SEENSCAPE { AN ARCHITECTURAL EXPLORATION OF THE MIND’S EYE }

Thalia AndreoglouAdvisor Neil Minuk

“In Hitchcock’s films it is just wavering between ordinary consciousness and dreams that predominates, the unreality of reality and the reality of unreality. ...when we watch ‘Rear Window,’ the film is a kind of conscious dream. But even artistic stages of architecture are always something other than the total of their material structures. Even these are mental spaces, architectural representations, and images of perfect life. Architecture, too, leads our imagination to another reality.”(Juhani Pallasmaa)1

Abstract Architecture and cinema both articulate lived space, and create and mediate comprehensive images of life. “[Both] define the dimensions and essence of existential space.” Steve Pile suggests the irrefutability of the belief that “understanding spatial patterns and processes [is] impossible without understanding how the individual ‘imaged’ the world and made decisions based on that image.” 2 (‘Image’ meaning a mental impression of the world). Just as the imagery or content of dreams is based on one’s experiences3, an individual’s understanding of a place is similarly analogous. Our mental impressions dictate these intelligible images of space and what exists beyond their contained worlds. These images are composed of fragments of a known reality.

This thesis will explore how and when these subjective understandings/experiences of space occur in relation to architecture and art, with focus on images and text. Ways of making will be brought to light (acts of photographing, filming, viewing, reading, writing…) in order to interpret, construct and engage an empathetic experience of visual mental imagery.

How can the mind’s eye influence the architectural design process and assist in generating meaningful scenes? Is it possible to intertwine the framer with the framed; the theoretical with the practical; the fiction with the reality? What opportunities and conditions emerge in such re-engagements?

1 Pallasmaa, J., The Architecture of image : existential space in cinema, Helsinki : Rakennustieto, 2007.2 Pile, S., The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space, and Subjectivity, New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 39.3 Bloom, H., Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.