Spatiality In the Age Of Instagram: Architecture or Stagecraft

History & Theory Studies - Old North Church

Spatiality in the Age of Instagram: Architecture or Stagecraft?

Human existence in today’s modern world is rooted in a pervasive technocratic duality of complexity and oversimplification. This dualism pervades all life. While every aspect of our being, is made exponentially complex through advances in technology, these very technologies are then used to present a reality that is ‘simpler, efficient, better’. Lost in this translation somewhere, becomes our understanding of our existence, of the truth (if there ever was such a thing) and of the spatial interconnectivity of all matter on earth. A false sense of self emerges out of this abstraction, blurring our sense of space and time. A distinct manifestation of such a condition is evident in all realms of being, consisting of but not limited to politics, economics and the socio-cultural imaginaries of our time, with technology as the clear common denominator for all. Nostalgia is for sale, facts are fiction, news is fake, the science is debatable, and the self is supreme.

Social media is deemed one of the most influential technological developments of our times, with several articles often demonstrating its part in swaying elections, enforcing a new trend and even shaping contemporary societal discourse at large. This essay hopes to examine the rise of Instagrammable Spaces in context to a convoluted timeline of economical, socio-cultural and architectural developments that have paved a way for this aesthetics to find prominence today and what this could mean for architecture as a discipline as well as society in general.

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Spatiality in the Age of Instagram

Visual Cues to Instagrammable Spaces: A surf through Instagram stories and posts shows a rise in seemingly beautiful spaces in the background of it users live and indicates that a recurrent set of spatial aesthetics has gained a special desirability among people over time. What has ensued is carefully curated personal feeds that are meant to be analogous with one’s value systems, societal status and personal brand. Though this phenomenon started by users posting photos of accidentally discovered picturesque views and admirable architecture, today it has snowballed into the willful adoption of the most popular Instagram aesthetics for crowd engagement and profit into digital and physical spaces. At a glance, the flows of these images indicate a mass desire for a dreamscape of sorts, a perfectly fabricated fantastical world, oddly familiar but devoid of the actual content of our everyday lives. Vaporwave, industrial chic, millennial pink, ahistorical romanticism, tropical plants - household or in print, flamingoes, marbles surface, rose gold accents, quirky art prints, reflective surfaces, steel with pops of color, tiled floors, surreal furniture (egg shaped toilet cubicle), dramatic lighting, fairy-lights, pastel-colored everything, personalized coffee cups, sleek glass buildings, pop-up urbanism are some of the most popular on the platform.1 These aesthetics have completely taken over the imagination of our public spaces- stores, restaurants, art installations, all have an instagrammability factor. This urge to share our association with certain themes or objects online is becoming an increasingly significant determinant of how we choose to spend our leisure time., where we go for holidays2, what we eat and how we design the interiors of our homes.

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Image 1: A MUST TAKE SELFIE! The infamous egg shaped toilet cubicles of Sketch, London in the background

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Spatiality in the Age of Instagram

Platform Capitalism In order to understand the evolution of social media into the paradigm reinforcing force that it is today, a critical glance at its economical foundation is important. Capitalism demands innovation (in ways to continue the accumulation of capital), always shedding away its obsolete skin and slithering into the future. New technologies, new modes of organizing labor, new types of job roles and new markets are always around the corner. Thereupon, it is in its core, a dynamic economic system capable of turning crises into opportunities for profit generating contraptions and so digital platforms have seized the moment (and possibly our future).

Learning from the financial meltdowns of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the preferred business model today, is largely founded on systems of code that value data as the most vital asset and raw material of contemporary age.3 Platform economics, as a term, gained traction in the 1990’s among a handful of academic scholars who first predicted the course economics may take in light of the internet, which had only been materialized less than a decade before.

