You're sitting at your desk on a rainy Tuesday morning when all of a sudden everything goes black. The voice of your roommate just starting to ask you if you want a cup of coffee starts to fade away as you're sucked into a dark void. A numbness starts to creep up your legs, starting at your toes and slowly making its way upwards. As it approaches your torso you think "this is it, it's really happening". A burst of memories shoot into your head as you reflect on the life you've had; "It's been nice," you think to yourself, "I've had a good life, I'm content with the things I’ve done and who I was as a person."

We are currently living, working, eating, sleeping, yawning, crying in an enclosed space. Every single built space we have is operated or inhabited by humans. Heck, you are probably reading this comfortably inside a well-lit building. Thinking further into this, before the brick and mortar phase of this very space you’re sitting in, through the expertise of architects and engineers, we can rely on computer renderings and the scale figures plotted in the scene to be convinced that “yes, this space looks comfortable and meaningful to future users.” This article is here to contribute some awareness to the underlying bias we have for the polished world of architecture rendering. It is impossible to represent architecture without representing the human, yet, in present day, adding people into an architecture render is the last thing on an architect’s task list. 

Ron Barten’s photographs are part of his personal research for the Interiors Building Cities graduation studio at TU Delft.  They portray the streetscape of Rotterdam with a careful eye, looking at how the city indirectly converses with its citizens, either through text, signs, graffiti, labels, and symbols. Such a diversity of languages often occurs in the space of two metres, on the buildings’ plinth. Here, the formal language of the landlord intersects with the informal response of who dwells in the city. A discussion that changes over time; a confrontation, questioning to whom the street really belongs.