Space Wars

Fredric Jameson

• The Invisible in Architecture edited by Ole Bouman and Roemer van Toorn
  Academy, 516 pp, $115.00, February 1994, ISBN 1 85490 285 7
• The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism by Roger Scruton
  Carcanet, 158 pp, £19.95, October 1994, ISBN 1 85754 054 9

To what degree is our experience of modern – let’s say rather, contemporary – architecture mediated through photography? To what degree, in other words, is that experience really photographic rather than architectural (and spatial)? And would such ‘contamination’ be a bad thing? Is it possible that the buildings themselves are complicitous, no longer offering the grand head-on, Neoclassical façades for simple reproduction (see, for example, the magnificent Richard Pare collection, Photography and Architecture 1839-1939)? Photography would then be co-operating in the actual construction of the newer buildings, angling into dimensions of built space that our ordinary human bodies have little daily commerce with, combining planes we normally separate in dramatic visual ‘chords’, and absorbing the signs of space in order to produce a new simulation. The older photography wished to isolate the building from its surroundings and render it visually independent: this new kind uses it to render a seamless web of spatial texture, like a Mayan frieze.