Introduction
This essay will addresses architecture's position in a consumer culture. Consumer society serves as a the outcome of modernism where eating material goods is the paramount feature of its balance and worth. It's the result of the increase in manufacturing and quick industrial developments. It is also the results of the immense tempo of diversification and expansion of culture, creativity, technology and urbanism as a way of life. I will use the concepts of semiotic philosopher Jean Baudrillard's as a basis in understanding the implications of the culture on the built environment, metropolitan design and technology. I am going to also analyze the desire to have illusion realms that mirror certainty by analyzing Baudrillard's three orders of simulacra and the "hyperreal". To understand the expression of the phenomenon in our consumerist culture I have chosen to look at its manifestation in the urban framework of Montecasiono and also online environment of Second Life. My aim is to better understand the architects' position in this current culture and what it might mean for future years of structures.
Postmodernity and Hyper-reality
The postmodern condition does not simply replace modernity but it alternatively opens up a fresh and complex coating of interpretation of the modern by emphasizing its paradoxical aspects. Modernity has become deeply rooted in modern-day societies and therefore it is almost impossible to discover a condition where it has had no impact. Post-modernity by default cannot be separated from modernity as emancipation and liberation are inherent to the modern. Within the post-modern era the electronic picture is the predominant make defining its figurative persona. It is saturated with pictures in the degree that was not observed in record. (Asanowicz, 2014) To understand a few of the complexities in our image powered culture I am going to first be exploring the writings of Jean Baudrillard.
According to "Simulacra and Simulation" (Baudrillard, 1994) inside our post-modern world, "It is no more a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real". Baudrillard suggests that postmodern culture is not merely artificial, because the idea of artificiality still involves some sense of actuality against which to identify it. What he conveys is that people cannot realize the distinction between artifice and mother nature. Baudrillard then argues that there are three "orders of simulacra". Simulacra (Simulacres in French means: stereotype, a pseudo-thing, a clear form, a blank form) is one of the key concepts of postmodern looks. (Asanowicz, 2014). The first order of simulacra relates to the pre-modern period where the image is a specific imitation of the real. Baudrillard associates the second order of simulacra with the professional revolution of the nineteenth century where mass production and the increase of copies break down the differences between your representation and the image. The 3rd order of simulacra is specifically associated with the postmodern age. It suggests that the representation precedes and establishes the real. The variation between reality and its representation is has disappeared and there is merely the simulacrum. Baudrillard identified this distortion of the lines between the original and its own backup as the 'hyperreal' (Baudrillard, 1994). Not merely does indeed the simulacrum simulate the original but the simulacrum of truth is truer than true and thus the hyperreal is realer than real. (Horrocks & Jevtic, 1999)
This kind of simulated image is all around us, mother nature reserves are made to disguise the lack the natural environment in cities. Reallity Television programs are edited to romanticize the mundane. Baudrillard uses the example of Disneyland, "Disneyland is provided as imaginary in order to make us believe the rest is real, whereas most of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but participate in the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It really is no more a question of any wrong representation of truth (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no more real, and therefore of saving the truth basic principle. " (Baudrillard, 1994). To connect this theory to a Southern African context I'll use the example of Montesasino. As the simulated environment is patently incorrect, friends at Montecasino agree with the "reality" of dream because world will constantly absorb simulacra and its preference for this over reality. Offering a surplus of services and entertainment options in a Tuscan themed environment, Montecasino disorientates and mesmerises its guests in an environment of fantasy where extra cash enhances participation in, and pleasure of the retail and leisure experience. Baudrillard feedback on the blurred distinctions between culture, consumerism and personal information: "Work, leisure, characteristics and culture, all recently dispersed, separate, and everything pretty much irreducible activities that produced anxiety and complexity inside our true to life, and inside our 'anarchic and archaic' metropolitan areas, have finally become merged, massaged, climate managed and domesticated into the simple activity of perpetual shopping. All these activities have finally become desexed into a single hermaphroditic ambience of style" (Baudrillard, 2001).
Another example of hyperreality is that of MultiConsumer Virtual Environments. This has fascinated me since I employed my first multi-player role-playing computer game and recognized the addictive features it stirred. Today these virtual environments are much more sophisticated with digital worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life simulating not only of our own physical world but also of our own social, politics and monetary condition. Second Life comes with an active socialist get together, an opposing Marxist party and even an anarchist group. Prostitution, playing and consumerism are central to the simulation. Users of the environments create avatars which they define as the most accurate representation of theirrealself. Aside from hyperreality, lots of the principles Baudrillard postulates in Simulacra and Simulation are present. It is a semiological perfect world, where the users are deprived of the capability to move, eat and drink. The avatars have little or nothing else to consume but "signs" of the real. Avatars can lease prostitutes to have sexual intercourse which is devoid of human contact or experience subsequently consuming the "signal" of having intimacy. The avatars buy expensive digital clothes to express the distinction resistant to the avatars wearing free clothes. No actual clothes have transformed hands, but people spend real that they have actually earned to consume "signs" of goods. From a modernist this would seem to be irrational but Baudrillards says that, "Nothing resembles itself, and holographic duplication, like all fantasies of the precise synthesis or resurrection of the real (this also goes for scientific experimentation), is already no longer real, has already been hyperreal" (Baudrillard, 1994), so that it could be argued that there is no difference in eating something "real" or a "sign of the true".
