5.1 Mimesis and Anti-Mimesis
“The process of determining ‘Mimesis’ and ‘Anti-Mimesis’ to justify the motives of movies (or art) is a redundant exercise as ‘in a pervasive game of mirrors reflecting each other; art imitates life, life imitates art, art imitates art and life imitates life”
-(Baudrillard, 2010)
Jean Baudrillard was one of the most influential post-modern theorists, who regularly commented on works of fiction and cinema, particularly American cinematic fiction. Baudrillard is seen as a pioneer of French postmodern theory through his combination of social theory and philosophy in unique ways as well as developing a distinctive writing style. He also commented prolifically on changes in the ways that media and information are consumed, as well as the impact of digital technology on the formation of new social orders leading to mutations of social interactions amongst humans[1]. During Baudrillard’s shift from economic theory to technology and mass communication he began commenting on pre-modern, modern and postmodern societies. (Purdue University, 2011)
On the topic of postmodern societies, Baudrillard says that they are organized around a simulation. By simulation, Baudrillard is referring to the idea that society simulates reality as seen in film and TV. According to Baudrillard, the current culture that consumes Science Fiction has come to appreciate the fiction over the real. This representation is what he calls the ‘simulacra’, a hyperreality where the audience has lost its ability to tell the difference between the real and the simulation. (Hegarty, 2008)
“Baudrillard claims that henceforth the masses seek spectacle and not meaning” (Ritzer, 2008)
This makes the perfect case for why creators of art and media must pay more attention to the consequences of their design. In the postmodern world, we live in media and fiction have a far greater impact than what they have ever had in the history of humanity.
Nathan Shedroff in his book ‘Make it so: interaction design lessons from Science Fiction’ compiles various lessons contemporary designers can learn from the constraint-free design of Science Fiction interfaces. One such lesson is from a Motorola cellular device, the MicroTAC. (Shedroff and Noessel, 2012) (Book introduced through Roman Mars’s brilliant podcast — 99 Per cent Invisible)
A MicroTAC 9800X (Padluck, 2007)
The MicroTAC was a cellular phone first manufactured in 1980 by the telecommunication company Motorola. The phone was meant to be a state-of-the-art device with an innovative design for the mouthpiece that flipped down. However, when the phone was released, it wasn’t well received. This failure baffled the MicroTAC designers who could not understand why a well-designed futuristic device failed in the market.
To understand what went wrong the Motorola designers took the phone to the Argonne National Laboratory (A.N.L.) for their advice. The engineers at A.N.L. immediately pointed out an inherent flaw in the design of the phone and said they had made the phone the wrong way. Rather than open down, the mouthpiece ought to open upwards like the communication device used on Star Trek.
Star Trek Phone (Gene, 1966)
This revelation lead to the Motorola StarTAC, the first ever clamshell/flip mobile phone in 1996. The phone was an immediate success selling approximately 60 million devices. In a demonstration of Baudrillian simulacrum, life had once again imitated art as it will always do. Science Fiction can have enormous impacts on the way design is perceived, be it industrial design or Architecture.
In the field of Architecture, Archigram has served the same purpose that speculative Science Fiction has served for various ideas (Anderson, n.d.). For instance, the Pompidou centre in Paris, France, one of the most important and influential post world war monuments of Architecture has been applauded for its innovative use of building services into its facade and the idea of not shunning and hiding service elements within the building. Another aspect of this inversion is that it allows for mare functionally usable space by freeing the floor spaces inside to be used for various exhibitions inside. The Pompidou centre express ideas of transparency and openness in support of the public’s right to protest and express their opinions within a safe space in a square.(Hegarty, 2008)
However, in a case of life imitating art, an anti-mimesis in architectural took place with the concepts explored in the designs philosophy of the Pompidou centre. Rogers and Piano took cues of inspiration from the doyens of cultural criticism in the world of Architecture, Archigram. (Barrell, 2016)
Pompidou Centre (Barrell, 2016)
Archigram — Plugin City (Cook, 1964)
The Architecture of the Pompidou centre of the 70’s is an homage to and manifestations of the incredible visions created by the mavericks at archigram. In the 60’s. Apart from the Pompidou centre, archigram has gone ahead to inspire numerous architects and designers as well as movements in Architecture and design such as the visual aesthetic of Blobism inspired by archigram’s vision for walking cities, instant cities and the Sin Centre.
