Materialising vision: performing a high-rise view

This chapter explores the proposition by way of an investigation of the active seeing that happens in and around high-rise windows, and specifically the windows of Red Road. It enters into the practices of urban visioning of which the modernist high-rise was a part, but it also addresses the role of views and viewing technologies in that architecture, as well as the ways in which such visioning technologies are lived with. The chapter explores how the varied visual orders and practices bear directly on the materiality of a building: bringing it into being, holding it in place and even contributing to its demise. In recent moves to materialise vision, scholars have called upon Roland Barthes interpretation of the photograph as a laminated object: both material and visual. The architectural imagination that gave rise to the high-rise as a mass housing solution was motivated by the potentials economic, formal, social, spatial of new materials.