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Reception and Exposure in

Architecture, Film and Television
Tom O'Regan
Published online: 06 May 2014.

To cite this article: Tom O'Regan (2013) Reception and Exposure in Architecture, Film and
Television, Architectural Theory Review, 18:3, 272-278, DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2014.875611

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 Architectural Theory Review, 2013
Vol. 18, No. 3, 272–278, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2014.875611

TOM O’ REGAN
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RECEPTION AND EXPOSURE IN

ARCHITECTURE, FILM AND TELEVISION

As architecture becomes more concerned with

how to better understand, accommodate, and
use the public’s increasing exposure to and
engagement with architecture in its practice, it
increasingly encounters the sorts of issues film
and television have long grappled with. In this
article, I ask what, if anything, can architecture
learn from film and television’s apparatus of
reception and its use of the idea of exposure? I
will answer this question with reference to the
continuities and discontinuities among recep-
tion and production systems in architecture,
film, and television. The article ends by
speculating on what a ratings-like system of
measuring and giving the public a voice in
architecture might do to how it is discussed and
performed.

Q 2014 Taylor & Francis

 ATR 18:3-13 RECEPTION AND EXPOSURE IN ARCHITECTURE, FILM AND TELEVISION
Introduction
Architecture is in the reception business. Like
the work of filmmakers and television
producers, the professional architect’s work
is publicly exhibited. Its public reception
varies along a continuum: it is variously
lambasted, admired, and ignored. Architects
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and film and television producers alike
commonly negotiate fickle commissioning
agents. Each deals with publics who are as
likely interested more in the practices, norms,
and styles de jour than they are in creating
innovative and creative buildings, programs,
and films.
The television business has a useful charac-
terisation of public reception in its concept
of “exposure”. In the broadcast ratings,
exposure measures whoever is physically in
the presence of the program, regardless of
whether or not they are attending to it.
Exposure in architecture is somewhat akin to
this. Some attend to buildings closely and
argue about them passionately. For others,
buildings are a background noise attended to
intermittently while doing something else.
Both architecture and television are marked
by the concentrated attention and desultory
connection captured by the word
“exposure”.
But architecture does not have the same
capacity to measure and calibrate reception
and exposure as do film and television. What,
if anything then, could architecture learn from
film and television’s apparatus of reception and
the idea of exposure? I will answer this
question with reference to the continuities and
discontinuities among reception and pro-
duction systems in architecture, film, and
television.
Reception and Exposure in Architecture and
Film and Television
Reception in architecture, film, and television is
multifaceted. People not only have different
responses to a building or work, but also have
responses that vary over time, producing
historically changing estimations of value.
This range of views can be seen at different
points in the production– reception cycle. This
cycle consists of the time of the building or
screen work’s:
1. “Preliminary reception” in the planning
construction and production phase;
2. “Initial reception” upon its completion and
initial circulation;
3. “Mature reception” when familiarity has
made it a naturalised and unexceptionable
part of the built environment and screen
worlds;
4. “Heritage reception” when it becomes
a heritage object assessed as having
“significance” on grounds of its typicality,
popularity, critical estimations of value, or
social and historical significance.
Within each of these points on the
“exposure –reception cycle”, several differently
constituted publics come into being. We can
talk about buildings, like film and television,
as being:
1. publicly received and perceived as popular,
unpopular, or as having a certain niche
appeal;
2. critically received in criticism and review;
3. peer received and evaluated, often through
prizes and awards both at the time of
construction or later as retrospective
achievements;
273
 O’REGAN
4. scholarly received in academic literature in
both university and para-university con-
texts;
5. curatorially received in museological con-
texts of exhibition or retrospective screen-
ings in both permanent and “for a limited
time only” exhibitions;
6. patronage received as appealing or not
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appealing to the “backers”—the clients
who commission buildings and film and
television programs and the advertisers who
buy time on both commercial and pay-TV.
Differences among cultural forms turn on how,
in each cultural form, these elements of both
the production – reception cycle and the
different reception publics are assembled,
inter-relate, and cohere.
As “industrial” (situated between commerce
and art) and “popular” art (seeking both public
approval and authorisation and peer evalu-
ation), architecture, film, and television share a
number of attributes. Each is defined by cycles
of repetition, of fads, and of “copying”. The
emulation of successful and notable buildings,
programs, and feature films is a constitutive
