Am I Wrong?
There’s no doubt that the architecture has been heavily influenced by the emergence of social media and the development of platforms such as archdaily and architizer. These sites become a one stop shop for students and professionals looking for inspiration, and for projects that are deemed successful by the rest of the field. The potential issue with popular websites that have a filter on what types of projects are published is that they pre-determine for their viewers the level of success a project achieves. Usually projects are only praised, without any discussion of their shortcomings and the text that is published is frequently written by the architect.
How do we as users of these sites begin to filter through and understand the shortcomings when we are only shown these projects through the lens of the architect? As a student who has used these sites as inspiration for my work, I’ve often struggled with forming my own opinion around these projects because someone else has already deemed the work successful. If I think there are shortcomings in these projects, does that make me wrong?
I think this is an interesting point you make about how commercial journalism can heavily influence people's opinions while filtering the content they consume. These magazines understand their influence and often times only show the positives as you mentioned. This can be dangerous as it may influence others to implement designs that prove to cause harm than good. I think its always good to have a little skepticism when reading commercial articles from magazines such as these.
ReplyDeleteYou are wrong. Just kidding. I do think it is a disservice that we face with experiencing buildings through pictures. Being over exposed to buildings just through images lets us make quick judgement of buildings and allowing only our narrow sense of sight dictate our opinion. I think it is important to experience buildings in person to take in all the senses to properly form an opinion of the building.
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