Surface and Deep Histories: Critiques, and Practices in Art, Architecture, and Design Editor Anuradha Chatterjee Under

Contract Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Surface in architecture has had a deeper and a more pervasive presence in the practice and theory of the discipline than is commonly supposed. Orientations to the surface emerge, collapse, and reappear, sustaining it as a legitimate theoretical and artefactual entity, despite the disciplinary definition of architecture as space, structure, and function. The persistence of surface is a commentary on the concomitance of the visual and the built, especially as modernity casts into question the nature of the eye, vision, and the visible. In White Walls and Designer Dresses, Mark Wigley notes: Architecture is no longer simply a visual object with certain properties. It is actually involved in the construction of the visual before it is placed within the visual. Indeed, vision itself becomes an architectural phenomenon (1995). Even though surface is defended for its pervasiveness by Kurt Forster, it occupies the interstice or the space of the unconscious in architectural discourse, from where it defends its legitimacy as architecturally valuable, as opposed to merely visually pleasurable. Nevertheless, it is a key site for interdisciplinary collaborations, which allows practitioners and thinkers in art, heritage, fashion, interior design and craft, industrial design, new materials and installation technologies to think of surface as superficial and pervasive, symbol and space; meaningful and functional; static and transitory, object and envelope.

1. Introduction 2. Molly Duggins, Montage and Modernity: Late Nineteenth-Century Colonial Graphic Culture 3. Anna Daly Between mischief and reason: wallpaper, femininity, and the production of space in the late-nineteenth century 4. Stella North, The Surfacing of Expansive Bodies 5. Chris Brisbin The in-between-ness of the edge: the verandahs public faces and threshold spaces 6. Peter Kohane, Rational complexity: James Fergussons theory of Ornament 7. Hank Haeusler Hypersurface architecture [redux] 8. Anuradha Chatterjee Surface typologies, critical function, and glass walls in Australian architecture 9. Flavia Marcello and Ian Woodcock Scratching the surface: representational and symbolic practices of contemporary Green architecture