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Top2. The Dialectics Of Spectacle And Experience
Hegel stated that vision and hearing are the two superior senses, as they do not consume their objects. What is seen and what is heard remain the same, while what is eaten, for example, has a finishing point. According to Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier (1997) the superiority of vision and hearing over the other senses dates back to classical Greece, when the ‘distance’ that has marked Western science and art was established—when Greek Tragedy separated stage and orchestra from the audience.
The ‘logic of the visual’—to use Henri Lefebvre’s term—has its impact on space first as a ‘spatial practice’, as that of the theatre displacing the ‘lived space’ of the ritual, and only later, in the Renaissance, as the dominant means for the production of space, which Lefebvre calls ‘representations of space’ or ‘conceived space’ (Lefebvre, 1991). Such an impact means a clear distancing from lived space, the space in which people are bodily engaged in its simultaneous design, building and use, towards conceived space, in which design, building and use happen separately.
The hegemony of vision is not usually acknowledged by historians of architecture and urban space. According to Lefebvre, even Sigfried Giedion—the first historian to put ‘space, and not some creative genius, not the “spirit of times”, and not even technological progress, at the centre of history’ (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 126)—failed ‘to show up the growing ascendancy of the abstract and the visual, as well as the internal connection between them; and to expose the genesis and meaning of a “logic of the visual”’ (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 128). However, Pérez-Gómez and Pelletier in their history of architectural representation, point out that such hegemony of vision culminates with the shift from embodied to visual spatial practice. For the user this means a contemplative practice and for the designer it means that perspective and projections are used to foresee space as an object. Moreover, Sérgio Ferro (2006) shows that as well as representing space as an object, this design process serves to make space a commodity.