Abstract
Archi.Pop is the augmented proceedings of the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians for 2013. The 12 essays collected here explore the extent to which buildings and interiors are present as complex sign systems and repositories of association, meaning and memory in a range of popular media. Walter Benjamin’s perception that architecture is perceived ‘in a state of distraction’ (see Benjamin, 2008[1936]) reinforces the ways in which mediation and semi-conscious memory fabulate as well as distract from the material presence of buildings and environments. As the editor points out, everyday ‘architectural’ experience is rarely worthy of an upper case ‘A’ and popular ‘lifestyle’ magazines and media events are more likely to constitute a viewing context than more professional or academic sources. Archi-Pop follows the initiative of critics such as Barthes and Banham and acknowledges the work of more recent, mostly American, design historians with the intention of engaging with, in Stuart Hall’s (2007) words, ‘a proliferation of secondary environments mediating everything’, an expanded cultural realm of reference.
In the case studies explored in the essays, the relationship between drama and mise- en- scène constitutes virtual experiences that are continuous with a more narratively inflected environment. The essays address the near impossibility of approaching an environmental phenomenon with innocent or impartial eyes. All manufactured environments are richly endowed with meaning by their entanglement with films, advertisements, magazine articles and video games. In an ‘experience economy’, structures are pre-loaded with significance drawn from narratives and tableaux, and often actively seek to exploit those associations.
Architecture has always been culturally embedded, but the claim of this book is that mass media is a structural component of the environment. At a time when the division between material and immaterial, nature and culture has been brought into question, design objects are increasingly regarded as ‘actants’, ‘part objects’ and mysterious compounds of materials, affordances, emotional investment and narratives. This collection testifies to the raising of the stakes for producing a fuller understanding. It is necessary to comprehend objects not just as immanent and intentional, but as vectors of interpretation and unruly stimulants to free association.
The focal points for the authors of these essays – shag-pile carpets, and the technologies that seek to tame them (‘shagmatic’ vacuum cleaners), the extended presence of an archetypal suburban house from a popular situation comedy, dolls’ houses, the Playboy Club, theme parks, hip-hop, the modernist mise- en- scènes of degenerates and villains, vehicles, road-scapes and reconstructions of ancient Rome are all revealed as ‘props’. Each essay is an exploration of a design fiction, elaborating the meanings that circulate around an object/environment.
On the assumption that meaning is not a monopoly of the author of a building or its ‘original’ mediators, the essays examine a wide range of pre-conditioning and frameworks within which meaning is constructed. Essays on houses by John Lautner and Frank Lloyd Wright demonstrate the ways in which exotic and experimental architecture can be deployed to testify to the ‘otherness’ of pasts, futures and deviant instances of contemporary taste and morality. An essay on dolls’ houses speculates on the role played by toys in establishing the normalities of home and the ‘paracosm’ of a fully furnished imaginary world.
The thrust of this collective work on mediation is to acknowledge the continuity of architecture within the realm of scenario building, set dressing, mood setting and the stimulation of fantasy. There are references to the work of Reyner Banham, Gaston Bachelard and Adolf Loos, but there is an equally insightful insistence on the importance of understanding the roles of such popular imaginative realms as: ‘I Love Lucy’, the oeuvre of Hugh Hefner, ‘Gidget Goes to Rome’ and the accessorized automobiles of James Bond.
The introduction acknowledges the ways in which architecture and all its contents occupy the realm of ‘lifestyle’ in which meanings are negotiable, fluctuating and associative. It demonstrates the capacity of architectural environments to sustain complex meanings and establishes the continuity of architecture with set designs, aspirational fantasies and mise en scène. It acknowledges that even the most austere and minimal examples function in a Baroque fashion – as devices for framing other worlds and providing fetishistic pleasures. Most importantly, the accumulated effect of reading the essays is a highly effective way of acknowledging the de-authorisation of design and feeling a way towards the complex investments, re-interpretations and projections that create the world of objects.
The authors have all taken a responsible and densely researched attitude to specificity but the collection demonstrates how unlikely it is that anyone can approach a complex architectural structure/space/experience with ‘innocent’ eyes. The articles are a valuable supplement to extensive explorations of ‘Thing Theory’, ‘speculative realism’ and ‘object oriented ontology’. The case studies undertaken here demonstrate the inherent multivalence and animation of objects by considering them in terms of the meanings released, relayed and reinvested. The ‘Leave it to Beaver’ house is re-constructed as an archetype that has been invoked, subverted and reaffirmed in numerous incarnations; its very normalization has provided opportunities for revisiting it as an uncanny site vulnerable to the return of what it represses. A complementary essay explores the implications of the ‘McMansion’ in relation to Tony Soprano’s ‘palazzo’, drawing on resonances with the Medici in Renaissance Florence, and the persistent issue of ‘authenticity’ in relation to status, refinement and luxury in the particular context of American ‘move up’ homes of the early 1990s.
