"The body, landscape, time all progressively disappear as scenes. And the same for public space: the theater of the social and theater of politics are both reduced more and more to a large soft body with many heads. Advertising in its new...dimension invades everything, as public space (the street, monument, market, scene) disappears. It realizes, or, if one prefers, it materializes in all its obscenity; it monopolizes public life in its exhibition... It is our only architecture today: great screens on which are reflected atoms, particles, molecules in motion. Not a public scene or true public space but gigantic spaces of circulation, ventilation and ephemeral connections."--Jean Baudrillard ^Ref.1

(1) As inhabitants of late twentieth-century America we daily encounter the ephemeral hyperreality that Baudrillard describes, but as architects we acknowledge the existence of this new kind of reality hardly at all. Architects tend to think in terms of concrete realities. We make things that enjoy a spatial and temporal existence; through form and material we might even hope to contribute to new modes of thinking about reality. Yet, for the most part, the ways in which we understand that reality are wholly inadequate to the post industrial age; our notions of time and space are nineteenth-century at best. As Walton Wriston, former chief executive officer of Citicorp, once pointed out: "...the 800 number and the piece of plastic have made time and space obsolete."

(2) The ecstatic flurry of media images and mass communication has created countless new hyperrealities, not of the concrete and the enduring, but of the ephemeral, the virtual and the ever- changing. This essay is a case in point, since it exists not as "text" (as it has existed for centuries, as finite and determined) but as "hypertext" within the unseen dimension of an electronic journal which occupies neither time nor space as these have been understood. The very mode of "existence" of Architronic belies our outmoded notions of time, space and the "real."

(3) The condition we call "postmodernity" may indeed be characterized by these radical transformations in the ways in which we think of time and space. Since time and space are the vehicles through which we perceive reality, as our perceptions of space and time change, so do our experiences of that reality. In the hyperreality of postmodernity, time and space seem paradoxically to be simultaneously absolute and relative. On the one hand, the smooth functioning of the global economic and commercial complexes require precise and absolute constructs of time and space. On the other hand, we experience more and more rapid communications and transportation and the demands for ever-increased growth and productivity in the workplace subjectively as a "shrinking" of the world and a relativizing compression of space and time.

(4) From the architectural perspective, the most immediate casualties of this temporal and spatial implosion have been "authentic" (or stable) senses of place and time. We tend to experience the "present" as something like the oscillatory space between two opposing mirrors in a department store dressing room: our reflections repeated to infinity into the dim recesses of the mirrors. The present moment is continuously recontextualized and flanked by past events and future circumstances in equally distant and alienated relations to our place in the "now." The present is insulated from the fatality of the future by the conceptual carapace of a "future" which seems to have little relation to present economic and political conditions, while at the same time, we need take no notice of historical events, since these are now safely "past."

(5) Likewise notions of "place" have been dislodged from the specificity of history and locale and have yielded to the kind of homogenized commodification that characterizes all of consumer society. Authentic "place" is systematically supplanted by the themepark architecture of abstract and ageographical Cyburbs and the imagistically powerful hyperspaces of those more-real-than- real instant-colonial-Williamsburgs or whatever.

(6) It is no mere coincidence that electronic media, advertising and the entertainment industries have a far better grasp of these new hyperreal experiences of time, space and place than do other disciplines, architecture included. This is because the principal concept through which these experiences are commodified and made consumable is "image." It is through the insubstantial qualities and mythic content of image that commodities are made to appeal to us as consumers. As images become decontextualized and liberated from the specificity of substance and place, they become free-floating and thus available for endless recycling. This is why appropriation is increasingly common in film and popular music, as well as in architecture.

(7) In light of this, the current popularity of architecture would appear in large part to be an effect of commodity fetishization, since it is largely preoccupied with style, fashion and image rather than, for example, substantial and social issues. Indeed, the purpose of much architecture would appear no longer to be the actual production of space, but instead those emblematic qualities of image, which are so very reproducible in glossy magazines.

(8) In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," ^Ref.2 Walter Benjamin argues that mechanical reproduction served to devalue the "aura" of authenticity and authority of the artwork, yet it seems that mediation actually has something of a reifying effect when it comes to image. Things become "more real" when endowed with the notoriety of reproduction and mass diffusion. To many architects, buildings do not even become "real" until published, and consequently, buildings are often designed with that mediation in mind. In some cases, the graphic flatness of buildings resembles nothing so much as an illustration of a building.

(9) The bottom line is that what we think of as "authentic" architectural experience is increasingly subordinated to the production of mediated meaning for and within the mass culture of the consumer marketplace. Although architects like to think of themselves as practitioners of the original and the substantial, they are increasingly pressed into service as Imagineers for the production of architectural commodity; the production of space is directed into the generation of new images for consumer culture. Half a century ago, Martin Heidegger suggested that we build because the need to dwell is in our nature. Do we now build because we consume?

(10) The political economy of mass consumption requires the predictability and indeed the reassurance of the series, and yet as individuals we find serial sameness abhorrent to us and offensive to our sensibilities. Therefore, although as consumers we take comfort in serial predictability, we seek to efface the evidence of serial production through simulated difference, or formal manipulation, or mildly regional inflection, or blandly historicized reference, or other simulacrum of authenticity and uniqueness. In countless corporate centers and cities, the endless nuance of variation of virtually indistinguishable office blocks and apartment buildings, attest to the ubiquity of the series, and to our attempts to deny it through minor differentiation.

