Hans Tursack

Theoretical Notes on the Aesthetics MIT School of Architecture +

Planning

of Architectural Texture Mapping

Imperfect Acts of Perception

ABSTR ACT
This paper explores several historical and contemporary examples of architecture that 1 Concept rendering and unrolled
surface diagram for a public
employ graphic texture mapping in their design processes. The technique of texture
art installation to be installed on
mapping is outlined as a particular formal relationship between images, geometric a university campus. Funding
scaffolds, and new material explorations. Texture-mapped architecture is a relatively for this project provided by
the Council for the Arts at MIT.
contemporary phenomenon that is distinct from several known genres of image-building Project research assistant:
hybrids such as media facades, Ganzfeld art installations, building-scale projection Jonathan Brearley.

experiments, postmodern semiotic billboards, and affective ornamental pattern strategies.

Architectural texturing utilizes UV editors in modeling and animation software platforms
to place and edit two-dimensional graphics or photographic images on three-dimensional
models. UV editors allow an unprecedented degree of precision during the design process;
image and geometry can be manipulated in tandem and two-dimensional source material
can be edited and live-updated. Material manifestations of this process use commer-
cial printing technologies and one-off processes developed by artists and designers to
generate building-grade printed envelopes.

The theoretical wager of the paper is that the accessibility/availability of texture mapping
techniques, digital printing technologies, and new materials (such as 3M’s vinyl wraps)
have triggered a graphic impulse in contemporary experimental architecture culture.
Images, color theory, and flat graphics are now central to compositional theory as it is
taught in academia and applied in the field.

678
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Image-objects—a term used here to denote architectural
forms wrapped in photographic source material and
complex graphic designs—frequently appear in visual
studies syllabi, experimental exhibition venues, and even
as large-scale built works. The term itself is likely to
invoke some low-level anxiety, as the history of composi-
tional theory in architectural education is largely one of
geometric (conceptual) thought being translated into the
material stuff of the built world through intricate line-
work drawings and diagrams. Asserting photographs and
colorful, two-dimensional graphic matter into geometric
genesis narratives upsets received formalist wisdom.
What’s more, when images cross over into compositional
theory and the built environment (as printed envelopes in
the case of the examples cited here), known methods of
formal analysis come unmoored. Postwar debates between
the critical agency of legible geometric systems vs. the
phenomenological immediacy of tectonics have little to offer
the reader of an image-object. Likewise, recent (one might
say antiformal) theories centered around architectural
atmospherics reduce any discussion of surface to blurry
2
“affect” and mediatic “spectacle” discourse. Image-objects
frustrate a too-easy divide between geometric systems
(read through gestalt perception), phenomenological
formalism (the corporeal experience of material assem-
blages), and affect-theory. At the same time, the elusive
aesthetic properties of this work need to be framed by
technical as well as visual analysis. The work explored here
exploits contemporary digital tools drawn from advanced
animation, modeling, video games, and graphics platforms,
in addition to commercial printing technologies and new
materials. Several exemplary pre- and early-digital prec-
edents offer more analog approaches to the image-object,
suggesting a sensibility that belongs to an even longer
timeline. Through this lens, enigmatic photo-mapped works
such as Michael Heizer’s Dragged Mass Geometric (1985)
might be understood as examples of a slow revision in
recent decades of known formalist ontologies that privilege
geometric and material construction over the “superficial”
qualities of color, images, and graphics.

The theoretical mistrust of spatialized image-based work

is well-documented in recent criticism. In his reframing of
Kenneth Frampton’s theoretical project, art critic Hal Foster
3
pits empathetic identification with materials, and a phenom-
enological self-awareness, against all that is virtual, optical,
atmospheric, scenographic, and disorienting in painterly, 2 Coop Himmelb(l)au, Groninger 3 Coop Himmelb(l)au, Groninger
Museum East Pavilion. 1993– Museum East Pavilion. 1993–
surface-centric architecture. In these scenarios (Ganzfeld
1994. Digitizer and physical 1994. Roof plan and unrolled
art installations, Minimalist museums, and neo-modern model. surface drawing.
“Light Construction,” for example), painterly architecture
“render[s] the phenomenological faux” (Foster 2013, 209).

