The Spectacle of Normality
(Supervisors: Mark Cousins, Pier Vittorio Aureli)
In architecture, as in discussions of power, ‘representation’ remains a debatable if not obsolete category. For the ancien régime, where a perspectival knowledge served as a fulcrum between space, subject, and power in the form of spectacle, in modernity this is no longer the case. The emphasis shifted from the compositional to the functional; from the pictorial to the managerial. This shift, I will argue, instrumentalizes a principally diagrammatic logic—a neutral, scaleless, and repeatable device where power presents its new rationality. In this way, its ‘representation’ would become implicit, yet it does not cease to exist. Instead, it reveals itself through a different form of spectacle, where the persuasive effect does not rely on the exception, but on the establishment of the normal.
Biography:
Ivonne Santoyo Orozco is an architect who obtained her master degree from the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam and was graduated magna-cum-laude from the UDLA in Puebla, Mexico. She has collaborated with Fernando-Romero, Wiel-Arets, Foster&Partners and Ove-Arup. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and published in a diversity of media. Currently she is a Ph.D. candidate at the Architectural Association, where she also teaches History and Theory.
