Although the model presented in “Learning from Las Vegas” still holds true as a tool of urban analysis it is of dire importance to realize that it is not the only model currently in play. Prescient for its time, it exists in that historical space that straddles post war optimism with one foot, and the rise of information technology and the OPEC embargo with the other. The results of VSB’s Yale studio were in line with a manufacturing economy indentured to a network of highways on which our consumer goods were physically moved. Hence, it only made sense that architecture began to communicate through the automotive windshield. It is important to remember that this adaptation was not responding to the car or the highway, but instead to the change in speed at which the human body was now moving in relation to architecture. The vector from a stationary architecture, to a human body in motion was the line of transmission along which information was disseminated.
In 1971 this held true, but forty years have passed since Bob and Denise visited the Vegas strip. Now, in many instances the vector of transmission has inverted as a result of media technologies which have recently become ubiquitous. The human body is stationary, and architecture now moves. We don’t look at architecture. We look at digital images of architecture. Buildings converted to bits. This has had a profound impact on the field on many fronts, and the traditional physical potency of architecture is at now at stake.
Walter Benjamin saw this inversion through the lens of his own time. “For centuries,” he states, “a small number of writers were always confronted by many thousands of readers”, but due to the ‘letter to the editor’ this phenomenon inverts. Suddenly, the masses have a voice. Easy access to publishing destroys the barriers to authorship. It destroys barriers in architecture too.
Consider the barrier between public and private on Nolli’s map of Rome; a clear delineation in black and white. Yet, where is our cherished public space today? How do we find it? We can turn to Charles Moore’s revolution test. Moore asks where you go to have a revolution. When you know the answer, you have also found your public commons. So let’s take the test! Where do we go to have a revolution today? The answer… We go wherever there is a camera.
The digital camera, convergent with a mode of transmission and a publishing function is legion. We are all citizen journalists; digital devices turn ordinary humans into George Hollidays and Edison Carters. We can broadcast from anywhere within the urban fabric, interior or exterior. The figure ground of public to private is dematerialized and Nolli’s map fades to a murky 50 percent grey.
Architecture must begin to speak a new language. It must become ready for its close-up, and if it can’t stand the scrutiny, it must learn to wear a mask. Take the classic example of John Quincy Adam Ward’s Stock Exchange building. It is the connotative codification of the American financial system. When we watch the financial news on CNBC the image of its six columns and neo-Grecian pediment frequently grace the screen. Yet, the building is a fiction. The majority of stock trades now take place in a non-descript red-brick low-rise office park in Mahwah, New Jersey. The NYSE building is devoid of most programmatic function. It is almost solely a signifier.
While it is obvious that architecture has always been a medium from which ideas are transmitted or reinforced, it is only in this new reality that function can become disjunctive in relation to the image of the building. In fact, it is amusing to think how many architectures are resident in the collective conscious, yet have no physical presence at all.
