The Eye as Oculus: The Counterfeit Virtual and The Mirror Finish

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The eye as oculus: The counterfeit virtual and the mirror finish

Sean Edirisinghe

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Preface Camera obscura. Optical instrument; projective device and apparatus for architectural observation.

This essay examines the theory of architecture as a mediating object, with a particular focus on architecture’s relationship to the curated image. There are two components to this essay which need to be addressed; the first component is the optical apparatus – the camera obscura. The second component is the study of the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, by architectural practice Gehry Partners. The Dr Chau Chak Wing Building offers a distinctive perspective on the mediation of the camera obscura, as an optical apparatus forming a similar tectonic perspective.

The camera obscura depicted in Mario Bettini's illustration is the scale of a room (fig. 1).1 The camera obscura as an apparatus – drawing from the componentry involved to create images provides the connection of architecture as a mediating object. The apparatus works as both an architectural object and observational apparatus, and this connection is examined closely by theorists to positioning the camera obscura as a mediating apparatus – in the frame of architecture as a mediating object.

1.

Georges Teyssot, “Windows and Screens: A Topology of the Intimate and the Extimate,” Log, no. 18 (January 2010): 77.

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Figure 1. Camera obscura, Italian Philosopher Mario Bettini's drawing of a camera obscura in, Apiaria Universae Philosophiae Mathematicae, translated from Latin, to Collection of Mathematical Curiosities. (1642)

Considering the complex array of ideas that are presented in this essay, two ‘characters’ are used to distinguish between interior and exterior examined moments. These moments outline a theoretical observation between the camera obscura used as an apparatus to explore the building and the building itself as the deconstructed camera obscura; to conclude - is the building a curation of image or directed by an architecture pastiche for the inhabitant. The essay notes a reference to the passerby and is represented as a person located outside of the building. The observer is a person inside the building.

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Introduction The idea of architecture as a medium is complicated. Architectural Theorist, Georges Teyssot puts forth the definition of medium as a space ‘between-the-two, ‘that opens between two things.2 Teyssot is referring to the spaces that arise from a connection of mediums that represent a precise meaning and resides within the the experience of someone in architecture. There is a connection between “a passage and peristyle, pronaos and portal, entry and vestibule, triumph arch, sacred and profane, do not create boundaries but an in-between, a space in the middle.” 3 These spaces evoke a sensation of a thoroughfare – the movement in one space to another. The movement of passage is captured in the painting from Samuel van Hoogstraten, (fig. 2) View into an interior from the depth of frames that draw the

Figure 2. Samuel van Hoogstraten, View of an Interior, 1627-78. Paintings, oil on canvas, 103 x 70 cm. Louvre, Paris France.

2.

Georges Teyssot, “Mapping the Threshold: ‘A Theory of Design and Interface’,” AA Files, no. 57 (January 2008): 8.

3.

Teyssot, “Mapping the Threshold,” 8.

5 attention to the interior spaces. The first frame is that of an architrave, including the door and handle; the second frame is of a door with keys hanging, and the third frame is of the painting on the wall also showing an interior view (fig. 2). The painting draws the viewers’ attention to the architecture, the medium is the architectural object – like the architrave as an frame for the opening in the wall.

Philosopher Georg Simmel expands on the representation of architecture, through the dissociation of a user's haptic connection, within that architecture. Simmel notes the interaction in simple processes, such as opening a door and using a door handle is being lost as the user moves through the interior. Moreover, Simmel argues the humane connection between architecture is fading; the allure of automation is the shiny new object.

Frank Gehry’s Dr Chau Chak Wing Building is such an example of medium presented in a multitude of architectural styles. The tectonic dysfunction of the facade, almost jousts for superiority from either orientation - the passerby’s perspective changes as they walk by.

The building located in Ultimo Sydney resides amongst heritage sandstone, redbrick facades and adjacent to The Goods Line, an old train track converted to a park and shared pedestrian walkway spanning eight-hundred meters. The Dr Chau Chak Wing Building is centrefold to its surrounding context, from the innovative application of an undulating brick façade. Gehry Partners was instructed to add a Gehry to Ultimo, Sydney’s expanding horizon line, Australia’s first Gehry, perhaps likened to Australia’s first Jackson Pollock – Blue Poles, the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building emits a risqué public division (Fig 3,4).4 As the clients, The University of Technology Sydney wanted to harness the media and marketing opportunities the appointment of Gehry Partners would facilitate.5

4.

