Emma Silverblatt and Ryan Whitby: Canon
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The architectural canon derives significance through distillation — a curated reduction into discourse extracted from one perspective grounded in epistemological experience: plans, a section, a seminal photograph. However, in the poly-objective aftermath of the internet age, controlled narratives have a way of dissolving, diluted in the acetic ether of non-hierarchical search results, democratized digital reproduction, factual populism, tangential cancellations…and it would seem the canon's become conversely… less digestible.
Canon, a series of lenticular prints, explores the following question: what happens to images of the canon in the era of poly-objectivity, if every viewpoint exists on equal footing? Installed in the primary hallway of the Cornell School of Architecture, Art, and Planning, this installation suggests that the academic obsession with turning these chosen few around and around as ideas, as objects, in 3D simulacra, in square holes, and ad nauseam for all time, inevitably leads to idealized arguments blurring, formative interpretations turned inconclusive, and, most significantly, the preclusion of possible invention and alternatives — a loss to the potential of architectural discourse which may never be fully overcome.