The newest period of consumer culture is accordingly concerned with the effect of digital utilization. This is intensified by globalisation, new information technology and real-time communication. In the next section I'll discuss the implications of society's preoccupation with intake and hyperreality on Structures.
Post-Modern Structures in a consumer society
Frederic Jameson shows that Postmodernism replicates or reproduces and reinforces the reasoning of consumer capitalism. Thus when we analyze a consumer modern culture we should concentrate on the seductive and appealing as this is inherit to the consumer lifestyle. In structures terms such as image, ambience and enchantment of appearance will be more important than modern notions of individualism, rationalism, naturalism and functionalism (Jameson, 2002).
Few modern architects have consciously thought of their works with consideration to our image influenced culture. In "Visions' Unfolding: Structures in age Electronical Media", Peter Eisenman postulates that by using computer programs which arbitrarily fold surfaces and connect the building and scenery into one constant whole, the architecture will not surrender to any particular explanation, but continually disrupts what's defined as architecture (Eisenman, 1999). This does address the thought of surface being the most crucial aspect of design but the situation would be that the works is possibly not seductive enough, alternatively the work is merely fascinating.
On the other side the task of Jean Nouvel is shrouded in the enchantment of appearance. In Jean Nouvel in Chat: Tomorrow Can Take Attention of Itself, he says that "image is the matter of architecture and so the continuing future of structures is not architectural in the tectonic sense". Nouvel emphasises that his architecture is not composed of space but of communicative floors, which he phone calls interfaces. He's not thinking about details but only in images.
Koolhaas and Tschumi are two other architects which may have centered their works on a conscious research of atmosphere alternatively than functions or meanings in structures. Finally one cannot forget to say Bernard Tshumi. After the vertical, modern, in La Villette we've the horizontal, little, conceptual and postmodern hyperrealism. The "cinematic" adaptations in the architecture allow "events" and are said to provide new independence for visitors when choosing routes and viewpoints. Lastly the famous "congestion" in Koolhaas' works can be recognized as an atmospheric impact created by "programming". Koolhaas tries to create architecture congested with the people in diverse actions. These activities have typically not been designated a specific place. Rational individualism must be left behind when interpreting mass society.
Conclusion
In its latest forms, architecture has already been becoming transparent, mobile, flexible and interactive. It almost tries to disappear in order to let a hypothetical mass imagination show through. It replaces the immaterial with floating guidelines of the overall game, a display of deconstruction which leaves the things quite absolve to invent their own game rules. Besides, architecture is not the thing to provide way to this interactive utopia of exchange and playful entertainment: all art, politics and virtual technology is certainly going in this course. These tendencies express themselves in modern day architecture in the new prospects for pluralism, "open" architecture, the flexible interrelationship between companies and consumers, interactivity, and "the innovative consumers".
Moralism against consumer modern culture and commercial structures does not work because it is quality of consumer population itself it spreads moralities concerning how people should live and which buildings they should have. These moralities involving individuals are disguised by means of "choices". Neither building without architects nor pragmatist architecture can make the positioning of architects better in world, because these phenomena are already contained in the mythologies of consumer modern culture.
As concerns the relevance of Baudrillard's theory in architecture, it is becoming noticeable through my theoretical work that this makes impossible such traditional architectural principles generally as ingenuity, the fulfilling of needs and operation. Architects can only just increase or decelerate interpersonal socio-economic operations and in this way increase cultural reciprocity and cohesion.
According to Baudrillard's evaluation of today's socio-economic habits in modern culture, it is becoming almost impossible to make truly seductive and reciprocal architecture. Baudrillard's theory does not leave very much for architects to lean on, up to the question of requesting whether architecture can in any way be designed under Baudrillard's terms, however believable he is in pointing out the key problematics of culture in consumer world.
Source List
HILDE HEYNEN, 2000, Structures and Modernity: A Critique, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 8-24
JEAN BAUDRILLARD, 1994. The precession of simulacra, Ann Arbor, College or university of Michigan Press, 1-42.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD, 1982, Modernit, " in La modernit ou l'esprit du temps, Biennale de Paris, Section Architecture, Paris, L'Equerre, 27-28.
PETER EISENMAN, 1994, Visions' Unfolding: Architecture in age Electronical Press, Michigan, A+U Publishers, 2-5.
REM KOOLHAAS & SANFORD KWINTER, 1996, Interactions with Students, NY, Princeton Architect ural Press, p 5-6.
