Writing on the Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation

Ranging from an examination of the politically-laden spectacle of George IV's visit to Edinburgh in 1822, as stage-managed by the celebrated novelist Sir Walter Scott, to an analysis of Google Earth's role in the construction of a new kind of political map, one no longer structured by boundary lines and coloured territories but instead through a politics of image resolution, the remarkable essays in this book present innovative ways of understanding visual phenomena in historical and contemporary culture. Writing on the Image brings together a series of Mark Dorrian's celebrated critical writings. Focusing on issues of elevated vision, spectacle, atmosphere, and the limits of aesthetic experience, Dorrian explores the politics of representation through a series of close readings of the ideological effects of images in their specific contexts. Seamlessly traversing sources from architecture, art, literature, history, geography and film, the essays gathered here exemplify Mark Dorrian's pioneering 'post-disciplinary' approach to architecture and visual culture. Featuring a foreword by Paul Carter, and an afterword by Ella Chmielewska, Writing on the Image opens with a sequence of four historically-oriented chapters that then lead on to considerations of key events in architectural, urban and visual culture over the past decade. Whether it be an eighteenth-century engraving that depicts a magnified drop of tap water as an alien planet swarming with monstrous creatures, an artwork showing a car with the silhouette of a building mounted on its roof, the covering up of a tapestry in the UN before a televised news conference, or a large-scale satellite image that is affixed to the basement floor of a public building, Dorrian shows how each artefact or event he examines is eloquent in its ability to problematise a larger set of relations beyond itself.

Table of Contents:
Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Foreword by Paul Carter Introduction 1. The King in the City: On the Iconology of George IV in Edinburgh 2. Cityscape with Ferris Wheel: Chicago 1893 3. Falling Upon Warsaw: The Shadow of Stalin’s ‘Palace of Culture’ 4. Adventures on the Vertical: From the New Vision to Powers of Ten 5. ‘The Way the World Sees London’: Thoughts on a Millennial Urban Spectacle 6. The Aerial Image: Transparency, Vertigo and Miniaturisation 7. Clouds of Architecture 8. Utopia on Ice: The Sunny Mountain Ski Dome as an Allegory of the Future 9. On Google Earth 10. Transcoded Indexicality 11. Voice, Monstrosity and Flaying: Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas as a Silent Sound Work 12. Architecture and A-disciplinarity? Afterword by Ella Chmielewska Notes on the chapters Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Mark Dorrian is the Forbes Chair in Architecture at Edinburgh College of Art. Previously, he was at Newcastle University, where he was responsible for the creation of new research led postgraduate programmes in architecture and related disciplines. With Adrian Hawker he is co-director of the art, architecture and urbanism atelier Metis.

Review :
Writing on the Image is a collection of twelve beautifully written essays … [Dorrian’s] work demonstrates how particular cultural artifacts drive focused criticism that needs to draw upon expansive investigation and understanding. His essays challenge orthodoxies of architectural thought, demonstrating in manifold ways the involvement of the architectural object in complex relays of broader cultural, political and technical forces… The essays [in Writing on the Image] are beautifully written, each a rich education … Short essays such as those found in this journal are 1,500 word abstracts to a discussion perhaps not yet written, perhaps fully-formed; they merely signal a wider, more complex discourse. Mark Dorrian’s Writing on the Image is that discourse. Each case study is embedded in a description of a world exposed to enormous historical and ethical and political forces. In the world of nuclear physics Enrico Fermi was recognized by his peers as being equally gifted as an experimentalist and as a theoretician. Dorrian is that rara avis, Fermi's equivalent in the world of architecture … Reading through these scintillating essays, I often heard echoes of the dialectics and the voice of the renegade American critic Kenneth Burke. Writing on the Image is a sort of anti-picture book where the language is at once complex, poetic and explanatory, catching at the history and reception of images.