Browsing by Author "Niskanen, Aino, Prof. emerita, Aalto University, Finland"

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Building (with) Pictures: The Confusing Fluency of Architectural Photorealism
(2024) Hyvönen, Hanna
School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Doctoral dissertation (monograph)
This study explores the practice of photorealistic architectural visualization with regard to its technical underpinnings and cultural implications. In recent decades, pictures that mimic photographic documents have become a standard way to present architecture projects to the lay public. In critical and academic contexts, by contrast, photorealistic visualisation is customarily bypassed as a form of superficial illustration that has no significant bearing on truly architectural ideation. Through my study, I argue that photorealistic architectural visualisation should not be embraced as fluent communication nor dismissed as trivial pictorial representation. It is shown that both attitudes rely on questionable assumptions about pictorial realism as the straightforward imitation of visual reality. I develop my interpretation of photorealism by analysing the graphical user interfaces of common architectural software. On current 3D platforms, architecture is habitually inspected through operations that simulate photography: it is through an imaginary camera that architecture is made visible for the software user so that it can be assessed and worked on. I argue that the aim of photographic veracity is thus built into the digitalised toolkit of present-day architecture. Hence, instead of being a stylistic feature of pictures, architectural photorealism is better understood as a pivotal way of working on architecture – a common sense of digitalised architecture. Drawing on philosophical and art historical critiques of pictorial realism, I argue that the apparent naturalness of photorealistic operations cannot be accounted for in terms of visual imitation. Instead, the practical fluency of architectural photorealism builds on simulations of entrenched pictorial and architectural conventions. It is argued that as an artificial conglomeration of realist techniques photorealism ingrains largely held assumptions about the relationship of visual perception, pictures, and architectural space. Therefore, photorealistic architectural visualisation can be studied as a reserve of both pictorial and architectural ideals that implicitly guide the current production of built environment. It is under the cover of its seemingly trivial verisimilitude that photorealism can assume such an instrumental, and, frequently, misleading, role in architectural culture. Through my exploration, I challenge architects to develop new techniques of visualisation that would depart from the conventional commitments of photorealism. At the same time, however, my study underlines the vastness of the challenge: pictorial realism is more deeply rooted in architectural culture than the recent critics of photorealism have been ready to admit.
Talot pysyvät, ihmiset vaihtuvat : Sosialistisen yhteiskunnan rakentaminen entisessä suomalaisessa Kurkijoen kirkonkylässä Neuvostoliitossa
(2023) Böök, Netta
School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Doctoral dissertation (monograph)
The study examines the construction of a socialist society from an architectural point of view in the former Finnish settlement of Lopotti in the municipality Kurkijoki as part of the Karelian-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic after the territorial cessions of Finland following the Winter War (1939–1940) and the Continuation War (1941–1944). It sheds light on the norms, goals and principles of construction and planning in the rural areas of the Soviet Union, both at the time of the cessions and later on, which also determined the shaping of the former Finnish territories after the wars. As a subject of study, Lopotti or, since the cessions, Kurkijoki, off ers rare opportunities to examine the fates of buildings representing foreign culture within the context of a new state, because almost all the buildings of the pre-war period have been exceptionally well preserved, both through the wars and the Soviet era. Sovietisation meant bringing all aspects of society under the direction and control of the Communist Party and a complete change of population. The restructuring of the countryside was guided by the division between industrial and military twns and rural areas created in the 1920s, and by the classifi cation of collective farms and the ideal of the collective village created in the 1930s. The Finnish buildings were exploited as a resource, hybridised or adapted to the needs of socialism, both in terms of their function and architecture.After Finland temporarily retook the area in 1941, it was returned to Finnish normalcy, that is, dehybridised. After the cession of territory in autumn 1944, the process of sovietisation was repeated. For Kurkijoki, however, sovietisation did not bring about the modernisation of living conditions and society in the same sense as in post-revolutionary Russia; on the contrary, compared to the Finnish period, its material development stagnated or even took a step backwards. Thanks to the rare survival of its built environment, the Kurkijoki settlement also provides an exceptional starting point for examining the cultural encounter or clash and the reception of the buildings of a foreign culture within a new state context amidst the process of Sovietisation and after the reconquest in 1941. Many factors infl uenced the way in which this building resource was dealt with in the Soviet Union, especially the position of the individual in a socialist society, the ambivalent attitude of the authorities, the blurring of the Finnish history of the area and rootlessness. Nevertheless, the case of Kurkijoki shows that even buildings of a foreign culture with contradictory connotations can be extensively hybridised when, at the same time, they are cleansed of culturally or ideologically alien features. However, it may be diffi cult or take several generations to incorporate such a resource into the national building heritage. In the Soviet Union, the Kurkijoki settlement had the status of the local and central village of the Kurkijoki sovkhoz, for which an extensive town and building plan was drawn up in 1975 in line with the then current ideal of an agrotown. However, by the time of the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, the plan had only been implemented to a limited extent and ultimately, in the postsocialist period, there was no longer any justifi cation for the implementation of the Kurkijoki urban development plan. The pre-war building stock in the actual settlement survived the Soviet era almost intact. On the Soviet scale, the case of the Kurkijoki settlement is just one example of the failure of rural modernisation and urbanisation. The large-scale plans did not match the available fi nancial resources, and the rigid and hierarchical administrative system did not really allow for the specifi cities of the local building tradition and the use of local resources.