What archigram did in creating memes of unbuildable projects is clear out space for what one-day conceptual technology will eventually enable, and this is what all Architecture must attempt to embody, to inspire original thought and emotion.(Hegarty, 2008)
5.2 Trends in Architecture
“Effective prediction is a sketch of large, inexorable forces, Necessary to construct what in the 1960s was called the SFW — the Surprise-Free World. What the world would look like if all the dominating trends continued.”
-Charles Jencks (Jencks, 1971b)
Charles Jencks’s 1971 book ‘Architecture 2000’ was the author’s first solo book, a first of more than twenty-four works not including those that he edited or co-edited.(Haddad, 2009)
Structural Diagram 1920–2000 (Jencks, 1971)
‘Architecture 2000 — Predictions and Methods’ begins with a commentary on the past and the contemporary. From understanding the past, the book moves towards identifying future trends and making predictions based on what Jencks calls ‘inexorable trends’. According to Jencks, these trends are driven by six major architectural traditions that remain more or less autonomous. Trends in architecture tend to stabilize around a common core. (Figure 27)
Model of teleological development (Jencks, 1971)
Jencks also proposes a ‘Model for teleological development’ — a five-stage process through which an intention in the mind of the architect or designer goes on to achieve fruition. through which an intention in the mind of the architect or designer goes on to achieve fruition. The first step according to Jencks is the conception of an intention of a final goal in the mind of the architect or designer. The designer then would survey the possible solutions and build up various models to substantiate his claim, further, with or without luck the designer would have to create, invent or discover a new solution to the problem he is trying to address. This solution will then compete with other solutions, continue a process of refinement and perfection and will be ultimately evaluated both for its good and bad consequences.
Evolutionary Tree to the year 2000 (Jencks, 1971)
Drawing of the Hunchback of Notre Dame (Merson, 1846)
In a video essay titled “The next era of Architecture”, Evan Puschak discusses the historical trends in Architecture and the prophecy made in the ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame’ where Hugo says, “the book will kill the edifice”. He points out to chapter II, book V in the ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame’ to the point where Victor Hugo pauses the narrative to draw the reader’s attention to the ancient significance of Architecture. Hugo speaks about the tradition of cultures inscribing their stories by joining stones to form words and how eventually they wrote books. Architecture has historically evolved with human thought to the point where the thoughts were no longer scribed in stone and rather written in books.(Hugo discussed by Puschak, 2014)
Hugo believed that architecture had now come to a point where architects could not create anything new. According to Hugo the coinciding of the Gothic period with the invention of the printing press would mark the Gothic style as a point of impasse in architecture.
For centuries, Architecture was the language of human civilisation, “the great handwriting of the human race” as Hugo puts it, but the advent of the printing press made it cheaper and easier to communicate this language (Puschak, 2014).In the past, the identity of society was expressed in stone. A durable material that could only be dislodged through large natural events. The further back in time we go the larger these expressions seem to be. From the Egyptian pyramids to the Taj Mahal, every one of these architectural monuments is an expression of power and grandeur by the ruler commissioning it, and rulers they all were. As we come closer to the present in the timeline of human expression we see the need for self-expression spreads to the masses, leading to rapidly changing styles of self-expression through architecture. And as theorized by Hugo, the printing press was the ultimate form of self-expression at the time. Books were far more powerful than stone. A building can be brought down with an earthquake, but books were made up of ideas, and an idea is impossible to demolish.
Now, as technology has advanced leading into the digital age, accessibility to different media of communication has increased exponentially, more so with the introduction of the internet. Individuals no longer need to invest fortunes to imprint their identities on stone; instead, they can express themselves instantly through social media. Hugo feared the ease of communication and accessibility to the masses that books would provide. His fears were not of the book killing off architecture but technology diminishing literature, the literature of past written in stone or the literature of Hugo’s time, written in books.
Timeline of Internet Penetration, ((Graham and Straumann, 2014) (Data Source: : World Bank’s Worldwide Development Indicators Project)
This increase in accessibility of communication and exchange of thought, has reduced the relevance of Architecture or the relevance of architectural styles in which a society would collectively invest in. In the past, the utilitarian purpose of Architecture was a minimum requirement of the built environment but now, expression through Architecture usually ends at this utilitarian purpose of sheltering the occupants from the elements and aiding the functions within.
Jencks’s model of ‘Teleological development’ (Figure 27) enforces a methodology in which steps two and three (Intention of goal and model prepared) are in the hands of the designer to the most part, but in step four (diffusion + selective influences), selective pressures influence the hand of the designer to obey the norm.
