Regularly tinting the white surfaces of Brasília’s modernist buildings red, a great effort of human labor is required every day to maintain their intended autonomy. Dust clouds first appeared in February 1957 due to massive earthworks and the clearing of the original landscape. While large tractors and caterpillars aggressively manipulated the ground following the forms of Lucio Costa’s Pilot Plan, a formless entropic dispersal of red soil microparticles filled the air. As the floating dust spread over Brasília’s construction site, it also filled the printed pages of newspapers and magazines.
This article intends to discuss how dust tainted the representation of Brasília. As modernist architecture confronted the landscape, dust introduced a distortion in the pure image of Brasília, threatening not only the whiteness of the upcoming architectures but also contaminating drawings, cameras, lenses, printed photographs, clothes and lungs. While most of the architectural black and white photos of Brasília tended to produce clean images, the introduction of the newest color film Ektachrome by photojournalists made earthworks and dust visible. Associated with grainy reproduction in illustrated magazines and speckles of dust in the negatives themselves, the images enhanced the perception of Brasília’s total environmental design.
If dust is, according to Richard Meyer, “an environment in miniature, a physical archive of our material surroundings,” this article analyzes how these fine particles of solid matter and their accidental reproduction, operated as visual dissonances that confuse the modern distinction between nature and culture.

Cover image: Mário Fontenelle, Clearing, c.a. 1958, Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal

Filmmaking as architectural carpentry

2024-01-16T12:12:34+00:00

Food production is the largest cause of global environmental change. The debate on sustainable agriculture focuses largely on the implementation of new agricultural techniques. The impact of these techniques on agricultural landscapes is not often considered. With the film ‘Tussen de kassen’, I attempt to shift the current debate in a direction that allows consideration of the aesthetic and systemic consequences of the implementation of agricultural techniques on specific landscapes. ‘Tussen de kassen’ examines an innovative and sustainable landscape of greenhouse horticulture. More than a tool to communicate research or annotate site visits, film and filmmaking functioned as architectural carpentry. Meaning that the complete process of filmmaking (including preliminary site visits, editing, etc.) functioned as an unconventional method of knowledge production for an architectural research project.

Using ‘Tussen de Kassen’, I illustrate three ways in which filmmaking as architectural carpentry benefits the work of landscape architects whilst examining modern landscapes of food production; As a tool to explore and examine the atmospheres of agricultural landscapes (1) Film is able to convey synaesthetic properties of a landscape. These are properties that belong to multiple sensory fields at once and play a part in generating ‘atmosphere’, the meaning a person assigns unconsciously and almost instantaneously to a space. Film allows viewers to explore the synaesthetic properties behind this initial atmosphere and (re-) examine their subconsciously assigned meanings to space.

As a method to explore unexpected entanglements in food production landscapes (2) The (architectural) medium used to analyse a site determines the understanding of that site. Filmmaking demands close engagement with a site, making the filmmaker a participant of the landscape. This results in unexpected discoveries of entanglements between agricultural techniques and other site aspects.

As a form of eidetic storytelling for landscapes of the Anthropocene (3) Narrating the functioning and conception of Anthropocenic landscapes in a causal, linear manner is problematic as it leads to ‘undecidability’ and inaction. Film, as an eidetic storytelling tool, combines different types of information (i.e. visual, acoustic, quantifiable, metaphoric, etc.) to mediate multivalent, openended and non-linear narratives for Anthropocenic landscapes.

Cover image: Stills from ‘Tussen de Kassen’