Marian Macken

Beyond simulacrum: Artists' books as architectural models

Conventional documentation of architecture omits many aspects of the process of designing, building and inhabiting architecture. Alternative representational strategies and techniques are needed to explore spatialities that evade description through conventional documentation. Artists' books offer an alternative, complementary representation to be explored as new means of investigating architecture in three dimensional form.

The model is the conventional three-dimensional form of making manifest architectural concepts. However, this can also be seen to be a form of static objectification. By broadening the definition of the model, other works that usually lie outside the realm of architectural representation may be included. Artists' books offer qualities not present within the model; the episodic and temporal qualities of architecture may reside within the space of the book, due to these characteristics.

This paper investigates the book, not as a unique object of auratic power, but rather as a full-scale model. In this way, the book is seen to be exploratory, propositional and generative. This adds another possible role to artists' books, as this is, according to Johanna Drucker, an area that needs ‘description, investigation, and critical attention before its specificity will emerge'.

This investigation will examine the characteristics of the book, in reference to this role as architectural model. These include: the openable codex format offering the element of interiority, and hence, its opposite exteriority, that is, containment and exposure; the page as a site, and the book as ‘a sequence of spaces'; the movement inherent within the book, that is, opening the book, and the turning of pages, as a performance, placing the book in time; the narrative, sequential qualities of the book, its temporality.

By exploring artists' books as an alternative representation and documentation of architecture, the notion of the diagram within architecture may be examined. A set of structures and techniques that arise from the act of bookmaking may be established, and can be used in a similar way as the parti diagram within architecture. This new architectural representation could provide a new set of ‘diagrams'. The model then becomes both a representation of ideas, and an idea in itself. With a different, hybrid representation, a new perspective of visual communication is possible, stimulating architectural discourse, giving a presence to aspects of architecture that are under-visualised.

Marian Macken is an artist, designer and architect currently living in Sydney, and completing her Master of Architecture (Research thesis) at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). She has worked as a lecturer and tutor at The Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building UTS, The Departments of Landscape Architecture and Industrial Design, Faculty of the Constructed Environment RMIT University, and The Schools of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Faculty of the Built Environment, UNSW.