Pop Theory: The Architecture of Late Night Shopping

Abstract

Inviting audiences into the late-night, precarious world of (photo)shopping, we explore the way in which the ghostly figures of the Photoshop world – its exhausted architects, indebted consumers, and the two-dimensional cut-outs that populate its spaces – are all put to use in a project of producing subjectivities through environments. Feminist critiques of visuality provide a basis in understanding the play between bodies and worlds that set this production in motion. By looking at the mechanics of “pre-occupation” that allow us to inhabit such images, we speculate: could a re-theorization of this most commercial of “extra-architectural services” (visualization) allow the activity of shopping be put to more radical use?

Keywords::

• visualization
• Photoshop
• feminist critique
• architecture
• representation

Notes

1 We borrow this term from Zoe Sofia, “Container Technologies,” Hypatia 15, no. 2 (2000): 181–200.

2 By “Photoshop montage,” we refer to the commercial architectural illustrations created using Adobe Photoshop software for the purposes of marketing a project to a client or public. Generally, such illustrations are composite images and include as one layer a rendered image taken from a digital model of a proposed building or environment.

3 One of the most cited texts, even today, remains Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” [1973], in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 833–844. Another important text within this critique is: Rosalyn Deutsche, “Boys Town,” Environment and Planning D 9 (1991): 5–30.

4 Of seminal importance to this discussion is, of course, the work of Donna Haraway. For instance, see Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 275–299.

5 Alice Friedman, “Architecture, Authority, and the Female Gaze: Planning and Representation in the Early Modern Countryhouse,” Assemblage 18 (August 1992): 43.

6 Monica Degen, Claire Melhuish, and Gillian Rose, “Producing Place Atmospheres Digitally: Architecture, Digital Visualisation Practices and the Experience Economy,” Journal of Consumer Culture 17, no. 1 (2017): 3–24.

7 Mark Dorrian, Writing on the Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation (London: I.B. Taurus, 2015).

8 We are all professionally involved in some way in the production of visualizations and as such cannot claim a position of “observer” in any case. Both Rutger Sjögrim and Fredrik Torisson have worked as practicing architects, and have working extensively with commercial visualization. Helen Runting and Sjögrim have taught elective courses in practices and theories of visualization within the Master’s of Architecture at the KTH, Stockholm, in 2015 and 2016.

9 The area was subject to a range of critiques across the popular media for a range of reasons. Not only was it a key example in the (ongoing) debate over the merits of perimeter block morphologies, but also known for lack of planning for children and for lack of sustainable consumption behavior. For an example of the scholarly critique, see, for instance, Karin Bradley, Anna Hult, and Göran Cars, “From Eco-modernizing to Political Ecologizing,” in Sustainable Stockholm: Exploring Urban Sustainability in Europe’s Greenest City, ed. Jonathan Metzger and Amy Rader Olsson (London: Routledge, 2012), 168–194.

10 For a more extended discussion of the role played by anticipation within the performativity of the architectural image, see Helen Runting and Fredrik Torisson, “Anticipation and Other Affective Productions: Theorizing the Architectural Project in Action,” in After Effects: Theories and Methodologies of Architectural Research, Vol. 2: Architecture in Effect, ed. Hélène Frichot with Gunnar Sandin and Bettina Schwalm (New York: Actar, forthcoming 2017).

11 Authors’ own translation; “De ritar lyxhusen med industrikänsla” [They are Designing Luxury Architecture with an Industrial Feeling], Sjöstadsliv (January 29, 2013), https://www.sjostadsliv.se/hammarby_news/de-ritar-lyxhusen-med-industrikansla/

12 “Enhoused” is a made-up word describing the state of being “in-house” (against, perhaps, one’s will).

13 Ross Bryant, “The Addition of Real-World Imperfections is Taking Architectural Visualisation to the Next Level,” Dezeen (August 12, 2013), emphasis added, https://www.dezeen.com/2013/08/12/henry-goss-on-architectural-visualisations/ (accessed accessed March 6, 2017).

14 We checked the websites of a number of the most well-known architectural visualization offices and “head-counted” their teams: on February 24, 2017, at the Bergen-based Mir, two of the thirteen people depicted as workers were women (15.4%); of the team listed at the Stockholm-based Walk the Room, two of nine were women (22.2%); of the Paris- and Los Angeles-based Luxigon, this was eight of twenty-four (33.3%); of the Paris-based Artefactorylab, this was one of nine (11.1%); and of the German office Bloom, this was up to nine of twenty-eight (32.1%). We also called the international Vyonyx, who have one woman of nine workers (11.1%). Whilst this method is hardly rigorous enough to provide statistically significant data, it begins to paint a picture: European architectural visualization firms tend to be characterized by a gender imbalance wherein less than one-third of their team tend to be women.

15 Alice Friedman. “Girl Talk: Marion Mahony Griffin, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Oak Park Studio,” Places Journal (June 2011), https://placesjournal.org/article/marion-mahony-griffin/ (accessed March 6, 2017).

16 Runting and Torisson, “Anticipation and Other Affective Productions.”

17 Jean Baudrillard. Selected Writings, trans. Mark Poster (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1988): 177.

18 For an expanded definition of the concept of affect, and the way it “moves us,” see Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–25.

19 We introduced the term “after image” to describe the lingering performative effects of architectural images in relation to Bjarke Ingels Group’s 8 House; Helen Runting and Fredrik Torisson, “Yes Boss! Towards a Projective Critique of BIG’s 8 House,” Drawing On 1 (2015), https://drawingon.org/uploads/issues/IS01(1).pdf (accessed July 20, 2017).

20 Daniel Koch, “A Cortege of Ghostly Bodies: Abstraction, Prothesis, and the Logic of the Mannequin,” in Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, ed. Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson, and Helen Runting (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2017).

21 Ibid.

22 The construction of subjectivities (and desires) by capitalism through “dispositifs” and “machinic enslavement”; Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014), 12–13.

23 As Judith Butler famously explains, “the critical task is, rather, to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions [of identity], to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them”; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge 2006 [1999]), 201.

24 Such a distinction is, of course, itself dependent on who is looking, how their subjectivity is constructed.