Michael Young will speak about The Turned Room, his exhibition of photogrammetry work currently on view in the Foundation Building. 
 
Digital sensing and imaging can be defined as the translation of detected environmental energy into numeric information—which is to say, sensing and imaging become interchangeable. The differences between a two-dimensional image and a three-dimensional model, or a still photograph and animate cinema, also tend to blur. The moved image—two images of an object from two different locations—can be sequenced to create a sensation of camera motion, but these displaced images can also be used to triangulate the location of a point in space, as with humans’ binocular vision or when birds bob their heads. This moved, or doubled, image of the world is also the basis of photogrammetry. Used in surveying for centuries, the doubled image—“a point in space known through two interrelated projections”—is the fundamental principle of Gaspard Monge’s Descriptive Geometry (1798), which was the foundational course of the École Polytechnique; it is also the technical basis of interrelated plans and sections in architectural drawing.
 
The Turned Room also relates to Young’s recent book Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image (Routledge, 2021). The book explores architecture’s entanglement with contemporary image culture, looking closely at how changes produced through technologies of mediation alter disciplinary concepts and produce political effects. Using both historical and contemporary examples, it focuses on how conventions of representation are established, maintained, challenged, and transformed. Young’s investigations are conjoined with inquiries into aesthetics and technology in the hope that the tensions between them can help reveal how architectural images are produced, disseminated, and valued, and how images alter assumptions regarding the appearances of architecture and the environment.

This event will be held on September 19th in the Third Floor Hallway Gallery from 6:30 pm to 8 pm. Open to students, faculty, staff, and alumni.



Exhibitions and events presented by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.