Simone Brott, “Modernity's Opiate, or, the Crisis of Iconic Architecture,” Log, no. 26 (October 2012): 57.

5.

Sandra Kaji-O'Grady, “Gehry Comes to Sydney,” Architecture Australia 100, no. 2 (2011): 17

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Figure 3. The Western facing facade of the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, the mirrored window finish, opposed to the undulating brickwork. Gehry Partners, Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, Photograph, Peter Bennets. Jennifer Calzini, and Peter Bennetts, “Dr Chau Chak Wing Building,” Architecture Australia 104, no. 2 (April 2015): 27.

Figure 4. Amid the controversy of the purchase of this painting, Blue Poles remains one of the National Gallery of Australia major paintings. Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles, 1952.

Paintings, oil, enamel, aluminium paint, glass on canvas, 212.1 x 488.9 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia.

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The Window as eye Georges Teyssot refers to the window as an artificial eye,6 Teyssot analogises this by the Italian Philosopher Mario Bettini's drawing of a camera obscura in, Apiaria Universae Philosophiae Mathematicae, translated from Latin, to Collection of Mathematical Curiosities.

Teyssot notes, in Bettini’s representation of the camera obscura: In Mario Bettini's Afiaria universae fhilosofhiae mathematicae (1642), the entire room becomes a camera obscura, while the window is actually made opaque. By way of small openings, light is brought through apertures to project the moving images on the internal surface of the opposing wall, which thus acquires the nature of a screen. The window has been blinded, and it is the very occlusion that allows a counterfeit, "virtual" spectacle to appear.7 Teyssot is deconstructing the window in Bettini’s illustration to examine a architectural symbolism, for its humane condition to the threshold. Furthermore, Teyssot insights the creation of a virtual spectacle, a manufactured interior space where the passerby is disconnected from their tactile connection to the interior. The material and user connection of Bettini’s camera obscura can be said for the window treatment of the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building. One can place a similar emphasis on the metaphoric reference to the counterfeit object, through mirrored glazing arrayed in repetition along the façade (fig. 5).8 From Teyssot’s reference to the window as an artificial eye; the window presents a machine aesthetic, mechanical in character with processes imbedded in the very material.

The representation, of the window, can be expressed in contemporary terms, from the

6.

Georges Teyssot, “Windows and Screens: A Topology of the Intimate and the Extimate,” Log, no. 18 (January 2010): 76.

7.

8.

Georges Teyssot, “Windows and Screens,” 76.

Simone Brott reflects the character of the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building to the Minoru Yamasaki’s 1950s building – imploding in slow motion. Brott is referring to the housing towers Pruitt-Igoe. The towers were demolished in 1971, Brott notes the implosion of the towers to the façade of the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building. Brott, “Modernity's Opiate, or, the Crisis of Iconic Architecture,” 57.

8 very condition architecture, as a discipline and cultural contributor and tectonically driven, yet the old antithesis lives on. Architectural styles change.

Figure 5. The Eastern edge of the building displaying the mirrored window finish, connects with the Goods Line, a repurposed railway line currently used as a pedestrian thoroughfare. Gehry Partners, Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, Photograph, Peter Bennets. Jennifer Calzini, and Peter Bennetts, “Dr Chau Chak Wing Building,” Architecture Australia 104, no. 2 (April 2015): 27.

The camera obscura broaches the divide of the interior to the exterior, the various scenes projected in the camera obscura transition into a connection between both spaces, as the exterior is defined as a public, to the private association to the interior space. Bettini’s illustration of a camera obscura shows the picturesque indicated from the rolling hillside to a curated mechanical condition needed to create the projected image. The illustration creates a broaching of the interior and exterior space, the tectonic of Bettini’s illustration

9 expand the threshold as a zone, encapsulating a multitude of architectural elements, all working in together to create the projected image.

