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Building as Sign: Architecture in the Image Economy

‘Building as Sign’ was presented as a conference paper at ‘On the Image’ at UCLA, December 2010. Following a double-blind peer review process the paper was published in the International Journal of the Image. The article provides an examination of the subsumation of traditional architectural orders by the proliferation of the image in a branded and globalised urban condition. The work is concerned with the forces or conditions of urbanism that are intrinsic to the supermodern conurbation and attempts, for the first time, to define a historic context within the visual arts and architecture. To research the paper field studies were conducted in New York and London supported by Travel Award from the Manchester Society of Architects. The work takes Baudrillard’s and Jameson’s notion of ‘kaleidoscopic urbanism’ and applies their near future descriptions to the specific context of built form. The generic nature of a considerable amount of the built environment means that it is important for architects and scholars of architecture to enage with the ‘undesigned’ as much as the designed and this article presents an original method and nonmeclature for the analysis of such. The article presents an understanding of the value of ‘image’, ‘sign’ and ‘object’ in a contemporary image driven economy outside of architecture and translates these values as potential mechanisms for architectural intervention that has a dialogue with this superficial and imposed context. The article proposes an original exoteric view of architecture that is not concerned directly with built form, but with the forces that act upon built form and thus can be seen to ‘shape’ our cities more than they are ‘designed’.