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Architecture: Between Spectacle and Use by A. Vidler

Article in British Journal of Sociology · June 2010


DOI: 10.2307/41472387

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396 Book reviews

1 panoramic account of Marxism in our times. All of which begs the question of why these
2 three modest essays left the pages of the NLR in the first place.

3 Alejandro Colás
4 Birkbeck College, University of London
5

6 Vidler, A. (ed.) Architecture: Between Spectacle and Use Yale University Press and Clark
7 Art Institute 2008 184 pp. £16.99 (paperback)

8 Despite the boom in the sociology of culture in recent decades and despite its increasing
9 prominence in discussions of popular culture, the most visible of the arts – architecture –
10 remains largely ignored by sociologists. This collection of papers from a Conference in 2005
11 at the Clark Art Institute, Massachusetts, gives plenty of good reasons why sociologists
12 should pay more attention to architecture. As the editor Anthony Vidler explains in his
13 introduction to the book, the idea for the Clark Conference came from Hal Foster’s critique
14 of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao (probably the most famous building since the Sydney
15 Opera House). Foster, elaborating on Debord’s definition in Society of the Spectacle that
16 spectacle was ‘capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image’ (p. viii), argued
17 that Gehry’s building (the most prominent, but one among many examples) shows that
18 spectacle is ‘an image accumulated to the point where it becomes capital’ (p. viii). While this
19 debate might seem arcane, Vidler successfully puts it in the context of Weber’s disenchant-
20 ment of the world, Benjamin’s loss of aura, and what he himself labels ‘the cultural ideology
21 of mass society’ (p. xi) – ideas that most sociologists will recognize. The Guggenheim
22 museum in Bilbao, completed in 1997, has been credited with transforming this declining
23 industrial city into one of the most sought-after tourist destinations in Europe and of raising
24 the cultural and political profile of the Basque country. While the economic impact of the
25 museum might have been somewhat exaggerated by the Basque authorities who have
26 invested millions of Euros in the project, there is no doubt that the Guggenheim-induced
27 ‘Bilbao effect’ has made the city and the Guggenheim Foundation exemplars for urban
28 boosters all over the world who wish to put their own cities on the global map. In its first two
29 years of operation around 8,500 press items (most with images of the museum) appeared,
30 more than half outside Spain. As I write (September 2009) a google search turns up 861,000
31 sites for Guggenheim Bilbao. Something is clearly going on. Foster concludes the volume
32 with an trenchant essay on ‘Image Building’, arguing that architecture has taken its place in
33 Pop culture, just as Pop culture became the official culture of the avant-garde of the right.
34 Archigram, Venturi et al’s Learning from Las Vegas, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Rem
35 Koolhaas, various versions of postmodernism and, of course, Guggenheim Bilbao (illustrated
36 with a spectacular and fairly unusual image taken from the street rather than the river), are
37 all enlisted to support his conclusion that such spectacle architecture ‘is a winning formula
38 for museums, companies, cities, states, and other corporate entities that want to be perceived,
39 through instant icons, as global players’ (p. 175). While Foster rather sidesteps them, Vidler
40 precisely raises the twin questions that need to be raised here: what are the aesthetic
41 implications of this critique and does it condemn all contemporary iconic architecture?
42 (And, of course, the same question can be asked for any cultural form).
43 Sandwiched between Vidler’s setting out of the problem and Foster’s stern reply are ten
44 papers, some more accessible than others. Those most likely to be of interest to sociologists
45 include Smith on the Sydney Opera House, the first great late-modern instance of spectacle
46 architecture and, apparently, the only contemporary building that the activists of Situationist
47 International approved of. Kurt Foster explores Scharoun’s Berlin and Gehry’s Los Angeles

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(2)
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Book reviews 397

1 (Disney) concert halls, arguing that concert halls are moving from theatre spaces to arenas,
2 with implications for architecture, music and urban space. A recurring theme in the book,
3 unsurprisingly, is the thesis that the architecture becomes the image. Dorrian in ‘The Way the
4 World sees London’ (quoted from the website of the London Eye) juxtaposes Iain Sinclair’s
5 dystopian Sorry Meniscus against the marketing of the major millennium projects to great
6 effect; Colomina expands on her well-known argument that: ‘Modern architecture is all
7 about the mass-media image. That’s what makes it modern . . . ’ (p. 60); Goldhagen shows
8 how monumentality works as a pictorial still with some telling illustrations from Brasilia,
9 Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York and the World Trade Center.
10 One of the most challenging contributions is Carpo’s analysis of ‘Nonstandard Morality:
11 Digital Technology and its Discontents’ which thoroughly demonstrates that the new divi-
12 sion of labour made possible by CAD-CAM means that a new era of digital artisanship has
13 arrived – he illustrates this with pictures of the very expensive ninety-nine unique Alessi
14 coffee and tea towers (pots) made by Greg Lynn, and Bernard Cache’s Tables Projectives.
15 Digital technology overcomes the problem of identicality, though perhaps not entirely of
16 aura and authenticity. Nevertheless, the inflated exchange value of these similar but unique
17 luxury items is a powerful argument in itself. Carpo connects this intriguingly with the work
18 of Rem Koolhaas, from S/M/L/XL to the CCTV Tower in Beijing, but lack of space prevents
19 me from going there in this review. Vidler in his own essay on architecture’s expanded field
20 argues that as architecture gets more sculptural, sculptors get more architectural. This leads
21 him to some interesting speculations on the connections between architecture and its envi-
22 ronments and the idea of ecological aesthetics, but he too seems to run out of space.
23 In the end, Debord’s theory of the society of the spectacle and Foster’s critique or revision
24 of it seem equally totalizing, no doubt explaining why the debate has proved so attractive to
25 those of one of the many postmodernist persuasions still bubbling away near to the surface
26 of contemporary cultural studies. The merit of this book is that it poses some fundamental
27 questions and often engages with these questions with convincing concrete examples and
28 crucially, in this field, with some excellent images (though too many are too small). This does
29 permit readers/viewers to come to their own judgments about whether or not these buildings
30 and spaces are beautiful or uplifting or appropriate to their surroundings, all questions that
31 are both aesthetic and sociological. The fact that a building is the result of processes intrinsic
32 to the culture-ideology of consumerism within the constraints of capitalist globalization (or
33 spectacular) does not necessarily mean that it is ugly, degrading and inappropriate to its
34 surroundings, or vice versa.
35 While this book is likely to be a tough read for most sociologists (and, I suspect, for many
36 architects) it thoroughly deserves a place on the shelf of anyone interested in the ongoing
37 controversies swirling around architecture, urban life, image and reality, and consumer
38 society.

39 Leslie Sklair
40 London School of Economics and Political Science
41

42 Wagner, J. Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of Modernity


43 Polity Press 2009 307 pp £55 (hardback) £18.99 (paperback)

44 Every attempt to define modernity has to address the problem that it is both a concept and
45 a historical condition. It has been variously equated with modern society, or with a process
46 of modernization, or with a particular temperament or attitude concerning the specificity of
47 the present. The distinction between modern and non-modern societies, or societies that are

British Journal of Sociology 61(2) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2010

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