SOCIETY OF SPECTACLES vs. ARCHITECTURE
Pavilion for Madrid Book Fair 2008, Madrid, Spain, Olga + Sanin Marcelo Dantas 1
When we look at today's society, we find that we are constantly exposed to a vast amount of information and media images that shape our habits and behaviors, with the goal of preserving that very culture and its prevailing consumer values.
The position of architects is almost always mainly linked to capital, consumption and the media.
Consumer culture makes us insatiable. In such a society, the architect becomes only one element in a continuous system that creates the illusion of an idealized reality far removed from basic human needs. Therefore, all engineers today increasingly combine art, science and technological solutions, trying to create new content with different approaches and technologies. The result of such an approach is innovative solutions that, in most cases, provoke a spectacle.
Spectacle has always been present around us as a social paradigm that shapes life, but today it is manifested through mass media and contemporary culture. For this reason, design solutions today are incredibly flexible and mobile.
In The Society of the Spectacle, the French philosopher and writer wrote Guy Debord: "In all its particular aspects - news - propaganda, advertising and entertainment - the spectacle is the dominant form of life. It is a ubiquitous confirmation of choices already made, both in the field of production and in the field of consumption related to that production. "
How does architecture respond to the society of the spectacle?
Architecture is created according to rules and strives for order and the idea of organization. In functionalism, the very function of architecture conditions its form, and this conditionality of form gives it the status of art. The spectacle is achieved at the moment when certain changes occur within this discipline, which essentially challenge the form, the esthetics, the materialization, the structure, but also the laws of physics that seek to overcome these very changes.
Buildings today contain elements of a cultural building, introducing scenographic elements into the very shaping and definition of space. Temporary artistic-architectural installations are an excellent example of this flexibility, whose design can follow the needs of today's consumer society.
The idea and need for the formation of such a space is to create a specific identity or accent in the space, which would attract many users with its content and design.
Nowadays, our choices in life, both in everything and in architecture, are unconsciously the very result of these stimuli that are filtered or remain buried somewhere deep inside us.
