CREATIVITY GAME

Tim Gerdin:

The use of composite representations of space in history and today

DOI 10.15292/IU-CG.2025.13.030-036 | UDK 71:72.012(091) | SUBMITTED: 08/2025 | REVISED: 09/2025 | PUBLISHED: 11/2025
Author's affiliation: Urban Planning Institute of the Republic of Slovenia, Ljubljana, Slovenia

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ABSTRACT
At least since prehistoric engravings, we have been using spatial representations to explain and connect knowledge about the world, using it as a means of thinking, exploring, and understanding relationships in space. The early formalized Egyptian system of register division, narrative Roman mosaics, analytical drawings of the Beaux-Arts school, and contemporary digital techniques are all related to the principle of combining building blocks into wholes that reveal relationships, functions, and meanings that would be difficult for individual elements to express on their own. Such composite images function as tools that do not merely depict a snapshot of space, but interpret it as a sequence of processes, as a layering of criteria, or as narrative-analytical connections. The article highlights the etymological connection between composition and effective communication, which is then illustrated through the presentation and analysis of selected historical examples of spatial images that use a thoughtful approach to composing elements, enabling effective communication. The examples lead to analytical architectural drawings from the 19th and 20th centuries and today’s range of digital and analog media, which open a reflection on the creation of composite representations of space in different periods and their role today, when digital workflows and new artificial intelligence tools enable new ways of working. These must still respond to the demand for understanding of space, to which composite images can respond in the form of an approach that functions as a mental tool, combining observation and interpretation of space and the relationships that occur within it into a single, multi-layered visual whole.

KEYWORDS
drawing, assembly, composition, presentation techniques

FULL ARTICLE
https://iu-cg.org/paper/2025/IU-CG.2025.13.030-036.pdf (0.65 MB)

CITATION

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