SPECULATION AND CRITIQUE 679

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5 6
Environments soaked in colorfields and projections create
carefully calibrated visual experiences where, “percep-
tion is, as it were, done for us” (Foster 2013, 209). On the
other end of this well-documented image-architecture
polemic, Sylvia Lavin (2013) theorizes the “kiss” of building
facades and luminous projected images by design-savvy
artists like Doug Aitkin. In Lavin’s celebratory catalog of
novel, collective affects, youthful artworks kiss and thereby
erotically dissolve the tragic, stiff, politically retrograde,
gestalt surfaces of institutional (modern and neo-modern)
architecture. Pipolotti Rist, in Lavin’s reading, applies
“moist pressure” to the banal and authoritarian relic of
Greenbergian elitism that is Yoshio Taniguchi’s MoMa
atrium with her luminous projection piece Pour Your Body
Out (7354 Cubic Meters) (2008). Lavin praises the ability
of such installations to melt the oppressive, Cartesian
coordinate space of modernism: “A kiss puts form into slow
and stretchy motion—renders geometry fluid” (Lavin 2013,
5). Both “kiss” and the more ominous image-architecture
“complex” read buildings as frames, lattices, or supports for
the faster, more immediate, and sensorially commanding
powers of the image.
Both critics are also careful to maintain distinctions
between mediums (sculpture, image, film, architecture),
even as they intermingle in “catastrophic” (Foster) and
“bedazzling” (Lavin) new ways. The image-based work exam-
ined here could certainly be objects of interest for both
authors, but would likely frustrate their medium-specific
analytics (painterly colorfields and projected films/photo-
graphs vs. architectural form). If Lavin and Foster read the
680
dissolution of material, built objects into the “virtual” by way
of images, it may be more instructive (if unsettling for the
medium-sensitive) to put pressure on the effects produced
by the geometric specificity and printerly materiality of
the image-objects cited here. By embedding images into
the design process from the moment of inception, projects
like Coop Himmelb(l)au’s Groninger Museum East Pavilion
(1993–1994) can hardly be understood as a neutral frame
for light, color, or graphics. Instead, the source image
for the project (a small, “automatic” pencil sketch) drives
the form-generation narrative as a device used to divide
space and make decisions about the geometric nature
of the pavilion’s envelope and interior partitions. The
Groninger is an emblematic image-object study in that the
process designed to transpose the scan stamped on its
massive, self-supporting steel cladding plates involves
techniques native to printmaking (a messy, error-prone,
technical process) rather than cleaner applications like
projection, colorfield washes, or other atmospherics. The
image blanket that coats the surfaces of the Groninger is a
(drastically) enlarged pencil sketch that was scanned, cut,
and pasted onto a physical model and digitally enlarged to
a 1:1 stencil. The stencil was then cut as an adhesive film
mask for shipbuilders to use as they painted the design
with tar directly onto the flat, self-supporting steel plates
that clad the museum wing. The noise and grain of the
scan (the pencil sketch was enlarged such that lines broke
down into pixelated bands of dots and fills) marks the
pavilion with glitchy traces of process, doubled by the (by
now more familiar) geometric fragmentation of the facade.
The Groninger tar-tattoo is worlds away from the “moist
Theoretical Notes on the Aesthetics of Texture Mapping Tursack

