"Who does not know of Potemkin's villages, the one's that Catherine's cunning favourite cunning Uncle Built in the Ukraine? They were villages built of canvas and pasteboard, villages intended to transform a visual desert into a flowering landscape for the eyes of Her Imperial Majesty. Bur was it a whole city which that cunning minister was supposed to have produced?" (Adolf Loos, Vers Sacrum 1898)'
Potemkin was cunning because he knew that his cities did not have to exist; he understood that Catherine would read his mock cities as signs, associate them with memories and expectations in her mind and be satisfied. Because he understood this, Potemkin simulated not just an image of the city, but the experience of it - in Catherine's mind. He relied on her imagination to provide a non-existent depth and materiality to his two dimensional canvas screens.
Catherine's experience of Potemkin's villages was mental, experienced in her mind, but had Potemkin built real cities, would her experience have been more physical, more "real"? It was on the shrewd prediction that it made no difference that he gambled.
The modern city is constructed and perceived in much the same way as Potemkin's village. Elaborate facades, like video images, attempt to engage our imagination through visual effects, gambling that we will not notice the shallowness of experience beyond them. The gaps, the
visible seams and defects in this foil are hidden only by our own selective perception. We, like Catherine, are infatuated with the images presented to us, and are satisfied.
But what if her carriage had swayed from its path far enough that she could not deny the wooden scaffolding behind the screens? As she stepped down and wandered among the hasty construction, would not her elaborate imaginings about the city, her assumptions, be shattered? And further, would not her previously mental or imaginative experience be replaced by the "real" and physical experience of the constructed object?
This thesis investigates the surface and the depth of the city in relation to our perception. As in the case of Potemkin's villages, the surface lends to engage the mind through visual effects, as a
two dimensional field, or image, relying on memory to complete the "experience". The depth, as three dimensional space and material, requires the engagement of all the senses. It can only be
experienced directly through physical interaction. Regardless of the nature of the object, when the experience becomes indirect, ie. through representation, the depth transforms into surface.
The terms surface and depth refer to aspects of the same reality - that is, one cannot exist without the other. Though the surface may be "read" visually, without physical interaction, it still has physical characteristics, and can be appreciated beyond its capacity as a signifier of something else (Catherine wandering among the scaffolding of Potemkin's hasty construction). Similarly, though the depth may be perceived physically (understood or what it is, rather than what it represents) that depth is made up of surfaces and inevitably triggers associations to other things - other depths, other surfaces ...
In the end, surface and depth are distinguished by perception and not by inherent physical qualities. But while it is inevitable that things are experienced on both of these levels, the surface, as a medium of mass communication is highly privileged. This is perhaps because it is useful in the cycle of production and consumption. The surface, the billboard, the sign, the icon, the postcard facilitate immediate communication, recognition and seduction and effectively stimulate
consumption.
The surface, as a medium of vicarious experience depends on a wealth of "real" physical experience to inform it and provide its power. A billboard image of a Club Med beach draws its power from some other beach, experienced first hand and stored away in memory. There is nothing inherently wrong with this condition (is it not this condition that makes art possible?). But the physical world around us, through its role as promoter, advertiser, developer, etc. is increasingly becoming defined by these images of vicarious experience. The majority of day to day physical expcrience takes place in the depth of the surface, that is, in the physical reality residually created by the
signifiers of other, distant realities; in a billboard reality.
This thesis reacts to the imbalance of this condition and an attempt will be made to discover if it is possible for architecture to effect it. Can an architecture be wrought which resists immediate consumption via surface "readings"? Can that power be deflected into an investigation of the complexity of its depths? Are we, in fact, more interested in the seduction of Potemkin's fantasy than the reality it implies? And if so, can a reality fantastic enough be formed lo compete with it?