Building Translations: Narratives on Bizarre Preservation

In today’s globalized society, we’re confronted with a flood of images and data at a speed that strains our ability to fully process the information. This messy network often gives way to misreading’s and poor interpretations. In the architectural discipline, a suspension of critical disbelief is necessary to accommodate the lack of fidelity, clarity or resolution that exists in many of the documents we encounter. We contend that there’s a productive tension between the object and its mediated representation and that the translations that occur between the two are embedded within the way that architects communicate with one another. Robin Evans points to how the translation from drawings to buildings is not always exact, that “…things can get bent, broken or lost on the way.” We do not see the process of translation as one of loss, but one that reconfigures elements in different forms of media. They are representations separate from their origin with their own identities and unique attributes