Representation(s): A Mutable Process for a Transitioning Urban Landscape

Abstract

To understand the medium is to understand the affects the medium has on the changes and the scale and form of human association and action over time, not only as the medium is being introduced, but also the unconscious and unforeseeable effects the cultural matrix within which the medium operates. Marshall McLuhan

Difference is not simply the collapsing [or circulation] of identity, it is also the rendering of space and time as fragmented, transformable, interpenetrated, beyond any fixed formulation, no longer guaranteed by the a priori or by the universalisms of

science. Elizabeth Grosz

Media can be leveraged as a way to evaluate and inform the built environment. By using media as more than just a communicative necessity, media is capable of directing process. This process seeks to construct a representational framework and narrative through the investigation and translation of cultural, historical, and conceptual contexts. Architecture, as media, functions as a perceptual tool toward the fusion of process and a meta-physical and physical experience.

This thesis asks the question: How can these complex contexts create a framework within which the media operates and informs the built environment?

The validity of this research in the context of the culture of architectural education is to show that architecture is more than simply applied knowledge and skills translated through conventions of visual communication. Architecture is a way of seeing and thinking that requires understanding of media beyond the idea of tool and production to an idea of performance, process, and methodology.