The Image As an Architectural Material

There is at present a fashion for the application of images onto building facades. The most common line of comment on this phenomenon is to fetishize "the image." According to such accounts, images have changed their status, or locale, and become monstrous hybrids of human consciousness and the Internet. They have come to be on buildings through some will or teleology of their own, lessening the materiality of building and threatening the culture of architecture. ¹ Or so the story goes. Few remark on another obvious aspect of this trend, which is that of the relatively recent availability and rapid uptake of the technical means for the application of images onto buildings. As early as the 1940s, José Luis Sert, Fernand Léger, and Sigfried Giedion were calling for a new civic iconography of kinetic sculpture, which was to include fireworks and large-scale projection and murals. ² None of this was very practical, however, until the last few years when megascreens and large-scale banner printing became available. Similarly, we have only recently gone beyond nineteenth-century techniques in the etching of images into glass and masonry. To a certain extent, these two observations reverberate within the work of Walter Benjamin and his famous attempt to argue at a most general level for an interrelation of histories of technology and mentality. ³

Benjamin understood vision as containing an opposition between optical and tactile perception that related to the articulation of art and architecture. ⁴ This idea, developed to describe the role of cinema in the 1930s, undoubtedly has something to tell us about more recent phenomena such as theme parks, where images become tangible, and the Internet, which has made tactility the principle of the computer screen. Yet Benjamin's ideas cannot be used simply to describe the present circumstance. To do so would be to forget the historicity of those ideas, and to indulge a greater essentialism in which architects and artists seek to describe the image as nature, existing outside of art. ⁵ Typically, such an approach supposes that popular image culture is a natural outgrowth of perception, which develops unselfconsciously. I argue that the image has indeed changed for architects, but not because of changes in human perception, perceptual technology, or some putatively unconscious popular image culture. The topics, themes, and materials on which cultural disciplines such as architecture work are not given so directly. The logic of architecture is an internal logic, a nonconceptual yet rational set of operations that develop historically from past architectural issues. What architecture works on is not the present problematic of the image, but rather the earlier forms of this problem, such as the relation of cinema to art and architecture that Benjamin described in the 1930s. This has become internalized and formalized as a thematic and indeed as a repertoire of techniques. As Theodor Adorno says, "Form is sedimented content." ⁶ The images applied to buildings today relate not to the Internet, but to the social and technical context of the arts in the 1930s. It is this dialectic across history that makes architecture so useless in any current program to reconcile culture. Yet, it is this uselessness that opens a critical dialectic in the present between, on the one hand, an apparently free, aesthetic use of applied image and, on the other, the raw facts of the commercial value of images in the new electronic capitalism.

My proposal is that for much of this century the image has been a technique or tool of architecture, whereas now it has become a "material." By this I mean to put aside the relation of images to perception and ideas in the mind, and also to put aside the issue of how image technologies might replicate or change such mental relations. Rather, I am concerned with the materiality that the image possesses, both actually and conceptually, through being taken up as "stuff" that can be used in the making...