Platforms are digital infrastructures that act as intermediaries between different users, enabling them to build their own products, services and marketplaces using platform provided tools. In acting as a ground on which various user activities take place, the platform is then able to profit from these interactions by means of collecting data.4 This gathered data gives a competitive advantage to algorithms, enables co-ordination and outsourcing of labor, allows optimization and flexibility of productive processes, transforms low margin goods into high margin services and can be used in the generation of more data, forming a virtuous cycle. Platforms are monopolistic in nature and thrive on a form of surveillance capitalism. Though today’s platforms have diversified their product portfolio to enter agriculture, medicine and several other industries, one of the most early and prominent platforms were that of social media. Social media platforms have built empires on ad revenue, further data extraction and consequent personalized targeted ad campaigns for the millions of users that use them for various digital interactions. Today, they are synonymous to communication in itself, designed especially to create dopamine dependencies and be addictive in use, enforced through likes, pings and so on, solely guided by a thirst for even more data extraction and subsequent profit.

The Hegemonical Eye ‘The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as a picture.’, writes Heidegger.5 While the age of Instagram is often accused of heightening our reliance on the eye, the prominence of visual architecture in the dominant narrative isn’t a recent one. In fact, Western philosophy, dating as far as back the Greek, deemed sight as the noblest of senses, relating certainty to vision and visibility. Plato even regarding vision as humanity’s greatest gift, insisting on the need for accessibility of ethical universals to the mind’s eyes. The invention of perspective during the (alleged) Renaissance ‘made the eye the center point of the perceptual world, as well as of the concept of the self.’ Knowledge, ontology, power and ethics thus, evolved under the careful control of this ocular centric paradigm, limiting our perception to vision as the sole sense of truth and reality.6

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The onset of industrialization and modernism not only sustained this hegemony of the eye but also, heightened its negative inclinations through a myriad of technological inventions turning imagery into a mesmerizing flow of abstractions without focus or participation.7 Architects in this time reinforced this dominant paradigm through their works of theory and practice. In this manner, inarguably the most influential of this era’s inventions on architecture proved to be that of the camera, touted as the most honest of mediums, incapable of deception. One of these most enthusiastic advocates of the transparency and truth in the new age of modernism, Le Corbusier is notoriously known to have had photographs of all his built work manipulated based on his understanding of photography as a medium for visualizing an architecture that could be rather than simply picturing an architecture that was.8 The camera has continued to dominate architectural discourse since, with the likes of prolific photographers like Julius Shulman revolutionizing architectural photography and post-modernisms consequent obsession with photogenic buildings.9 Other technological advancements too, have only increased ocular centrism, dominating modes of communication and experiencing the world, through the advent of newer, more easily accessible electronic screens of televisions, computers and tablets. Paul Virilio explains this transition from the window to the electronic screen and the extent to which screens rupture the spatial order of its predecessors, stating, “what we see through the screen window is no longer restricted by locale or bound to a stable, center perspective, but an image that is inherently mobile and infinitely restless… It carries not only a new mode of representation but institutes a new order of subjective experience.”10 The domination of a device that carries both the camera and the electronic screen. i.e., our smartphone is a testament to this longstanding history of the hegemony of the eye.

From Use Value to Sign Value The birth of a middle class during post-war capitalist’s societies created a new wave of consumers that now had the time and the money to indulge their infinite desires. A booming economy in the golden age of capitalism meant an increase in manufacture and in the variety of products and objects available for consumption. Consumerism thrived as traumas from the past wars, instability of the depression years and the grief from the lives lost in the first half of the 20th Century were escaped through the consumption of different objects. Advertising and media houses gripped mainstream society, using objects to represent entire lifestyles and value systems – utopian, prosperous, modern. Objects thus took up a meaning beyond their original use and market value. Baudrillard explains this phenomenon as the creation of sign value.11 While symbolic value of objects was based on a static system of meaning derived from traditional social orders, the sign-object of postmodernism was liberated of a fixed meaning, gaining meaning only through its association within a group of objects. As consumerism peaked, sign value took over the way consumers interacted with objects, re-wiring the working of their brains to evaluate everything, not through its physical materiality but through what it represented. This world of representations signs being derived from signs creating simulacra, causing the implied associations to feel more real than reality itself, taking over how the world was understood and lived in, Baudrillard refers to this as hyper-realism.12 Though socio-cultural trends varied, and financial inequality deepened, and objects were not as affordable as before, the world of simulacra was here to stay, assigning aesthetic value to culture itself and so, causing consumerism to be forever cemented in the now hyper-real society of late capitalism.