Within the same epoch as the historic reference to the window, the mirror became a predominate interior decoration in Baroque and Roccoco interiors.9 As Georges Teyssot notes, the illustration of the mirror is used to draws out the notion of narcissistic, representation of mimicry, to emphasis the drama of the interior decoration.10 As Teyssot notes, “the multiplication of mirrors, is a spectacle that would both nurture its narcissism and create the condition of its ultimate downfall.”11 From the illusion of space, and the perception of the interior that is manipulated by the purposeful use of materials is not akin to Baroque or Rococo architecture, such examples drawn from, Athanasius Kircher, Ars Magna Lucis et umbrae in Decem Libros Digesta, Camera Obscura (1646). Kircher’s treatise on catoptric devices employs the mirror to extend and capture the scene, creating an illusion of interior space to the viewer, which is larger than the surround itself (fig. 6).12

9.

Teyssot, “Mapping the Threshold,” 7.

10.

Teyssot, “Mapping the Threshold,” 7.

11.

Teyssot, “Mapping the Threshold,” 7.

12

.Teyssot, “Mapping the Threshold,” 5.

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Figure 6. The arrangement of mirrors are intentionally convex and concave to highlight the ornate architectural motifs such as the marble floor. Johann Michael Lugwig Rohrer, Schloss Favorite, Photograph, Baden-Württemberg Germany, 1725.

Source. https://www.schloss-favorite-rastatt.de/en/visitor-experience/palacegarden/buildings/hall-of-mirrors

The enchantment of Baroque interiors, to the freestanding Baroque exterior, as noted by philosopher Gilles Deleuze describes a broad curation between interior and exterior spaces.

For Deleuze, the pure interior, or monad representation of the interior.

Monadic space is 'the architectural idea [of] a room in black marble, in which light enters only through orifices so well bent that nothing on the outside can be seen through them, yet they illuminate in colour the decor of a pure inside. Deleuze continues to argue that, if the freestanding baroque facade presents itself as 'an outside without an inside', then monadic interiors are 'an inside without an

11 outside': this inside is 'pure', it is the 'closed interiority'; 'its walls are hung with spontaneous folds' of a soul or a mind.13 A pure outside, and a pure inside.14 An architecture self-sufficient from its defined delineation of tectonic form, and description. The inside is masked to the passerby on the outside, through the arrangement of bricks and windows (fig 7).

Figure 7 Alexi Marmot, "Educational Innovation through Building Adaptation."

Architectural Design 87, no. 5 (2017): 96-105. https://doi.org/10.1002/ad.2222.

13.

Teyssot, “Mapping the Threshold,” 6.

14.

Teyssot, “Mapping the Threshold,” 5.

12 Wing Building, this is represented in the brick façade and the window. The brickwork fluctuates and undulating in a curved form; a method unorthodoxly applied to brickwork

The eye as oculus: The Counterfeit virtual and the mirror finish.

Figure 8. The representation of the frame in the window and the mirror are visually similar to draw the attention to the emphasis on the interior condition opposed to the exterior. Johann Erdmann Hummel, Sitting Room in Berlin, 1820-25. Watercolour and Pen and Black Ink on Paper, 40.6 x 52.8 cm. Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany. Georges Teyssot, “Windows and Screens: A Topology of the Intimate and the Extimate,” Log, no. 18 (January 2010): 78.

Johann Erdmann Hummel’s Berlin Zimmer (1820-25), in Teyssots “Mapping the threshold”, positions mirror cloaking the overlooking to the outside (Fig 8). The mirrors are placed next to the windows in the room, reflecting the surfaces and decoration of the room. Teyssot notes, the interior treatment is indifferent from the treatment of the

13 windows, as opposed to the frame of the mirror. They were creating an abstraction, a contradiction to the weighted hierarchy of the window frame to the mirror frame.

In short, an Interieur - reversed itself into an exterior: The Interieur steps outside.

It is as if the bourgeois were so sure of his stable prosperity that he disdains the facade in order to declare: no matter where you open it and cut a section through it, my house remains a facade. 15 Philosopher Walter Benjamin’s account of interior and exterior space reveals the indifference between the interior and exterior of the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building.