Modernism was the first of the architectural trends to achieve this. The “less is more” philosophy spearheaded by minimalist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe gave the world an inkling of what is to be expected of Architecture. Post Modernism attempted to revive the embellishments of Architecture by bringing back the ornamentation. However, the rise of the digital age has rendered any excess in design to be a luxury, reserved for one per cent of the privileged population of the world.
Architecture epochs (Voorthuis, 2008)
Analysing the duration of architectural epochs over the past millennia (Figure 30), it can be seen that over the years the duration of the architectural epochs has reduced rapidly. Styles that would last centuries reduced to decades and now are a few years long.
5.2.2 Architecture in the age of pluralism
As the epochs of styles in Architecture have grown shorter over the decades, the current trend in Architecture has resulted in one of pluralism. This is abundantly evident from contemporary icons of Architecture by architects such as Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Norman Foster and other architects that are iconic in their standing, there is no architectural style. Charles Jencks in his article for the Architecture review called “In what style shall we build?” writes about trends in Architecture in response to ‘Farshid Moussavi’s’ 2014 book, ‘The function of style’. Jencks says in the favour of adopting pluralism,
“The strongest reason to support pluralism is that great Architecture like great art deals with a myriad of opposite values which it attempts to confront and present if not always reconcile; multivalent or deep art is always a measure of this quality.”- (Jencks, 2015)
Jencks compares pluralism in Architecture to food by comparing its appeal to the appeal of variety as observed in food. Rather than “ground styles and the aesthetic appearance of buildings in the micropolitics of every day”(Moussavi, 2014), Jencks celebrates the ability of the architect to acknowledge social complexities and design spaces by adapting to these complexities. No one style must be expected to satisfy the wants of a multi-cultural global society rather we must embrace the pluralism in the designs around us just as we celebrate the pluralism of the society around us (Jencks, 2015).
As the capability of personal expression increases so will the pluralism in styles of architecture and design.
Conclusion
Dissertation Network Diagram (Author, 2018)
The topics discussed in this dissertation range from a broad domain of ideas. By establishing Science fiction as a valid tool for social commentary through the values of critical theory, Sci-Fi and Sci-Fi Architecture can be seen as credible visions of society’s aspirations and issues. It is more than just a means to entertain the audience. This dissertation has demonstrated the predictive abilities of science fiction and also the effect it can have on real-world events. On further exploring concepts of Sci-Fi; the dissertation employs the concepts of a Utopia and Dystopia to emphasise the value of science fiction as a tool to interpret social issues and drive urban discourse.
The value of sci-fi concepts like cognitive estrangement is demonstrated in creating architecture. This shows that the creative process is one of interoperability. The processes of science fiction perfectly apply to architecture and can further be extended to any creative design process. Identifying a ‘novum’ to distinguish design helps the designer make a wholesome argument for the logic followed in the design process, resulting in a richer design.
Feedback mechanism of hyperreality. (Author, 2018)
The architecture that is produced collectively contributes to the hyperreality. The feedback to this hyperreality comes in the form of Science Fiction; if the feedback cycle is not addressed by correcting the errors made in contemporary Architecture, the errors flow back into the hyperreality (Figure 32). It is a cycle of mimesis and anti-mimesis that determines trends in Architecture. Positive responses result in positive trends, and negative responses result in negative ones.
In the past, self-expression was a privilege; available to those with means, and they expressed themselves with monumental Architecture. However, as the cost of self-expression through Architecture no longer was feasible, the masses shifted to a more economical means of self-expression. Science Fiction fills the void left in Architecture by the advent of the printing press, coupled with the internet and social media, as they are a more convenient and efficient form of self-expression. It helps us to achieve what traditional Architecture does not allow us. Through Sci-Fi, we can experience our aspirations and goals and dream of an architecture that may never be achieved.
[1] Baudrillard’s body of work spans a period of over five decades and without doubt the topics he worked on shifted along the years. Though he eventually switched from commenting on economic theory to technology, he would always come back the concepts of simulation and simulacra and its effects on the postmodern condition. (Purdue University, 2011)
[2] “Other” in the title of the chapter in the Hunchback of Notre Dame points towards the Notre Dame Cathedral. This has been debated to imply “religion”, but the cathedral is the architectural embodiment of the religion, a grandiose monument to celebrate religion.