The chapter on ‘shag-pile’ carpeting is a triumphant demonstration of how a time-specific phenomenon can invoke the contradictory aspirations of a period. ‘Shag’ is demonstrated as a new fabric technology that served complex aspirations which combined folkish, erotic and playful revisions implicit in a new relaxed and intimate relationship to the floors and even the walls of domestic interiors. It is evidence of the dialectic of modernist minimalism and ‘rediscoveries’ of the primitive and textural. Introduced by leading architects like Saarinen and Rudolph, and adopted by prominent media ‘stars’ such as Jayne Mansfield and Liberace, ‘shag’ traced an arc from avant garde to ‘tacky’ in just over a decade.
Two of the essays are devoted to the mediated afterlives of famous buildings – John Lautner’s houses and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House. In both cases, the alterity of these structures and their play on contemporaneity have enabled them to figure as futuristic and delinquent, and to continue as a substantial tradition of associating ostentatious modernity with perversion. Lautner’s houses, conveniently situated for the film industry are analysed in terms of their cinematic potentiality, but also as ‘traps’ and lairs – frequently associated with optical megalomania and prurience. The Ennis House, star of over 20 films, is steeped in biographical implication and the complexities of Wright’s syntheses – the meanings have been mined and amplified in a number of films, pop videos and ads – in turn, its uncanny moods are unpredictably available for further exploitation.
Barbara Penner’s semiotic evaluation of the Park Lane Playboy Club proceeds from Reyner Banham’s question of what architecture can learn from popular culture. She demonstrates the extent to which Banham’s prediction that architects, as scenarioists, would increasingly defer to selection and styling is fulfilled in the appropriation of a Gropius-designed shell for the complexly contrived interior experience of modernity and sensation. The essay demonstrates the role of design in creating an ‘atmosphere’ of pleasure, seduction and sophistication – a mise en scène redolent of meanings appropriated from multiple sources.
One essay with the engaging title ‘Gidget and the Creature from Venus’ undertakes the complex task of interrogating the significance of Classical Rome for mid-century American movie-goers. The referent of the ‘real Rome’ is in perpetual recession; the author concedes the long history of fabulation that has been appropriated in the science fiction creature feature and the romantic comedy that she analyses. The conjuring with contemporary Hollywood epics, the ways in which new technologies – in this case of space exploration – trigger primal anxieties and the ‘romance’ of the literary tradition of American encounters with Europe are imbricated in a rich account of emotions and imaginings that take the environmental assemblage of Roman ruins as their object.
Two essays engage with the dispersed object of architecture in the spaces between structures – the roads and roadsides and ‘metro-mobile’ settlements. Iain Borden explores the fused nature of driving, viewing and gaming and their inter-determinations, pondering on the inseparable nature of the fictional and experiential in car design. An essay that focuses on the representations of the American highway in Time Life magazines investigates the ambivalence expressed towards the emergence of a new ‘honky tonk’ road experience, explored by beatnik writers and subsequently by British ‘pop’ artists and architects, and then systematically investigated by Robert Venturi. The author sifts and analyses the illustrated accounts of chaos, the integrated remedies of Interstate and Mall, and the new forms of ‘anti-architecture’ that proliferated at the time.
The concluding essay demonstrates the ways in which the emergence of hip hop produced a critical/evocative form of expression to evoke the experience of living in a savagely modernized Bronx. Proceeding from the fascinating coincidence of Charles Jencks’s announced ‘death of Modernism’ in 1972 and the contemporary emergence of ‘hip-hop’, the author proceeds to analogise the music of selection and montage with instances of environmental chaos. This architectural understanding of a new compounded musical genre is conceived in relationship to a debate over the politics of the film Fort Apache: The Bronx which sought to represent the ‘hood’ as a dangerous and malevolent ghetto. The essay is an enlightened study in how music, film, lyrics and architectural environment, and the discourses with which they engage are diachronically charged with meaning.
An essay on hip-hop and housing explores the only non-Western attempt to extend this kind of analysis to a Thai theme park, and in the process opens a new realm of necessary knowledge adequate to understanding the manipulations of history and scale that seek to reconcile the universal to the regional.
All the essays make generous contributions to an enhanced awareness of the allusive and interpretative dimensions of architecture. They provide knowing antidotes to the reverential decoding of ‘masterpieces’. All building and design, the authors suggest, are over-determined by their entanglement in provisionally constructed meanings. Architecture, in its most symptomatically understood sense is mediated and subject to processes of identification and projection. The essays propose that architects are agents in complex acts of allegory. They manipulate details and fragments whose meanings can only be grasped by intuiting the concealed, forgotten or yet to be manifest meanings of provisional and shifting wholes.
The message is that meaning is environmental, conjunctural and fractal, a constantly shifting constellation of significances. The understanding of architecture or any other kind of object/things is not easily conceivable via the containerization of subject disciplines. This collection reveals the near impossibility of an innocent encounter with the architectural environment.
I am reminded of the plaintive account that so many bystanders give of extreme experiences – that it was ‘like a movie’. The essays collected here provoke a similar response. They conjure with the haunted sense of familiarity evoked by certain tropes and memes that adhere to and permeate the environmental experience.