pressure” of Rist’s projected image-kiss (the Groninger’s
architects boast that the tar of its tattoo will outlast the
material decomposition of its steel support) and is more
disorienting and formally dissembling than it is sublime.
Form, image, material, and process are inextricably woven
together in the production of the pavilion’s envelope.
NOISE, ERROR, CHROMA-GLITCH
A common quality of the work described here is the loss
of image resolution and the introduction of material error
(some of which comes naturally by printing at an architec-
tural scale as 1:1 file sizes can become unwieldy). Media
theorist Carolyn L. Kane (2019) theorizes the aesthetics
of glitch as something particular to the digital culture of
the first decades of the 2000s (autotuned vocals, pixelated
JPEGs, video compression errors, etc.). “Accidental color” (a
cousin of compression-error or datamoshing) in particular
is described by Kane as the aestheticization of discor-
dant palettes and chromatic noise. While Kane points out
that “color has always been a kind of noise” throughout
the history of western aesthetic philosophy—distrusted
as merely cosmetic and prone to “false appearance”—its
shifty nature is taken to extremes with digital patterning
and “accidental” mixing, as in the videos of Ryan Trecartin
and Lizzie Fitch (Kane 2019, 71). Trecartin and Fitch have
become particularly adept at drawing attention to “acci-
dental” colors by using techniques like overmatching in
the surfaces of their videos (a character’s outfit, garish
makeup, a Naked Juice bottle, and a wallpaper background
are painted with uncanny chromatic fidelity, collapsing
figure and ground). The architectural office Current
SPECULATION AND CRITIQUE
4 Current Interests (Mira Henry
+ Matthew Au). Hedges of the
World. 2018. Texture rendering.
5 Current Interests (Mira Henry
+ Matthew Au). Hedges of the
World. 2018. Physical mockup.
6 Current Interests (Mira Henry
+ Matthew Au). Hedges of the
World. 2018. Tyvek presentation
model.
7 Michael Heizer. Dragged Mass
Geometric. 1985. Construction
and installation photos.
Interests (Mira Henry + Matthew Au) has begun to fore-
front the skins of architectural envelopes as sites for
similar inquiries into color and graphic error in their design
work. The duo reconceives the building envelope as a soft,
cosmetic wrapper through a revision of Gottfried Semper’s
theory of textile enclosures, one of his four (primary)
elements of architecture. In Current Interests projects
like the office’s design for an artist studio in Silverlake, Los
Angeles (2019), they quite literally imagine building enve-
lopes as slack blankets with careful attention paid to subtle
shifts in the hue, value, saturation, and texture across a
given surface. In their piece Hedges of the World (2018),
however, color is taken to a new extreme (an extreme
familiar to the makeup, costumes, digital effects, and set
designs by Trecartin and Fitch). The image-map for Hedges
was developed through a complex series of analog and
digital processes. The architects gathered and carefully
cataloged a selection of plants from a residential neighbor-
hood in South L.A. before photographing each sample with a
ruler to maintain its scale. The catalog of samples was then
enhanced in Gigapixel and run through a series of scripts
in Photoshop and Grasshopper to separate color channels,
before being redistributed onto 3D surfaces. The project
was then materialized as a printable Tyvek fabric before it
was sewn and fitted with an interior structure. The all-over
field-like quality of the final work speaks to high-fashion
pop-camouflage, Luis Gispert’s photographs of candy-
coated custom car interiors, and the “chroma-glitch” that
marks the swipes and transitions in Trecartin and Fitch’s
videos and set designs. Kane’s descriptions of the artists’
figure-ground transgressions could easily apply to the
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9 10
uneven color-image field mapped onto Hedges of the World:
“The power of color is movement from singular, linear, and
rational frameworks into noise, nondistinction, and the decep-
tive but vital qualities of visual perception” (Kane 2019, 121).
An important quality unique to image-objects like Henry and
Au’s textile experiments is that they are “mapped” (rather than
projected or tiled) with photos, graphics, and colors. Mapping
is the precise operation of placing images onto the individual
faces of a massing model and assigning them (U,V) coordinates
relative to surface geometry. Image mapping allows a user to
scale, rotate, and skew images attached to geometric shells
in digital modeling environments. In this, images are wedded
to the geometric wireframe of a project in the first stages of
design. Unrolled surface drawings are a critical part of all
image-object workflows, allowing the designer to visualize
a complex volume as an array of flat planes. Platforms for
animation, modeling, character design, and rendering allow
users to quickly and carefully position images on 3D surfaces
using UV editors. In a UV editor, a 3D object’s mesh is unfolded
and images can be placed and manipulated on an unrolled
surface drawing with incredible speed and control. Also
unique to contemporary texture-mapping platforms is the
ability to update source-image files (a linked Photoshop file
mapped onto a mesh in the Maya platform, for example), while
manipulating a 3D model in real time.
GR APHIC SKINS
Video game theorist Ian Bogost tells us that “textures are
the graphical skins laid atop 3-D models so they appear to
have surface detail” (Bogost 2011, 78). Indeed, advances
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in texture mapping were driven, in part, by the popularity
of first-person video games in the early 1990s like id
Software’s Doom (released in 1993 for MS DOS) (Pinchbeck
2013). Doom’s designers outdid their previous 3D releases
that used cartoonish environmental palettes created from
scratch (id’s Catacomb 3-D [1991]) by scanning physical
materials and using them to coat the surfaces of different
levels. Using photographed source material and new
lighting algorithms, Doom’s immersive environments were
unlike anything the gaming world had seen before. The
use of texture mapping is second nature to many younger
architects; part of the phenomenology of gaming is the
experience of getting lost in the illusion of textures, only
to run into errors and accidental off-map blind spots that
reveal the superficial nature of a mesh (which can appear
as a group of broken, unwelded surfaces). Unlike video
games, however, which look to dial up the level of realism
and resolution with each new release, texture-mapped
architecture draws attention to its artificiality and flat-
ness with graphic glitch, noise, static, printerly error,
and misregistration. The image-objects in projects like
T+E+A+M’s Living Picture installation (2017) use historical
photographs of the installation’s site as it was designed
in 1912 and translate that archival material into a digital
map. When said map is printed on vinyl and used to skin
the steel wireframes of geometric primitives in the actual
installation, however, the effect inverts the “gritty, realistic
look” that Doom’s designers were after. Instead the cones,
cylinders, and prisms scattered across Living Picture’s site
appear to be native digital artifacts that somehow fell out of
a gaming platform back into the material world.
Theoretical Notes on the Aesthetics of Texture Mapping Tursack