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Spatiality in the Age of Instagram

A Brave New World With the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the ideological dichotomy of cold war era came to an end. Rising from its ashes, globalization ushered in a new era of progress and human advancement. The neo-liberal rhetoric of late capitalism in the 90s began to take form. An open world with a floating currency and free trade flourishing among different nation states, innovation thriving amidst competition in a free market and the rise of a global community of consumers – the new world order. The advent of the internet heightened the effect of this “We are the world...” sing along, making mass culture a synonym for global culture as a tidal wave of mass taste ‘engulfed the farthest shores of a world, woven by the warp and woof of the instantaneous net that blurred identity, bred uncertainty and rendered meaningless the comforting oxymoron of the glocal.’13 Carrying on this sentiment that ushered the era of the World Wide Web, social media platforms are a further step in bringing the world closer together and enabling people to see and get to know the authentic versions of each other. Ironically, superficiality became rampant in a frenzy to project an ideal version of oneself, as one could and did portray their happiest through peaks of depression, opulence with a near empty bank account or even intellectual depth without ever having to read a book, in this brave, brave new world.

Locating the Self in the Hyper-real: There’s much to be said about the contemporary collective mental health of society in regard to our general turn in this direction of display and opulence online. A quick look at the spatial quality of the most Instagram favored spaces – soothing, dreamlike, pristine, futuristic, nostalgic, distant - hints at a deep-rooted desire to escape reality or at least what’s left of it. We have ourselves have become signs in the system of objects, seeking meaning and coherence through our association with other objects of mass consumption. Social media apps give us a medium to revel in our existentialism after the inadequacy of the “be yourself” rhetoric of the early 2000s, building up the illusion that the superficial curation of our lives online is in some part if not fully representative who we really are. It gives a false sense of control in a hyper-real world we no longer fully understand or know how to navigate. We want to appear edgy, mysterious, unique, socially responsible, fun, happy and living with a sense of abundance and it allows to us manage these perceptions of ourselves, which ironically are guided deeply by our perception of other people, that we interact with digitally, creating this cyclical phenomenon of one-upping one another to seem more unique. With socioeconomic inequality at its highest, a post about an aesthetic breakfast or visit to the latest instagrammable art installation misleadingly assures users that life can still be enriched by experience (it is not a real experience if performed for the ‘gram) if not wealth and seeks to bridge the gap in reality between the have and have nots. Thus, loss of a sense of collective belonging by the relentless commodification and privatization of every discernible artifact of human value, the overstimulation of the mind through an almost constant feed of useless information being flung at it and the impending doom of the climate catastrophe can be understood to have generated this dissociative language of specific objects, environments and priorities that act as pockets of respite in contemporary times.

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A Discipline in Crisis: The advent of modernism – a movement so significantly manifested in the architecture of its time – ascertained the part architects played as agents of ideology, regulated intrinsically by whims of the plutocratic upper class, however, too consumed by their self-glorification to notice or break away. It was in this period, that brought a newfound status to the profession of an architect, revered as the intellectual of that time. A failure of modernism was thus, inherently a failure of its fore-bearing ideologues – modern architects. An existential and ideological crisis has taken hold of the profession ever since14, many suggesting it obsolesce in contemporary society. From the initial relaunching of a more ethical modernism such as critical regionalism to the reactionary postmodern neo-classicism, deconstructivism to technologically driven parametricism, and finally, to the contemporary acceptance of multiform eclecticism, these theoretical re-articulations, while critical for discourse and inevitable in their own right – inherently demonstrate an architecture that is on a quest to find itself. In mainstream culture, the role of the architect has thus come under repeated scrutiny for its elitism, alienating intellectualism, self – referential modes of design and socially and/or environmentally irresponsible work that prioritizes profit. Internally too, all is not well. A difficult, expensive and often long path to qualification with a below average pay scale, a rising dissatisfaction with constant exploitation of young and vulnerable architectural professionals, a competitive fee-based market that doesn’t compensate for the work put in and the compromise of design over profit are all little tumors, slowly gnawing away at the discipline from the inside. Crises abound.

