The Perfect Self(ie)
turning your back on design
Aditya Ghosh, Eric Galipo | FXCollaborative
The Perfect Self(ie) turning your back on design
Aditya Ghosh, LEED AP BD+C, FXCollaborative Edited by Eric Galipo, AICP, LEED AP BD+C
Introduction: What’s in a Frame? In what has become a common photographic capture, a painting is discernible in the background, and the foreground is the face of the photographer. This is a selfie: proof to their audience that they have seen the painting in person. At times, the people looking at a painting through a smartphone screen outnumber the ones directly observing it. For the most popular exhibitions, like the Mona Lisa,1 the museum has had to resort to providing more room to accommodate the crowds and their backward-facing photos. In these photos, the expression of the selfietaker is more prominent than the
infamous half-smile of the lady behind them. Her visage is barely discernible in the background, but is visible enough to make the photo “shareable.” In his rumination on the painting, journalist Scott Reyburn says, “Imprisoned by its reputation as the most famous painting in the world, and by its security capsule, the Mona Lisa has, to all meaningful intents and purposes, ceased to exist as an original work of art. It has become an idea—and a photo opportunity. What could be a more contemporary way of seeing?” 2 (Figure 1) For museum exhibitions, online media and “going viral” has become a key factor in amplifying marketing efforts they may employ. Photography is now allowed, even invited, in the museum. It is therefore possible to observe
trends in the program and structure of art installations as a result of the selfie as a proxy to predict the direction of architecture. Essentially, as buildings and art exhibitions have moved from the foreground of individual photographic documentation to background elements, art installations and architectural programs are responding to this new direction. This is just one example of how social media has changed the expectations of individual experience of the public realm and in the build environment. In fact, art is increasingly seen as a participatory object to be appropriated as a secondary subject by selfie-takers. Consequently, the program and spatial requirements necessary to house art exhibitions
1 E xhibited at the Louvre Museum in Paris since 1797. 2 Scott Reyburn, “What the Mona Lisa Tells Us About Art in the Instagram Era,” The New York Times, April 27, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/arts/design/mona-lisa-instagram-art.html.
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Figure 1
Visitors at the Louvre. Photo by Gustavo Rodriguez
are also evolving. The presumption is that the greater the fame of the painting, the larger the “selfie space� must be to accommodate the crowd of social media mavens. If museums are designed as experiences, and if social media is driving popularity, then examining the tools the public uses in their status updates may be integral to charting and predicting the evolution of programmed space and architectural design. Studying the impact that virtual depictions
have on the shaping of space might enable a greater understanding of programming, participation and public space design. This article will trace the inter-relationship between, and evolution of architectural photography, the photographic gaze, and notions of the production of public space in order to decipher the cultural impact of social media on the built environment. The act of taking a selfie is the proclivity of the people, the latest mode of making space for themselves, and programmatic changes in architecture and art exhibitions have become secondary to it.
Aditya Ghosh, Eric Galipo | FXCollaborative
Public Space: Order and Disorder Academics have tried to develop a unified theory of how people use public space by asking what does the public respond to in terms of boundaries and enclosures and how does this affect their activities within the public realm? In Henri Lefebvre’s book The Production of Space, he simplifies social life by classifying the creation of public space into cognitive and behavioral divisions, thus creating a framework that explains how humans perceive, understand and utilize public space. There is space that is hard-lined and defined by usage and practice. It is the most direct interpretation of what designers shape for a user to experience. When laying out space, programmed areas and circulation form the building blocks of design. The occupant is meant to be influenced by these components and follow the architect’s conceptual program and spatial organization. When applied to an art institution or exhibition, the program is the galleries and circulation spaces, and the intended flow of the crowd is its relational aspect. Thematic maps like those of the subway or models of migration and diaspora: these are time-dependent representations of space, a kind of vector diagram. For someone living in a city, these representations form the cognitive understanding of and interaction with the environment.
