Stereo - from Greek stereos ‘solid’
Architects are asked to address a multitude of problems ranging from the everyday pragmatic—program, structure, envelope—to the culturally complex—environmental collapse, social injustice, technological acceleration. An architect’s primary agency in relation to these issues is through the organization of space, form, and material, that is through design. Which is why when architecture is seen falling short, as it often does, the blame is typically laid on design. This fault can be expressed in several ways, but one common complaint is a lack of realism.
When architecture is negligent in addressing realities, the shortcomings often begin with how architects understand, translate, and imagine problems through representation. Put simply, the problem of “problems” begins with how they are mediated. It is important to articulate that mediation is both between things relationally and a thing in-itself as opposed to the traditional understanding of representations as secondary images re-presenting a primary reality. Furthermore, there is even the suggestion that mediation precedes what it mediates. “Cultural techniques,” as formulated by Bernhard Seigert, establish sensible distinctions between things, altering how the world is sensed and made sense of. And it is this combination of mediation and realism that brings us to the prefix “stereo.”
Stereotomy – the geometric cutting of solids
Stereoscopics– the appearance of solidity and the calculation of depth
Stereophonics– the spatial depth of acoustic artifice
Stereotypes– the printing from casts of movable type
Stereotomy
Architectural mediations are historically tied to the operations of stereotomy, the geometric cutting of solid matter. Stereotomy is a cultural technique with ties to masonry vaults, domes, and arches, the use of templates in construction, descriptive and projective geometry, and the modeling of volume and mass through spatial intersections. Although stonemasonry is fundamentally materially based, as a cultural technique stereotomy demands abstractions to regulate with precision of joints between stones. These layout drawings precede the construction, focusing efforts on planning and layout, requiring skills that are taught in the studio as opposed to the construction site. Stereotomy becomes an apparatus for managing and manipulating solidity – in a way, it is a mediation of constructed reality. It also provides the initial technique upon which future “stereos” draw their analogies.
Stereoscopics
The calculation of depth through projective geometry is fundamental for both perspective and photogrammetry. Our environment is increasingly modeled through the scans of the double image, be that Google Earth, surveillance cameras, self-driving cars, or drone warfare. These techniques of stereoscopics are also found in the nineteenth-century stereoscope as a technological interface simulating human binocular vision for proto-cinematic spectacles as well as physio-psychologies of perception. This is the basis of AR and VR, but beyond these technologies, the stereoscope and stereograph introduce the experience of an expanded sensorium where the biological senses collude with a technologically enhanced artifice, creating phantasmagorias both enchantingly strange and deceptive dangerous.
Stereophonics
Stereophonics might well be the most common current usage of the prefix, but it is also the newest as it was first developed in the mid twentieth-century as left/right split channels for recorded music and playback, what we commonly just call “the stereo.” Double tracking also marks the advent of the recording studio as a technology of mediation for the creative construction of almost all modern music. The artifice of stereo sound not only simulates the biological experience of sonic space, but it also expands the palette to include what was formerly considered noise. As these technologies enter our daily life, they radically transform hearing towards an inner “headspace,” normalizing disassociations between sound and vision. It is helpful to consider that our personal digital devices developed not only from screens and telephones but also from the interceding step of the personal stereo, the “Walkman.”
Stereotypes
The last topic of stereotypes is commonly associated with the social construction of how entities – human and nonhuman – become reduced to simplified generic assumptions. This term was first used in the social sciences as an analogy to the processes for the duplication and dissemination of mass media newspapers. It was during the nineteenth century that duplicate casts, the stereotypes of movable type, were developed to accelerate printing time and quantity. This allowed an explosion of printed media radically affecting cultural knowledge and behavior, with the problematic increase and expansion of stock tropes following in its wake. When the repetition of an image, belief, or textual phrase becomes the basis for the construction of “reality,” we speak of a fully mediated world. Generative AI is our current manifestation of this trajectory; one we are only just beginning to grapple with.