Professional Distortion
Loong Swim Club Café, courtesy of X+Living
Architecture students are not taught how to make buildings.
They are taught how to make images of buildings that might possibly exist in the future. Architecture students use images to produce new images—cutouts from Henri Rousseau and Jonas Wood paintings, or 3d models from Kitbash or Sketchup Warehouse. The images serve as sampling materials for the production of more images—but not spaces. Students learn how to simulate the sun, the sky, climatic events, textures, and materials in the infinite cartesian space of Rhino, 3ds Max, Maya or Blender. “In design worlds, the architect decides where the sun goes.”i
When we produce these images, we are responsible for a camera lens, a view, materials, and textures. Did you place diverse enough people in your collage? Is it filled with white males in suits or an eyesore cutout people seen in every other architectural rendering online? Why are these images so sunny, if on an average day there would be a grey sky? Why do your collages have no shadows? Is this image for public discussion, investors, for the press package, or an exhibition? What is distorted besides the camera lens?
Beyond the architectural production of images depicting possible futures, the digital reproduction of space—from photographs and LIDAR scans, to immersive VR experiences and LCD screens imitating window apertures—has complicated the relationship between images and their implied corresponding spaces. The built environment turns into a spectacle to be captured and shared on social media. 3d visualization is nearly as indiscernible from photographs as windows are from screens. Images mimic space and space mimics the images.
The role of the image in the production of space is not merely the role of the illustration and blueprint. The Renaissance defined a clear hierarchy of spatial production: The architect draws, and the workers build.ii Analog photography and film later made it necessary to design physical spaces to construct images—photo and movie sets that reproduced samples of different environments served as backdrops, and helped to stage both action and still life. In 1970, Michelangelo Antonioni, in his feature film Zabriskie Point, ordered a field of grass to be painted to archive a particular hue.iii In the analog world, it seemed reality could be reconfigured to become a bespoke image.
Digital image-production redefines the relationship between the physical space and the image world. For Lev Manovich, digital cinema is a case of computer animation, which uses action footage as but one of its many elements. In digital filmmaking, reality has become raw material, open for further morphing, editing and post-production.iv If twentieth century animation—as opposed to film and photograph—aimed to distinguish itself from reality by admitting that its images are mere representations, digital cinema pretends that the spaces it displays exist beyond the animated realm. Digital images attempt to mimic reality—or supersede it. In digital cinema, space does need not be constructed to be recorded. Even seemingly prosaic spaces are designed and embedded into these scenes. In Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street, the protagonist is greeted at the door of a woman’s ordinary white stone townhouse. Only the house is not stone, nor white, nor even in a townhouse. In a film that does not broadcast its reliance on CGI, digital post-production replaces the stage set with an illusory fabrication. Overhead scenes showing views of oceanside villas may be entirely digital, and almost any minor scene or minute detail can be adjusted in post-production. The portrayal of the lavish wealth of Wall Street relies on digital phantasm.v As Manovich suggests, digital cinema and digital image-making becomes a special kind of painting: one that manipulates pixels, rather than one that records reality, from painted green grass to the green screen.vi
Following this cinematic logic, the spaces of everyday reality—outside the fiction of film—are being produced for their digital reproduction on social media. Instagram has over one billion monthly active users,vii and there are over 200 billion images on Pinterest.viii On any given night, 2 million of users stay at an AirBnB listing, having selected their accommodation based on a digital representation.ix These platforms further complicate the relationship between the digital image and lived space. Social media, the gig economy, construction of the digital self, and the relationship with the digital Other, purportedly encourage the radical democratization of image-production while furthering the conditions of global capitalism. Our images construct branded selves, generate desire, expand markets and produce new kinds of spaces.
Spaces produced for the generation of images are designed to be captured by a smartphone camera, to be filtered and processed, posted and shared. Neighborhoods are styled to look good online. Cloud Gate in Chicago, Broad Museum in Los Angeles, Hong Kong’s Choi Hung Estate, and Zaradye in Moscow captivate the commercial public as Instagram-worthy locations. Immersive art seems to equate with commercial pop-ups. Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project or Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms exist within the same representational space as pop-up stores capitalizing on the desire to take a selfie. These are dubbed experiums,x yet they seem to strip away any experiential value from space as they trigger our smartphone reflex. Pink walls with printed banana images—as well as mirror rooms, plastic flamingos and pastel-colored branding walls—proliferate globally wherever there is money to be made on collective image production. Image-commodities absorb the built environment and social space.