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Decisions are made by selecting the best route to coordinate outdoor/ indoor presence depending on the spatial depiction of the weather map on the evening news. A Lefebvrian understanding of space, therefore, is that of an appropriative setup, one that changes dramatically with highly specific cultural and historic contexts. Architects design with the intention that the people using the built environment will condition it to their social practices and create their “moments.” 3 The frame of the selfie might be seen as one such space of representation. If we were to interpret public space to the current day, the “moment” is simply the frame the user decided to use to situate themselves in public. William H. Whyte, American journalist, urbanist, and people-watcher, documented a similar perspective in 1980 when he filmed what eventually became The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Using still and movie cameras as well as charts and graphs, Whyte and his associates observed and analyzed how people really inhabited, modified and resisted the space given to them by architects and planners at the Seagram’s Plaza in New York City. He looked at a few basics of an urban setting: proximity and surroundings, degrees of congestion, and the availability of furniture whether provided or improvised. He also writes of “triangulation,” 4 the presence of a third
3 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992). 4 William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (Project for Public Spaces, 2001).
Aditya Ghosh, Eric Galipo | FXCollaborative
stimulus that draws in two people. The scene is now a stage with the animate and inanimate actors participating in dialogue. It can be an object or occurrence that draws acquaintances or even strangers to talk to each other when they usually wouldn’t. His examples include art, sculpture, street musicians— urban equivalents of a coffee table conversation piece. Thirty years later, the scene is being remade every day. City dwellers can choose a modernday simulacrum of the plaza and cast themselves in the lead. Using their smartphones, they document themselves in public space, filling up social media platforms with their personalized urban ethnography.5 The takeaway is that appropriation follows a pattern. Whyte and Lefebvre were not only documenting and theorizing on public behavior, but also handing us the tools to understand what constitutes the production of public space. Applying their conclusions to the current city scape helps create a framework for understanding the phenomenon of the selfie.
5 William H. Whyte, “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces,” USA, 1980.
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Architectural Photography: From Subject to Object The visual history of the public realm is closely linked to the timeline of architectural photography. Paintings and murals of buildings have always attempted to memorialize the greatness of civilizations and the significance of their artifacts. Architects seemed to have understood the importance of photography and representational imagery early on, enriched by the play of light and shadow. Some of the first examples like View from the Window at Le Gras by Nicephore Niepce6 and William Henry Fox Talbot’s photograph Latticed Window at Lacock Abbey 7 made way for the early architectural photographers like Roger Fenton, Francis Firth and Ezra Stoller (Figures 2 and 3). In keeping with the architecture of the early to mid-20th century, the photographs were largely black and white, relying on shadows and contrast to highlight the form of their subjects.
Figure 2
View from the Window at Le Gras, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, 1826-27
Figure 3
Latticed Window at Lacock Abbey, William Henry Fox Talbot, 1835
The rise of amateur photography made way for buildings and their locations as the setting for captured memories. Photographs were personal postcards of holidays and pilgrimage, and the focus of the frame ranges from an exterior perspective of the building to friends and family with landmarks in the background. As people became included in the frame, the camera went closer, usually on the approach to the building, its facade forming
6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_from_the_Window_at_Le_Gras 7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Fox_Talbot
Aditya Ghosh, Eric Galipo | FXCollaborative
the backdrop. In this era, people occupy half of the frame, which included their torsos if not their whole bodies. The building and the visitor seemed to have equal importance in the photograph. The illustration of the public realm in David Harvey’s book Paris: Capital of Modernity situates the general public within the built environment, treating the streets and alleys of the city along with their occupants as the subjects of the photographs (Figure 4). First published in 1935, the book focuses on the economic, demographic, and urban transformations of the city through the 1800s. The illustrations demonstrate the spatial relations between varying socio-economic classes and do so by “bringing the lens down to street level”.8 In the timeline of architectural representation, the pedestrian perspective begins its association with more than just the visual experience of the city, it represents a larger cultural reading towards being a citizen.9 Digital photography made print obsolete and democratized the ease of documentation in a way that led to an exponential rise in the sheer volume of photographs. The invention of the smartphone, a communication accessory that also took photographs, put this power to document the world in everyone’s pocket. The devices suddenly allowed unprecedented freedom to record every moment and aspect of our lives, regardless
8 David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York, NY: Routeledge, 2003). 9 T his statement would require an explicit example of citizenry as a benchmark of responsibility and participation. One could state any current phenomenon whether Occupy Wall Street or the “Yellow Vests” to be representative of active citizenship.
