665145

research-article2016
VCU0010.1177/1470412916665145journal of visual culture<bold>Brillembourg et al.</bold> Architecture in the Age of Digital Reproduction

journal of visual culture

Architecture in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Alfredo Brillembourg, Hubert Klumpner,

Alexis Kalagas and Michael Waldrep
Urban-Think Tank

It is a truism to suggest we engage constantly with architecture. For

many, this extends beyond the immediacy of first-hand experience. We
scrutinize plans at exhibitions, wage virtual battles in 140 characters or
less, follow Snøhetta on Instagram, or thumb the pages of Domus. We
gorge on photographs and renderings of buildings we will never enter
– that perhaps will never be built. In other words, we judge buildings
(and the architects and firms who design them) by means of irrevocably
mediated experiences. As these media diversify, go online, and become
more accessible, the size and appetite of the audience grow. If, as in
Marshall McLuhan’s (2003 [1964]: 4) conception, we occupy an ‘electrically
contracted’ global village, architects are populating that digital village
with representations of buildings even as they remake our actual cities in
concrete, wood, and steel. Like reproductions of art in John Berger’s Ways
of Seeing, these representations ‘have become ephemeral, ubiquitous,
insubstantial, available, valueless [and] free’ (Berger, 1972: 32).
Significant energy has been exhausted in recent years debating the merits,
or corrupting influence, of so-called ‘starchitecture’. But to speak of this
work is to speak, in simplest terms, of offices acting as prestige guns for
hire astride a global terrain. For instance, in 2015 OMA was set to complete
headline projects in Italy, the Netherlands, China, the United States, and
Russia. In 2016, construction continues in Germany, France, Qatar, and
Canada. To assess the firm’s output first hand, as a collective body of work,
would require a punishing travel schedule (and budget) that few can manage.
As a result, these businesses are, to their most loyal and fleeting devotees
alike, primarily media producers rather than producers of buildings. The
new operating landscape – architecture in the age of digital reproduction,
with apologies to Walter Benjamin – is a crucial way in which architects not

journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com]

SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne)
Copyright © The Author(s), 2016. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav
Vol 15(3): 349­–356 DOI 10.1177/1470412916665145
350   journal of visual culture 15(3)

only fashion their reputations and position themselves at the forefront of

design discourse, but also secure new work.
The images flooding digital media networks comprise a coherent system of
visual culture that the field of architecture today lives and dies by. Buildings
themselves have not lost their aura. Pilgrimages are still undertaken. But
architectural photographs often function in the same way that Susan Sontag
(1977: 104) described commercial photographs: they aim to ‘embellish and
idealize the subject’, the camera is ‘lenient, [even though] it is also expert
at being cruel’. Architectural renderings – views of an idealized future
replete with outsized crowds and gauzy sunset skies – push this mediation
a step further. They encapsulate Jean Baudrillard’s (1983: 2) ‘precession of
simulacra’: copies of objects that are yet to exist. If we accept that architecture
is consumed and traded by way of this system, then architects with social
goals can and must leverage its power. After all, McLuhan’s global village
is not just a world made small by media, but ‘a sudden implosion [that]
has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree’
(McLuhan, 2003 [1964]: 104).
Architectural exhibitions are a more traditional, but still prominent, vehicle
through which visual material is shared. In these settings, curators ask us
to treat architectural simulacra – models, drawings, plans for unrealized
buildings – as art objects. That is, to be experienced and disassembled via
the myriad aesthetic and interpretative lenses through which art conveys
meaning. Yet, when architects exhibit their work, it cries out for public
discourse in a way that most art does not. These are representations of
projects that may one day demolish treasured heritage, house the homeless,
rupture urban space, or fuel gentrification. The cavalier attitude of many
architects in encroaching on adjacent creative fields speaks to an egocentricity
verging on dilettantism, evident (at least) since the era of high modernism.
The same can sometimes be said of exhibiting architecture. Even as digital
media have proliferated, architects have simultaneously gravitated to the
sanctity of the white cube as a means to both engage in self-aggrandizement
and cultivate patronage.
By the same token, however, artists without any training or licensure in
architecture, such as Rick Lowe, Tania Bruguera, Theaster Gates, and Thomas
Hirschhorn, have ventured beyond the gallery to renovate structures, create
community centers, and even develop supportive housing. Their works not
only point toward a broader ‘architecture in the expanded field’, pioneered
by figures like Gordon Matta-Clark, but also encapsulate an ideal of socially-
oriented practice that seeks to divert the resources of the commoditized
global art market to more constructive ends (see Atlee, 2007; Krauss, 1979).
At Urban-Think Tank, we develop ideas that emerge from self-initiated
research identifying a need, and pursue activist tactics to secure the
constellations of support required to realize them as concrete projects.
Similarly, we use our research and documentation to advocate for broader
systemic shifts in the arena of urban development and governance. For us, the
 Brillembourg et al.  Architecture in the Age of Digital Reproduction  351

