Other Media, Other Architecture

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 structure diagram, since 1999

AMO, The Image of Europe, 2004

Squint/Opera, Alsop Architects, Birdhouse, 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

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.

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.

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

BIG and Squint/Opera, 2 World Trade Center, 2015

Étienne Duval, Yo is More, 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

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