A number of architectural practices have admitted that they consider “Instagrammability” to be an important aspect of their projects, and are being asked to by clients to design Instagrammable moments.xi Buildings and public spaces are designed as “selfie sets.” Often, the low-cost spectacle leads to low-quality materials that can be post-produced and filtered to look appealing on social media but may not have a utility that extends beyond their be effective beyond being images. Tom Wilkinson stated in his harsh criticism of architectural photography, “Trash turns into tinsel and muddy water into limpid streams via the refracting crystal of the lens.”xii Though this has existed long before Instagram, as the architectural photography is akin to the visualization—it does not need to serve as evidence to reality. It serves as a marketing tool.
The Shanghai-based architecture firm X+Living has been known for designing remarkable immersive retail spaces across China. One of their most recent projects, Loong Swim Club, was dubbed as the most beautiful swimming pool in the world. “Every inch of it is designed to spark wonder”xiii —wall surfaces are covered with pastel pink tiles, then blue ones under the water; arched entrances frame majestic viewpoints on the space; mirror ceilings in the coffee shop double the ornate sitting booths, whose backs look like arrangement of "lady finger" cookies. The images of the space published on the known architecture and design portals do not depict the space being used—each of the mesmerizing rooms is empty of people.xiv
Last year, at the SocialXDesign Conference Design (dedicated to design that fosters social connection) organized by Harvard School of the CEO of Figure8 (parent company of the Museum of Ice Cream,) Manish Vora, stated that the mission of their business is to create and foster community. The Museum of Ice Cream (MOIC) is one of the first, and probably the most celebrated, among Instagram museumsxv, and it is portrayed by Vora and his co-founder Maryellen Bunn as a place where humans can reconnect with each other, escaped from the world of distractions. MOIC founders emphasize that the true value of their venture derives from the genuine social connection their visitors are building among each other within their “museum” included with the $38 dollar per person entry fee.
Similar "social" rhetoric permeates other venture-backed experience-like spaces. The Wing, a coworking space for women only, according to Audrey Geldman (The Wing’s CEO which was among the panelists at the SocialXDesign) is modeled after the women’s clubs that helped bring about women’s right to vote, with philanthropy and civic-minded ideas at its core.xvi Most of the images of The Wing’s locations on their official website are, in fact, 3d visualizations or empty staged wide-lens photography—colorful, instagrammable, and devoid of female figures.
As observed by Joseph Pine II in 1998, experience has become an economic offering, distinct from services and goods.xvii The experience here is equated to a commodity. Companies have been staging experiences as a part of their marketing strategy, hence the pop-up parties in Nike storesxviii and the likes of the Rosé Mansion.xix Pine suggested that the experiences at one point would overpower the goods and become meaningful, memorable events. Among the panelists at SocialXDesign, companies frame themselves as social clubs. The identity of each of these spaces relies on their recognizable brand and design; both immersive and Instagrammable. The enclosure of social space by private capital goes hand in hand with immersive total design. These spaces and the “likes” they accumulate are the commercial product; They purport to find meaning as social spaces aiming to foster “inclusive” communities, but this questionable claim is undercut by their exclusivity and a steep price tag.xx
The experience offered, however, often ends up being one of waiting in the line to take a quick selfie. The images are displaced and decontextualized; these “museums,” “factories,” and ”clubs” are almost entirely windowless and have little relationship with the outside world. Every element is a part of orchestrated totality.
The images we see online formulate the aesthetic and cultural narrative of the world we live in. The images redefine our basic understanding of the world—from domesticity, to ecological and urban environments, to the totality of the planet. This framing has not so much to do with the experience of reality; digital photography and film do not serve as documentation of the truth or an evidence of reality—what Harun Farocki called operational images.xxi On Zillow, Trulia, AirBnB, or the real estate section of New York Times, these are the realms of distorted spaces. They pretend to be bigger, cleaner, and sunnier—to be sold faster and at a premium. With wide-angle camera lenses and over-exposed images, professional stagers and decorators distribute food props and blankets (often digitally) to manipulate the space. There are listings with architectural visualizations that are completely indiscernible from photographs. As with digital images in post-production, these images—both photographs and photo-real renderings—are nothing more than a special kind of painting, where reality has been manipulated and commodified. Aesthetics translates directly to economics.xxii
The photo-realism of digital images normalizes certain design choices and drives expectations of reality as celebrity culture. As more and more of the media we consume on a daily basis utilizes CGI technologies, distorts the reality of the environments on display, this simulated reality more directly shapes the cultural context. The contemporary digital mimesis has become the matter of generative algorithms, that are capable to produce breathtaking experiences, which are becoming measures for the imperfect reality.