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of momentary significance. With this came the ability to turn the camera on ourselves. The selfie placed the person taking the photograph directly in the foreground—the building now further away to allow it to fit into the perspective, scaled back into the likeness of an object at the vanishing point behind the person taking the picture. Typically, selfies are meant for friends and family. Sharing a selfie is a form of semi-public dialog that is often broadcast through a social media profile—the publisher is engaging with their “followers.” The fact that there are voyeurs to this conversation is at the photographer’s discretion. Sharing on social media seems to oppose the assumption that privacy is a natural condition. Privacy is made optional by choosing (or not choosing) to display online visibility. To many, the depiction of a full and meaningful online persona overrides the chances of ignominy.
Figure 4
Statue of Liberty in Paris, 1886, in Paris, Capital of Modernity, David Harvey, 2003.
Aditya Ghosh, Eric Galipo | FXCollaborative
Figure 5
The TKTS booth stairs in Times Square
Building Out: The Gradual Unfolding of Architecture The experience of a building or exhibition is dependent on elements that engage the occupant. Generally, we associate the architect or artist as the author of such works. However, there are plentiful examples of artwork, sculpture, iconic buildings, architectural follies, or landscape panoramas, attributed to an author, that have become secondary elements in observers’ quests to document themselves on social media. In Times Square, a set of stairs over the TKTS
ticket booth faces the huge digital screens and billboards the crossroads is known for. An estimated 17,000 Instagram posts a day feature Times Square and about a third of them likely feature the Red Steps (Figure 5). More than one visitor has tripped and fallen trying to take a selfie with the stairs behind them, leading some to wish the stairs could be fitted with a platform or outcropping that would safely allow spectators to turn their backs on the scene.10 The city is filled with such moments. The accidental or planned geometry of the streets place a structure within a frame that is perfect for a photographic moment, the proportions
10 Shaye Weaver, “Times Square’s Red Steps, TKTS booth, gets new glass stairs,” AM New York, June 26, 2018, https://www.amny.com/things-to-do/times-square-redsteps-1.19441647
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of the building in focus substantiating the perspective. The selfies on the Brooklyn Bridge are mostly of the arches, from the walking pathway on the bridge itself. The recognizable forms are the backdrop, usually enough to make the location obvious. The most propagated picture of the Manhattan Bridge, however, arises from an accidental perspective. The outpost at 55 Washington in Brooklyn brings us unexpectedly to the bridge climbing at a slant. A diagonal truss intersects the framed verticals of the brick buildings on either side of the street. Such cross-sections of the built environment influence the angle of the camera. The Flatiron Building lends itself to the frame as a “worm’s eye view” because of its shape, both by design as well as the access the pedestrians have to its bounding streets. The photographs appearing on social media have similar points of view, all owing to the urban conditions in front of the building. Now, new buildings are being designed with this visual in mind. At the Statue of Liberty museum (Figure 6), the outcropping of the museum roof is an expression of form but also a serendipitous platform to stand on, to get the statue into the selfie frame. In describing the reason for the design, Lead Designer Cameron Ringness says, “The museum creates multiple destinations. One culminating moment occurs at the prow of the roof. Visitors ascend to this point and are meant to pause with the city, harbor and statue as their backdrop.” 11
11 Statue of Liberty Museum courtesy of FXCollaborative Architects
Aditya Ghosh, Eric Galipo | FXCollaborative
Figure 6
Statue of Liberty Museum
A sculpture that is both a park ornament as well as an attraction, Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor is an interesting statement about combining subject and surrounding.12 The reflective surface shows the skyline of the city; upon getting closer to the form, the onlooker sees themselves standing on the plaza among the crowd. Get even closer and it is the perfect frame for a selfie with the city (Figure 7). The artist states his intent to have the viewer placed in what he calls a “distorted alternate space.” The concave mirror provides a unique moment to someone wanting to take
a selfie that very obviously says where it was taken and generates numerous subjective representations online. Not all interventions have to be so blatant—sometimes just an outcropping or a strategically placed platform is enough to goad the user to take a selfie. The new Whitney Museum of American Art by architect Renzo Piano embraces a gentrifying New York that is glamorous, safer and more accessible to the public than ever before. The building and its surrounding public spaces open up to the city, providing a sight-line through its vast lobby and extending its presence into the public streets
