On My ‘Imaginary Architecture’

Leonardo, Vol. 11, pp. 53-54. Pergamon Press 1978. Printed in Great Britain ON MY ‘IMAGINARY ARCHITECTURE’* Friedrich St. Florian** In 1968 I began to work on the idea of an ‘imaginary architecture’, an architecture that would be conceived and displayed in some manner but that would not be limited by the requirements of actual building construction . I dream of magnificent architectural volumes that are transparent and illusory. As a dream it may not be too far fetched. Arnold Toynbee, the historian, spoke of current ‘etherealization’, asserting that there is a dematerialization of human concerns. However, illusions and delusions have had for many humans a stature comparable to that of reality since the distant past. My first attempt at ‘imaginary architecture’ was an ‘Imaginary Room’ that I was invited to present at the Stockholm Museum of Modern Art in 1969. At the time I was fascinated by the procedure for air traffic control above busy airports. One of the measures used is the herding pattern of incoming aircraft, which controllers call ‘waitingrooms’. These consist of well-defined spaces in the vicinity of an airport-‘rooms’ with invisible walls, floors and ceilings, which a pilot can ignore only at great peril. My ‘Imaginary Room’ (Fig. 1) was an attempt to convey to viewers a visible outline of an air controller’s ‘waiting room’. This I did by means of a laser beam produced by a 50 mW helium-neon unit made by Spectraphysics, Mountain View, Calif. The beam was made to take various paths by the use of mirrors. Visitors on entering the darkened gallery room passed between a pair of photoelectric cells that caused shutters in front of the laser units to open and, on leaving, to close. Only one visitor at a timewas allowed to be present in the room. On entering, a visitor obtained a contrast between the dark room and the laser-beam outline of the ‘Imaginary Room’. Although the demonstration might be called primitive, I found the experience aesthetically satisfying. After exhibiting a smaller laser beam project called ‘Imaginary Ceiling’ at the Hayden Gallery of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970, I decided to discontinue the use of the laser beams for demonstrating ‘imaginaryarchitecture’. Viewers found it difficult to comprehend my intentions, because the degree of abstraction of the model was too great. It occurred to me that I might convey a better demonstration of ‘imaginaryarchitecture’ by resorting to holography. I drew up a proposal in 1970 for large-scale holograms of a series of old land-marks in New York City, which I called ‘Vanishing New York’, as part of a proposal for a museum of architectire. The landmarks still existed when I arrived from Austria in 1961. I *Based on a paper entitled ‘ImaginaryArchitecture’and the Aesthetics of Impermanence presented at the 1975 Annual Meeting of the Optical Society of America. **Architect, Rhode Island School of Design, School of Architecture, 2 College St., Providence, RI 02903, U.S.A. (Received 18 Oct. 1976) prepared a number of photographic montages as models for the proposed holograms. While in the midst of preparing these proposals, I chanced to see in the physics laboratory a concave mirror in which was a striking reflection of objects that brought to mind the illusions produced in Andrea Palladio’s Theatro Olimpico at Vicenza, Italy; Francesco Borromini’s Galleria Prospettiva in Pallazzo Spada at Rome; the paintings of Andrea Pozzo in S. Ignazio at Rome; the Amalienburg Pavilion in the Nymphenburg Castle in Germany; Adolf Loos’ ‘American Bar’ in Vienna and the exhibition prepared by Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) of New York at the Worlds Fair at Osaka, Japan in 1971. The EAT exhibition included a balloon with a mirrored surface (dia. 27m) on which were reflected a magical transformation of the surroundings that struck me by their beauty and that also influenced my work ‘Nymphenburg Two’ (Fig. 2). In Nymphenburg Two’ I attempted to bring into juxtaposition aspects of the real and the illusory. It consists of elements related to computer hardware and software and to a hologram of clouds as the central point of interest. I believe that thecontrast between the qualities of the elements are...