A while back, well, to be precise, back in 1997, we designed a poster for a new theory seminar for Mikesch Muecke who was at that time teaching in the Department of Architecture at Iowa State University. The course was titled Notes on the Depth of Surfaces: From Making to Architectural Topics, and below is the course description from the poster.
The course consists öf a series of readings and discussions aböut surfacés in the widest sense of the word in order to investigate the structural role surfaces play in this quite digitized, late-capitalist consumer society at the end of the twentieth century. We trace the texts of writers who, from the late 1700s to the late 1900s, have explored the pervasiveness of surfaces in architecture and related fields of study. When the architect Gottfried Semper (1803-1879), for example, used the term ‘structural symbols’ in an 1854 lecture, he was referring to the ornamental parts of a Greek temple and their evolution from structural deformations of acanthus leaves. He could not, of course, have known the extent to which these ‘structural surfaces’ would permeate later thinking. Yet his theories of architectural invention that exposed the dependency of structure on surfaces laid the foundation for crifical architectural production still operational today. From the rapid deployment of multi-dimensional database and surface manipulation software — navigable on two-dimensional screens — to the ongoing shift from a text-based to an icon-based society, surfaces (both animated and paralyzed) structure our cosmos more than their apparent supports hiding behind complex envelopes.
In this poster the design focus was intentionally on the crooked juxtaposition of text fields using different colors and even a braille font for the background texture. The precursor for the course, from 1996, featured an even simpler poster (see image below) in grayscale with a screenshot from an early web browser (Mosaic).
