Social Awareness

As students in South Carolina, Charleston is a place we visit and we love, but we struggle with. There is an identity issue in the city that prides itself in its past and avoids its present and future. This preoccupation with history leads to new construction that simply replicates historic architecture. We find this to be a dishonest as it does not communicate the era in which we live today. Instead, it represents social values of past centuries that have limited relation to today's society. We call it kitsch.

In contrast, there is the Metropolis and the idea of contrived cities within the confines of a building. Most disagree with this "bigness" in architecture as there is no connection to the outside world and no sense of place. However, while I agree it is artificial in nature, is it actually dishonest, like we call Charleston? The invention of steel enables us to build taller. The invention of the elevator allows us to occupy new heights. Curtain walls enable more natural light and electricity allows for rooms to function with no sunlight at all. Our current technologies enable bigness in a way that could never be achieved in Charleston when it was first built.

New technologies have also changed the way we function today. Though we may hate to admit it, much of our culture is online... We are tweeting, instagramming, emailing, and texting more than we are interacting face-to-face. It can be argued that social media is the new social reality in which we now live. I see many parallels in this new virtual reality and the virtual reality that bigness offers. The Metropolis offers a contrived interpretation of the natural world just as social media contrives a new form of social interaction. The Metropolis is a direct representation of our social values today. And shouldn't honest architecture communicate the values of present day society? Anything else would be kitsch.