Abstract:
This thesis retraces architectural history, physically traversing Europe as Grand Tourists once did, and digitally exploring the world as technology now allows. In doing so it investigates the effect of visual media on architectural design process and practice, utilising photography and travel as its primary modes of architectural documentation and production, and a model-making practice as a device for speculation and self-analysis. The investigation is contextualised by the contemporary ‘post-digital’ media environment of simultaneous digital experience. Within this, commercialised models of consumption, largely dependent on photographic representations, are fundamentally changing architectural experience and discourse. As an examination of the effect of photographs within architectural representation, the model-making process reconstructs and reimagines architecture that Grand Tourists might have encountered during previous centuries, as well as architecture which the author encountered on a similar tour while undertaking this thesis. Operating between analogue and digital methods, the process translates twodimensional representations of buildings into three dimensions. Reconstructions investigates the perceptual difference between existing buildings and representations of these, a comparative process based on models that originate from either the author’s first-hand documentation, or from digital representations. Re-imaginations transposes the author’s photographs of architecture from the tour into new, speculative combinations, appropriating specific views and elements of visited buildings thus paralleling the Grand Tour’s precipitation of new styles via media produced by tourists. Finally, this thesis exhibits its reconstructed and re-imagined tour, expressing the differences between travels real and virtual, and the speculative possibilities these entail. It positions this thesis as suspicious of the photogenic, of the digitally perfected, and of the consequences of a ‘post digital’ Grand Tour.