The technologies of image production across the worlds of mass-market entertainment, design, and science are the same. The same mathematic simulationsare used to calculate the light in computer graphics, evaluate the financial risks and complex physical events. The same animation and visualization software is used in videogames, VFX in movies, architectural renderings, and virtual reality experiences. Real-time rendering game engines are not only increasingly used to produce real-estate visualizations, but to design and operate urban design tool and interfaces used with administration and businesses.xxiii Smart cities utilize the same rendering engines that have been used to image Fortnite and World of Warcraft.
Urban digital twins— three-dimensional simulations of space with an overlay of real-time dynamic sensor data— have been finding their application in global tech capitals from Singaporexxiv to New York.xxv One of Siemens's promotional videos speaks of “digital twins” as the technology which helps to visualize, anticipate, experiment, plan, simulate and execute product development of any kind.xxvi In a way, the digital twins are the operational images—tools used to manipulate the actual urban space.
The optimization of rendering engines allows the production of complex photorealistic visualizations in real-time. Today, the real estate sector has begun actively utilizing virtual reality to test-drive (and market) the space before it is built.xxvii Other real estate companies utilize Computer Aided Virtual Environments (CAVEs) and green rooms to showcase projects.xxviii A “still” digital rendering of the future space is no longer enough—we now expect an interactive walkthrough in the projected future.
Other companies, merging digital representations with physical environments, use LCD screens to simulate windows. Kyohi Kang, a founder of Atmoth, a company producing digital windows, came up with the concept when he felt that his apartment had become suffocating and lacked a sense of openness. He pondered, “We can’t change the view from our homes. But what if we could?”xxix Kyohi founded a company capable of changing views from your windows digitally. Now, one’s home can be “located” anywhere, and it can move around the world on your whim. Urban vistas or pristine ecological landscapes are delivered directly to one’s apartment.
Deterritorialized spaces (as portrayed and produced by social media network affect,) de-contextualized interiors with digital windows, and virtual worlds that capitalize on the emotional connection to the virtual and digital renderings of different grades of “realness,” continually redefine the relationship of images to space. Digital aesthetics have become weaponized by capital to subsume social space. As the world is increasingly being experienced through digital screen, the world itself—overpowered by its image-driven experience—has (in reverse) begun imitating the images.
Architecture students learn collage, use staffage, and remix different cultural statements in the scale of one image—to make the standalone piece, not secondary to the possible future building. Architectural visualizations negate heavy reality. Our images are as important as our spaces, and it may be that they are ends of themselves.
Yet reality is expected to corroborate with its post-produced digital twin. Framing of space in specific ways has little to do with the experience of reality; instead, the proliferation of this image-driven and intentioned immersion invites us to wonder if there is something else in these voids of meaning beyond the image-commodities and capital’s search for the potentially infinite imagined worlds to colonize. These totalizing environments operate as deprivation tanks, intended only as an ideal image, a perfect whole, uninterrupted by the messiness of the exterior world. Everything is an image. Image is everything!xxx
Alina Nazmeeva is a designer and a researcher studying the relationship between technology, built environment and representation. Alina is a graduate of Master of Science in Urbanism, MIT; and a former fellow of the New Normal program at Strelka Institute of Media Architecture and Design. She is a research associate at future urban collectives lab at MIT and a research analyst at MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab.
