FORMAT FACTORY - The Architect's Journal & Architect's Format : questioning the architect's role
Media Culture
As the production of architecture and art has embarked on a cultural enterprise it needed the magazine and website as an aggregator of media.
''Community, Collective, Participation, ...'' seem to be the words which define culture. But how can these forms of togetherness be maintained in a world of 'allatonceness', where we experience everything immediately and meaning is assumed everywhere. The average social media user is turning numb towards the many voices which echoe through an endless loop of street billboards and pop-up adverts.
In architecture, a practice which engages in a cultural production, the social relations within schools and offices are at stake. Place is no longer needed as the physical 'meeting point' for communication and intellectual production. Architects, artists and designers are now trying to reconstruct a notion of culture in the magazine and their digital counterpart.
I argue that the process of formatting should not remain limited to the imposition of figures on plinths but expose the internal and external logics of contextual relationships and reestablish a notion of architecture reaching far beyond stylistic terms.