Copyright 2010 Los Angeles Times. All rights reserved.
latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-ca-screens24-2010jan24,0,3068829.story
By CHRISTOPHER HAWTHORNE, Architecture Critic
January 24, 2010
Apple is expected to unveil its much-anticipated touch-screen tablet
on Wednesday morning. A few journalists see the device as a possible
savior for the newspaper business. Me? I'm wondering how it'll affect
the skyline.
Don't laugh. Whatever shape it takes, Apple's tablet promises to slip
another digital screen -- and with it another layer of seductive
interference -- between us and the contemporary cityscape. As these
layers pile up, they are fundamentally changing our relationship with
architecture: how we look at and think about buildings and the extent
to which they even register in our minds at all.
Digital screens now line the walls of nearly every airport terminal,
restaurant, convenience store, bar and waiting room in America. They
have popped up in gas stations, taxis, schools and even on public
buses. They wrap the exterior of L.A. Live and other major commercial
complexes. And increasingly they rest in our palms, in the form of the
iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smart phones that many of us rely on,
like Dante following Virgil, as we walk or ride through the city.
The appearance of all these screens is not some harbinger of cultural
decline. It doesn't signal the end of architecture or even,
necessarily, a cheapening of it. What it does mean is that more and
more we find ourselves estranged from the physical, bricks-and-mortar
life of buildings -- and that we look at the cityscape not just with
divided but with fully fractured attention. Even a pedigreed piece of
architecture by a famous designer is no longer simply an object that we
confront directly or consider whole: It is often something either
hidden behind digital walls or half-glimpsed in the background as we
direct our main attention to the flickering object in our hands or laps.
Most of these screens, of course, are deployed without the aid of an
architect. Long after the design process for an office building, casino
or shopping mall is finished, some manager or other non-designer
typically steps in and decides to hang flat-screen monitors in
seemingly every corner. But the effect is fundamentally architectural:
The digital screen is arguably the most powerful form of decorative
ornament ever invented -- a kind of super-ornament. A screen playing
along a wall with the sound going -- or an iPhone showing Lakers
highlights -- produces a vortex capable of sucking up nearly all our
attention, making the rest of a room's design invisible or irrelevant.
Writers and architects have studied for generations the various ways
signs and screens animate the city, a focus that accelerated as car
travel and billboard culture began to redefine American culture after
World War II. What's changed in the last two or three years is both the
number and type of screens that fill our cities and, crucially, the way
they operate. The collective power of these screens means that every
city is capable of containing the kind of visual energy we've
traditionally associated with exceptional urban pockets like the Las
Vegas Strip. Every intersection is morphing into Times Square.
What is projected
For a handful of architects, these developments are welcome, opening up
the chance to create buildings that are sheathed in digital skins and
operate more as immersive environments than mute, monumental objects.
The Los Angeles architect Greg Lynn, among others, talks about that
prospect in optimistic tones.
It's not hard to understand why: As the separation between buildings
and their digital exteriors falls away, architecture will become
capable of endlessly reinventing itself, constantly refreshing the face
it shows the city. An early example of that approach can be seen in
Eric Owen Moss' newly constructed Art Tower on National Boulevard in
Culver City, a 72-foot-high, open-air steel structure with digital
projection screens on each of its five levels.
But other architects will react to the rise of the screen by seeking
inspiration in the field's pre-digital past, making their designs
quiet, contemplative or unmistakably hand-crafted -- refuges from the
city's digital noise. In explaining his decision to recruit Peter
Zumthor to produce a new plan for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
Michael Govan, the museum's director, described the Swiss architect's
buildings as a potential antidote to the visual overload of the
Wilshire Boulevard streetscape.
As architects try to comprehend these changes, meanwhile, technology
companies are busy giving us new ways to see and interpret buildings.
Take the introduction last month of Google Goggles, which follows on
the heels of Google Earth, Google Maps and other features from the
company that have transformed the way we look at the city. The feature
allows owners of cellphones with cameras to search the Web using images
instead of words. Say you see a building and want to know more about
it. You simply hold up your phone and snap a picture -- and Goggles
delivers information from the Internet to your screen.
The arrival of this service means that the details of a building -- who
designed it, even descriptions of its cultural importance -- now hover
in the ether around the building itself, waiting to be downloaded onto
a portable screen. A new world of architectural literacy could open up
as a result.
