In an illustration for the Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, David Hockney’s delicate etched lines reveal a boy hiding inside a giant fish at the bottom of a lake. The child, curled up in its belly, resembles a foetus inside the soft shelter of a womb. The fish’s outline becomes the thin boundary keeping the dark black waters from encroaching the space inhabited by the boy.In an illustration for the Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, David Hockney’s delicate etched lines reveal a boy hiding inside a giant fish at the bottom of a lake. The child, curled up in its belly, resembles a foetus inside the soft shelter of a womb. The fish’s outline becomes the thin boundary keeping the dark black waters from encroaching the space inhabited by the boy.

The Chilean architect Smiljan Radić (1965 - ) cites this etching in his essay “Some Remains of My Heroes Found Scattered Across a Vacant Lot”. The writing adopts a stream of consciousness style where Radić wanders through a labyrinth of his heroes (artists, architects, writers) and various artefacts (photographs, models, illustrations, and fables) that have occupied a place in his mind – inviting us to glimpse inside his architecture cosmos.

The essay was initially delivered as a lecture in Santiago later published in a compilation of essays in his autobiographic book Every So Often a Talking Dog Appears. The book’s cover, in white, red, and orange, is punctuated by abstract motifs that resemble Vassily Kandinsky’s graphical translation of music. The unusual title is reminiscent of Miguel de Cervantes' satirical novella, The Dialogue of the Dogs, which uses a framework of two talking and reasoning canines to expose certain realities of society. In a similar vein, the “talking dog” in Radić’s book is simultaneously philosopher and guide, leading the reader into Radić’s cryptic cosmos sprinkled with magical realism, where prose and poetry, reality and fantasy are interwoven.

To dive deeper into his cosmos, let us cast our gaze back to “Some Remains of My Heroes Found Scattered Across a Vacant Lot”. In a prelude of the essay, he asserts:

Heroes have to exist; people need to feel a deep admiration for certain figures, or at least for their work. I think that is the only way to generate historical continuity, if we find some value in it.

One such hero is Aldo Rossi, whose name appears six times in the essay and whose book, A Scientific Autobiography, had a clear influence on Radić’s writing. Strong stylistic parallels can be drawn between the two. Resisting the standard linear structure, both texts operate in the realm of the nonrational, moved by impulses and fascinations. Rather than focusing on the architectural outcome, the two architects also address the personal and existential relationship they have with their work, which in turn forms the continuity of their architecture. In Vincent Scully’s words, the autobiographies are “changing but static, revolving around fixed points of obsession”.

In Radić’s essay, free associations, fleeting memories, and impressions fade in and out of focus, as if he is constantly distracted by multiple fascinations and possible linkages. The frequent use of low modality, such as “it seems”, “perhaps”, “may”, creates a tone of uncertainty, allowing him to construct a cosmos that does not pretend to be self-explanatory, reasonable, or logical. In fact, Radić states that he attempts to generate in his writing “an enchantment through a weak certainty,” leaving “the truly real and the really true” to theorists and specialists. Undoubtedly, Radić was influenced by Rossi’s writing, who recognised that a certain limited and honest disorder might most authentically reflect the fluid and sometimes inconsistent mind of an architect.

There is a lightness in the way Radić writes. Pivoting phrases such as “There is a connection between…”, “It is in these terms that…”, and “If we return to…” help Radić leap from one fascination to another and back, and the text does not burden itself with deductive reasoning or the need to reach a predetermined destination. Something briefly mentioned in the previous paragraph, such as “a thin tent”, becomes the subject of the next. The memory of “the tent of a family circus” inspires surreal imageries of “a false ceiling”, “an impoverished sky”, and a “thin wall of plastic fabric [that] separates the trapped made-up air inside from reality outside.” Radić continues to layer metaphors upon metaphors, illustrating an architecture that constitutes the thin membrane between internal fiction (the show and its spectators) and external fact (the empty football field on which the tent stands). Like the silhouette of the fish, the tent architecture upholds the suspension of disbelief – of promises of possible, yet unforeseen ways of life.

One could look similarly at the fisheye lens used to photograph Constant Nieuwenhuys (another one of Radić’s heroes) in his studio. Radić starts by describing Constant seated amongst a curated arrangement of his models in a third person passive voice. In the same paragraph, the writing shifts without warning to first person perspective, “all of a sudden, we are inside his head, looking out or at ourselves through the transparent, curved tissue of his retina or his space devourers (spatiovores).” Perhaps for Radić, the fish-eye camera lens resembles in some way the architecture that upholds the fiction of Constant’s curated studio, distorting and suspending reality, swapping the observer with the observed. Radić’s internal monologue four pages later, “Once we leave there, or they kick us out, in the blink of an eye everything will exist again,” underscores his fascination with the construction of such “a momentary conviction”.