practice in each cultural form.
Architecture and film and television are all
time-based media. Architects, like filmmakers,
go in and out of fashion. They can define a place
and moment in time. Those who come after
rebel against prevailing styles, create new ones
and new ar tist-celebrities, whether
“starchitects”1 or high-profile film producers.
We tend to think of this as a process internal to
the respective cultural industry, but, in a society
rationalised through publicity, public opinion
and interest need to be mobilised to
promulgate, license, and authorise alike new
building styles and signature buildings, and to
employ and make “starchitects”.
274
This gives to both architecture and film
and television what John Macarthur and
Naomi Stead2 call the “unreflected timeliness”
of architectural practice. Within television
aesthetics, this is expressed in philosopher
Stanley Cavell’s 3 claim that television
participates in a continuous “current of
simultaneous event reception”. Here,
precedent is past and usually contempora-
neous practice. The aesthetic “standards” of
building lie in both the written and unwritten
codes of the profession just as they lie for
television producers in knowing contempora-
neous standards of presentation, imaging.4
Architecture and the screen industries also
share a similar structural disposition to be
shaped by many different agents acting in
concert. This makes the “artist”-architect and -
film and -television practitioner a part of the
broader community of practice in which they
work. If architecture’s excuse then for how bad
it can be is the commissioning agents who
notoriously lack vision (or perhaps have the
wrong kind of vision), then television’s excuse is
shared between the commissioning agents and
a fickle public measured by broadcast ratings.
Finally, each cultural form shares the same need
to balance and manage the “essential tension”
between conservative and innovative
dispositions.5 As Donald Sassoon put it,
producers “must not run ahead of the
consumers too much . . . and yet must offer
something new”.6 Cultural forms differ in terms
of how agents within them work with this
“essential tension”.
If architecture is to learn from film and
television reception and vice versa, we must
proceed by recognising the shared dispositions,
critical and reception norms, and manoeuvres
among these cultural forms. These common-
 ATR 18:3-13 RECEPTION AND EXPOSURE IN ARCHITECTURE, FILM AND TELEVISION
alities provide the materials out of which the
bespoke systems of architecture, film, and
television are formed.
Bespoke Reception Systems
Architecture and film and television are
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situated within different cultural spaces, con-
form to different economic logics, and are
shaped by their commissioning agents and
publics in different ways. A building is not
ephemeral in the way that a film and television
program is. It persists in ways that film and
television do not. Buildings are place-based and
virtual in ways that film is not. Buildings are not
meant to entertain and inform. They are
inhabited—worked and slept in—and admired.
While occupying public space, architecture—
even when it is a public commission—is
characterised by largely private (delegated)
decision and assessment processes.7 By con-
trast, public assessment, whether at the box
office or through ratings numbers, is central not
only subsequent to a work’s completion, but
also to its very development. To be sure, film
and television do have purposes other than to
be popular. But in architecture, these purposes
are less constrained by the elaborated systems
of public reception and review that obtain in
film and television. Architecture’s other pur-
poses can, therefore, more readily assume
prominence than in film and television: whether
to be imposing cultural icons, the biggest and
the highest, or simply to be an innovative work
of the future, not the present. These purposes
can readily take precedence in architecture
over securing a broader public uptake.
Unlike the screen producer, architecture’s public
exposure, and therefore reception, occurs over a
significantly longer period of time. As a cultural
and symbolic form, the average building is
designed to be much “longer lasting” than a
television program is. While many film and
television programs have their economic funda-
mentals constructed out of repeat viewing, the
architectural structure is “present” to us in a more
fundamental way, to be experienced and re-
experienced over and over again in the course of
a day, a week, and a lifetime. This is a very different
“economy” of repetition and perdurance.
Unlike architecture, film and television operate
in content and audience markets. Economic
value and sustainability are related to either
direct purchase by consumers of the cultural
work or the selling of the audience. Architecture
is neither wholly in the content nor the audience
market, although it has features of each. The
transactional nature of both content and
audience markets in film and television creates
the need for efficient measures tracking ticket
sales and attendance in the cinema and
audiences across the television schedule.
Architectural transactions do not factor in the
public’s enthusiasm or approbation for archi-
tecture in this strong way. Public guides like the
ubiquitous star ratings system for film are,
therefore, not as developed for architecture.
There is also not the same incentive for people
to become online architectural critics as to
become film critics. This is because film and
television criticism is not only used to guide our