One could look at photographs of T+E+A+M’s final built
installation and mistake it for a straightforward exer-
cise in texture mapping, projection, and anamorphosis,
a digital Magritte. The project is composed as a suite of
stage-prop-scaled geometric primitives strewn about a
suburban lawn. Each geometric volume is wrapped in
a vinyl print with a full-color rendering that was applied
using a texture-painting tool in the Blender platform. From
certain vantages, one appears to see through the printed
objects as though a photograph of its context were printed
directly onto the form in the manner of science fiction active
camouflage devices (Masahiko, Kawakami, and Tachi 2003).
Closer inspection reveals that the mapped images are in
fact renderings of the architect Howard Van Doren Shaw’s
1912 garden stage design for the site. A fabricated history
leaks into the anamorphic projection, along with digital
artifacts from T+E+A+M’s process (the default Photoshop
checkerboard background is revealed in areas where the
texture-painting tool “missed” part of a volume’s surface).
Even in photo documentation, the architects’ rendering of
the original Shaw scheme asserts its character as a 3D
model (trees and shrubs are rendered digital objects; one
is not meant to be duped by photorealism). The resolution
of the projected images is then conceptually doubled in the
array of volumetric forms that they wrap (primitives being
the default geometric menu of most 3D modeling software).
How does one describe the visual qualities of a work that
blends fiction (3D-generated models), documentation of
a site’s past life (photos of the Ragdale Ring’s site from
1912), and first-person perspectives (sitelines drawn from
SPECULATION AND CRITIQUE
8 T+E+A+M (Thom Moran, Ellie
Abrons, Adam Fure, Meredith
Miller). Living Picture. 2017.
Concept rendering.
9 T+E+A+M (Thom Moran, Ellie
Abrons, Adam Fure, Meredith
Miller). Living Picture. 2017.
Installation Photograph
(T+E+A+M).
10 T+E+A+M (Thom Moran, Ellie
Abrons, Adam Fure, Meredith
Miller). Living Picture. 2017.
Unrolled surface drawing.
11 Wade Guyton. Untitled. 2006,
Epson UltraChrome inkjet on
linen, 85.25 × 69 inches, 216.5 ×
175.3 cm. Courtesy of the artist
and Petzel, New York.
11
a close reading of the present-day site before construc-
tion)? Printerly error and low-resolution rendering in Living
Picture are calibrated to invite the viewer into the 3D envi-
ronments used to design the work. One is made aware of
Photoshop glitches and the registration imperfections that
inevitably come with any texture-mapping exercise (images
can get stretched and smeared when projected onto 3D
models). While the expertise and skill behind the installa-
tion’s modeling/rendering is a given, there is a modesty and
playfulness in the work that speaks to a reverence for the
early years of computer rendering (the architects came of
age just before the advent of gaming engines like the id Tech
1). The loving nod to images of early rendering experiments
from the 1970s and 80s, and simultaneous command of
contemporary tools might be understood as a subjectivity
specific to the architects’ generation.
T+E+A+M’s use of texture mapping, image editing, digital
printing, and the almost-mute forms native to 3D modeling
menus clearly forefronts process over authorship. Nearly
50 years after the introduction of Peter Eisenman and Sol
LeWitt’s “semi-automatic” geometric systems, however,
we know that such processes have absorbed new affects
(Keller 2018). In the digitally native inkjet canvases of Wade
Guyton, for example, one senses a melancholic ghost in the
machine. The “X” shapes repeatedly printed on works like
Untitled (2006) get cropped, overlap, bleed, and suffer from
the banding that happens when a print head is clogged or
low on ink. It’s as though the system is struggling to get its
message (the X removed from any context is already a weak
signifier) from digital machine to substrate. To use a musical
683
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13
analogy, cultural theorist Mark Fisher describes the digital
grain that filters the vocals on Darkstar’s 2010 electronic
album North as “if it has been recorded on a shaky mobile
phone connection” (Fisher 2014, 173–174). The printerly
errors that mark Guyton’s work and the texture-mapped
image-objects cited here speak more to digital deterioration,