Benjamin’s, determination of interior and exterior space resonates in the building and defines the interior and exterior spaces as distinct entities.16 The exterior window frame protrudes past the undulation of the brickwork, yet the interior frame is moulded into the interior plasterwork (fig. 9,10). Cutting a section of the building would note the visual disconnection of the exterior and interior – In such a way of the interior can be represented as façade, from the evidential spectacle of the metal stairs, and stacked timber battens.

15.

16.

Teyssot, “Mapping the Threshold,” 9.

Philip Drew, “How Frank Gehry Imposed Hollywood Narcissism on Ultimo,” Quadrant 59, no. 4 (April 2015): 42.

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Figure 9. View from street level viewing the protruding windows reflecting the adjacent street scape, Photograph by author.

Figure 10. A view from the upper floor onto the cityscape. There appears to be no connection between the protrusion of window frame to the same windows interior tectonic treatment. Gehry Partners, Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, Photograph, Peter Bennets. Jennifer Calzini, and Peter Bennetts, “Dr Chau Chak Wing Building,” Architecture Australia 104, no. 2 (April 2015): 27.

15 The reflective material surroundings the harsh bones of the stairs in an ornately peculiar display of centralising ones focus to the stair (fig 11).17 Liken to the undulation of the brickwork, these architectural elements all seem to compete with one another.

Retrospective of their function, they appear to be scattered throughout the internal floor plan of the building. A sculptural piece, from the metal cladding, adding no more than ornamentation. The resemblance of the Roccocoian interiors’ is somewhat clear, in the comparative use of ornamentation to amplify the hierarchy of the interior in the overall perception of the building.

17.

Philip Drew explains, the spatial planning of the metal clad staircase, and moreover the narcissistic mannerism atoned with Gehry’s use of reflective material, comparing Narcissus, a hunter in Greek Mythology, who fell in love with his reflection in the water, Gehry undergoes a similar assertion. Drew, “How Frank Gehry Imposed Hollywood Narcissism on Ultimo,” 42.

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Figure 11. Sculpture Gehry LLPral stairs reflecting the surrounding architecture, inasmuch as the windows from the exterior refract light. Gehry Partners, Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, Photograph, Peter Bennets. Jennifer Calzini, and Peter Bennetts, “Dr Chau Chak Wing Building,” Architecture Australia 104, no. 2 (April 2015): 30.

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The oculus as apparatus: The tectonics of the window Leon Battista Alberti’s painting-as-window creates the condition of the modern spectator; one can stare through the window at the view or the passerby without being seen.18 Nevertheless, the window is an architectural feature and optical apparatus. In the instance of Albert’s Painting-as-Window (Alberti’s Window 1435), The grid placed on the window is in a frame not only to the landscape but also to the drawn perspective, the apparatus is orthogonally presented to the viewer (fig. 12).19 The window, in this instance, becomes an apparatus, and object used for replication, in Alberti’s painting-as-window. Henceforth, the visual connection to Mario Bettini's drawing of a camera obscura in, Apiaria Universae Philosophiae Mathematicae can be made. The small apertures in the illustration of Bettini’s camera obscura, comparable to the protruding windows of the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, the visual separation to the window frame to the façade create a distinct feature, standing out to passerby, curating the window as an object, separate from the façade, and methodology of the comparative focus of the Dr Chau Chak Wing Buildings representation.20

18.

Teyssot, “Windows and Screens,” 76.

19.

Teyssot, “Windows and Screens,” 76.

20.

Teyssot, “Windows and Screens,” 83.

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Figure 12. A figure of a persons gaze as they illustrate the outside landscape, using the grid on the window, projecting a quadrant on the window. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Brunelleschi's mirror, Alberti's window, and Galileo's perspective tube. https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-59702006000500010.

Figure 9. View from street level viewing the protruding windows reflecting the adjacent street scape, Photograph by author.

19 The Dr Chau Chak Wing building, mirror-finished glazing, does not offer such transmittance, of the passerby view into the interior. Henceforth the perception is diminished from the outside, as the mirror finish of the window cloaks the internal gaze.