Witness Dallas
But there is a price to pay for that stream of information, or at least
a new kind of architectural way-finding to get used to. The phone
becomes, in essence, the set of eyes we use to see and make sense of
the city, or a second set. Even as Google Goggles and programs like it
bring architecture closer to us, they also push it away.
There are yet other ways that digital screens are allowing developers
and marketers to rewrite the basic definition of architecture. Two
significant examples can be found in a single, albeit massive,
building: the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington, Texas, which
just wrapped up its first season in operation.
Designed by Dallas architecture firm HKS, the extravagant stadium cost
$1.15 billion to build. Football fans have nicknamed it "the Dallas
Palace." Suspended over the center of the field is its most
attention-grabbing element of all: A huge four-sided video board that
shows replays, and live action of the game itself, in crisp
high-definition. The board -- 72 feet tall and 160 feet wide on each of
its two biggest sides -- is so much larger than existing stadium
screens, and its images so much sharper, that it seems to create an
entirely new category of sports-world amenity.
Though the stadium holds up to 100,000 fans, depending on the
configuration of the seats, and includes 300 luxury boxes and
large-scale, site-specific artwork by Olafur Eliasson and Matthew
Ritchie, none of that seems to matter once the video board, the largest
in the world, is switched on. Many fans inside the stadium simply
capitulate to its overwhelming presence. In December, the team handed
out special glasses and showed part of the matchup between the Cowboys
and the Chargers in 3-D -- the same game that was going on live on the
field below.
Like many new sports-world facilities, Cowboys Stadium also features
long, thin video screens -- so-called ribbon screens -- ringing the
field and its interior concourses. Even the menu boards at the
concessions stands are digital.
The presence of all those screens has opened up fresh revenue streams
for the Cowboys and their marketing-savvy owner, Jerry Jones. The
signage in the stadium, as it is nearly all digital, can be endlessly
reprogrammed and shuffled during the course of a game or a season.
Companies can buy ad segments during pregame warmups or halftime, say,
when fans are out of their seats and walking around.
The result is a piece of architecture that exists not just as an
arrangement of steel and glass but also, fascinatingly enough, as a
broadcast medium, like television or radio. Thanks to the number and
variety of screens inside the stadium, from the giant video board on
down, what Jones sells to advertisers is not space but time.
Ornament as content
Ornament has long been among the most controversial subjects in
architecture. A century ago, architect Adolf Loos, a self-appointed
evangelist for the modern movement, infamously compared building
decoration to degeneracy and crime. In the 1970s, architects including
Robert Venturi and Charles Moore dusted off ornament and made it
respectable again. And in recent years a new generation of digitally
savvy architects have begun to weave ornament into the skins of their
building designs, blurring the distinction between decoration and
structural engineering.
But the rise of the digital screen has left many architects
flat-footed, slow to respond to changes in the basic definition of
ornament and decoration that have profound implications for the future
city. In Loos' day, ornament took a very different form, and filled a
different need, than it does today. The neoclassical colonnades and
Gothic gargoyles of the 19th century city gave richness and depth to
facades -- and stitched connections between new buildings and the
architectural past. Loos argued for rejecting that sort of ornament in
favor of the lean smoothness of a Modernist building -- a building
shorn of extraneous detail and thus liberated from the weight of
history.
The digital screen, by contrast, combines both sides of the old
smoothness-versus-ornament divide. It is decoration and flatness at the
same time, which is precisely what makes it so powerful.
As screens begin to cover more buildings, the city will become capable
of effortlessly updating its architectural content. In the most extreme
scenario, a sort of Marshall McLuhan-meets-"Blade Runner" fever dream,
the skyline may begin, like television, to broadcast a continuous,
all-encompassing present. Every building will be a contemporary
building, carrying an up-to-date visual message, which means that no
building will be a historical building. Digital screens seem likely
over time to render the architectural past fainter and fainter -- and
maybe even lead the city to forget itself.
That prospect remains a long way off. But it suggests that it is not
just architects who ought to be paying attention as the screen
continues to change the way we interact with buildings. It is also
preservationists, novelists, developers, politicians and planners --
anybody with an interest in understanding the forces shaping
architecture in the digital age.
christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times