The Image As an Architectural Material

Abstract

There is at present a fashion for application of images onto building facades. The most common line of comment on this phenomenon is to fetishize the image. According to such accounts, images have changed their status or locale, and become monstrous hybrids of human consciousness and Internet. They have come to be on buildings through some will or teleology of their own, lessening materiality of building and threatening culture of architecture. Or so story goes. Few remark on another obvious aspect of this trend, which is that of relatively recent availability and rapid uptake of technical means for application of images onto buildings. As early as nineteen forties, J L Sert, F Leger and S Geidion were calling for a new civic iconography of kinetic sculpture, which was to include fireworks and large-scale projection and murals. None of this was very practical, however, until last few years when mega-screens and large-scale banner printing became available. Similarly, we have only recently gone beyond nineteenth century techniques in etching of images into glass and masonry. To a certain extent, these two observations reverberate within work of Walter Benjamin and his famous attempt to argue at a most general level for an interrelation of histories of technology and mentality.