postmodern consumer

society

ARCHITECTURE in the

MAGRIET steynberg
25076436
word COUNT: 2076

Contents

List of Figures............................................................................................................. 3
Introduction................................................................................................................ 4
Capitalism and Modernity........................................................................................... 5
Post-Modern Architecture in a consumer society........................................................6
Conclusion.................................................................................................................. 9
Source List................................................................................................................ 10

List of Figures

Figure 1: Wexner Center for the Visual Arts at Ohio State University, 1989, Peter
Eisenman.................................................................................................................... 6
Figure 2: In Kochstrasse IBA Housing in Berlin, 1985, Peter Eisenman......................6
Figure 3: Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, 2010, Jean Nouvel...........................................7
Figure 4: The CCTV building in Beijing, the headquarters of China Central Television,
2012, Rem
Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren.....................................................7

Introduction

This essay will address the study of architectures position in consumer society.
Consumer society is a term describing the outcome of modernisation since the
beginning of the 20th century. It is the result of rapid industrial developments,
the growth in manufacturing, trade and standardisation, but also the immense
pace of diversification and growth of culture, creativity and urbanism as a way of
life. I will predominantly look at the French sociologist Jean Baudrillards
interpretation of consumer society in terms of Modernity and Post-Modernity.
Baudrillard has offered a convincing view about consumer society and the
cultural and economic patterns of the present time, as well as deep insights for
understanding it. My aim is to better understand the architects position in this
current culture and what it could mean for the future of architecture.
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Capitalism and Modernity

According to Heynen (1999:11) the discussion of modernity is inseparably

bound up with this problem of the relation between capitalist civilization and
modernist culture.
The different positions that have been adopted in this debate have to do with
how this relationship is understood. Heyden (1999:11) et al then asks if it a
matter of totally independent entities or is there a critical relation between
them? Or is it rather a determinist relation, implying that culture cannot but
obediently respond to the requirements of capitalist development? She then
states that in the case of architecture this question is a very loaded one
because architecture operates in both realms. It is unquestionably a cultural
activity, but it is one that can be realized only within the world of power and
money. In the case of architecture, aesthetic modernity cannot avoid
entering into a relationship with the bourgeois modernity of capitalist
civilization.
For this essay I am focusing on the transitory views of modernism.
Throughout the development of modern art, this moment of transitoriness
has been emphasized. From the field of art it has been transferred toward a
more global conception of modernity, as is made clear by Jean Baudrillard. In
La Modemite ou lesprit du temps(1982:28) he describes modernity as a
characteristic mode of civilization that is in opposition to tradition. The desire
for innovation and the rebellion against the pressure of tradition are part of
the generally accepted ingredients of the modern. However in Baudrillard s
view, the desire for innovation and the revolt against tradition are not
included in a general drive toward progress, but gradually become
autonomous mechanisms. In his account, the transitory aspect therefore has
dominance.
Baudrillard et al(1982:28) states that modernity is radicalized into
momentaneous change, into a continuous traveling, and thus its meaning
changes. It gradually loses each substantial value, each ethical and
philosophical ideology of progress that sustained it at the outset, and it
becomes an aesthetics of change for the sake of change. In the end,
modernity purely and simply coincides with fashion, which at the same time
means the end of modernity. Thinking through the transitory concept of
modernity to its conclusions can lead to the proclamation of the end of
modernity and to the postulation of a postmodern condition.
One should not assume that the postmodern condition simply replaces
modernity. It rather seems to open up a new and complex layer of meaning
of the modern by highlighting its paradoxical aspects. One cannot simply get
rid of modernity. It has become so deeply rooted in contemporary societies
that it is no longer possible to find a place where its influence does not
prevail. This also means that to deny modernity as a uniform whole is a
reactionary attitude; not only does it ignore the fact that we are modern
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whether we want to be or not; it also reneges on the promises of

