The Audience as a subject: MANIFESTO

In a 1954 collage Mies represents his proposal for the Chicago Convention Hall as, essentially, a sea of people framed by sumptuous marble walls and protected by a large-span truss roof. The abstraction of the architecture is expressed less in the actual depiction of the elements–that are, in fact, quite realistic and detailed–than in the simplicity of the composition; in other words, the very formal qualities of the image are charged with meaning. Mies’ work is exemplary from this point of view as it makes clear that renderings are not supposed to ‘render’ spatial qualities per se, but, rather, a way of seeing things. Images have always constructed an audience before projecting a space; the idea of producing a polemical drawing able to embody a specific argument has become preeminent with modernist avant-gardes, but is by no means a novelty. Publicly visible frescoes played a crucial part in political propaganda already in premodern times, as the work of Giotto clearly shows, but it is with the invention of printing that the making of manifesto-images will become one of the main concerns of architects, starting from Palladio’ s reframing of his own work in the Four Books. The session will look at the work of architects who employed in a conscious way drawing as a manifesto of their idea of architecture, from Schinkel to Mies and Hadid.