Technological discoveries have extended and reshaped the physical environment. They have changed our visual surrounding partly by actually rebuilding the physical environment, and partly by presenting visual tools that are of assistance to our discernment of those phases of the visible world, which were previously, too small, too fast, too large, or too slow for us to comprehend.
To orient oneself in walking requires a different spatial measurement than is required in riding in a motorcar or in an airplane. To grasp spatial relationships and orient oneself in a metropolis of today, along the intricate dimensions of streets, subways, elevated, and skyscrapers. Requires a new way of seeing. Widening horizons, and the new dimensions of the visual environment necessitate new idioms of spatial measurement and communications of space. The visual image of today must come to terms with all this: it must evolve a language of space, which is adjusted to the new standards of experience. This new language can and will enable the human sensibility to perceive space-time relationships that weren’t recognized before.
Gyorgy Kepes 1944