emancipation and liberation that are inherent in the modern. At the same
time one cannot afford to be blind to the reality that these promises have not
been fulfilled.
In this Post-modern condition I will first be exploring the writings of Jean
Baudrillard on the subject. According to In Simulacra and Simulation
(1994:33), when it comes to postmodern simulation and simulacra, It is no
longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a
question of substituting the signs of the real for the real. Baudrillard is not
merely suggesting that postmodern culture is artificial, because the concept
of artificiality still requires some sense of reality against which to recognize
the artifice. His point, rather, is that we have lost all ability to make sense of
the distinction between nature and artifice. To clarify his point, he argues
that there are three "orders of simulacra". In the third order of simulacra,
which is associated with the postmodern age, we are confronted with a
precession of simulacra which states that the representation precedes and
determines the real. There is no longer any distinction between reality and
its representation, there is only the simulacrum.
Baudrillard points to a number of phenomena to explain this loss of
distinctions between "reality" and the simulacrum which I think are all
relevant to the discipline of architecture.
The first is in our media culture, contemporary media (television, film,
magazines, billboards, the Internet) are concerned not just with relaying
information or stories but with interpreting our most private selves for us,
making us approach each other and the world through the lens of these
media images. We therefore no longer acquire goods because of real needs
but because of desires that are increasingly defined by commercials and
commercialized images, which keep us at one step removed from the reality
of our bodies or of the world around us.
The second phenomenon is multinational capitalism. As the things we use
are increasingly the product of complex industrial processes, we lose touch
with the underlying reality of the goods we consume. According to
Baudrillard, it is capital that now defines our identities. We thus continue to
lose touch with the material fact of the laborer, who is increasingly invisible
to a consumer oriented towards retail outlets or the even more impersonal
Internet. A common example of this is the fact that most consumers do not
know how the products they consume are related to real-life things.
Urbanization is the third phenomena. As we continue to develop available
geographical locations, we lose touch with any sense of the natural world.
Even natural spaces are now understood as protected, which is to say that
they are defined in contradistinction to an urban reality, often with signs to
point out just how real they are.
The final phenomenon is language and ideology. Baudrillard illustrates how in
such subtle ways language keeps us from accessing reality. Postmodernism
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understands ideology as the support for our very perception of reality. There
is no outside of ideology, according to this view, at least no outside that can
be articulated in language. Because we are so reliant on language to
structure our perceptions, any representation of reality is always already
ideological, always already constructed by simulacra.
Post-Modern Architecture in a consumer society

The study of consumer society should mean a study of predominately

seductive and, more generally, other enchanting understandings in
explaining the dynamics of society, because these are nearer to the
consumer lifestyle (Baudrillard 1979:19). According to this view, such terms
as enchantment of appearance, image and ambience are more important
than individualism, signification, rationalism, naturalism and effectivity in all
theories interpreting architecture.
There have not been
many
contemporary
architects who would
have
consciously
thought of their works in
terms
of
the
enchantment
of
appearance.
Peter
Eisenman is a rare
example.

Figure 1: Wexner Center for the Visual Arts at Ohio State

University, 1989, Peter Eisenman

In Visions Unfolding:
Architecture in the Age of Electronical Media, Eisenman says that the first
step when making architecture based purely on its appearances is to depict
what one knows from what one sees The second step, which suggests
certain kinds of ironical objects, using Baudrillards concept, would be
inscribing the object with the possibility of looking back to the subject. By
using computer programs which randomly fold surfaces, connecting the
building and landscape into one continuous whole, Eisenman attempts to
create architecture which does not surrender to any particular explanation,
but continuously disrupts what is defined as architecture. Eisenmans idea of
architecture idea is that of a surface is relevant in this context. However, the
problem with his architecture is that Eisenmans works are too sterile and
pre-conceived to be seductive. Rather, they are merely fascinating. If you
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think of image in architecture as a mental

representation of appearance, it refers to
simulacra, likeness, deception and looks. It is
closely related to the associations the object
creates in the mind. When images gain an
importance of their own, suggestion begins to
win over realism.
As with the enchantment of appearance, there
are not many architects who have taken
image as the starting point in their
architecture. Jean Nouvel is one of them.

Figure 2: In Kochstrasse IBA

Housing in Berlin, 1985, Peter

Eisenman

In
Jean
Nouvel in

Conversation:

Tomorrow

Figure 3: Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, 2010, Jean Nouvel

Can Take Care of Itself, he says that image is the matter of architecture and
thus the future of architecture is not architectural in the tectonic sense.
Nouvel emphasises that he is not interested in details but images, and that
his architecture is not composed of space but of communicative surfaces,
which he calls interfaces.