12 T he sculpture is the centerpiece of the AT&T Plaza at Millennium Park, Chicago.
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beyond. The galleries on the upper floors of the new Whitney do not allow the exhibitions alone to be the focal point of a visitor’s experience. Instead, architectural features draw the eye past the exhibitions and interior spaces and situate the art and the user within the city beyond: a window looking across the vast expanse of the Hudson River; a courtyard that frames sunset views to the western horizon; or an outdoor metal walkway to observe sculpture against the wall-ofbuildings that is Midtown Manhattan. In his 2015 review of the building for The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman said, “The museum becomes an implicit extension of the High Line: an outdoor perch to see and be seen.” 13 In today’s connected public realm, social media makes “being seen” a powerful personal statement that can reach millions, a cultural phenomenon that is having an impact on spatial program and architecture. The ability to share the experience of a building instantaneously has broad implications for architectural program and concepts around authorship of and participation in public space.
Figure 7
Cloud Gate, Chicago
13 Michael Kimmelman, “A New Whitney,” The New York Times, April 19, 2015, https://nyti.ms/2kyJbOU
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Anything for Attention: Galleries and Trend Setters While a building is more permanent than an ephemeral exhibition, it is possible to observe trends in the program and structure of art installations as a result of the selfie as a proxy to predict the direction of architecture. As buildings and art exhibitions have moved from the foreground of individual photographic documentation to background elements, art installations and architectural programs must respond to this new direction. Even offices are being redesigned to be more Instagrammable, suggesting that shareability is influencing program, materials, and architectural design.14 In 2016, some of the most popular art-related posts on Instagram were from exhibitions that allowed the visitors to immerse themselves in an installation for the single purpose of taking a selfie. The show Pixel Forest by Swiss artist Pippiloti Rist covered three floors of the New Museum in New York City and dealt with dreamscapes that range from “the intimacy of the smartphone to the communal experience of immersive images and soundscapes.”15 The inclusion of the observer/participant in the composition of the art recognizes the attraction of participation and self-documentation in installations and portends shifts in how spaces are designed and programed to include specific places where self-
14 Maria LaMagna, “Offices Get Redesigned for an Instagram World,” The Wall Street Journal, https://www.wsj.com/articles/offices-get-redesigned-for-an-instagramworld-1520820180 15 Pipilotti Rist, Pixel Forest, October 26, 2016 -January 15, 2017, The New Museum, NY, https://www.artsy.net/show/new-museum-1-pipilotti-rist-pixel-forest
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documentation is encouraged. Another exhibition in New York City, Daniel Arsham’s Circa 2345 at Galerie Perrotin, made use of the proportions of the installation, Amethyst Sports Ball Cavern to provide the setting for the public to place themselves in a fantasy surrounding, making for the perfect acid purple social media post.16 Around the same time, Instagram was flooded with events taking place at the Fridman Gallery in Manhattan. The exhibition contained a large-scale interactive sculpture named Prana, a sphere with glittering stalactites of LED lights that engulfed the viewer in a tangle of beads of color. The installation senses the participant’s breathing using a sensor and reacts with its own pulsating glow.17 What these installations have in common are scale, color, and that they seem to influence the spectator’s point of view. Participation is the key design driver in all three; the artist’s installation is incomplete without an active spectator. Additionally, the portrayal of the artwork in the press and online necessarily includes the human figure situated inside of it. The prevailing commentary of each exhibit is a second-hand perspective of a personal experience. With a rise in art that is interactive and exhibitions that do not have a protective perimeter around them, art has already begun to recognize the power of individual participation in installation.18
16 Ben Roazen, “Daniel Arsham’s ‘Circa 2345’ Presents Sports Memorabilia as Calcified Ancient Artifacts,” Hypebeast, https://hypebeast.com/2016/9/daniel-arsham-circa-2345nyc-exhibition 17 Alicia Eler, “Breathing Life into a High-Tech, Glowing Sphere,” Hyperallergic, https:// hyperallergic.com/223850/breathing-life-into-a-high-tech-glowing-sphere/ 18 A similar train of thought has been around when evaluating newer artists and exhibitions; Katharine Schwab, “Art for Instagram’s Sake,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/ entertainment/archive/2016/02/instagram-art-wonder-renwick-rain-room/463173/