A (Possible) Return to Relevance: Plaguing the rest of the world with its addictively interactive algorithms, Instagram, has caught on, in architecture too. An increasingly large number of firms, graduate schools, critics, journals, national institutes like RIBA and AIA, professionals of all ages and students of the discipline have Instagram accounts, causing architecture to have its own digital ecosystem, down to the architectural meme-pages and unionizing voices like DankLloydWright and the FAFront. While most architectural circles usually remain closed off to the rest of the world, on Instagram, this is changing. The rise in demand for spatial aesthetics, even if only for a good ‘post’, requires architects to step up to the occasion and they are. With developers and private clients wanting to profit from this phenomenon, architecture and art practices are developing their designs with an Instagram factor. Practices like Heatherwick and Diller+Scofio are key examples.15 Firms are also devising tool kits, for instance, Vale Architects is advising retail owners on how to make their spaces more visually apt for online sharing through pre-formulated Instagram Design toolkits.16 In fact, practices like OMA are now considering post-occupancy analysis through IG tools like hashtags and geo-tagging, in order to determine the success of their projects.17 More architects are thinking of design through a series of user engagement strategies, providing almost voyeuristic views into every stage of their projects, fetishizing the process of design and building.18 Farshid Moussavi, who is employed by Harrods to refurbish sections of the luxury department store to make it more Instagrammable, says “Instagram is reinforcing the fact that space matters, which can only be a good thing for designers and architects.”19

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Spatiality in the Age of Instagram

Ready, Set.. Perform!

For architectural businesses, it implies profit, recognition and the propagation of more starchitects giving masterclasses on design. For architectural value however, a crisis grimmer than the one caused by the collapse of modernism is unavoidable.20 The reduction of places and buildings, old or new, to serve as back drops for selfies signifies a loss of culture and identity based on relation to place and consequently, the peak of simulacra in the built environment. From a design perspective too, the focus on the superficial exteriority takes away from other more pressing issues of decommodification, materiality or sustainability in exchange for, flimsy pink wallpaper and a cheese plant. By engaging in such a discourse, we become designers not for immediate users in the physical place but for the imagined perception of that user to a hypothetical digital audience.21 Further, the use of Instagram as a tool to analyze design performance limits the perception of the world to a flattened image on our screen, blocking out the reality of the myriad of meanings, functions and experiences a place holds beyond what is visually assessable. It also enables Big Tech to further their own agendas through the design of an architecture that inherently increases their platform usage and enables even more data to be extracted and sold off and control the population through. The turn of architecture towards stagecraft, fragmented flattened, yet beautiful pre-staged set ups devoid of experiential depth, that curate the nature of interactions among people and with place as if it were a film or a game, programming us to perform in a certain way, notice certain things more than others and eat at restaurants for the photos in their surreal washrooms rather than the taste of their food, demands a deep reflection on if this is what we want to contribute to the world going forward.

A highly performative and controlled society emerges as a result, with human emotion, insecurities and struggles redacted, somewhere along the way, only to be displayed superficially alongside other accumulated objects, in the pursuit of self-construed fantasies that never were and perhaps, will never be.

Endnotes: 1

Giulia Pistone, Fabiola Fiocco, “Good Content Vs Good Architecture: Where does Instagrammability Take US?,” Strelka Mag,

December 16,2019, https://strelkamag.com/en/article/good-content-vs-good-architecture.

2

Rachel Hosie, “’Instagrammability’: Most Important Factor For Millenials On Choosing Holiday Destination,” Independent,

March 24, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/instagrammability-holiday-factor-millenials-holiday-destination-choosingtravel-social-media-photos-a7648706.html.

3

Nick Srnicek, Laurent De Sutter. Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 36 - 43.