The repetition of windows against an undulating façade is opposed to each other. In the same visual assumption and relationship, a sphere has inside a cube, the juxtaposition of the two elements, the façade and fenestration allow for this examination to present itself.

The glazing creates a distorting surface, through the mirror finish of the windows, reflecting the surrounding Ultimo. Light, however, is controlled into space through the small square windows. They are projecting light internally into the floor plan, through the framed windows.21 The projected light from the windows is overpowered from the artificial lighting needed to illuminate the interior, the small windows are an architectural feature, more akin to the ornamental decoration of baroque exteriors, in the way of decoration, rather than addressing the environmental concerns of contemporary architecture in Sydney, apart from the windows primary condition – the need for natural daylight to the interior.

Therefore, viewed from the outside, the windows remain a part of the architectural implosion.22As if the building almost keep the tectonic ordered of the surrounding Second French Empire architectural buildings at bay.23 The image of the exterior is not seen from the passerby and is only a mere reflection of themselves and the surrounding context. Like, Bettini’s soldier, the perception is masked from the truth of the matter – the pure exterior.24 Furthermore, in Hummel’s painting, the exterior window is

21.

Teyssot, “Windows and Screens,” 76.

22.

Drew, “How Frank Gehry Imposed Hollywood Narcissism on Ultimo,” 41.

23.

Authors own observational analysis.

24.

Teyssot, “Mapping the Threshold,” 6.

20 framed, as if the façade was bare, to the pure interior.25 The interior of Dr Chau Chak Wing Building is thus the actualisation of the difference between a pure interior and pure exterior. The spaces act autonomously; however, independent they may seem, the delineation of these spaces is dynamic. Like the interior of Bettini’s illustration, the multiplication of the soldier’s projection is likened to the dynamic transference of thresholds, in the point of view of the observer. As the observer can see out, but the passerby cannot see-in, the observer’s immediate threshold is of a greater significance of the passerby as the observer can examine their reflection from the mirrored internal stair cladding, whilst also observing the passerby’s interactions from the exterior. They are reversing the image that is produced from the projection. In effect, the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building analogises a vector of the threshold, creating a duality of spaces. The examination of the camera obscura, as an apparatus, broached the medium between the architecture. The window is defined as the true threshold in this instance. As the window encumbrances a duality of functions, the window is more than the outlined definition.26 The window is medium to a collective array of objects and series of temporal moments captured through its tectonic materialisation.

25.

Teyssot, “Mapping the Threshold,” 6.

26.

Teyssot, “Windows and Screens,” 76.

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Conclusion Dr Chau Chak Wing building follows the metaphorical comparisons to the windows in the Mario Bettini’s Camera Obscura. The surface mirror finish of the windows, and in combination the tectonic function of the window, result in the window becoming a screen.27 As represented in Bettini’s illustration of a camera obscura, the condition of the window curate’s passerby to only see themselves, in an inversion of the image created from the projection they stand within. For the observer, inside the building, the passerby is seen, yet the passerby does not see the observer inside. Comparative to the soldier in Bettini’s illustration, the soldier is not able to see inside, yet their projection is arrayed internally, therein, the interior observer sees the soldier, and in turn, the solider is unbeknownst. The monadic space: and according from Gilles Deleuze, 28 a pure interior and exterior is present.

Historically the interior space has been deemed to be private, while the Dr Chau Chak Wing building interior’s spectacular arrangement of ornamentation, reminiscent of Roccoco interiors, on display ornamentation, with the allegorical passerby and observer ballet of surveillance subject the Dr Chau Chak Wing building’s interior and exterior as two entities, with separate function, as directed by the passerby and observer. Therefore, as these two spaces can be analysed separately, a deconstructed analysis notes comparable elements to Bettini's camera obscura. The camera obscura, in its deconstructed form, can be used as an apparatus to examine the tectonic structure, as a comparative analysis at first – to explore the dynamic projections of the passerby and the observer from the building.

27.

Teyssot, “Windows and Screens,” 8.

28. Teyssot, “Mapping the Threshold,” 6.

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