Although today we live in an age of publicity, it is yet uncertain how this ‘publicity’ affects contemporary architecture positively or negatively and if either or, to what extent it does so. In addition what are the opportunities which it presents for the future?
With modernity, the site of architectural production literally moved from the street into photographs, films, publications, and exhibitions—a displacement that presupposes a new sense of space, one defined by images rather than walls.
We must consider architectural discourse as the intersection of a number of systems of representation such as drawings, models, photographs, books, films, and advertisements. This does not mean abandoning the architectural object, the art house, but rather looking at it in a different way. The art house should be understood here in the same way as all the media that frame it, as a mechanism of representation in its own right.
We must question certain ideological assumptions underlying the received view of modern architecture and reconsider the methodology of architectural criticism itself. Where conventional criticism portrays modern architecture as a high artistic practice in opposition to mass culture, the ‘art house’ embraces the emerging systems of communication that have come to define the pop-culture of today—the mass media—as the true site within which architecture of the future will be produced.
This age of publicity corresponds to a transformation in the status of the private, Hence modernity is actually the publicity of the private. The architecture of tomorrow must renegotiate the traditional relationship between publicity and privacy in a way that profoundly alters the experience of space.
However, would the potency of the idea of this new kind of space be lost to the filters of the very publicity on which it is based?
