ABSTRACT

This chapter articulates an approach to the relationships between post factum architectural documentation, art practice and critique. It proposes the visual arts practice of the artist’s book’that is, a book made as an original work of art, with an artist or designer as author’as a lens for critique. This considers the book as analytic method and vehicle for creative criticism, operating with a different visual register from textual commentary. It focuses on the notion that artists’ books containing post factum documentation shift the perception of representation as a repository of a complete idea of a building, to instead perceiving it as an act of translation and transformation. Books containing post factum documentation perceive representation as an act of translation and transformation. This act of translation is not the transference, reproduction, or image of an original, but rather is the transition between forms. It is this role of the book which makes it a potent vehicle for critique and offers new territory for the creation and presentation of creative criticism. This form of creative criticism is then demonstrated to operate as a duality of material presence: as both a sign of something else; and an autonomous project, leading towards exhibition as a site of architectural critique.