In 1967 Guy Debord published Society of the Spectacle, a critique of modern society's preoccupation with the commodity of culture and the isolation produced through mediated and inauthentic experience. His intellectual assault on the decay of capitalism, the collapse of historical perspective, and media's control mechanisms for class struggle resulted in a call to revolution realized via The Situationalist International in 1968 Paris. Through the SI tactics of détournament, media's mechanisms of control were turned against itself to disrupt prevailing behavior within urban society.
The shifting role of the image in contemporary Architecture is a direct descendant from that revolutionary tract of SI. The rendering is architectures trojan horse, historic disciplinary irrelevance masking its revolutionary tendencies. Rendering is a fiction, and through material advances in surface treatments and structural gymnastics, they are realized spatially. The invasion of simulated spaces into an increasingly simulated notion of habitation produces opportunity for new modes of connection between people and their environment. Below are 5 projects paired with excerpts from Debord's seminal text that illuminate a change in tone toward fantasy as tendencies shift toward the built unreal and image free's us to develop our simulated selves.
ELBPHILHARMONIE - 2016 - HERZOG & DE MEURON
“The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.”
DATONG LIBRARY - 2013 - Preston Scott Cohen
“The world the spectacle holds up to view is at once here and elsewhere; it is the world of the commodity ruling over all lived experience. The commodity world is thus shown as it really is, for its logic is one with man’s estrangement from one another and the sum total of what they produce. ”
SLICED POROSITY BLOCK - 2012 - STEVEN HOLL
“Like modern society itself, the spectacle is at once united and divided. In both, unity is grounded in a split. As it emerges in the spectacle however, this contradiction is itself contradicted by virtue of a reversal of its meaning: division is presented as unity, and unity as division. ”
MUSEE DES CONFLUENCES - 2014 - COOP HIMMELB(L)AU
“The spectacle cannot be understood either as a deliberate distortion of the visual world or as a product of the technology of the mass dissemination of images. It is far better viewed as a weltanschauung that has been actualized, translated into the material realm - a world view transformed into an objective force. ”
PTERODACTYL - 2014 - ERIC OWEN MOSS
“So-called cold societies are societies that successfully slowed their participation in history down to the minimum, and maintained their conflicts with the natural and human environment, as well as their internal conflicts, in constant equilibrium. Although the vast diversity of institutions set up for this purpose bears eloquent testimony to the plasticity of human nature’s self-creation, this testimony is of course only accessible to an outside observer, to an anthropologist looking back from within historical time. In each of these societies a definitive organizational structure ruled out change. The absolute conformity of their social practices, with which all human possibilities were exclusively and permanently identified, had no external limits except for the fear of falling into a formless animal condition. So, here, in order to remain human, men had to remain the same. ”