Dalibor Vesely - Architecture and Representation

Architecture and Representation

In Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation (2004), Vesely sets the argument from the experience of architecture, as it constantly works through different modes of representation, including "built reality".

Vesely defines the present cultural situation as divided and ambiguous, especially when it comes to architecture (pp. 4-12, 36, 44 ss). Twentieth-century architecture placed its trust in the epistemological model of modern science and technology that is today largely reflected in instrumental concepts of city and suburban landscape. When epistemology initiated its foundational enterprise it could hardly suspect that its role in validating scientific knowledge would very soon be challenged. Quine's Epistemology Naturalized (1969) reports how this is precisely what happened when it became clear that the argument developed in the terms of logical empiricism was not based on the same empirical standing as the sciences. Today, the attempt to rehabilitate epistemology faces the problem of bridging this gap. This is obviously not an easy task, since the gap is between different modes of representation and concepts of knowledge that in some cases precede modern science, i.e., precede the historical notion of scientific knowledge as it takes course from the seventeenth- and sixteenth centuries.

Vesely's research delves into these historical settings that are understood to be the birth place of modern science, in the general hope of exposing the origin of our modern notion of knowledge and how it came about to emancipate from traditional representations of the world. Vesely’s research has accordingly been working out the historical notion of representation, as it constitutes a central issue in this historical affair; and the construction of a modern notion of knowledge has much to do with a changing nature in the concept of representation (pp. 13-19). The concept as it is generally understood today largely surpasses the history of epistemology. According to Vesely, this is because representation is generally understood on the basis of a certain "continuity between a particular mode of representation and what is represented" (p. 14), a notion which has been current throughout the whole of European architectural history.