LA DIMENSIÓN IMPOSIBLE. Estrategias de alteración de la percepción y las ideas en el arte y la arquitectura desde la segunda mitad del siglo XX

The hypothesis of this work is based on the study of alterations and intensifiers of perception in the fields of thought and art from the second half of the 20th century, which have inevitably influenced the understanding of architectural space, at both experienced and physical levels.

The visible, what our eye perceives and its possible plastic alterations, has been widely discussed and developed by numerous artists. In this sense, the French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman proposed a new dimensionality, which he called impossible:

“The object has two contradictory dimensionalities, a visible dimension and an impossible dimension”.

Perhaps impossible to measure, quantify or modulate; an unstable, changing, undefined dimension. A variable dimension – located between the scales of reality and visual order – where the object breaks, changes, modifies, mutates or even disappears, depending on all the meanings and perceptions that identify it.

On the basis of this research, this dissertation aims to study the strategies of perception transformation in art and architecture from 1950 to the present day, as well as the transfers between them. We will study those works in which artists and architects, intentionally, have delved into aspects such as the manipulation of the object and its environment, with the intention of intensifying and enriching the viewer’s experience, from the decontextualization and the new meanings of the work to the perceptual alteration of it.

Artists and viewers, architects and observers, will establish new rules of perception that awaken our senses and allow us to approach the object from three perspectives: the sensory, the perceptual and the atmospheric.

Architecture, for its part, cannot be measured in strictly physical terms without understanding, with a certain critical (and even subjective) level, the paradoxes that have formed it and its possible alterations, either natural or artificial. Invariables of architecture – form, volume, texture, matter, etc. – will be defined by their relation with light, movement, time or place. For this reason, we will study the relationship between those strategies, techniques and concepts that have allowed architects to work with architecture as a complex, unstable, flexible, open, changing object.

Furthermore, the active role of architects as synthesizers capable of transforming, changing and canceling the rules imposed by context, and the altering elements of architectural space will be also studied. Preconceived ideas of viewers will be erased and new visions related to architectural works will be explored. This architecture is understood to be a producer of all kinds of environmental and architectural effects, from the most emotional to physiological and hormonal ones.

Finally, to present an architectural paradigm shift. Architecture projects will become an open process in which all the parts will coexist together enhanced by the experiences, environments and meanings that surround it: new reality much richer, denser and, at the same time, indeterminate. The impossible superimposed on the visible.