loss, and breakdown than to the techno euphoria that Foster
and Lavin diagnose (for better and worse) in mainstream
image-architecture hybrids. Viola Ago’s project Poppy Red
(2018), for example, begins with a series of vacuum-formed
PETG relief studies that are hydro-dipped with an inkjet-
printed film. Hydro-dipping (or water-transfer printing)—a
technique Ago borrows from custom automotive culture—is
the process of applying an image film to a three-dimensional
form by floating the image in a chemical bath and plunging
the object through its surface. The technique is by nature
imprecise, and one can never accurately predict how an
image will wrap the geometry in one of her studies (though
the architect studies this process with digital physics
simulations in Maya as well). The imprecision is of course
the point, and even though the graphic was carefully crafted
in Rhino 3D and the ZBrush platform to “fit” the folds and
cavities of the vacuum-formed reliefs, Ago exploits moments
when the film misses its mark, tears, wrinkles, and delami-
nates from its support, just as Guyton relishes in the drips,
clogs, print-head traces, and misregistration when over-
printing giant X’s on folded linen with his large-format Epson.
Both architect and artist use digital (and analog) printing
processes the way experimental musicians use looping
and delay: mechanically repeating an indexed action while
offsetting and overlaying its repetition.
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14
The image of a glitched-out image “blanket” projected from
above onto an object reads most clearly in the presentation
model for Poppy Red. In the model, mechanically skittish
white lines and fills “hit” the project’s massing volumes and
spill out onto a glossy, back-painted, monochrome ground
plane (one imagines a 3D version of Frank Stella’s offset
paintings, where the white lines and polygon supports fail
to catch up and properly align with one another, caught in
a perpetual state of asynchrony). The vertically projected
blanket also visually connects Poppy Red to a much earlier
precedent, Douglas Garofalo and David Leary’s Camouflage
House (1991). In both examples, the plan-oriented blanket
dissolves figure-ground demarcations, and the projects’
massings seem to emerge from their sites. The backpainted
gloss of Ago’s project speaks more to the culture of 3M
vinyl car wraps than the ominous “protective coloring” of
Garofalo and Leary’s militaristic studies. However, the
high-perspective model photographs and roof plans of
Poppy Red, the Camouflage House (and the Groninger for
that matter) are the most expressive and complete images
of these projects. Designing to an aerial perspective begs
the question of satellite and aerial photography (camou-
flage was, after all, designed primarily with the planometric,
photographic, gaze in mind) (Bousquet 2018, 157). The work
might also address Google Earth, drone’s-eye-views, and
the ubiquitous “top” viewport, a common perspective option
in most 3D modeling software. The image-­architecture
works by Doug Aitken, Herzog and de Meuron, and
others analyzed by Lavin and Foster still largely owe their
optical models to the anthropocentric, vertical, modernist
­viewing-eye, epitomized by Robert Slutzky and Colin Rowe’s
Theoretical Notes on the Aesthetics of Texture Mapping Tursack
Yale Perspecta Journal Transparency articles published
in the 1960s. Many of the image-objects analyzed here,
by contrast, concern themselves with both human and
machine perspectives.
PRINTERLY MATERI ALIT Y
Nowhere is the collapse of architecturally scaled form,
image, and mechanical perception more intricately inter-
twined than in the installation Dragged Mass Geometric
(1985) by earth/land artist Michael Heizer at the Whitney
Museum of Art, New York. Dragged Mass Geometric is
a series of faceted volumes built from steel trusses and
lumber clad in screen-printed corrugated board. The
dimensions of the piece are massive for the Whitney’s
fourth-floor gallery, measuring 16.5 × 115 × 46 feet. The
reason for its scale is that Dragged Mass Geometric is actu-
ally a loose simulacrum of Dragged Mass (1971), a 30-ton
granite block and earth installation staged in the Detroit
Institute of Arts outdoor grounds. The Whitney recon-
struction (if it can be called that) reimagines the boulder