selection of film and television programs, but is
part of our “right” to have and promulgate our
views about film and television as a public. In
architecture, the public—by which I mean those
not directly involved in the practice and
commissioning of architecture or in its pro-
fessional review—do not have quite as direct or
personal a stake as they do in film and television.
Like the educational publisher whose significant
audience is not the children themselves, but
the educators and parents who adopt and
275
 O’REGAN
purchase titles, architecture’s significant audi-
ence is the commissioner and the client.
The public’s enthusiasm and approbation for
architecture, like that of the child recipient of
children’s books, is weakly registered in such
transactions. The house that is loved by its
owner-occupiers who commissioned it and is
abhorred by the community who live alongside
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it is the reductio ad absurdum of this logic.
Architecture’s commissioning practices entail
weakly-developed democratising logics. In film
and television, by contrast, the public’s stance
towards the cultural object is naturalised and
legitimated through instruments (such as ratings,
box office, and other public feedback loops) that
make audiences and publics “partners” in the
very governance of film and television.
In these circumstances, public reception of
architecture has relied rather more than that of
television on the kinds of public reception
generated by criticism and review. Architecture
shares with the visual, literary, and performing
arts and cinema an increasingly extensive
apparatus of criticism and review. It has been
a beneficiary of the general shift “to infuse an
ever widening range of outputs with aesthetic
and semiotic content”.8 Consequently, more
and more of the ordinary stuff of architecture
has become notable and reviewable as cultural
artefacts. Architectural criticism and review is
not only proliferating, but is becoming more
varied. In the process, different publics for
architecture are being created. As Meaghan
Morris once pointed out for film criticism, it is
best seen not as a parasite on the profession (in
this case, architecture), but rather as so many
bits of the medium in which it appears.9
The proliferation of mediated public discourse on
architecture seems connected with the increas-
ing need to have and be seen to exercise an
opinion on architecture and the built environ-
276
ment. This is due to architecture’s increasing
public importance: to city, regional and national
identities, to the provision of public amenity, and
to a range of broader public policy agendas. This
much more organised and elaborated public
discourse on architecture and the built environ-
ment is an inevitable consequence of the role
architecture is playing in place-branding larger
cities, like Melbourne, and smaller cities, like Vejle
in Denmark.10 Like the role that loss leading, high-
budget event programming plays in the television
network brand, notable signature buildings are
looked upon as creating and recreating a city’s
brand and identity. Architecture is now used as a
ready proxy for the “health” of a city or nation’s
creativity and creative industries. These diverse
public purposes and roles being played by
architecture are not only enabling non-specialists
to ponder on, among other things, the
“architecture of happiness”,11 but also producing
a democratisation of architectural speech.
Architecture is becoming too important to be
just left to the architects.
But for all this, architecture still does not have
the validated pictures of public consumption
and engagement that television ratings provide
to set beside such public discourse. Courtesy of
ratings, television—unlike architecture—has a
way of qualifying and putting a brake on critical
evaluation. In television and film, the public
opinion status of the review has long been
contested by the actual viewing behaviour of
the public. Film and television industry
practitioners take great pleasure in pointing
out the discrepancies. There is no immediate
equivalent in architecture.
Ratings and Architecture
The ratings system continuously measures and
systematises public reception by breaking down
 ATR 18:3-13 RECEPTION AND EXPOSURE IN ARCHITECTURE, FILM AND TELEVISION
media exposure by demographics in represen-
tative panels based upon the national census.
It is a measure of exposure that strives for a
degree of completeness and renders public
reception in some complexity. But the strength
of the ratings lies in that they are much more
than a snapshot of who is watching what, when,
and for how long. To paraphrase Donald
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MacKenzie, it is an “engine not a camera”.12
Ratings data become the calculative basis for:
analysing current programs and allocating
advertising spends; cutting and rescheduling
existing programs; and investing in and devel-
oping future programming.13 This audience/
public decisively enters into and shapes the
future television program and television sche-
dule alike. While architecture affords no such
equivalent place for the audience –public (and
certainly not any ready-made coalition of
partners to the ratings convention!), we can
speculate on what such a system of measuring
and giving the public a voice in architecture
might do to how architecture is discussed and
performed.
First, just as ratings and audience measurement
historically emerged as a way of thinking with
and against the “court of public opinion”
as expressed in publicly vocal voices and
perspectives, architecture would need a way of
