during the daytime, and the El Croquis photographs thus reflect the
life of the building in monograph No. 134/135, whereas the Casa da
Musica in Porto, mainly an evening building in terms of programming,
appears empty, human-less in the same issue. In 2006, Koolhaas
introduced the idea of post-occupancy, originally a term reserved for
the evaluation of buildings involving user feedback, to architectural
criticism in a special issue of the journal Domus by looking at four
OMA public buildings (including the Casa da Musica and the Seattle
Library) through the broader media and cultural context within
which they operate, empowering the critical experience of users
(Koolhaas & Ota, 2006; Preiser, White, & Rabinowitz, 2015). The issue
included abundant nighttime material on the projects portrayed.
Long before the social media era, it was key in the articulation—or
consolidation—of a radical shift in the point of view through which
architecture is regarded, portrayed, and circulated, from the eye
of the specialist to that of society at large, giving it new agency in
architectural discourse.
The centrality of photography, a 19th century invention, in the schism
between day and night remains a critical endeavour in architectural
theory. Volumes are exterior, photographed, whereas interiors have
remained for decades diurnal. In the case of the workshop with El
Croquis, the sequence of images favours an oscillation of perception
between the real space of the architecture and the virtual domain
of the publication. The journal envisions architectural practice as
the intersection of several representation systems such as drawing,
writing, photography, and graphic design in successive iterations
and manipulations. The resistance to night photography in El Croquis,
other than due to habits and trip schedules, is related to the blurring of
architectural volumes at night. Atmospheric, diffuse, or blurred would
never describe any of its photography. There is diurnal exteriority
in this way of thinking “because you need to see the outline of the
building,” as Levene would claim in a conversation on the history of
the journal (Levene et al. 2020). Only one night photograph, that of
the Rolex Center in Lausanne by SANAA, has made the cover of El
Croquis (No. 155). It creates, literally, an image that shapes the rest
of the content. There is a recurrent absence of lighting plans, not to
mention diagrams, in the drawings. The non-visuality of architecture,
i.e., its acoustic, thermal, and lighting qualities, is recurrently rendered
invisible, not only by the limitations of photography but also in the
choice of the accompanying graphic material.
Through photography, El Croquis objectifies—in the literal sense
of rendering objects—architectural spaces, particularly from the
outside, with a recurrent yet not exclusive preference for the isolated