and earth-mounds as low-poly hollow volumes, framed in
steel and wrapped in printed photographs. The images are
close-ups of “geologic source material” shot with an “exten-
sive twelve minute exposure from twelve feet in the air” in
the artist’s studio (Heizer and Whitney 1985, 6). The idea
of using photographs of raw materials (and Southwestern
landscapes shot before the project) was likely inspired by
Heizer’s archaeologist father, who used aerial (helicopter)
photography, magnetometers, and other sophisticated Cold
War–era measurement tools to study ancient architectural
sites in Mexico, Peru, and the American Southwest (Kett
2015). The complex translation of the Detroit installation
into radically simplified geologic volumes and massively
enlarged, printed image textures (dots that were 125th
of an inch “are now blown up to eight feet or nine feet
long”) similarly echoes the artist’s father’s labor-intensive
surveys and early-digital models of sites like the La Venta
pyramid (Heizer 1986). Though Heizer is largely known for
his colossal outdoor installations with concrete, rocks, and
metal, Dragged Mass Geometric is more like an exercise in
analog photogrammetry. The artist pushes this work one
step further in his Altars (2015) series, where enlarged
hand sketches are painted on the borders of colossal “alien”
shapes built out of weathering steel and coated with poly-
urethane. That the “altars” (some more than 40 ft in length),
which are also silk-screened with collaged fragments of
the imagery used for Dragged Mass Geometric, speak to
the artist’s career-long interest in spatial drawing, photog-
raphy, and textures rendered at scales better suited to
aerial and satellite photography than to human perception.
Image-objects are, at the end of the day, not for first-person
viewers to take in as a corporeal experience.
SPECULATION AND CRITIQUE
12 Miracles Architecture (Viola
Ago). Poppy Red. 2019. Unrolled
surface drawing.
13 Miracles Architecture (Viola
Ago). Poppy Red. 2019.
Presentation model.
14 Miracles Architecture (Viola
Ago). Poppy Red. 2019.
Presentation model.
If enlarged photographic images of the Southwestern land-
scape dematerialize geometric substrates for Heizer, the
office Alam/Profeta takes this process to a new extreme
using photogrammetry and lidar scans of building sites
to translate architectural solids into vaporous image-
clouds. In projects such as Watchtower (2018), Casa Zwei
(2018–2019), and Street|Scape (2017), the office moves
between consumer smartphone photogrammetry apps
(Autodesk ReCap) and premium, high-end Leica lidar
equipment to survey sites for architectural interventions.
By beginning with machine vision, A/P mobilize the survey
(rendered as point-cloud objects) as a design agent. In his
history of military perception, Antoine Bousquet tracks
the historical transition of conventional planometric maps
from finished products to be read by users (printed on
paper like architectural projections) to computer cartog-
raphy. In computer cartography, a map is an object “to
be displayed within a visual toolbox to be used interac-
tively for exploratory data analysis” (Bousquet 2018, 157).
Similarly, the initial design act for A/P has more to do with
the real-time analysis, management, and interpretation
of high-­resolution point-cloud models than it does with
orthographic geometric concepts born in an imaginary
compositional nonspace. In projects like Watchtower,
photogrammetry is used to generate a point-cloud model
of the original architecture+site as a first operation.
Renderings of the point cloud are then flattened using
Grasshopper and MeshLab (and Processing) to create flat,
two-dimensional skins (their “texture worlds” as A/P likes
to call them) before they are rethickened as low reliefs
to be mapped onto geometric substrates. As with the
Groninger, A/P relishes the opportunity to render visual
information from vaporous renderings (a medieval tower
translated into a field of free-floating cloud points) into
the emphatic materiality of Cor-Ten steel, locally sourced,
building-scale, sandstone color printing, and custom-fab-
ricated bricks. In A/P’s oeuvre, composition as we
conventionally define it is almost entirely absent. Instead,
images give birth to models, models become renderings,
renderings become textures, and textures take shape
through material research.
685

