Atlas Materia: Fieldwork Experience in the Material City

Today, architecture is primarily consumed through interfaces like Instagram, on-line journals, websites, video games and print publications. This is in part due to the fixed geographical position of architecture. Images allow architecture to be distributed to a broader audience. However, images also represent a problematic disembodiment of the built environment. The complicated relationship between architecture and its image is explored in the first section of this paper, Mnemosyne Field through an interrogation of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. The second section of this paper, Atlas Materia investigates material qualities as conveyors of architectural identity through fieldwork. The material adjacencies and observational imperfections of fieldwork result in an equivocal architectural experience that takes place at the intersection of a city’s physical qualities and the phenomenological response they produce. This paper describes the pedagogical outcome of sensorial mapping strategies that provided a visual and tactile representation of the city of Buffalo, New York. Based on the experience of material properties, the ultimate objective of Atlas Materia is to help establish a link between phenomenology of perception and urban spaces through a material-centered strategy

which the classical tradition was represented in the twentieth century. With barely any text accompanying the images, Mnemosyne Atlas was left unfinished when Warburg died in 1929. 1 Austrian-British art historian Ernst Gombrich (1909Gombrich ( -2001, the fourth director of the Warburg Institute 2 between 1959 and 1976, wrote that, "Warburg certainly hoped that the beholder would respond with the same intensity to the images of passion or of suffering, of mental confusion or of serenity, as he had done in his work." 3 Two major decisions led to the construction of the viewer's response: first, the careful selection of the black-and-white images; second, the image arrangement within the categories on the black cloth backgrounds. These two frameworks conditioned the work that Warburg proposed as a visual display where specific readings of classical culture could take place at multiple levels. Warburg's arrangement -processed after subjective and objective choices -constructed an imagery map that remained open to individual interpretations. Warburg had hoped that his work would allow its spectators to experience for themselves the "'polarities' that riddle culture and thought." 4 (figure 1) Warburg's Atlas organized the images as an intuitively-derived field condition, where the relations and hierarchies among them followed patterns that were not always evident or literal. 5 The multiple photographs were arranged by affinitiessometimes thematic, visual or other -on a black background that was conceived as an endless frame. The author formed his own subjective interpretation, and, in shaping such a field condition with the selected images, he created a coded field for other interpretations as well. If the Atlas is the result of fieldwork, then that 2 "The Warburg Institute, which is a constituent institute of the School of Advanced Study, University of London, is the premier institute for the study of cultural history and the role of images in culture. It is dedicated to the history of ideas, the dissemination and transformation of images in society, and the relationship between images, art, and their texts and subtexts, of all epochs and across the globe." From: www. warburg.sas.ac.uk (accessed April, 2021 which is the only one of our experienced certainties, to be the matter that will be conformed, shaped, stylized, modeled by culture, or denied by barbarianism. 11 Simmel emphasized the importance of the visual but also that of haptic perception. His thought was strongly based on "building up an image by choosing a viewpoint." 12 The experience of the material world is in this way constructed with the conjoined action of the body and the framed viewpoint. Tessarolo adds: "[…] Art can derive only from artistic dynamics. It does not begin with the finished artistic product. When speaking of creativity in architecture, Richard Sennett, too, observes that the diverse cultures allow one to bear in mind the materially elaborated cultural model." 13 We could say that the "materially elaborated cultural model" observed by Sennett was not part of Warburg's operative approach to his classification of images. In omitting the "experience of the material world," Warburg avoids a constituent dimension of cultural production.
This is because Warburg's "field" is represented by the ecology of images that constituted the published cultural response of his age to the classical world. In constituting his field in this way, Warburg was able to use contemporaneous representations as a means of exploring his own cultural context. Warburg's investigation is thus less a reflection on the classical than an interrogation of the values of his own age as they are reflected through the representation of the classical. Yet, the dissociation of representation and referent prevents Warburg from establishing a clear point of differentiation between the classical and contemporary frames within which he is ultimately working.
Warburg's Atlas was constructed at the beginning of photographic culture.
