Manipulated Traces: Architectural Post-Productions’ Contemporary Techniques

Interventions on existing buildings are increasing every day. The actions do not only affect buildings to be preserved for their history or importance, but also “Tiers-Paysage”: in other words, abandoned or marginal residual places and buildings become objects of interest. The object of intervention – once the spirit of conservation is abandoned in spite of re-use and the sacredness of the existing building – becomes manipulable, overwritable, making the waste as activator of imagination. Is it possible today to define an architectural language of modification? Nicolas Bourriaud, in his Postproduction affirms that from the beginning of the 1980s, artworks were created from pre-existing ones. He defines this tendency as post-production, or the artist's action to create manipulation “processes” on materials that already exist. The use of this term is borrowed directly from the audiovisual technical language used in filmmaking, to specify the last part of a movie production, which takes place when shooting is over and the process involves video editing. The present essay thus links cinema and architecture. Through this vision, we cover a narrative sequence of moving frames for a static viewer in a first case, or processed in the mind of a dynamic viewer in the second. If the perception and creation of architecture would take place as a mounting of scenes or frames, what would the editing design methodologies be? These might include chroma-key, jump cut, fast cutting, graphical mach, mach on action, fades, mounting trick, metamorphosis, cross-cutting, freeze frame, etc. New invention techniques are investigated through an analogical comparative process, made on a selection of projects in the built environment, by transposing the movie mountingtechnology and definitions within the architectural design discipline.