Abstract:
The design process is essential to creating meaningful architectural space. Through this sequence or cycle, creative surprises emerge. With the advent of digital media, perceptions of architectural space are being transformed, and new architectural ideas and innovative spatial concepts are being revealed. Media is an extension of the mind and body. And digital technology is changing human behaviors, interactions, and relationships. Thus, it is evident that an inherent interconnection exists between imagery and the experiential, physical world. Engaging in design inquiries, architectural theorists are already beginning to explore this concept. Creation is exploration, observation is revelation. Digital images and motion pictures can be used as abstract forms of sketching and hypothesizing about architectural space. Production can induce further inspiration. Capturing new images and reworking existing digital content initiates the process, but the designer’s active, manipulative experimentation unveils avant-garde thoughts and visions. As the designer creates various mediascapes, architectural and spatial ideas can be explored like never before. In this way, the architect is learning about the project by alternating between intuition and analysis. By transmutating digital content into fresh imagery, one creates new modes of perception. These transmutations can alter the way individuals view the world and interact with it. As the designer creates exploratory media and manipulates digital imagery, some impressions are revealed and grasped, while other concepts encourage further questioning. With the acquisition of new ways of viewing architectural space, the contemporary designer’s ways of thinking, working, and making are constantly evolving. By creating and presenting intriguing digital imagery, both still and in motion, a designer can stimulate a suspension of disbelief, prompting an altered state of curiosity. This state is partially and simultaneously connected to reality, to memory, and to the imagination. New perspectives generate new ways of seeing — and possibly more importantly — new ways of understanding. Consequently, architectural imagery can engage viewers in ways that begin to explore potentials for alternate realities, as existing relationships with space, time, and form are openly challenged. Within this context, the designer is not someone who simply re-presents some aspects of the world as it is, but rather, with his manipulative explorations in digital imagery, is one who triggers entirely new mental constructs, affecting thoughts, knowledge, memories, and imagination. With this process, the architect is creating space that exists at the intersection of digital imagery and architecture. Furthermore, the designer is initiating an architecture that exists at the edge of perception. These spatial conditions establish an environment which directly engages and responds to the individual’s evolving relationships with time, space, and form, with memory and imagination, and with reality and the screen. And in the end, the designer is attempting to manipulate both architecture and space to elicit a response similar to that which is created by manipulated digital imagery. Thus, this architectural space challenges perception and requires personal translation and reconstruction within the mind to be fully comprehended.