Warburg himself had seen within his own lifetime the ascent of imagery as both a commercial and a pedagogic tool. As a result, he had witnessed a significant epistemological transformation that had seen classical fieldwork largely replaced by photographic research, especially among younger researchers, including Sigfried Kracauer (1889Kracauer ( -1966, Adolf Behne (1885-1948), and Paul Frankl (1878-1962, all of whose early work relied heavily on photographic evidence and proof. 14 The rise of photography -and ultimately film -would exacerbate the mind/body duality emphasized in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Western thought, replacing the abstractions of cognition with those of representation. This fissure fueled a phenomenological response, which emphasizes embodied experience.
Today, much of architectural theory and history is dependent on photographic evidence, which is advanced as proof, in itself. The work of many theorists and historians, like that of Beatriz Colomina, has shifted to an interest in images -their production, manipulation, and repetition, and how each has influenced and continues to influence architectural production. Images infuse the pedagogy of architecture.
In opposition to a fieldwork focused on images and representation, fieldwork has been historically defined in terms of physical commitment to a specific material context. Direct experience with embodied and situated objects, artifacts, and contexts frames the potential fieldwork exploration through interaction and the expanded sensorial field. Embodied fieldwork that is engaged with the object of observation or action not only includes proprioceptive response that is limited or lacking in off-site research, but also engages the material continuum of the site more directly. 15  13 Tessarolo states that in the mental elaboration of prototypical models, "a constant relationship can be seen between assimilation and adjustment. The subject's activity is tied only to assimilation, and the image depends on adjustment; the connection with imitation would merely serve to qualify it as a copy. Imitation occurs when adjustment does not follow assimilation and produces the image.
[…] assimilation schemes enable one to embody the objects of one's activity, even if no assimilation schemes exist because each scheme is the result of assimilation. The enjoyment of an object of art does itself produce adjustment because it shifts attention onto aspects of reality on which only the creative eye is able to dwell, presenting afresh the same reality that is under everybody's eyes. and tactile fieldwork in the assembly of a material portrait of the city. In contrast to collections of images disengaged from site-specific exploration, such as Mnemosyne Atlas, the work from Atlas Materia was to be based on direct contact with a specific physical reality, exposing the Atlas' producers to a built environment from which they could extract data in order to produce their own interpretations.
Equally significant and distinct was the collective nature of the fieldwork portraiture, born from what might be called a collective intuition.
The seminar gave the students an opportunity to explore the material condition of the city of Buffalo, New York, through a simultaneously physical and intellectual approach that emphasized objective and subjective exploratory methodologies. 18 The hand, the eye, and the camera became tools to capture their observations on the material character of the city's identity. 19 Through the conjoined actions of physical and emotional sensing, the seminar enhanced the students' experience of the city's built environment through a focused survey of material dualities such as hard/soft, old/new, organic/inorganic, permanent/temporary, colored/uncolored, and moving/still, among others. The fieldwork investigated the architectural experience that takes place when matter and the senses coalesce in the urban environment. The connection between the physical space of the city and its interpretation was at the core of the research. 20 The learning experience was determined through immersion in a culture of fieldwork exploration. The photographic compilation required the students to be attentive and inventive, pursuing a simultaneously objective and subjective portraiture of the site conditions. 21 The study called for the unexpected by exploring the tactile dimension of materials in apparently conventional scenes in the city's architecture. They were to find the unconventional and the unseen and connect them to an interpretive narrative of their own, developing critical positions around the perception of the built environment that the students would utilize to produce a particular portrait of the city. 22 Henri Bergson's (1859Bergson's ( -1941 observations on matter as an "aggregate of images" led to considering the fieldwork study an approach to reality and representation. 23 The objectives of the seminar were threefold. First, the on-site exploration of the physical environment led from the earlier objective mapping exercises to a subjective, physical, hands-on experience of the constructed city. Second, through this fieldwork, the students elaborated a personal representation of the material essence of different areas of the city following an inevitable subjective intuition conducive to their own experience. Third, the fieldwork was shared through social and intellectual exercises of discussion, also encompassing writing, and reading.
The results aimed to improve the observational and analytical skills of the students in their urban journeys and provided a collective portrait of the perceived city.
These three objectives were developed through a multi-step analytical and synthetic process. Students explored the physical environment of the city on foot 17 From the course syllabus.
