ambience and attention

I’m back from my first day at MIT, where I’m moonlighting by filling in for Mark Jarzombek, teaching his history of theory class. MIT was great and I’m very much looking forward to my Tuesdays in Cambridge.

I’d like to juxtapose two unlikely texts: Clive Thompson’s piece in this Sunday’s New York Times on the “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” and Walter Benjamin’s classic “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility.”

Let’s begin with Benjamin. As a scholar in matters of architecture and place, the most crucial line in his essay is

“Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.”

Architecture, in other words, is understood through habit, through a distracted awareness of the ambient environment not through contemplation. In this it is a very different kind of art from, say, painting or poetry. 

But as Thompson points out, our ambient attention is increasingly being occupied by digital media, from a constant stream of Facebook status updates, Twitter tweets, and SMS messages. I should add that the iPod also figures in this, painting a soundscape on the environment that creates an emotional ambience that simply overwhelms any architectural environment (imagine how your perception of architecture changes due to your music choice… think, for a moment, of the Boredoms at the Salk Institute or the soundtrack to Mary Poppins at Robin Hood Gardens). The ambient awareness of our architectural environment that Benjamin described is waning, as we find ourselves distracted by other media.

In this light, couldn’t we see the compulsion to form in recent neo-avant-garde architecture as a salvage operation, a move meant to ensure that architecture can still be visible to the senses. If distraction won’t do, then fascination will. But is this ecstasy of form sufficient? The modernists suggested that the spread of modernism in the ambient environment would lead to a rewriting of the sensorium, helping us deal with the split between our hyperdeveloped reason and atrophied emotional intelligence. If architecture cedes the ambient environment to technology, what of architecture’s ambitions?

I’m back from my first day at MIT, where I’m moonlighting by filling in for Mark Jarzombek, teaching his history of theory class. MIT was great and I’m very much looking forward to my Tuesdays in Cambridge.

I’d like to juxtapose two unlikely texts: Clive Thompson’s piece in this Sunday’s New York Times on the “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” and Walter Benjamin’s classic “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility.”

Let’s begin with Benjamin. As a scholar in matters of architecture and place, the most crucial line in his essay is

“Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.”

Architecture, in other words, is understood through habit, through a distracted awareness of the ambient environment not through contemplation. In this it is a very different kind of art from, say, painting or poetry. 

But as Thompson points out, our ambient attention is increasingly being occupied by digital media, from a constant stream of Facebook status updates, Twitter tweets, and SMS messages. I should add that the iPod also figures in this, painting a soundscape on the environment that creates an emotional ambience that simply overwhelms any architectural environment (imagine how your perception of architecture changes due to your music choice… think, for a moment, of the Boredoms at the Salk Institute or the soundtrack to Mary Poppins at Robin Hood Gardens). The ambient awareness of our architectural environment that Benjamin described is waning, as we find ourselves distracted by other media.

In this light, couldn’t we see the compulsion to form in recent neo-avant-garde architecture as a salvage operation, a move meant to ensure that architecture can still be visible to the senses. If distraction won’t do, then fascination will. But is this ecstasy of form sufficient? The modernists suggested that the spread of modernism in the ambient environment would lead to a rewriting of the sensorium, helping us deal with the split between our hyperdeveloped reason and atrophied emotional intelligence. If architecture cedes the ambient environment to technology, what of architecture’s ambitions?

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