Throughout the essay, fiction is always associated with the intangible. It is the winter winds that blow in the corridors of the selfish giant’s castle, of Rossi’s fog which penetrates the interior of the Basilica of Sant’Andrea in Mantua, and of wandering “almas (souls)” silently inflating the family circus tent. The castle, the basilica, and the tent are all forms of shelter that separates interior from exterior, and the fiction from reality. However, one cannot exist without the other. Radić proclaims the circus as fiction, and fiction as “a made-up face of reality”. So, if we take shelter as a generator for fiction, then it must also be essential to our understanding of reality.

At the same time, the shelter should adapt to the protagonist of the fairytale. According to Radić, “the fate of all shelters, or of any studio, is tied to its inhabitant.” The fish that hides the boy, the study of St. Jerome, and the amorphous mesh model housing Frederick Kiesler to dare protective refuges for their respective inhabitants, sharing their scale, proportions, and time.

Radić’s Serpentine Pavilion in 2014 was conceived with the scale of the human inhabitant and the hands of a giant in mind. Its enigmatic presence emerges as a result of layered sources of influence. On one hand, the torus form resembles ancient carved Indian stones; on the other, the folly is the scaled-up papier-mâché model of The Castle of the Selfish Giant (2010) inspired by Oscar Wilde’s tale with the same name. The voluptuous space also bears a visual connection with Kiesler’s elevated Endless House, which was conceived as “a spatial shelter to be filled with the exuberance of the life that we have yet to invent.” The translucent fibreglass blob balancing on six quarried boulders recalls the Hockney’s etching of the see-through fish, floating silently above river rocks with a child in its belly. Through a dissonant juxtaposition of rough and refined, archaic and futuristic, permanent and fragile, the building refuses to offer a singular interpretation or take part in a singular history.

Openings formed by Burda patterns at the model scale become sharp cutouts at the pavilion scale. Through these cracks and openings, nature rushes inside while the fictive guts of the shell spill out. These can be traced back to Radić’s interest in Rossi’s idea of the ‘sventrata’ (gutted) view, through which we can peer into architectures’ hidden interiors.

To a certain extent, “Some Remains of My Heroes Found Scattered Across a Vacant Lot” functions in the same way, carving out a hole in the fourth wall, Gordon Matta-Clark-style (another hero), and offering us a glimpse into Radić’s multi-dimensional universe. Through an open-ended rhizomatic approach (as mentioned by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus), the essay puts Radić’s work in dialogue with heroic figures and artefacts, anchoring Radić’s work in the fleeting continuum of history. Perhaps it is by no coincidence that Radić’s book Every So Often a Talking Dog Appears adopts a strikingly similar cover design to A Thousand Plateau’s red and white. To use Kersten Geers’ words, “Since the past, sources have never been linear; on the contrary, there have always been multiple simultaneous influences.” Indeed, Radić’s essay affirms an architectural attitude that eagerly builds alliances with artistic, cultural, and literary reference points.

Perhaps the best way to understand Smiljan Radić’s work is to see it as a momentary constellation of his collection of heroes, memories, and artefacts. His architecture exists at the nebulous boundary between fiction and reality. Every new project gives birth to a new star, generating new possibilities within a cosmos that is unstable, luminous and infinite.

Paying Attention in the Metro:

Analysing Perception and Information Load in Urban Transit Environments

As the traveller descends into the metro station on one of the constantly appearing and disappearing escalator steps, they enter a bustling bazaar, where advertisements, signages, shop fronts, digital display screens and even handrails compete for the scarce resource – attention. Efficient navigation through the labyrinth of stairs, corridors and platforms becomes a daily duty of the commuter. The problem arises, however, when an abundance of competing stimuli erodes the visual hierarchy of metro signages, resulting in confusion, reduced efficiency, and inducing psychological stress on the traveller.

The typology of the metro station is selected for the analysis of attention dynamics as it is a unique urban environment where humans are passively exposed to a vast amount of information during their journey. As its surfaces are increasingly saturated with readily available information, the metro station becomes a microcosm of the contemporary metropolis. The essay refers to metro stations in cities across the world such as Shanghai, Milan, Vienna to exemplify information excess and attention deficit as global phenomena.
However, this information is not free to attain. The traveller must invest a fraction of their finite pool of mental resources to process and access it. Indeed, in an information-rich world, “attention is the commodity in short supply” (Lanham, 2006, p. xi). Thus, the key economy at play today is no longer an economy of money or material, but rather, one of attention. It is thus important to dissect and analyse the complex, high-stimulus environment of the metro station as well as the way the traveller perceives such information.
The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Classic Edition) by James J. Gibson (2014), first published in 1979, provides a powerful lens to do so. Gibson defines “perception” as being “aware of the surfaces of the environment and of oneself in it” (2014, p. 244). It is a process which occurs between the moving animal and its partly dynamic, partly invariant environment (Gibson, 2014, pp. 4, 10). Adopting this theoretical framework, the essay addresses perception through the eyes of the urban traveller, the animal, within the metro station, its environment.