similarly recognising an effective separation
between “expert opinion” and “elite opinion”
on the one hand, and the “ordinary/fragmen-
ted/variegated” opinion of a more dispersed
public on the other hand.
Architecture would then need to develop
systems by which it could effectively use any
measurement of reception to inform architec-
tural practice. It would need to establish
feedback loops and find ways of using
architecture reception research to think
through the renovation of existing and devel-
opment of new buildings. For its par t,
architectural criticism and review would need
to be reconceived in the light of a measure of
architecture exposure. It would need to find
ways to engage with empirical measures of
public perception of taste and value.
As a corollary of this, architecture would need
to explicitly adopt something of the “service”
orientation of the television and film industries.
Of course, architecture already has its own
service orientation in its client-focus, its
commissioning and tender structures. But this
is not quite the same as television’s proactive
engagement and development of programs
with its audiences and within these particular
audience segments.
An architectural measure of exposure would
also need to adopt some of the “ethical” and
representative characteristics of the broadcast
ratings. Just as the provision of the ratings is
structurally disconnected from, but paid for, by
those who buy and sell audiences, so too an
architectural ratings system would require
similar third-party provisions to generate
confidence in its findings. Any architectural
reception measurement system would also
need to be, to the extent that this is possible,
representative in its sampling to inspire public
and industry confidence in its results.
Of course, architecture presents formidable
obstacles to the development of any ratings-
like system. There are not the same ready-
made points of application in architecture that
broadcasting provides in the home and through
nationally distributed program schedules. Not
everyone is capable of accessing, either
physically or virtually, an architectural artefact
across national and international territories in
the way that audiences for film and television
can. People cannot switch off their exposure to
277
 O’REGAN
the built environment in the way that they can
their exposure to film and television. Just being
exposed to the built environment, for instance,
is not going to be as useful a proxy for
engagement as exposure is in television.
The conjunction of architecture and film and
television examined here illuminates some of
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the issues that are in play as architectural theory
and practice seek to better accommodate and
understand architecture’s reception and pro-
Notes
1. Anna Klingmann, Brandscapes: Architecture in the
Experience Economy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2007.
2. John Macarthur and Naomi Stead, “The Judge
is Not an Operator: Historiography, Criticality
and Architectural Criticism”, Oase, 69
(2006), 130.
3. Stanley Cavell, “The Fact of Television”,
Daedalus, 111, no.4 (1982), 75 – 96; 85.
4. For an account of television’s standards of
imaging as an intrinsic dimension of its aesthetic
system, see Tom O’Regan, “Transient and
Intrinsically Valuable in their Impermanence:
Television’s Changing Aesthetic Norms”, Lola, 3
(December 2012), http://www.lolajournal.com/
3/tv.html (accessed 1 May 2013).
5. The phrase “essential tension” comes from
Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected
Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Fred
D’Agostino sees this “essential tension” as a
general characteristic of knowledge formations.
See D’Agostino, “Naturalizing the Essential
Tension”, Synthese, 162, no. 2 (2008), 277.
I am adapting it here to understand the dynamics
of cultural forms.
6. See Vassilis Fouskas, “The Culture of the
Europeans: An Interview with Donald Sassoon”,
278
ject people’s diverse exposure to the built
environment. As architecture becomes both
more visible and important on governmental
and corporate horizons, as it becomes more
significant to city identity and the experience of
place, the public’s engagement with architec-
ture becomes more pronounced. This makes a
more systematic consideration of how best to
measure and accommodate the public’s
exposure to and engagement with architecture
all the more necessary.
Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans, 8, no.
3 (2006), 274.
7. In public commissioning, this is always delegated
decision-making conducted on behalf of the
public and government.
8. Allen J. Scott, The Cultural Economy of Cities,
London: Sage, 2000, x.
9. Meaghan Morris, “Indigestion: A Rhetoric of
Reviewing”, in her The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism,
Reading, Postmodernism, London: Verso, 1988, 121.
10. Søren Smidt-Jensen, “Making a Micropole: The
Experiensation of Vejle”, in Anne Lorentzen and
Bas van Heur (eds), Cultural Political Economy of
Small Cities, London: Routledge, 2013, 114.
11. Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness,
New York: Pantheon Books, 2006.
12. See Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a
Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
13. For an extended discussion, see Philip M. Napoli,
Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the
Audience Marketplace, New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003; and Mark Balnaves, Tom
O’Regan, and Ben Goldsmith, Rating the
Audience: The Business of Media, London:
Bloomsbury, 2011.