other media, other architecture
TRANSCRIPT
ARCHITECTURE
TEXTS
IMAGES OBJECTS
MEDIA
SUBJECT MEDIA OBJECT
SUBJECT MEDIA OBJECT
MODERNITY
Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized - the medium in which it occurs - is conditioned not only by nature but by history.
Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories seemed to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-world with the dynamite of the split second, so that now we can set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, 1936
For centuries it was in the nature of literature that a small number of writers confronted many thousands of readers. This began to change toward the end of the past century. With the growth and extension of the press [...] an increasing number of readers - in isolated cases, at first - turned into writers. It began with the space set aside for "letters to the editor" in the daily press, and has now reached a point where there is hardly a European engaged in the work process who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other an account of a work experience, a complaint, a report, or something of the kind. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, 1936
Distraction and concentration form an antithesis, which may be formulated as follows. A person who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it; he enters into the work, just as, according to legend, a Chinese painter entered his completed painting while beholding it. By contrast, the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves. Their waves lap around it; they encompass it with their tide. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always offered the prototype of an artwork that is received in a state of distraction and through the collective.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, 1936
Mies van der Rohe, Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper, 1921
Mies van der Rohe, Glass Skyscraper, 1922
Mies van der Rohe, Brick Country House, 1923
Le Corbusier & Amédée Ozenfant, L’Esprit Nouveau, 1920-25
Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 1923
Le Corbusier, Beistegui Apartment, 1929-31
Le Corbusier, Villa Meyer, 1925
Sergei Eisenstein, sequences diagrams for Battleship Potëmkin, 1924
MASS CULTURE & MEDIA
In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man, 1964
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.
The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, that has become an objective reality.
The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967
Archigram #1, 1961
Archigram #4, 1964
Archigram #4, 1964
Archigram #5, 1964
Bau #1/2, 1968
Hans Hollein, Highrise Building, Sparkplug, 1964
Hans Hollein, Non-Physical Environment, 1967
Hans Hollein and Peter Noever, Svobodair environment spray, 1968
Casabella #367, Radical Design, 1972
Superstudio, Continuous Monument, 1969
Superstudio, Storyboard for the film on the Continuous Monument, 1971
Superstudio, Supersurface, 1971
Superstudio, Supersurface - An alternative model for life on the Earth, 1972
INFORMATION AGE
The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models - and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal.
In this passage […] the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials - worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, which are more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence.
It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 1988
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
Information devours its own content. It devours communication and the social.
McLuhan’s formula, the medium is the message, must be imagined at its limits where, after all the contents and messages have been volatilized in the medium, it is the medium itself that is volatilized as such. [...] Finally, the medium is the message not only signifies the end of the message, but also the end of the medium.
Jean Baudrillard, The Implosion of the Meaning in Media, 1994
SUBJECTMEDIAOBJECT
While aestheticization remains a background cultural condition that permeates - to a greater or lesser extent - the whole of present society, its effects will be all the more marked within a discipline that operates through the medium of the image. Architecture is fully ensnared within this condition. For architects engage in a process of aestheticization as a necessary consequence of their profession. Convention dictates that architects should see the world in terms of visual representation - plans, sections, elevations, perspectives, and so on. The world of the architect is a world of the image.
The consequences of this are profound. This privileging of the image has led to an impoverished understanding of the built environment, turning social space into a fetishized abstraction.
Neil Leach, The Anaesthetics of Architecture, 1999
Privileging the category of visuality runs the risk of ignoring the forces of specialization and separation that allowed such a notion to become the intellectually available concept that is today. So much of what seems to constitute a domain of the visual is an effect of other kinds of forces and relations of power.
Spectacular culture is not founded on the necessity of making a subject see, but rather on strategies in which individuals are isolated, separated, and inhabit time as disempowered.
Jonathan Crary, Suspension of Perception. Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, 2001
Since the nineteenth century Western modernity has demanded that individuals define and shape themselves in terms of a capacity for “paying attention”, that is, for a disengagement from a broader field of attraction, whether visual or auditory, for the sake of isolating or focusing on a reduced number of stimuli. That our lives are so thoroughly a patchwork of such disconnected states is not a “natural” condition but rather the product of a dense and powerful remaking of human subjectivity in the West over the last 150 years. Nor is it insignificant now at the end of the twentieth century that one of the ways an immense social crisis of subjective dis-integration is metaphorically diagnosed is as a deficiency of “attention”.
