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tive viewing. But it also offers the advantage of being ame-
nable to substantial control, and is easily reproduced and
globally disseminated; as an incisive and readable image, it is
also well suited to marketing purposes. In all these cases, the
image content tends towards a certain artificiality, one that is
detached from a given situation and does not belong wholly
to the beholder’s reality.- This mode of image perception, however, may be dis-
placed by a specifically architectural experience of the image,
one liberated now from fixation by any single viewpoint.
Summoned to life as soon as architectural space draws us into
depth and surrounds us, or else generates a three-dimensional
field of tension via corporeal confrontation, is an authenti-
cally ‘architectural image’. Although the visual qualities as-
sociated with the previous mode of perception may still play
a marginal role, the situation as a whole now becomes an
image. It is no longer a question of purely optical contempla-
tion; instead, the image extends around us, we are contained
by it, and we perceive ourselves within it. Although this ar-
chitectural image neither represents any external reality, nor
presents us with picturesque contents, like other images, it
can nonetheless be regarded as a true image: the way in which
real spatial situations, including actors, can represent some-
thing is familiar from the theatre. There, every scene sum-
mons a suggestive image, and is the staging of something in
the sense that it not only depicts a fictive set of events, but
also shifts them into a particular light, thereby generating an
imaginative image magic. Its medium is not the stage setting
alone, but also the situative interplay of spatial design, atmos-
phere and action, in ways comparable to architecture. The
equally vivid resources of spatial design, atmosphere, and the
movements and actions of figures also produce a scenic im-
age, albeit without a play. We, the beholders, are found within
this architectural image. The architectural image also engen-
ders an imaginative image magic, not to stage a fictive reality,
but for the sake of reality itself. In fact, one often feels as