same visual culture that transforms architectural images into an aspirational

lifestyle currency can be deployed in the service of social change.
One example of this is our work on Torre David (see Brillembourg
and Klumpner, 2012), which was originally conceived as a landmark
commercial development for downtown Caracas. Construction on the
45-story skyscraper was abandoned in the wake of a national banking crisis
in 1994. After lying dormant for over a decade, the tower was transformed
into an improvised, occupied home for more than 750 families, living
as a self-organized community (Figure 1). Urban-Think Tank spent a year
studying the physical and social organization of the tower. The architectural
sum of residents’ efforts simultaneously resembled both an incursion of
informal barrio survival strategies into the heart of the city, as well as
a consummation of John Habraken’s 1960s vision of an open building.
Despite an absence of elevators, electrical infrastructure, running water,
and windows, shops, services, and sporting facilities sprung up over time,
alongside work-in-progress living spaces. Notwithstanding its deficiencies,
Torre David emerged as an organic example of adaptive reuse in the face
of endemic scarcity and political inertia.
Fascinated and inspired, we initiated a relationship with community
leaders in the tower. We aimed to document and share what residents had
accomplished, and to help develop improvements to the building. Our work
ultimately produced retrofit designs, a short film, a book, and, perhaps most
(in)famously, a Golden Lion-winning installation at the 2012 Venice Biennale,
in collaboration with Justin McGuirk and Iwan Baan (Figure 2). By adhering
to the system of visual culture that envelops and propels architecture in the
21st century, we shared representations of a project, built without architects,
that provided homes and a sense of community to thousands of people in a
flexible, affordable way. The crucial difference is that instead of exhibiting
photographs of a structure we had built, or drawings of one we hoped to
deliver, we demanded that the global architectural elite assembled in Venice
confront this reality with the same respect and critical view they would
afford any other representation of architectural practice or speculation.
If architecture is transmitted by and understood through visual media, why
not coopt these processes to draw attention to social issues evident in the
already-built environment? With our communication around Torre David,
and the privileged pulpit we were afforded, we sought to redirect the public
gaze toward a global problem that often suffers from invisibility. Urban-
Think Tank has since been accused of turning the struggles of residents into
art. But ‘art’ that probes beyond a vacuous appropriation of ‘favela chic’ can
agitate for and even set in motion genuine progress. Ultimately, we were
unable to convince the Venezuelan government to avoid the tired ruts of
modernist planning – in 2014, residents were evicted en masse to housing
blocks in a nearby satellite city. We remain hopeful, however, that the
debate that was ignited, including the notoriety it attracted, will contribute
to a more sustained commitment amongst architects internationally to not
352   journal of visual culture 15(3)

   igure 1  Exterior view of ‘Torre David’, Caracas. © Daniel Schwartz/

F
U-TT.

only address urban inequality, but also use what already exists in creative,
unexpected ways.
While the impetus of the Torre David research was to challenge certain
core values of the discipline, and suggest alternative possibilities grounded
in the complex realities of urbanization, our more recent efforts in Cape
Town are focused on carefully conceived strategies to address a worsening
housing crisis. For more than 7.5 million people in South Africa, life
 Brillembourg et al.  Architecture in the Age of Digital Reproduction  353

 F
 igure 2  Torre David/Gran Horizonte, Venice Biennale of Architecture,
Venice, 2012. © Daniel Schwartz/U-TT.

plays out amidst the precarious conditions of 2,700 informal settlements

spread across the country – the legacy of both discriminatory apartheid-era
planning practices, and the inadequacies of the post-1994 policy response.
In Cape Town, sprawling townships like Khayelitsha, home to our project
site BT-Section, are characterized by poorly built shacks, limited access
to basic infrastructure, and personal dangers and environmental risks
stemming from ad hoc development patterns. Those facing the interminable
wait for an identikit subsidized dwelling on a peripheral greenfield site are
locked out of the formal property market due to escalating prices, restrictive
financing, and inflexible regulations.
Empower Shack aims to develop a comprehensive and sustainable upgrading
strategy for these informal settlements. The approach comprises a low-cost
housing prototype, participatory spatial planning, and an experimental
financing model. Visual communication has been central to securing
financial backing and non-monetary ‘buy-in’. In a perhaps unorthodox
move, we exhibited the embryonic results of our initial research and
design at a leading Zurich commercial gallery in 2014 (see Kalagas, 2014).
Through film, photography, drawings, models, and large-scale installations,
we sought to contextualize and convey the catalytic potential of the project –
all in a rarefied space normally reserved for international art sales (Figure 3).
The intention was not to rethink the form of the architecture exhibition,
but its curatorial purpose. We did not disguise commerce as artistry, nor
unrealized architecture as conceptual art. Instead, we devised an exhibition
that could function as a fundraising platform, by suggesting the promise of
a process of design thinking, rather than consecrating an end product.
354   journal of visual culture 15(3)

Figure 3  Empower Shack, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, 2014. © Daniel

Schwartz/U-TT.

