RE: Notional Architecture

Gazing through the viewfinder of a camera at a building in Fitzroy Square on an afternoon in 2005, a photographer asks himself whether anything in this scene had changed in 150 years. The building is untouched save for a new coat of paint and the railings and cobbles remain from the Georgian period. At this moment an airplane passes overhead and with a daunting interjection the scene is rendered spatially forever incomparable to a Georgian skyline. "Never again can it ever be possible to view a historic sight," thinks the photographer and puts his camera away.  

A Georgian viewer was a land dweller, being profoundly incapable of viewing a London street with anything but a land-dwellers eye. Dwelling and the existence of humankind took place at street level, leaving the sky removed, fantastical and the realm of the God and of the future (the first demonstrations of air travel being via Hot Air Balloon and took place in Versailles in September 1783). Contemporary man views the architectural fabric of dwelling from an utterly modern spatial position, a position of ownership. Contemporary dwellers own the sky, enter it freely, pass through it, place objects in it, and build in it. Our realm is everything that we can see, no space is impossible to us, neither the heavens nor the seabed, our culture is projected into all the physical corners of visual perception. It is not possible for us to experience, although we might try to imagine, the crushing weight of the medieval city with it's choking tonnes of building materials stacked at ground level. Perhaps then a walk through a mock street in the Dickens World theme park may be the closest we could come to the experience of Dickensian dwelling, shut in from above by a conceptual ceiling bearing a trompe l'oeil of crushing affect.

The picture essay in this book is not interested with the architecture of the sky to which it is indebted but instead is intended to act as a document and commentary on an architecture of non-visual fabric.

Imagine a public space.

A vast public space, a square or a piazza.

Around the piazza, neither a part of it nor separated from it, are a million points of entry and exit. Enter here, leave there.

The space is a public space, that is to say that it is offered for public use, but it's physical manifestation is built from private structures. These private structures have a public face and a private back, a behind-the-scenes area, the staffrooms. Some people are entrusted with the keys to enter these areas. Some people however, understand the technology of locks and are free to move between the two sites as they see fit. The more primitive the technology of the lock the easier it is to break and the greater the number of those willing and able to enter. Some locks, and some of the structures they restrict, are obsolete. They are no longer actively protected and are only nominally monitored.
A man on a street and a man in a wilderness are free to enter this public space, the piazza, as long as they are armed with one of many, increasingly primitive, pieces of technology. He may use a radio, a television, a mobile telephone, a computer or any combination of these devices. In this space people meet, discussions are held, money is exchanged, political agenda is decided and all aspects of our cultural civilisation take place.

This building is the notional architecture.

It is a transparent architecture, a structure built from an informational transfer in an electromagnetic spectrum.

I don't believe that this pictorial essay should limit itself to acting purely as a description. I have endeavoured to cross reference the thesis that information is a building material against experiments conducted in the field over a two year period. With this book I hope to be able to shed some light on the results of the investigation as it stands.

Sebastian Craig, 2006.