Current Views in Architectural Theory

In the age of the digital communication technologies architecture must address today's unprecedented shift of the cultural dominant from the modernist object production to the post-industrial image consumption. Doubtlessly, with today’s total flow of images we are confronted with radically new forms of abstractions. Thus, following K. Michael Hays in his assessment of the nature of the new digital media, we cannot think anymore about the social system without a clear concept of the new media and its two constituents: electronic consumer technology and heterogeneous communication. The questions for architecture arise in its most privileged field which, according to Henri Lefebvre, is the production of space as the most prominent platform for social interactions.

In the course of the dramatic shift of the cultural dominant, architecture finds itself in the midst of the transition from the linguistic turn of the 1960ies to the iconic turn in the age of the new media technologies. If architecture theory has been based in semiotics until today – with structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstructivism as its philosophical references – with the iconic turn one must call for a radical reconceptualization of the theoretical bases of architecture. Indeed, with today's liquification of the boundaries between the world of objects and the world of images - whether digitally produced or not - architecture must open up itself to the new modes of perception and the new pictorial practices in all their spatial and visual anachronism.

With this paper I try to underscore that the current issue of the undisputable visual contamination has to be at the center of the debates on any cultural practices, even those which do not refer to the digital technologies for their visual appearances, as it is the case for the most material of all cultural practices: architecture. As W. J. T. Mitchell pointed out all media today are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous. Thus, with architecture as the quintessential mass medium, what is asked for today is a critical picture theory in architecture.

 

Vol. 9, No. 2
March 2005