16
15 Alam/Profeta (Maya Alam, Daniele Profeta). Watch-Tower. 2018.
Algorithmically edited texture map.
16 Alam/Profeta (Maya Alam, Daniele Profeta). Watch-Tower. 2018. Final
concept rendering.
17 Alam/Profeta (Maya Alam, Daniele Profeta), Watch-Tower. 2018. Final
concept rendering.
CONCLUSION
Image-object research in the mode of Alam/Profeta and
Heizer (and an understanding of the subjectivities that
such research can produce) is an emerging category in
visual studies. That said, in the “kit-of-parts” conceptual
formalism (a postwar invention) still commonplace in many
foundation-level architecture curricula, composition is
understood as the construction of gestalt figures (Love
2003). Students learn to manipulate geometric grammars
in plan, section, elevation, and axonometric projections
to set up and then carefully delay the satisfactory reso-
lution of parts (point-line-plane and solid-void geometric
elements) into pictorial wholes. Several schools of phenom-
enological painterly thinking and affective ornamentalism
686
may have challenged such gestalt pedagogy in recent
decades, forefronting image, pattern, ornament, light,
and color over form. However, the practices that expertly
utilize these strategies (artists like Aitken, Turrell, Irwin,
and Eliasson and designers like Herzog and de Meuron,
UN Studio, and Steven Holl Architects) default all too often
into a high-tech, black-boxed, atmospheric euphoria that
renders material “virtual,” phenomenological experience
“faux,” and form as viscous or “fluid” (to borrow terms from
Lavin and Foster). The image-object is, instead, a unique
aesthetic and technical category that sets image and form
into a more complex conversation. They are geometrically
precise and process-oriented, and mobilize printerly glitch,
error, dissonance, noise, and image breakdown to flirt with
an optical formlessness. The graphic matter in the exam-
ples cited here is overexposed, overscaled, overprinted,
and misaligned. Color is “accidental” and speaks to data-
moshing and compression algorithm noise. The tools used
to generate the envelopes of projects like Living Picture,
15
Poppy Red, and Hedges of the World are borrowed from
animation, character design, game design, and rendering
cultures. Image-objects are expertly conceived in these
platforms, often assisted by scripts and looped analog
processes, and printed with material workflows invented by
their designers and/or co-opted from custom car culture
and commercial printing. Though technologically adept
and materially advanced, the thematic of mechanical error,
low or compromised resolution (in geometry and image
alike), and semiautomatic processes belies an ambivalence
17
towards the more future-forward aspects of earlier digital
waves, and sets image-object sensibilities largely outside
of, or peripheral to, architectural computation culture.
Instead, the work asks fundamental (and much older) ques-
tions about the base structures and visual hierarchies that
constitute our collective compositional vocabularies.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many of the artists, architects, and designers cited in this paper
generously shared invaluable insights into their processes, tech-
nical innovations, and material explorations. I would like to extend
a special thanks to Karolin Schmidbaur and Jan Rancke of Coop
Himmelb(l)au, Matthew Au and Mira Henry, Thom Moran, Ellie
Abrons, Adam Fure, Meredith Miller, Viola Ago, Maya Alam, Daniele
Profeta, Wade Guyton, and Lucas Page and Rebecca Ochab of the
Friedrich Petzel Gallery. I would also like to thank my summer
research assistant Jonathan Brearley of the MIT SA+P.
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All other drawings and images by the authors.
Hans Tursack is a designer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He
received a BFA in studio art from the Cooper Union School of Art,
and an MArch from the Princeton University School of Architecture
where he was the recipient of the Underwood Thesis Prize. He has
worked in the offices of LEVENBETTS Architects, SAA/Stan Allen
Architecture, and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. His writing
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IMAGE CREDITS
Figures 2, 3: ©Coop Himmelb(l)au.
Figures 4, 5, 6: ©Current Interests.
Figure 7: ©MichaelHeizer.
Figures 8, 9, 10: ©T+E+A+M.
Figure 11: ©WadeGuyton, 2018.
Figures 12, 13, 14: ©MiraclesArchitecture, Viola Ago.
Figures 15, 16, 17: ©Alam/Profeta.

SPECULATION AND CRITIQUE 687