18 "Insofar as the aim is to catch what is particular to a place, a significant degree of objectivity is intended, retaining key aspects of what presents itself as itself, or is proper to the location. […] The task is not to reproduce but to reduce, to see more by focusing on less: namely, those aspects of a place that are pertinent to the project […] projects begin with precisely this discovery, which can also be called an invention. to better understand material interaction in architectural production. The group divided a map of the city into eight large sectors, each of which was assigned to a team of two students. Eight pairs of students participated in weekly exploratory sessions, with each pair assigned to one eighth of the city's 40,384 square miles. The teams divided each sector into smaller sub-sectors following an equal grid and visited them over a series of weekends throughout the course of the semester, photographing material scenes along their walks. 24 The sectors had significant architectural and urban landmarks highlighted through axonometric representation, as well as the precise location of each photograph taken, thereby producing a web of dots and images assembling a visual map of the fieldwork conducted over three months.
The students generated perceptual observations on the material qualities of the city.
The photographs included notes on the address and the materials depicted in the images as well as keywords that synthesized their very own thoughts on what was being observed and experienced. Each image was required to capture a material situation photographed from a frontal position between one and three feet away from the material scene that was to be portrayed. At the same time, all images would be displayed in a square format to emphasize the abstraction and the lack of directionality of the photographer's frontal position. These restrictions of viewpoint and scale were meant to exclude any contextual information so that the photograph focused solely on the material qualities. As a result, the visual compositions were to emphasize material adjacencies, accidents, and joineries. 25 These parameters ensured an effective framework for visual comparison and collective cataloging (figure 2).
The photographic exploration of the city led to a collection of visual documents that reflected the students' experience of the city's material composition. As a result of this process, the students discovered revealing material conditions reflected in the sequence constructed through their visual exploration. Throughout their fieldwork, the students committed to their built environment by means of interaction and reciprocity, relating to Simmel's Wechselwirkung. The group sought unexpected material adjacencies and conditions revealing the specific character proposed by the overlaps of brick walls, mortar surfaces, wood slats, metal sheets, plastic shingles, glass panes, asphalt driveways, and invasive vegetation.
The final document included the maps of each sector and eight short essays about the images from each pair of students. This compilation revealed interpretations, assumptions, and initiatives from the students' perspective. The identity of each district was depicted through each snapshot. Only thirty images per photographer would make the final selection, so each sector was to be portrayed a total of sixty images. In the end, the group chose 480 out of the few thousand photographs taken during the three-month fieldwork. The selection 24 "Morley's studies were neither steadied nor set up this way. Perception was peripatetic.
[…] To be productive, the stroll had to be unhurried, its passage, uncharted, and progress uninterrupted.
[…] Morley's ambulant observer confessed a weakness for 'he everlasting lure of round-the-corner.'" Christopher Morley,op. cit.,10. In: David Leatherbarrow,op. cit.: 229. 25 All photographs were accompanied by a brief description of 15-30 words and three to five keywords. The photographs taken by each student covered one sector, which equaled five photographs per sub-sector for a total of 30 images. Each team of two produced 60 photographs of the same sector, which revealed overlaps, promoted discussion, and expanded viewpoints. The intention behind this fieldwork structure was to guarantee a proper distribution of photographs within the assigned area. The students were to take a larger number of photographs to choose from, creating a pool of images from which to select the final 30. The students' visual, written, and spoken reflection evolved through iterative sequences of action, perception, and reflection -sauntering, observing, selecting. This helped the students learn that there is no such thing as a single response in the study of the material environment, with problems having multiple answers.
They were encouraged to develop an approach that was both disciplinary -they followed certain objective restrictions and rules, and serendipitousthere was ample room for individual subjective creativity within the externally imposed structure. Photography was in this case an exercise of active rather than passive looking intended to encourage a proactive, analytical, curious attitude in the exploration of material identity. In this sense, the self-reflection that emerged through each student's visual and material exploration became particularly significant, as it imbued the individual and collective learning process with personal reflection ignited through their individual observations. Through the photographic process, the students were to develop specific narratives that they assembled as themes.
The students practiced different approaches to the act of seeing in personal ways through their fieldwork expeditions. While one looked at the way water changed the materiality of the environment through its liquid and solid phases -in the form of ice and snow -another explored the progressive loss of surface homogeneity by paying attention to paint cracking, or photographed the disjointing of assembled pieces that slowly lost their original arrangement. One student wrote, "What happens at the point at which what we have forgotten and hidden away is rediscovered by nature?
