The Architect's Plate

The plate is an exposure, not a drawing. The light fell on the paper for some number of hours through whatever lay across the surface, and what came back, as the prussiate of iron developed in the water-bath, was the negative of that arrangement — a building seen as the absence of the shapes that obstructed the sun. The architect did not draw the building. The architect placed objects on the page and let the day's light do the rest.

Look at it long enough and the building stops being a building. The staircases threading through each storey ascend to the wrong floors. The platforms hang at heights that do not match the framing they are bolted into. The surveyors' plumbs depending from invisible eaves indicate verticals that the structure does not respect. This is a record of an attempted building, not an instruction for an achievable one — a notion brought to paper and then exposed to enough light that the notion could not retreat back into the unmade.

The aesthetic is borrowed from the photographic plates of an earlier century when architecture and natural science were sometimes the same discipline. Anna Atkins pressed algae onto cyanotype paper because the contact print was the fastest way to communicate the morphology of a thing to a colleague who would never see the specimen. This plate operates the same way for a structure no contractor was ever asked to build. The exposure preserves the idea long enough to be passed forward.

What the architect chose to omit from the page is, in the end, the same thing the architect chose to omit from the building. There is no scale. There is no human figure for reference. There are no inhabitants, no doors that admit people, no rooms that imply use. The plate is for a profession that has not yet decided whether the discipline is engineering, or natural philosophy, or something stranger.

The cyanotype is patient. The plate will outlast the question.