Paper short abstract:

In his contribution, Sascha Roesler distinguishes between three forms of architectural-ethnographic representation while arguing for the necessity of doing justice to the epistemological peculiarities of this type of research.

Paper long abstract:

Generally speaking, the anthropological resources employed by architects are shaped in constructive and visual terms in three different ways: first, through their own images; secondly, through their own bodies; and thirdly through their own buildings. They are, as Beatrice Colomina has pointed out, the "media" - or to use Friedrich Kittler's expanded term for writing, derived from a reading of Jacques Derrida: the "inscription systems" - of ethnographic research within architecture that render the documented contents visible in the first place. The anthropological gaze of the architect can be enacted in all three media: images, bodies, and buildings. Here, it is important to emphasize the ambivalent character of the constructive knowledge that is represented in this way; that which is documented offers itself as knowledge about anonymous builders, as well as knowledge generated by architects. This leads to a symbolic split within architectural-anthropological knowledge, one that necessitates a reference continually to systems of vernacular and informal building on the one hand, and to the system of contemporary architecture on the other. Drawings represent supporting structures created by anonymous builders, and are the same time images created by the architects who execute them; the depicted technical performances belong simultaneously to the anonymous builders and to the architects who study them and hence reflect on them on location; the buildings are buildings of architects and of those anonymous builders to whose traditions the modernization attempts undertaken by architects refer.