@nazmeevaa
iSusan Piedmont-Palladino. “Into the Uncanny Valley.” Places Journal, (April 24, 2018). https://doi.org/10.22269/180428.
iiMario Carpo. Alphabet and the Algorithm (Writing Architecture). (MIT Press, 2011), 20-26.
iiiManovich, Lev. “What is Digital Cinema?,” (1995), 9. Manovich uses the example of Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni) and Appolo 13 (Universal Studios) to “illustrate the shift from re-arranging reality to re-arranging its images.”
ivIbid, 7
vDigital, Brainstorm. The Wolf of Wall Street VFX Highlights, 2014. https://vimeo.com/83523133.
viSee note 4
viiStatista. “Instagram: Active Users 2018,” https://www.statista.com/statistics/253577/number-of-monthly-active-instagram-users/
viiiPinterest Newsroom. “Company,” https://newsroom.pinterest.com/en/company
ix “Fast Facts - Airbnb Newsroom,” https://news.airbnb.com/fast-facts/
xKarin Eldor. “Meet Figure8, The New Company Launched By Museum Of Ice Cream’s Founders.” Forbes. Accessed February 12, 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/karineldor/2019/08/15/museum-of-ice-cream-founders-launch-figure8-and-announce-40m-series-a/
xi“Architects Are Being Asked to Create Instagrammable Moments.” Accessed February 12, 2020. https://www.dezeen.com/2018/06/05/instagram-moments-farshid-moussavi-instagram-architecture/
xiiTom Wilkinson, . “The Polemical Snapshot: Architectural Photography in the Age of Social Media.” Architectural Review, (February 11, 2020) https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/photography/the-polemical-snapshot-architectural-photography-in-the-age-of-social-media/8674662.article
xiiiElizabeth Segran.“This Super-Luxurious Swim Club for Kids Is a Sign of the Times.” Fast Company, (June 17, 2019). https://www.fastcompany.com/90363787/this-super-luxurious-swim-club-for-kids-is-a-sign-of-the-times.
xivIbid
xvThe overview of the Instagram Museum phenomenon can be found in Eichner, Sam. “Lights, Cameras, Action: The Rise of the Instagram-Friendly Museum.” The Daily Beast, August 26, 2018, sec. arts-and-culture. https://www.thedailybeast.com/lights-cameras-action-the-rise-of-the-instagram-friendly-museum
xviElizabeth Segran “The Death (and Improbable Rebirth) of the American Social Club.” Fast Company https://www.fastcompany.com/90350407/the-death-and-unlikely-rebirth-of-the-american-social-club
xvii B. Joseph Pine II, and James H. Gilmore. “Welcome to the Experience Economy.” Harvard Business Review, (July 1, 1998). https://hbr.org/1998/07/welcome-to-the-experience-economy
xviiiIbid
xix Amanda Hess. “The Existential Void of the Pop-Up ‘Experience.’” The New York Times, September 26, 2018, sec. Arts. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/arts/color-factory-museum-of-ice-cream-rose-mansion-29rooms-candytopia.html.
xxSee note 15
xxi“Harun Farocki: Eye / Machine III.” https://www.harunfarocki.de/installations/2000s/2003/eye-machine-iii.html
xxii Jesse Seegers “UNCANNY VALLEY: CONSIDERING LATE-CAPITALIST TECH AESTHETICS.” https://pinupmagazine.org/articles/uncanny-valley.
xxiiiUnreal Engine. “Unreal Engine | Build: For Architecture 2020.” Accessed February 12, 2020. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/events/build-for-architecture-2020. In this blog there is an assortment of presentations from architecture practices to research institutions that utilize Unreal Engine and other real-time visualization tools for real estate visualization, digital twins and construction.
xxivPatricia Liceras. “Singapore Experiments with Its Digital Twin to Improve City Life.” Smart City Lab, 30 May 2019, www.smartcitylab.com/blog/digital-transformation/singapore-experiments-with-its-digital-twin-to-improve-city-life/.
xxvChallenge Advisory. “3 Great Examples of Digital Twin Technology In Action.” https://www.challenge.org/insights/digital-twin-examples/
xxviSiemens Blog“The Value of Digital Twin Technology in Aerospace and Automotive,” September 26, 2017. https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/thought-leadership/the-value-of-digital-twin-technology-in-aerospace-and-automotive/
xxviiNat Athwal. “The Rise Of Virtual Reality In Real Estate.” Forbes. Accessed February 7, 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesrealestatecouncil/2017/06/13/the-rise-of-virtual-reality-in-real-estate/.
xxviiiKen Pimentel. “Mixed-Reality Architectural Visualization Opens Doors for AEDAS Homes.” Unreal Engine Blog (March 25, 2019) https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/mixed-reality-architectural-visualization-aedas-homes-live
xxvixAtmoph : Online Store https://atmoph.myshopify.com/.
xxxCanon. “Image is Everything.” Television Advertisement. Canon, 1990