Diverse visual stimuli in metro stations are strategically designed to demand and consume the attention of the urban traveller through the lure of colour, illumination, and movement. These techniques not only attempt to inform but also to influence behaviours of travellers, contributing to the broader dynamics of attention economics in public spaces. By analysing metro stations as markets where attention-information transactions take place, the essay reflects upon the tension between human’s limited attention capacity and increasing information load in urban spaces.

An Economy of Attention

The analysis further builds on the capacity theory outlined by Daniel Kahneman in Attention and Effort. Kahneman writes that “the total amount of attention which can be deployed at any time is limited” (Kahneman, 1973, p. 9). In the supply-demand graph shown in Figure 1, Kahneman also draws a close linkage between attention and effort, suggesting that the total supplied effort is composed of the capacity supplied to a primary task and spare capacity. Thus, the adequate allocation of this expendable resource becomes of utmost significance in an attention economy.

Figure 1.
Supply of effort as a function of demands of a primary task

Note. Source: (Kahneman, 1973, p. 15).

The term attention originates from the Latin word attencio, and is defined as “the action, fact, or state of attending or giving heed; esp. in to pay or give attention” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2024). The English expression “to pay attention” implies that attention functions as a form of currency – one that is deeply linked to the giver of attention and arguably more valuable than money.
In an attention economy, individuals expend attention in exchange for information, “which is in turn monetised via advertisement” (Franck, 2019, p. 8). Some of the information is actively sought out, some passively registered, which Kahneman identifies as applications of voluntary attention and involuntary attention (1973, p. 42). For example, to understand one’s position in the network of metro lines, the traveller must pay attention to the sign. To learn of the extraordinary lifestyle promised by new commodities, the traveller must give their attention to the advertisement. The metro station thus becomes a marketplace where attention/effort transactions are constantly processed, where forces are constantly in tension between the practical and the promotional, the public and the private.

Metro Stations as Supermarkets

The underground metro station is usually severed from the outside world to enable the curation of a completely controlled environment. This world operates on its own functional logic to not only guide the metro user efficiently through its spaces, but also display advertisement products along their journey to vie for their scarce attention capital. In an economy where attention is traded for information rather than money for goods, metro stations have emerged as the modern-day supermarkets of the attention economy.

Figure 2.
East Nanjing Road station line 2 platform

Note. Source: (Izudiver, 2014).

In the same way that products on shopping aisles are designed to encourage the shopper to spend money in exchange for the commodity, advertisements along tunnel walls aim to encourage the traveller to dispense attention and effort in exchange for the information they portray. In supermarkets, the items placed at eye level, between 1.2 and 1.5 metres above the ground surface, is expected to attract 14-15% more attention than top and bottom shelves (Ming, Burke, Hui, & Leykin, 2021, p. 1137). Similarly, on the metro platform, large screens and posters vertically centred at eye level fill the traveller’s visual field with stimuli. In Shanghai, more than 15,000 advertising panels from advertising display company STDecaux permeate 503 metro stations (JCDecaux, 2021). At East Nanjing Road Station (Figure 2), the functional information about metro direction is positioned on a brightly lit strip above the platform to enable visibility from a distance and in crowded situations. In contrast, advertisements in lightboxes assume prime attention real estate: positioned at eye-height and set against the dark background of the tunnel wall. The traveller can even walk along the linear platform to leisurely browse the aisle of evenly spaced eye-candy. This information imposes itself on the waiting traveller, capitalising on a few minutes of their idle attention before the next metro arrives.
In comparison, Milan’s Repubblica station (Figure 3) places functional signage on the same plane as its advertising. The station’s name and large marketing posters are alternatingly arrayed along the dark tunnel at eyelevel. Positioning both types of information side by side undermines the hierarchy of importance to the observer as well as blurs the distinction between the private and public. It is impossible to only perceive the yellow sign and ignore the adjacent panels in the peripheral vision. In both examples, visual information is purposefully placed where the resting gaze naturally lands, and in this fraction of a second, as the brain starts deciphering what the eyes see, attention-information transactions have already begun taking place.

Figure 3.
Repubblica Metro Station in Milan

Note. Source: (Ordóñez, 2011).

