Reflection
New Perspectives on Architectural Representation
Traditional architectural representation relies on fixed perspectives and material clarity, but Constructed Blindness challenges these conventions through ambiguity and layering. Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky’s seminal essay Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal (1963) distinguished “literal transparency” – the physical quality of a material transmitting light and revealing what lies behind – from “phenomenal transparency”, a perceptual effect of overlapping spatial layers . Literal transparency, as in modernist glass architecture, makes everything “perfectly evident” and clear, a condition Rowe and Slutzky found too simplistic. Phenomenal transparency, by contrast, produces ambiguity: multiple forms or spaces “interpenetrate without optical destruction of each other,” giving a “simultaneous perception of different spatial locations” . This idea, drawn from Cubist painting where overlapping planes force viewers to reconcile contradictions, requires active interpretation by the observer. In other words, we must mentally construct a coherent space from fragmented glimpses – a concept at the heart of Constructed Blindness, which uses layered, semi-transparent imagery to provoke an active way of seeing rather than a passive glance.
Architect Juhani Pallasmaa offers a related critique of visual dominance in architecture. He argues that modern design has been too “ocularcentric,” privileging the direct gaze and clarity of perspective at the expense of other senses (Pallasmaa, 2005). In The Eyes of the Skin, Pallasmaa notes how the rise of perspective and glass in architecture made the eye the “centre point of the perceptual world,” a condition tied to “a corrupt power dynamic” . He warns that the “dreamlike sense of unreality” caused by ubiquitous reflective glass and visual transparency can alienate us from the tactile, lived qualities of space . Instead, Pallasmaa advocates embracing “peripheral unfocused vision” and haptic perception, whereby “the very essence of the lived experience is moulded by hapticity and peripheral vision” . Constructed Blindness aligns with these ideas by undermining straightforward, camera-like vision. Its representations distort perspective and layer multiple viewpoints, echoing the phenomenal transparency of Cubism and engaging the viewer’s body and memory to piece together space. This approach offers a new perspective on representation: one that accepts blurriness, fragmentation, and distortion as tools to convey the experience of space rather than a literal depiction. It challenges the modernist ideal of a single, objective view, resonating with Guy Debord’s (1967) critique that in modern society “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”. By deliberately manipulating reality’s image, the project resists the passive consumption of architectural images and invites viewers to actively construct meaning, countering what Debord called the commodified “spectacle” of the built environment.
Transparency, Exclusion and the Semi-Public Space
The theme of transparency in Constructed Blindness also carries social and political dimensions, especially in semi-public spaces like shopping malls. Contemporary malls often present a shiny, transparent facade – with glass ceilings, atriums, and display windows – symbolizing openness and abundance. Yet this apparent transparency conceals a highly controlled environment. As sociologist Sharon Zukin observes, urban consumer spaces use curated images and memories to dictate “who and what should and should not be visible or present in such places” (Zukin, 1995). The shopping mall is open to the public by invitation, but it is a privatized public space where surveillance, rules of conduct, and subtle design cues enforce inclusion and exclusion. In his design of the first shopping malls, architect Victor Gruen famously engineered a disorienting layout to induce shoppers to lose their sense of direction and time. Margaret Crawford (1992) describes the “Gruen Transfer” – the moment a focused buyer becomes an impulse shopper, marked by a shift from a determined stride to an “erratic meandering gait” . Malls deliberately manipulate spatial perception (through labyrinthine corridors, strategically placed escalators, and lack of clocks or windows) to construct a kind of blindness: visitors see only an endless array of commodities, not the exit or the outside world. This controlled inward-looking transparency ensures shoppers are visible to security and surrounded by temptation, while the outside realities (daylight, city streets, socioeconomic struggles) remain invisible.
Architect Rem Koolhaas characterized such environments as “Junkspace”, the chaotic but air-conditioned terrain of malls, airports, and office complexes that has become the product of modernization (Koolhaas, 2002). Junkspace is glossy and seemingly open, yet it creates a closed universe – “a Pantheon of all the gods of consumption,” as Jean Baudrillard quipped of the contemporary shopping center. Baudrillard (1970) noted that in the modern mall “all the gods – or demons – of consumption have come together in our Super Shopping Centre, which is our Pantheon – or Pandemonium” . This colorful metaphor underscores how malls combine everything desirable in one place to create an illusion of a total world. The climate-controlled, perpetual “springtime” ambience ensures comfort but also suspension of reality. Such spaces exemplify what Marc Augé (1995) calls “non-places” – environments of transit and commerce (airports, hotels, highways, malls) that people pass through anonymously and which “do not hold enough significance to be regarded as places”. In a non-place like a mall, individuals are present but faceless, their civic identities replaced by a role as consumers. Augé argues that a non-place is “not relational, not historical, and not concerned with identity” – one “in which the individual remains anonymous and lonely” despite the crowd.
Within these semi-public interiors, visibility is carefully orchestrated as a form of power. The French philosopher Michel Foucault famously wrote “visibility is a trap” when describing the Panopticon principle (Foucault, 1977. In malls and other privately owned public spaces, architecture and management create a panoptic effect: security cameras and guards see all, while visitors cannot easily locate the sources of surveillance. Certain groups – loitering teenagers, the homeless, protesters – become invisible as they are excluded or discouraged from these premises, maintaining a sanitized image of order. Foucault’s insight that in the Panopticon “He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication” resonates here. Shoppers are seen (tracked via CCTV or even smartphone data) yet have no equivalent awareness of the watchers. Constructed Blindness highlights these dynamics by making the invisible visible. By digitally scanning and documenting a mall’s spatial layout, the project unmasks how transparency and opacity are distributed. It questions who gets to see and who is seen: for example, glass storefronts invite the gaze to consume products, while staff-only areas are opaque, and security observes from concealed rooms. In doing so, the research invokes a critical perspective on semi-public space shared by urban theorists. It aligns with the view that malls are pseudo-public forums where freedom of look (to window-shop) is exchanged for loss of public voice – an environment where our vision is guided and our actions quietly policed. By referencing these theories of spatial control, the project situates itself at the intersection of architecture and social critique, using representation to expose the selective transparency of contemporary public life.
