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Argument › No. 17/2025

Urban Imprints in a Vitrified Time. Observing, Thinking, Planning

https://doi.org/10.54508/Argument.17.02

  • / University Paris 8, FR

Abstract

The theme “Dynamic Spaces, Architectural Interferences” proposed for Argument Journal #17th entails a spatio- temporal dimension in art and architecture. The conversation about space and time has set a new aesthetic language where a fourth dimension had been imagined and represented in the visual arts of the 20th Century. In the same time, imaging technologies have allowed scientific analysis to reveal new aspects of the universe, or of previously unseen parts of the human brain.

The title “Urban Imprints in a Vitrified Time” suggests a way of looking at architecture’s presence in urban space through photographic and written memories of artworks and of architecture.

While the first part of this essay is focused on historical examples, the second part includes a theoretical discussion of networks in general. In the third part, a comparison of three maps – Bucharest, Paris and London – opens a more specific discussion about existing urban networks. But, their configurations placed above an assemblage of three kinds of fossil imprints, provoke a change of vantage point, from historical projections to images shaping a possible future.

Revisiting what Gaston Bachelard called poetic image, the aim of this text is to bring together the words and the iconography able to express our perception of the current urban changes.

Keywords

contemporary art, dynamic spaces, networks, poetic image, rhythm, space-time, urban studies, neurosciences

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