japanese
What is ambiguity of form?
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Ambiguity of form was defined as the potentiality of interpreting the form of a space in several ways in this research. The multi-interpretative forms could bring about the richer experiences in space and time.
The concept of ambiguity of form was recognized in comparative analyses between paintings and buildings by Sigfreid Giedion. Two figures of a face, the profile and the full, could be extracted from ‘L’Arlesienne’, the painting by Picasso. Two ways of the shape, a box enclosed by glass walls and a set of vertically overlaid slabs supported by columns and beams, could be extracted from ‘The Bauhaus, Dessau’, the building designed by Gropius. The common point was that different forms could be seen simultaneously through the transparent layers.
The concept of ambiguity of form was also recognized in comparative analyses between paintings and buildings by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky. Several ways of depth reading were possible in ‘Three Faces’, the painting by Leger. Several ways of depth reading were also possible at the front façade of ‘Villa Stein de Monzie’, the building designed by Corbusier. These were not caused by the transparent layers, but by the spatial organizations composed with elements of incomplete shapes.
Ambiguity of form was thought to be the outcome of modernists’ trials in the realms of both visual art and spatial design. Then, could ambiguity in forms of modern landscape works also observed?
(1) Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Fifth Ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967) 494.
(2) Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, Transparency. Trans. Jori Walker (Basel: Birkha user, 1997) 30.
