The Age of Spectacle: Adventures in Architecture and the 21st-Century City

Author: Tom Dyckhoff
Year: 2017 (Penguin Random House)
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/dyckhoff-2017-age-of-spectacle.md

Summary

Architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff recounts the transformation of architecture and the city since the 1970s into the "age of spectacle" — the era of the "Wowhaus," of iconic, flamboyant buildings designed to dazzle, linked to the rise of global free-market neoliberalism and to architecture's shift from the public to the private sector. Interweaving his own autobiography with reporting, he argues that "form is the function," that cities have been gentrified for the rich, and that a cult of the image has replaced criticism. He offers two calls to arms: an architecture that engages people in how it is made, and one that is truthful about its politics and economics.

Key Claims

• The Wowhaus / age of spectacle: "Strange, flamboyant and spectacular-looking" buildings have become "the norm, rather than the exception"; "form does not ever follow function any more. Form is the function." Icons are "designed not just to house us, or school us, or heal us, but to impress us."
• Economics as the driver: "in the capitalist West since the 1970s, in the absence of any other unifying faith or ideology, architecture ... has come to serve what has filled the void: the free market"; "Flamboyance and spectacle is the inevitable result of a political-economic system that encourages individualism and competition."
• Architecture as media: following Baudrillard, Jameson, Colomina, "architecture became just another form of media, the building 'a mechanism of representation'." The postmodern style war "has been won by the architecture best able to communicate ... the most visible, the most thrilling, the most profitable."
• The cult of the image and the decline of criticism: the media/architecture "dizzying embrace of superlatives"; impartial criticism "has shrivelled away, and, in its place has come partial celebration"; "the conditions under which our new pleasuredomes are created remain obscured by the dazzle and spectacle."
• The star/starchitect and the hero-genius myth: the myth of the heroic genius (Ayn Rand's Fountainhead) obscures that architecture requires a vast team; architects "reinvented themselves ... as their business shifted sharply from the public to the private sector," becoming "stars and celebrities."
• City + gentrification: as the West deindustrialized, cities "have been born again ... have been gentrified"; "the richest live in the centre, while in many places the poor have been displaced to the suburbs."
• Critical method: influenced by Lefebvre and Harvey (space as produced/contested, not a neutral "frame") and Adrian Forty (architecture as process); "to really understand architecture, you must understand the power relations behind it ... follow the money." "We are all architects, of a kind."

Connections

Concepts: Spectacle · Iconic Architecture · Star Architecture · Neoliberal Metropolis · Everyday Architecture
Authors: Tom Dyckhoff · Guy Debord
Debates: Spectacle vs. Function · Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: Modernity's Opiate (Brott) · Creating the Bilbao Effect

Direct Quotes

"Form does not ever follow function any more. Form is the function."

"[I]n the capitalist West since the 1970s, in the absence of any other unifying faith or ideology, architecture ... has come to serve what has filled the void: the free market."

"[W]ithin architecture the consequence has been a culture, or cult, of the image. We look at dazzling new architecture, but we don't see it."

"To really understand architecture, you must understand the power relations behind it ... follow the money."

Open Questions

• Does the "age of spectacle" reading (Dyckhoff) converge with or diverge from Brott's Adornian critique and Bismarck's financialization account — is spectacle an economic epiphenomenon or an ideology in its own right?