The Generative Image: Spatial Photography, Embodied Experience, and Architectural Design

Human spatial experience is formed via our interaction with both site and body. In dialogue with the physical manifestations of the built environment, new sensations combine with our intuition to generate our spatial understanding. We do this through sensing, thinking, remembering and feeling. But we can also engage this process through making - via creative pursuits such as drawing, painting or photography that respond to our experience of spatiality. While the results of these pursuits are not the same as the sites they respond to, they generate ancillary meaning by operating in dialogue with our phenomenological and intellectual responses.

In architectural practice, inquiry-via-making is the primary means by which a design project is developed, reflected upon and understood: rendering the world manipulable through abstraction such that spatial and architectural ideas can be applied to it. Photographic images – including photographs, renderings and AI imagery - are one such vital representational form. Extensively engaged for commercial means, architectural photographic images frequently appear polished, detached, and autonomous. Despite the medium’s general aptitude for promoting personal and collective ideas about space and architecture through memory and sensation, architectural photographic images largely exclude cultural, historical, and personal factors. Further exploration of the generative potential of photographic images offers an opportunity to forge alternate understandings of the purposes and possibilities of the medium as a design practice, linking the professional to the personal and allowing a broader range of disciplinary and cultural knowledge to inform the everyday methods of architecture.

As such, this dissertation argues that architecture should embrace a more expansive practice of photographically informed representation. Making the case for an artistic and speculative approach to the photographic image, this dissertation asks what we might learn if we challenge hegemonic understandings of the medium’s unfettered objectivity, questioning the reigning optic regime in search of contingent, subjective, and generative approaches for seeing, rendering, and understanding space through images. What other possibilities and kinds of knowledge might we encounter if we look past the status quo and open ourselves up to alternative approaches? And how might these alternatives affect design?

To better understand the generative potential of photographic images in design thinking and production, this dissertation offers a first-hand view of the methodological and creative exchange between subject and image, image and concept, concept and architecture. It is comprised of four individual photographic explorations undertaken by the author in which site-specific spatial encounters are analyzed via the creation of photographic images and through critical reflection on those images as well as the process of their creation. It concludes with a reflection on two student workshops, led by the author, which further investigated the interaction between photographic imagery and other visual representational tools used in architectural design practices.

In pursuit of an architecture of complexity and richness, these studies demonstrate a need for awareness of the hegemonic operative spatial constructs in architectural practice. Furthermore, they show how alternative approaches foster a more generative paradigm in the production of a situated, embodied, and contingent spatial imaginary. This paradigm not only engenders the expanded use of photographic images in the architectural design process but also facilitates a greater awareness of the complexities of the world and to our own complicated relationship to it. By embracing an expanded library of representational tools, sensation and alternative spatial constructs, the images offer a reevaluation of what we mean by spatial representation in architecture.