That which was overlooked and has disappeared throughout history is overgrown with nature. Even that which we try to preserve is inevitably found and changed by nature. Cracked edges, fractured forms, splintering material: all evidence of nature's reclaim of material and space. But is this simply a decay of material, or actually the rebirth of a new material?" These narratives arose from the field exploration rather than as an a priori condition. The fieldwork became a collective opportunity for measuring and contrasting results, and registering significant conclusions that merged the physical and the visual through interaction and reciprocity between each student and the built environment they explored (figure 4). In parallel to their visual explorations in the field, the students were asked to collect a number of small non-hazardous samples and objects found serendipitously during their weekly field visits -cans, papers, sticks, rubber straps, a broom, two bricks, stones, animal bones, metal scraps, etc. The objects were to be part of a sui generis material map of the city that was to promote further discussion and complement the photographic portrait, arranged on a large table and replicating the layout of the city. This group installation required every student's engagement giving rise to parallel and simultaneous narratives around the materiality of the pieces the students collected. The result was a mapping of the students' physical findings, a set of collective intuitions and a mutually agreed upon vetting process.
This map of objects echoed the fieldwork that had been the students' research site for weeks. Its ephemerality -the installation was put together on the last day of the semester and lasted only a few hours -spoke to the temporal tensions reflected in   the images. The arrangement of artifacts referred to each item's location as found in the city and emphasized -at that moment in the classroom -a physical ethos that emerged from the many walks the students took in their fieldwork (figure 5).

Conclusions: Visualizing the Material, Materializing the Visual
The seminar "Atlas Materia: Experiencing the Material City" offered a group of students the opportunity to create a representation of the material identity of the city through field research sessions. The material experience of the built environment presented an opportunity that facilitated perceptual processes and a sensory portrait of the city's material condition. The haptic intimacy of material scenes enabled a counterpoint to the virtual predominance of today's architectural education. The research involved a corporeal and tactile interpretation of the environment's material qualities, leading to considerations of decay or change, (figure 6) or the constant negotiations between artificial and natural conditions ( figure 7). Inspired by the theoretical framework The students reconsidered the city in terms of material identity and individual and collective perception. The fieldwork involved processes through which students opened their eyes and touched with their hands, constructing individual narratives. The methods involved stages of inquiry, insight, and impression, combining photographic exploration and the collection of objects with intense reading and written analysis. 26 The aim was not merely to document the material legacy of the city, but to instigate inquiry using the city as a field of sensory information whose exploration involved objective and subjective strategies. Through their active participation, the students connected the external material field, the selection of visual sources, and their individual interpretations of the built environment to forge new interpretative narratives.
The research Atlas Materia facilitated a composite understanding of the city's material qualities and the palimpsest of its identity. The exploration that this material identity poses for the future of the city incorporates a multi-faceted physical and intellectual approach to the built condition; a distinct individual and collective approach to New in-sights?

MIGUEL GUITART
Atlas Materia: Fieldwork Experience in the Material City Atlas Materia: experiencia de trabajo de campo en la ciudad material 58 its material identity, and the material landscapes of the city. While the students sought to extract the more permanent qualities of these material landscapes, they also framed positions about the ways the qualities could be re-choreographed in a cultural process, much as Aby Warburg did with his Mnemosyne Atlas in the late 1920s (figure 8) (figure 9).
Having returned from the outside world where they carried out their photographic and object-finding work, the seminar discussions provoked additional questions and extended the sequence of inquiry. 27 The study succeeded by encouraging students to find new ways to think about matter and perception in surrounding environments. The ultimate objective of the Atlas Materia project was to contribute to making a link between a phenomenology of perception and urban spaces through a material-centered project. In making this link, the exploration promoted additional strategies for personal intuition and unexpected ways of seeing and perceiving the haptic qualities of the surrounding city. In the process, students exercised a The research of Atlas Materia thus represents an extension of Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, one that at once references pre-photographic fieldwork traditions in architectural education, while also positing a future pedagogical method that combines digital, representational, and phenomenological techniques to impart broader understanding to students. As online content, VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality) result in an increasingly image saturated cultural context that is progressively divorced from embodied experience, Atlas Materia re-instantiates the importance of fieldwork and experience in architectural education and practice. Following the observations of Simmel and Sennett, it is a reminder that vision is only one of the senses, and that experience is a composite comprised of multiple inputs that together inform the perception and understanding of space, and thus place.