Photoshop it, please!

Years ago, I ran into a friend who was walking with her new baby in his new cart seat. I was happy to see this friend, and she introduced me to her baby. He was a cute child, and I complemented him, saying “what a handsome baby!" My friend turned to me and said something that really puzzled me, “Yes, but he was more handsome in the picture though.” I left puzzled, confused, and laughing to myself about what she had just said, but I knew she was serious about her comment. Reflecting about what had just happened, I realized how our modern society is very into the cleanliness, the shiny and the perfect image. The perfect image is better than the real thing. I realized then what simulacrum meant. The real thing does not matter, but a copy of the real thing can be much cleaner and more perfect.   

The Brazilian author Edgar Morin wrote a book about the culture of the masses that I think is very interesting. In his book, he defends the idea that globalization is a way for corporations to gain more market through homogenization of societies. Instead of making different products for different cultures, corporations will make more money if one product is sold as the most perfect one. Example: jeans. The whole world now buys jeans. A product that was used for outdoor workers in the early 1900s was transformed by marketing into a product consumed worldwide. By selling the idea that one product is better and more perfect than the others, companies will make more money. Whether Edgar Morin is right or not, I believe he touches some of the subjects mentioned by Kenneth Frampton in his text “Six points for an Architecture of Resistance,” like in the phrase of this book, “by the spreading before our eyes of a mediocre civilization which is the absurd counterpart of what I was just calling elementary culture.” 

One may ask me why my “simulacrum” discovery has anything to do with architecture?  I believe it has a lot to do with marketing, and since architecture can be seen as a product, corporations will try to make one product to sell all over the world, or products to make the architectural experiences more perfect than the perfect.  For example, synthetic grass, colored concrete stones, plastic shutters (that don’t close), etc.  I don’t think there is anything wrong with making money. However, when I think that an architect can help this “simulacrum” cycle or contribute to what Kenneth Frampton calls “elementary culture,” and Edgar Morin calls ethnocide, I think that as an architect I have the responsibility to think twice about my design and its consequences.

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