Figure 4  ‘Empower Shack’ housing prototypes in construction, Cape Town.

© Daniel Schwartz/U-TT.

Like our participation in Venice, it might be simple to dismiss such efforts as

art-world posturing. Yet, presenting the work in the gallery, and accessing
the audience this entailed, led a prominent philanthropist to our project. In
turn, this was instrumental in the award of a multi-year institutional grant
to expand the pilot to encompass an entire community. A crew of residents
 Brillembourg et al.  Architecture in the Age of Digital Reproduction  355

from BT-Section is now being employed with these funds to construct new
homes for themselves and their neighbors based on an improved prototype
design developed by a multidisciplinary team (Figure 4). On a broader scale,
municipal authorities have joined a supportive constituency interested in
the future scaling up of the pilot should it prove successful. Ultimately, just
as artists are borrowing from architecture to transform their social practice
into impactful physical spaces, so too can a design collective like Urban-
Think Tank temporarily inhabit a commercial gallery in Zurich and emerge
with the resources to effect real change in Cape Town.
Social design has perhaps replaced ‘starchitecture’ as the field’s zeitgeist in an
era of widening inequality and austerity. But while its practitioners have lately
garnered some of the most prestigious accolades in art and architecture, who
pays for these projects remains a thorny question. We have been here before.
The opening of MoMA in November 1929 coincided with the onset of the
Great Depression. Throughout the 1930s, curators in the nascent architecture
department staged a series of exhibitions advocating openly for improved
public housing. A global confluence of economic largesse and political
change gave rise to the Modern movement, whose key figures found willing
partners in governments committed to social progress. Public funding today
is more likely to be directed towards ‘iconic’ projects intended to generate
tourism revenue, or rebrand cities in the ongoing scramble for foreign capital.
As we have found, architects pursuing social goals must get creative in order
to conduct the research and experimentation that can seed more traditional
investment and, we hope, make a difference outside of the art-world bubble.

References
Atlee J (2007) Towards anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier. Tate
Papers 7, Spring. Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/
tate-papers/towards-anarchitecture-gordon-matta-clark-and-le-corbusier
(accessed 18 December 2015).
Baudrillard J (1983) Simulations. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Berger J (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin.
Brillembourg A and Klumpner H (eds) (2012) Torre David: Informal Vertical
Communities. Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers.
Kalagas A (ed.) (2014) SLUM Lab 9: Made in Africa.
Krauss R (1979) Sculpture in the expanded field. October 8, Spring: 30–44.
McLuhan M (2003) [1964] Understanding the Media: The Extensions of Man.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sontag S (1977) On Photography. New York: Picador.

Alfredo Brillembourg is the co-founder of interdisciplinary design firm Urban-

Think Tank (U-TT), and holds a joint Chair of Architecture and Urban Design at
ETH Zurich. As co-principal of U-TT, he has received the 2010 Ralph Erskine Award,
the 2011 Holcim Gold Award for Latin America, and the 2012 Holcim Global Silver
Award, and was part of the Golden Lion-winning team at the 2012 Venice Biennale
of Architecture. He has edited and contributed to a number of books, including
Informal City: Caracas Case (2005, Prestel), and Torre David: Informal Vertical
Communities (2012, Lars Müller).
356   journal of visual culture 15(3)

Hubert Klumpner is the co-founder of interdisciplinary design firm Urban-Think

Tank (U-TT), and holds a joint Chair of Architecture and Urban Design at ETH
Zurich. From 2013–2015, he served as the Dean of the Department of Architecture.
As co-principal of U-TT, he has received the 2010 Ralph Erskine Award, the 2011
Holcim Gold Award for Latin America, and the 2012 Holcim Global Silver Award,
and was part of the Golden Lion-winning team at the 2012 Venice Biennale of
Architecture. He has edited and contributed to a number of books, including Informal
City: Caracas Case (2005, Prestel), and Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities
(2012, Lars Müller).

Alexis Kalagas is a writer, researcher, and publications manager at the Urban-

Think Tank Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, ETH Zurich. He co-edited the
recent book Reactivate Athens (Ruby Press, 2016), has guest edited three editions
of SLUM Lab magazine, and is currently writing a forthcoming book on low-cost
housing in South Africa. His work has also appeared in Architectural Design,
Perspecta, trans magazin, and the edited volume Re-Living the City: UABB 2015
(Actar Publishers, 2016).

Michael Waldrep is a researcher and filmmaker at the Berlin agency Plane-Site.

He was previously a multimedia researcher at the Urban-Think Tank Chair of
Architecture and Urban Design, ETH Zurich, where he co-directed the short film The
People’s Museum, which was screened as part of the ‘Sarajevo Now’ exhibition at the
2016 Venice Biennale of Architecture, and co-edited an issue of SLUM Lab magazine.

Address: Department of Architecture and Urban Design, ETH Zurich,

Neunbrunnenstrasse 50, Zurich 8093, Switzerland. [email: kalagas@arch.ethz.ch]