Mark Dorrian
Edinburgh College of Art[21/05/2022]
W. Heath, A woman dropping her tea-cup in horror upon discovering the monstrous contents of a magnified drop of Thames water; revealing the impurity of London drinking water (1828), coloured etching (Wellcome Library, London). Source
Around the New Vision
While Le Corbusier’s Aircraft, brought out in 1935 by the British art publishers The Studio, is well known to scholars of architecture, what is less often remarked upon is that it was one part of a double publication. For, in marking the launch of an intended new series titled ‘The New Vision’ (which in the end ran to only three books), it appeared alongside a partner volume – W. Watson-Baker’s World Beneath the Microscope, a book of microphotographs prefaced with a richly-articulated text by the artist and critic William Gaunt. In this way, at its outset, the series tacitly established a relation between two species of downward look in which vision was transformed by technical apparatuses – the distanced view from the aeroplane and the microscopic close-up. Working from the two Studio publications, this talk will reflect upon the nexus of aerial view and close-up, and the kinds of imaginative entanglements and metaphoric exchanges it sets in motion and licenses. It had an important role in the thinking of László Moholy-Nagy, to which The Studio’s project was deeply indebted, but it is also evident, in often surprising ways, in nineteenth-century visual discourses and beyond.
Mark Dorrian holds the Forbes Chair in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Seeing From Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture (2013, co-edited with Frédéric Pousin) and Writing on the Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation (2015). Mark is editor-in-chief of Drawing Matter Journal.
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