4 Ilbd., 5 Juhani Pallasmaa. The Eyes of the Skin : Architecture and the Senses. (Somerset: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012) 24 6 Ilbd., 19 7 Ilbd., 23-24 8 Daniel Naegele, Seeing what is not there yet: Le Corbusier and Architectural Space of Photograph (Iowa: Iowa State University, 2016).

9 Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991 10 Paul Virilio as quoted in

Scott McQuire, “From Glass Architecture to Big Brother: Scenes from a Cultural History of

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Transparency,” Cultural Studies Review Vol 9 No 1 (2003): 111.

11 Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects.( La Vergne: Verso, 2020.) 200-204 12

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation.( Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994.) 123-127

13

Kenneth Frampton. Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture : A Harvard Design Magazine Reader. (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Accessed December 1, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central. 2 14

Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans Barabara Luiga La Penta (Cambridge: MIT

Press, 1976), 176-178.

15

Giulia Pistone, Fabiola Fiocco, “Good Content Vs Good Architecture: Where does Instagrammability Take US?,” Strelka Mag,

December 16,2019, https://strelkamag.com/en/article/good-content-vs-good-architecture.

16

Ibld.

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Ibld.

18

Salvatore Peluso, “Instagram as a window to the social side of architecture,” Domus, May 23, 2019, https://www.domusweb.it/

en/architecture/2019/05/22/instagram-and-the-social-side-of-architecture.html.

19 Farshid Moussavi, as quoted in, Oliver Wainwright, “Snapping point: how the world’s leading architects fell under the Instagram spell,” The Guardian, November, 23, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/nov/23/snapping-point-how-the-worldsleading-architects-fell-under-the-instagram-spell 20 Kenneth Frampton. Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture : A Harvard Design Magazine Reader. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Accessed December 1, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central.

21 Salvatore Peluso, “Instagram as a window to the social side of architecture,” Domus, May 23, 2019, https://www.domusweb.it/ en/architecture/2019/05/22/instagram-and-the-social-side-of-architecture.html.

Images: Cover Image: Stijn Orlans (@StijnOrlans) Twitter October 8, 2019, https://mobile.twitter.com/stijnorlans Image 1: Sarah Latham, Siobhan and Myself, 2018, Digital photograph, accessed December 10, 2021, http://sarahadventuring.com/ sketch-london/.

Bibliography: Giulia Pistone, Fabiola Fiocco, “Good Content Vs Good Architecture: Where does Instagrammability Take US?,” Strelka Mag, December 16,2019, https://strelkamag.com/en/article/good-content-vs-good-architecture.

Rachel Hosie, “’Instagrammability’: Most Important Factor For Millenials On Choosing Holiday Destination,” Independent, March 24, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/instagrammability-holiday-factor-millenials-holiday-destination-choosing-travelsocial-media-photos-a7648706.html.

Nick Srnicek, Laurent De Sutter. Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 36 - 43.

Juhani Pallasmaa. The Eyes of the Skin : Architecture and the Senses. (Somerset: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012) 24 Daniel Naegele, Seeing what is not there yet: Le Corbusier and Architectural Space of Photograph (Iowa: Iowa State University, 2016).

Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991 Paul Virilio as quoted in Scott McQuire, “From Glass Architecture to Big Brother: Scenes from a Cultural History of Transparency,” Cultural Studies Review Vol 9 No 1 (2003): 111.

Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects.( La Vergne: Verso, 2020.) 200-204 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation.( Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994.) 123-127

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Spatiality in the Age of Instagram

Kenneth Frampton. Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture : A Harvard Design Magazine Reader. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Accessed December 1, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central. 2 Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans Barabara Luiga La Penta (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), 176-178.

Salvatore Peluso, “Instagram as a window to the social side of architecture,” Domus, May 23, 2019, https://www.domusweb.it/en/ architecture/2019/05/22/instagram-and-the-social-side-of-architecture.html.

Farshid Moussavi, as quoted in, Oliver Wainwright, “Snapping point: how the world’s leading architects fell under the Instagram spell,” The Guardian, November, 23, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/nov/23/snapping-point-how-the-worldsleading-architects-fell-under-the-instagram-spell

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