can architectural hapticity be photographed?

i marked a student's essay last night, titled 'media + architecture: the role of image-making in a mass consumerist culture and its effect on the spatial experience of architecture'. this relates directly to a theory dissertation i wrote in 2000, and subsequent ongoing personal research. reading the paper has reignited thoughts. so i thought i might write some stuff about it.

the question i have been mulling over recently is whether architectural hapticity can be photographed. modernisation in the twentieth century brought about the rapid ascension of photography as a tool for mass communication. subsequently, the camera has profoundly affected our experience of memory, time and space.

at its very core, architecture is created for human engagement. it needs to be touched. but how exactly do we 'touch' a building? in his essay ‘hapticity and time', pallasma argues that touch is the unconsciousness of vision. however, in a predominantly ocular-centric culture, our eyes touch a surface before our body; and the architectural image plays a considerable role in this process. the contemporary architectural image is often manipulated prior to publication or exhibition, and there is a marked difference between the primary [primal] viewing and the secondary viewing – that which is seen through the eyes of another.

when physically experiencing architecture, a lapse of time provokes shifting changes in perception – for example, changes in light and shadow. photographs, though, capture a moment in time; a moment that will never be repeated. therefore, I wonder whether photographs can act as a medium for haptic engagement with architecture. and are photographs 'real', or something else? do they desensitise us to our physical world? beaudrillard's concept of simulacra questions the concept of reality as we know it: he argues that today there is no such thing as reality.

the distinction between real and hyper-real, therefore, lies in the photographer's bias and the photograph's viewport. both architecture and photographic representation will always be subject to individual interpretation – but can photographic representation ever satisfy one’s haptic expectations of architecture? or has architecture been dematerialised, and reduced from a phenomenological experience to an object which is merely consumed visually; thus negating any reason to physically and spatially experience it.