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Conclusion: Does Form Follow Frame? Designed space has come to be defined as public space, and now includes bodies in the composition. Calling these installations trendy might be hasty, and a misnomer, but we can comfortably see them as signifiers of an emerging concept. Propagated by the social media status update, these exhibitions piece together a visual geography of the times, saving current configuration of public space as digital time capsules. There is no linear narrative to creation and inspiration. Architecture in the past has given birth to cultural movements, but design is constantly responding to social and anthropological stimuli. In our hopes of underlining a trend, perceiving the tone of design to come, we are making a measured leap of faith. The speculation that social media and temporary moments will culminate into more permanent cityscapes is just that, an assumption that the current cultural modes of behavior will influence future designers. The shift from person as participant to person as subject has impacted art and architecture, and has ultimately influenced program. Some spaces are still grappling with how to accommodate the arrogating user, while others have been conceptualized with appropriation as the goal. There is an increasingly blurred demarcation between places that are sacrosanct and those that are flexible to any
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person authoring them via occupation. Authorship in a space is a key factor to establishing habitualness in populace. The interactive nature of the design elements might be active, like a movable chair where the view and placement are largely left to the interpretations and programmatic decisions of the person who moves it, or passive, like a view of the skyline or a sculpture. Visible authoring of a public space in turn leads to voyeurism as a supporting role. Whether online or in person, there is a third set of eyes looking at the interaction between the user and the object. Some artwork is designed to have the consumer set themselves up for a public performance. As the scale increases from the installation to the civic scale, it is possible to recognize and observe many such analogous moments. Both accidental or planned geometry, as well as natural features and topography impart their structure onto the framework of placement of oneself within the photographic frame, However, the person still provides the primary subject in relationship to the secondary place or relational object within a frame that is perfect for a photographic moment, the proportions of the building in focus substantiating the perspective. We are justified in giving credence to the relationship of the person and the enclosure. Architects have often considered the relationships of the
Aditya Ghosh, Eric Galipo | FXCollaborative
building to the human scale a central tenet of good design. The same rationale would allow any occupant of a building to base their understanding of space on the lens through which they perceive it. The permanence or transience of the selfie on social media as canon is subjective and might always be contentious. What isn’t subjective, however, is the fact that we are questioning the spaces created for us by someone else. The experience of art, space, and pathway is not de facto, it is subject to scrutiny online and critiqued for its merits and flaws. It is hard to say if we are better designers because of it or if catering to a frame is just lip service. Allowing pictures and selfies in museums is a sign of acknowledgement that pictures and social media add to experience and are vital to forming memories. Architecture might have to follow suit and even if it doesn’t, the person with the smartphone will find a way to make it their own.
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Aditya Ghosh, Eric Galipo | FXCollaborative
Aditya has experience in the architectural design, documentation, and construction administration of residential high-rise and other large-scale projects. In addition to drawing and detailing, his work, which focuses on exterior façades, includes determining proportions and material specification. With a strong background in theory and the intellectual conceptions that underpin architectural design, Aditya views himself as a storyteller more than a builder and sees his work as being about the interactions a person has with the built environment. For him, spaces are settings—for experiences, intentions, appropriation, and purpose.
Editor Eric Galipo’s background as an analytical chemist deeply informs his practice. In urban design, as in chemistry, a sustainable result is dependent on proportion, timing, and sequence. In managing a project’s planning and conceptual design, Eric thinks through the multitude of moving parts, identifying constraints and opportunities, establishing parameters, and developing innovative and aesthetic design and planning solutions. With ten years of design experience—from educational, cultural, and public spaces to resiliency, largescale master planning, and zoning analysis—Eric addresses global issues of consumption and sustainability.
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