(11) Likewise, in many respects, our urban planning amounts to commodity management and deterministic cause and effect behaviorism dissociated from the urban subject under the guise of aestheticized and rationalized classicism. Does the artificial variety of downtown malls, pricey boutiques and gentrified housing really constitute a viable urban realm, or are these elements of vast suburbanized shopping malls whose theme is "city?" We design for the city, but are we really so clear as to what the city is all about? Could it be that in the postindustrial economy, our notions of the city and its reserve population of workers are obsolete?

"By abandoning those populations that had become superfluous and unproductive, thanks to the advances of automation and the progress of tele-informatics, the crepuscular end of the providence-State would find a voluntary geography characterized by the bankrupting of all public assistance: the geopolitics of urgency, unemployment and destitution. Out of this would emerge the post-industrial and transpolitical destiny-State founded on threat, on apocalyptic risk as opposed to political enemies, the economic rival, the social adversary or partner. This would turn the tables on all History, for it would mean the end of the principles of territorial assembly and of the law of the city, and in which places, people and things became interchangeable at will."--Paul Virilio ^{Ref. 3}

(12) Despite its dire tones, Virilio's apocalyptic scenario is entirely plausible. Even within recent memory America has always grown towards the western frontier, where expansion took place at the threshold of civilization. Now this expansion has begun to recede and reverse itself, to fold back onto itself and into the new frontier within the declining inner city.

(13) Through our urban projects we seek to convince ourselves of urban rebirth through the signs of rejuvenation, while we attempt to stabilize reality by bringing to bear disembodied aesthetic standards of ethical and political "objectivity" on the cities we claim to remake. We may pretend to stability through the static and overdetermined forms and spaces of architecture, but the reception of the hyperreality of the postmodern environment, both concrete and virtual, is anything but static.

(14) But if we accept that hyperreality bespeaks a weakened and indeterminate condition of reality, must we dismiss this as an undesirable condition? Gianni Vattimo suggests that the hyperreal mode of indeterminacy and ambiguity might actually present a means of salvaging art, creativity and freedom from the sameness of market commodification, of avoiding, in Simmel's words, being "swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism?"

"The advent of the media enhances the inconstancy and superficiality of experience. In so doing, it runs counter to the kind of generalization of domination, insofar as it allows a kind of "weakening" of the very notion of reality, and thus a weakening of its persuasive force. The society of spectacle spoken of by the situationists is not simply a society of appearance manipulated by power; it is also the society in which reality presents itself as softer and more fluid, and in which experience can again acquire the characteristics of oscillation, disorientation and play."--Gianni Vattimo ^{Ref. 4}

(15) Thus, it would appear that the commodification and mediation lead to a loss of experiential and phenomenological authenticity. But we need not necessarily think of "authentic" experience in the romanticized and essential terms in which this might have been understood in late modernism. Instead, we might consider the authenticity of postmodern experience to derive from the very oscillation and indeterminacy which have characterized mass and electronic media. In other words, the characteristic particularity of those media's singular reception and interpretation by the individuals who constitute the "masses" might ironically resist the homogenizing tendencies of mass culture. No one can suppose that each individual has experienced quite the same version of reality. To this extent, hyperreality is specific and particular. Thus, the pursuit of "authenticity" might not be a matter of resisting the effects of electronic and mass media per se, but of exploiting their oscillatory, disorienting and hyperreal qualities to resist the collectivizing sameness of experience, thereby yielding a new definition of "authenticity" as the particularity of reception by the individual.

(16) The real challenge that hyperreality presents to architecture is not technical or aesthetic or even ideological; it is epistemological. Indeed, of all disciplines, it is architecture that most closely indicates the pervasive epistemological crisis of postmodern society. We cannot claim that as currently formulated, the bulk of architecture is in any way representative of the current state of knowledge. The challenge is to develop new ways of thinking: about culture, technology and the profession, not merely to illustrate these through formal manipulation. We might think of this new way of thinking as a kind of "soft" knowledge, not closed, objective, absolute and overdetermined, but subjective, situational, open and conditioned by its reception.

(17) Let us return to the subject of the electronic journal as a transformational body of knowledge. In this we have the possibility of an open, indeterminant text, and being indeterminate, it is more resistant to the generalizing tendency of the political economy of images. Certainly here the "written" word is not as stable as it once seemed. There is no singular topos or locus for this argument, indeed, it is nomadic, enjoying only "existence" as someone chooses through E-mail to bring it into temporal being.

(18) Architects might understand the architectural conditions and the implications of hyperreality through the model of the electronic hypertext. Hypertextuality suggests a way of considering architecture as a series of situational relations and responses. Once I push the "send" button on my keyboard and launch these words into the ether of the electronic network, it becomes truly a hypertext, effectively without origin, without beginning or end, constantly in flux and without author; we all become collaborators and co-authors. With the electronic journal it is possible to create a situational discourse whose content need not be static, finite or essentialized, but rather ultimately determined by the "reader." Likewise, as architects, perhaps the most we can do is to provide the dynamic MDNMsituations for people to play out their lives, rather than scripting their actions in minute detail or choreographing their interactions with mass culture. Could this be the emblem of a new situational architecture?

Ref.1: Jean Baudrillard, "The Ecstasy of Communication" in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA; Bay Press, 1983), pp. 129-130.

Ref.2: Included in: Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968).

Ref.3: Paul Virilio, "The Lost Dimension" in Semiotext(e) (New York: Semiotext(e) Publishers, 1991), p. 124.

Ref.4: Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 59-60.

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