“REPRESENTATION AS A VEHICLE FOR ARCHITECTURAL THOUGHT” 

The Department of Architecture of the University of Thessaly organized during 21-23 October 2006 international conference on "The representation of architecture as a vehicle of thought." The issue of representation was approached for the first time in Greece and involved 65 participants (architects, artists and historians) from Greece and abroad.

The conference sought to bring forth the manner in which the adoption of representational techniques:

• is influenced by the cultural values of each era,
• shapes the perception of reality,
• borrows representational techniques, images and concepts from the field of science and the arts,
• leads to the development of new concepts and notions.

The role of representations is central not only for architecture but for all representational arts (visual arts, photography, cinema, etc). Yet, in architecture has remained largely in the shadows of the major problems and immune to theoretical debates.

The development of representations in architecture was not merely a matter of technical inventions but a process of transactions with other fields of knowledge, that allowed the establishment in architectural thought of processes and services derived from them. Borrowing representational techniques, images and concepts from science and the arts has led to the development of new concepts and conceptions that shaped a lesser or greater degree of architectural theory and design.

The images used in architecture and metaphors, derived from science and the arts, is not a recent phenomenon. The development of the Perspective in the Renaissance was based on a significant percentage of the mapping techniques used for navigation in the seas. It became the dominant mode of representation of reality until the current digital era. In the 19th century architecture was highly influenced by the rapidly evolving biology (still talking about the heart of the city, country roads). Architecture and biology shared and the emergence of sectional anatomy and the concept of structure (structure) as the dominant methods of analysis and study of their objects. In recent years an increasing number of images and transport from the fields of computer science, mathematics, physics and molecular biology contribute to addressing the digital dimension of architectural practice.

Οι αρχιτεκτονικές αναπαραστάσεις είναι κατεξοχήν αναφορές σε κάτι που δεν υφίσταται ακόμη. Αποκτούν έτσι μια δυναμική που ξεπερνά την υποχρέωσή τους να κωδικοποιήσουν χωρική πληροφορία και αναλαμβάνουν λειτουργίες ξενάγησης και μύησης σε μια υποθετική ακόμη πραγματικότητα.

Scientific and Organizational Conference Committee

Pantelis Lazaridis, professor, University of Thessaly
Yiannis Peponis, professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
Lois Papadopoulos, associate professor, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Dimitris Papalexopoulos, assistant professor, National Technical University of Athens
Giorgos Papakonstantinou, assistant professor, University of Thessaly
Vaso Trova, associate professor, University of Thessaly
Kostas Manolidis, lecturer, University of Thessaly