Tschumi and Koolhaas have

also been heading in the
right
direction
if
one
believes
Baudrillards
interpretation
of
the
dynamics
of
consumer
society. They have based
their works on a conscious
study of atmosphere rather
than functions or meanings
in architecture. The famous
congestion in Koolhaas
works can be recognised as
Figure 4: The CCTV building in Beijing, the headquarters an
atmospheric
effect
of China Central Television, 2012, Rem Koolhaas and Ole
created
by
programming.
Scheeren
Koolhaas tries to create
architecture congested with the masses in diverse actions. These actions
have typically not been assigned a specific place. Rational individualism
must be abandoned when interpreting mass society.
In Baudrillards criticism of the previous theories of consumer society, it is
very much a question of the theory of consumer culture elevating to the
level where it lets go of communitarian ideals at the mass stage. That is why
long-term projects now become extremely difficult to realise in architecture,
when there cannot be any constant values. Furthermore, architecture as a
mass medium erases the rhetorical use of discourse that has defined
intellectuals. The difference between high and low architecture does not
actually disappear, but becomes
aleatory and constantly shifting. What does this mean for the future of
architecture?
Conclusion

During the last 30 years the purpose of architecture has been redefined.
Architecture has abandoned many of its utopian pretentions that we
envisioned of through the Modernist movement. Taking into consideration
the writings of Baudrillards and the meaning of architecture in a postmodern society, I found that Fascinism as a strategy to be pertinent in a
consumer society where media culture, multinational capitalism,
urbanization and language and ideology has led to no distinction between
reality and its representation.
In The Invisible in Architecture, according to Bouman and van Toorn,
Fascinism denies the dialects between form and content. For this strategy,
the surface is the deepest thing there is. The author, as genius and as
producer, no longer exists. Representation is reality, in an endless semiosis.
We can never stop this process, only succumb to it in fascination. Fascinism
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treats us to a bombardment of images torn largely from a variety of historical

and functional contexts, obscene fragments (1994:20).
The architecture of fascinism is a construction in name only. It is
dematerialized on all sides into a communication medium in which it is
possible to write meanings of every kind. Hence this tendency is posthistorical, post-humanistic and post-structuralist, outside dialectic history,
beyond Utopia and intertextual. What remains is a universe of signs that may
be viewed as a source of immense freedom, or as a shock of simulacra in a
pluralism of so many different micro-meanings that every distinction is
erased. However you look at it, it is a waste of time seeking anything
behind anything else, and certainly seeking truth behind form.
Fascinists take into account a whole complex of social, cultural and
technological factors, they aim at an architecture that is up to date.
Everything must be represented in this architecture. This architecture of the
superego as a hypersensitive stays on top. The here and now of current
reality is always one step ahead. Anyone who wishes to disobey is suffering
from hope for the past or yearning for the future. Hence fascinism is free of
nostalgia, but by no means free of other impositions. Mandatory submission
to the course of things, to a historical/futurological Zeitgeist, is a presentday alternative to the seductions of totalitarianism. Hence this strategy is
vulnerable to the same criticism as has been applied to cultural relativism. It
offers no moral criterion to help us chart a course into the future. At the
same time, the fascinist refuses to recognize the ethical choice implicit in
this observation. Nothing is true, not even that. Everything is relative except
for that. Fascinism appeals to the extensions of the cortex, to the eye of the
television, to the binary brain of the computer, to artificial intelligence.
Fascinist architecture is a excitedly progressive architecture, aimed at an
impassioned mood for homo cyberneticus.

Source List

1. HILDE HEYNEN, 2000, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique,

Massachusetts, MIT Press, 8-24
2. JEAN BAUDRILLARD, 1994. The precession of simulacra, In Simulacra
and Simulation, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1-42.
3. JEAN BAUDRILLARD, 1982, Modernit, in La modernit ou lesprit du
temps, Biennale de Paris, Section Architecture, Paris, LEquerre, 27-28.
4. PETER EISENMAN, 1994, Visions Unfolding: Architecture in the Age of
Electronical Media, Michigan, A+U Publishers, 2-5.
5. JEAN NOUVEL, 1993, Jean Nouvel in Conversation: Tomorrow Can Take
Care of Itself, AD, Visions for the Future, 37.
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6. REM KOOLHAAS & SANFORD KWINTER, 1996, Conversations with

Students, New York, Princeton Architect ural Press, p 5-6.
7. OLE BOUMAN & ROEMER VAN TOORN, 1994, The Invisible in
Architecture, New York, St. Martin's Press, 20.

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