Architecture is Muzak

From Audcwiki, the free encyclopedia.

As the most visible products of society that literally shape our environment, buildings provide social cues. Architecture structures group relationships by articulating moods and milieus within the ubiquitous horizontality of the contemporary urban realm. In the continuous construction of the postmetropolitan realm, architecture now takes on the same role that Muzak played within the office block. It adds color to our lives. Sometimes it is fast, sometimes it is slow. On rare, special occasions, it is engaging, more often it is banal and background.

Individual works of architecture now become examples of Atmospherics: a relationship between emotional forms whereby a sense of movement, from effect to effect, is generated for the multitude to experience. Stimulus Progression is replaced by Quantum Modulation. We no longer change to create growth and make progress, but to make one day progress differently than the others. The variation of stimuli within the built environment helps us to remain engaged with the world, by adjusting to constant change.

Architecture first fully realizes its potential with the mirror glass curtain wall building, developed in the 1970s. The reflections of the structure's surroundings in the surface creates a façade of infinite variation while the disappearance of clearly defined window openings replaces the bourgeois notion of the individual with a limitless free space. Transparency is replaced not with opacity but with the image of the city itself in perpetual flux.

Just as Muzak ordered the background condition of the late modern office building, Muzak now makes possible the contemporary condition in which the city itself becomes a background condition rendering the delirious vertical expressiveness of the skyscraper and signature object obsolete. Just as contemporary culture can absorb any content, the contemporary urban realm is capable of absorbing any amount of difference. Just as the horizontal office building made obsolete the skyscraper, new telecommunications technology—cell phones, email, and instant messaging—have made the horizontal world of office landscape obsolete. Physical boundaries no longer impede communication and open space no longer enables it.

Instead, office plans merely become infill, endlessly adapting to real estate footprints. Architecture, which had previously been a marker of difference, is similarly reduced to a background condition. But architecture does not merely go away as it recedes into the background condition of the city, it is transformed instead as every gesture and emotion produced through architectural form becomes a variation along a stimulus progression deployed throughout the city. Minimalism, the Blob, and the Spanish Revival seamlessly coexist in the city without qualities.

In the absence of real public spaces and collective icons, empty visual markers are developed to signify the presence of culture within a city. A tacit agreement has been reached between developers and urban planners: cutting edge concert halls and museums, McMansions, historic districts, and limitless sprawl co-exist merrily in the contemporary city. This urban condition makes possible the necessary illusion that individuation and autonomy remain options even as society continues to move toward an immaterial culture. Recent advertisements for downtown living verify this, suggesting that if one lives high up enough, one can dispense with curtains and clothes. According to the ad copy, better sex and greater freedom of expression are made possible against the anonymous background of the city. Skyscrapers retain their importance not for their forms or interiors, but for the vertical distance they create, whereby occupants can see the city as a background view.

As the lessons of industrial psychology and Muzak suggest, even meaningless change and variation makes us feel like someone or something is responding to us, filling the deadly silence of the city with a form of simulated interaction. Contemporary architecture creates a catalogue of prefigured affective conditions that allow for variation while accepting that mass difference is a fundamental requirement for living with total universalization.