Jonathan Crary, Suspension of Perception. Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, 2001
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 1978
Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL, 1995
AMO/OMA, Content, 2004
AMO/OMA structure diagram, since 1999
AMO, The Image of Europe, 2004
To think about modern architecture must be to pass back and forth between the question of space and the question of representation. Indeed, it will be necessary to think of architecture as a system of representation, or rather a series of systems of representation. This does not mean abandoning the traditional architectural object, the building. In the end, it means looking at it much more closely than before, but also in a different way. The building should be understood in the same terms as drawings, photographs, writing, films and advertisements; not only because these are the media in which more often we encounter it, but because the building is a mechanism of representation in its own right. The building is, after all, a “construction”, in all senses of the word.
Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity. Modern Architecture as Mass Media, 1996
Buildings are conceived and transformed through media rather than simply represented in the media. Furthermore, architecture is itself from the beginning a form of media.
These virtual systems are not simply opposed to the material reality of architectural objects. The objects themselves take on the characteristics of the media in which they are represented.
Beatriz Colomina, Skinless Architecture, 2003
Traditionally, the primary object of study for the architectural historian has been either the building or the architect’s life and oeuvre.
Sometime in the 1990s several architectural historians shifted their attention from buildings to publications, exhibitions, films and photographs produced by architects. Previously deemed to be mere instruments enabling access to the buildings themselves, these ‘side products’ of the discipline have themselves become the objects of scrutiny.
It is reasonable to attribute this shift to the late twentieth-century expansion in media available to and used by architects; however, it can also be seen as an implicit rejection of the idea of architecture as agency and therefore related to the architectural retreat from social concerns into the realm of culture.
Tahl Kaminer, Framing Colomina, 2009
POST-INTERNET SOCIETY
In the Post-Internet climate, it is assumed that the work of art lies equally in the version of the object one would encounter at a gallery or museum, the images and other representations disseminated through the Internet and print publications, bootleg images of the object or its representations, and variations on any of these as edited and recontextualized by any other author.
While art may no longer have to contend with an idea of “mass media” as a fixed, monolithic system, instead it must now deal with both itself and culture at large as a constellation of diverging communities, each fixated on propagating and preserving itself.
Artie Vierkant, The Image Object Post-Internet, 2010
Attention has always been a currency, but with the proliferation of networking methods and infinitely alterable and reproducible media, that attention has diverged and become split amongst anyone and everyone who wishes to seek it.
For the new hierarchies of many-to-many production, the cultural status of objects is now influenced entirely by the attention given to them, the way they are transmitted socially and the variety of communities they come to inhabit.
Artie Vierkant, The Image Object Post-Internet, 2010
The architecture of the Internet - an arrangement of language, sound, and images in which imagery is the most dominant, immediate factor - helps facilitate an environment where artists are able to rely more and more on purely visual representations to convey their ideas and support an explanation of their art independent of language. This is a crucial point of departure from recent art history, as arguably it marks an abandonment of language and semiotics as base metaphors for articulating works of art and our relationship to objects and culture.
Artie Vierkant, The Image Object Post-Internet, 2010
Michael Abrahamson, Fuck Yeah Brutalism (archive)
Jeff Kaplon, Subtilitas (archive)
Andrew Kovacs, Archive of Affinities (archive)
Andrew Kovacs / Archive of Affinities, Plan for a 9 Square Grid, 2012
Davide Trabucco, Conformi (archive)
Davide Trabucco, Curzio Malaparte, Villa Malaparte, 1937-1943, Capri VS Carolyn Davidson, Nike Swoosh, 1971, 2015
Davide Trabucco / Conformi, VS, 2016
Aby Warburg, Atlas Mnemosyne, 1924-29
Luca Galofaro, Unfolding Pavilion, 2016
Carmelo Baglivo, Untitled, 2014
Beniamino Servino, Pennata con addizione nerviana/Pennata housing with external profusions, 2013
Bjarke Ingel’s Instagram account, 2016
Revolutions have always been linked to new media and communication formats.
People ask me how you can control networks like twitter or facebook, and I just tell them that is the same that happened in the 60s and 70s: you can’t control it! This lack of control is the great thing about this kind of network. For example, who could imagine some years ago the important role that twitter would have on political issues like Iran.
That’s why I think a media revolution like the current one has also happened before. If you look back, you find the same relationship between politics and media, and relating this with architecture, you have to think that in the decade of the 1970s, the political agenda was almost part of our architectural curriculum.
Beatriz Colomina, in From Xerography to HTML, 2011