3D Scanning, Machine Vision and Digital Space
A core aspect of Constructed Blindness is the use of contemporary technology – 3D scanning, photogrammetry, machine vision – to re-imagine architecture. These tools blur the line between physical space and its representation, offering new ways to see buildings beyond human vision. Media theorist Lev Manovich (2006) describes how physical environments are becoming saturated with data-capture and display systems, effectively turning real space into an “augmented space” or dataspace. He notes that ubiquitous sensors and cameras now “translate the physical space and its dwellers into data,” while mobile screens overlay information onto our surroundings. In augmented space, the old binary of visible vs. invisible is disrupted – we can see through walls with infrared or reconstruct hidden geometries with scanning, just as a surveillance network might observe every point at every time in theory (). For architects and designers, this means the traditional techniques of representation (plan, section, hand-drawn perspective) give way to point clouds, 3D models, and immersive simulations. A laser scan of a building, for instance, yields a cloud of millions of points that “capture the essence of [the] structure” with extreme detail . Such a scan is an entirely different visual reality: it can be rotated, sliced, or merged with other data, revealing aspects of space that no single photograph or drawing could show. Walls become translucent layers of points; solid forms can be seen through from any angle. This inherently challenges how we perceive solidity, interior and exterior, and architectural form. The research leverages this by using scanning and digital compositing to produce images where a shopping mall’s spatial envelope might appear ghostly or transparent – for example, showing service corridors superimposed beneath public atriums, or blending multiple floors into one view.
In doing so, Constructed Blindness addresses how machine vision – the way cameras, algorithms, and AI “see” space – differs from human sight. Paul Virilio warned that as we increasingly rely on cameras and digital sensors to perceive the world, we risk “atrophy” of our own sensory engagement (Virilio, 1994). He coined the term “vision machine” for technologies that automatically capture and interpret images, from CCTV to satellite feeds. While Virilio was wary of a future in which humans “relinquish our own visual faculty” to machines, he acknowledged that these new perception apparatuses redefine spatial experience. For instance, high-speed cameras and scans can see in spectrums and perspectives impossible for a person, compressing time and space. Constructed Blindness uses this to its advantage: the project’s 3D documentation allows us to step outside our normal viewpoint and see the entire building at once, inside-out – a bit like an x-ray or a flattened map of a maze. This recalls Fredric Jameson’s notion of “hyperspace” in postmodern architecture – spaces so complex (like L.A.’s Bonaventure Hotel) that they overwhelm our ability to map them mentally (Jameson, 1991). Jameson argued that we need new representational strategies, a “cognitive mapping,” to grasp these vast and disorienting spaces of late capitalism. The digital point cloud is exactly such a strategy: it is a totalizing image that one can navigate and query. However, rather than presenting it with sterile objectivity, the project uses artistic sensibility – color-coding, layering, and selective erasure – to communicate a narrative about transparency and blindness. This is where it transcends technical research and enters the realm of visual communication.
Manovich suggested that architects must “think of overlaying physical space with layers of data” as an architectural problem and opportunity (). Constructed Blindness embraces this by overlaying the mall’s spatial reality with interpretive graphics – diagrams of sight lines, patches of transparency indicating surveillance zones, or blurred regions indicating blind spots. In effect, it creates an augmented reality image: not a literal AR through a headset, but a conceptual one on paper or screen, where digital documentation and critical annotation merge. This reflects the project’s interdisciplinary nature, drawing from architectural technology, but ultimately translating data into design storytelling. The result is a set of provocative images that make the viewer question: What am I not seeing in everyday space? How do digital eyes see it differently? By probing these questions, the research aligns with contemporary discussions in media and design theory about the impact of computational images. As John May (2019) writes, we live in an era where “everything is already an image” – architecture is experienced through Instagram feeds, Google Earth, surveillance monitors, and 3D models as much as through direct presence. Constructed Blindness positions itself in this context, using the very tools of digital capture to critique the limits of human perception and the politics of who controls the camera. In sum, it demonstrates how modern technologies can be harnessed not just to document architecture, but to reframe it – revealing new truths and raising new questions about the spaces we inhabit.
References
Augé, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso.
Baudrillard, J. (1998). The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage. (Original work published 1970).
Debord, G. (1967). The Society of the Spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chastel. (Eng. trans. 1994, New York: Zone Books).
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Allen Lane. (Especially Part III, Chapter 3 “Panopticism”).
Koolhaas, R. (2002). “Junkspace.” October, 100: 175–190.
Rowe, C. & Slutzky, R. (1963). "Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal." Perspecta, 8: 45–54.
Manovich, L. (2006). "The Poetics of Augmented Space." Visual Communication, 5(2): 219–240.
Pallasmaa, J. (2005). The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Chichester: Wiley.
Virilio, P. (1994). The Vision Machine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Zukin, S. (1995). The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. (See Chapter 1 on “The Cultures of Cities” for public space control).
Additional sources cited in text: Crawford, M. (1992). "The World in a Shopping Mall." In M. Sorkin (Ed.), Variations on a Theme Park, New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 3–30; Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press; Lupton, E. & Miller, J.A. (1996). “Deconstruction and Graphic Design: History Meets Theory.” In Design Writing Research. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.