American Glamour 2.0: architecture, spectacle, and social media

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this article, I argue that the layered notion of glamour, a term familiar from mid-twentieth-century film, architecture and popular culture, has increasing relevance in today’s hyperpublic world of social media, internet image-construction, and market segmentation. The creation and consumption of Hollywood images and slick advertising copy has long involved processes of narrative construction, projection, performance, and self-assessment that hold significant parallels for our culture of customized Instagram feeds, “Facebook envy” and other forms of digital communication, reception, and surveillance. Increasingly, contemporary public space is being shaped as a platform for the production and consumption of such data; a concomitant increase both in the development of techniques for surveillance and in the creation of defensible private spaces – both domestic and spiritual – creates new challenges for designers of both physical and online environments.