Lighting also plays a significant role in the perception of surfaces and allocation of attention in metro stations. Distinct from urban spaces above ground where the sun provides variation in lighting intensity and angle, metro stations are usually completely devoid of sunlight, illuminated instead by invariant artificial lights throughout the day. Like large supermarkets, the lack of windows and skylights in metro stations suspend the individual’s sense of time and keep them captive for longer, thereby increasing their total attention expenditure. The elimination of a variable lighting factor also ensures that signage and advertising panels, like products on a shelf, are always perfectly illuminated for the observer’s eye. However, the information-loaded environment becomes visually confusing and psychologically stressful for the commuter when important wayfinding signs are overshadowed by more illuminated, or even light-emitting advertising surfaces. They need to spend more effort and time to discern the sign from the clutter of every other visual stimulus. For example, in Shanghai’s East Nanjing Road station (Figure 2), the backlit advertisement lightboxes threaten to take precedence over the illuminated navigation strip in its degree of brightness.

Advertisement as the New Ornament

Not unlike the walls of the contemporary metropolis, surfaces of metro stations today have been “invaded” by images of headphones, SIM cards, face masks, coffee and so on, which are essentially commodities (Coccia, 2018, p. 11). These images of attention marketing from private companies are increasingly encroaching into the public realms of the metro, transforming commuters into consumers. The Milano Red Line is an example of this. The advertising campaigns, previously allocated within specific frames coherent with the design of the station (B. Carnevali, personal communication, October 29, 2024), are expanding their claim on public surfaces: metro gates, inside and outside vehicles, metro windows, platform walls and tunnel walls. Every surface visible to the urban traveller can be transformed into a point of sales to attract and monetise attention.

Figure 4.
Platform for L1 of Xujiahui Station, Shanghai

Note. Source: (MNXANL, 2016).

To understand how images are perceived, it is important to first understand the picture as a “treated surface” (Gibson, 2014, p. 269). The picture’s colour and texture do not coherently reflect its composition as do the colour and texture of a non-pictorial substance (Gibson, 2014, p. 26). Instead of solely showing information about the surface itself, a picture also depicts its scene - the virtual surfaces in the picture. This duality of invariant information requires the viewer to apprehend the picture both directly and indirectly (Gibson, 2014, pp. 269-270). For example, the decorated columns in Xujiahui Station (Figure 4) are simultaneously perceived by the commuter as its substance – a printed poster wrapped around cylindrical columns - and its pictorial depiction – a life-sized woman smiling in front of a red background and surrounded by slogans. This ambiguity in meaning implies that more effort and attention capital are required to make sense of and discern the two apprehensions. The allegory is evident: society today is no longer supported by columns of stone, concrete, or steel, but is instead built upon columns of symbolic depictions of commodity.

Figure 5.
KFC Lightbox Advertisement in Xujiahui Station, Shanghai

Note. Source: (JCDecaux, 2021).

Moreover, it is not a coincidence that the red columns echo the red colour-coding of Line 1. Advertisement here takes on a functional role too. The colour coordination (which will be further discussed in the next section) is also visible in the passageway of Xujiahui Station (Figure 5), where over-sized KFC advertisement covers an entire wall in red. Strategically employing the same colour, these panels have replaced the red orienting stripe that usually guides movement. In addition, these large lightboxes emit so much light that they are eclipsing and even overtaking standard ceiling lamps as interior illumination. The ambiguity of roles further reinforces the idea that the private and the public are becoming increasingly entangled and difficult to distinguish in metro environments. The dual-function advertising panels undoubtedly optimise the use of space, but they do so to the detriment of the human psyche. Rather than adorning city walls with intricate Baroque reliefs or exposing their raw materiality in Brutalist fashion, contemporary urban environments are increasingly defined by advertising as their main surface treatment.

Persisting Visual Cues as Navigation Anchors

Despite the overwhelming information-rich surfaces in metro environments, invariant visual cues such as colour-coding and clear signage provide clarity and direction during navigation. Surfaces that visually persist as the individual moves around in space function as a positional anchor for the urban traveller. According to Gibson, since “all observers are animals and all animals are mobile,” observation naturally implies motion, while stationary observation is a special case of it (2014, p. 66). As an animal in locomotion perceives its environment, its point of view changes. However, parts of its environment, a rock for example, stays unchanged and is perceived by the moving animal as so. These surfaces in the environment which persist during perception are referred to by Gibson as invariant structure (2014, p. 66). Invariant structure plays a key role in reducing the observer’s cognitive load as they require less mental effort to discern. The perceptions of a stationary rock during movement reveals its previously hidden surfaces to complete the picture instead of interpreting the object anew from every new position.