City, Screen and Hyper-reality: Television as a “Habitat” and Identity Platform By: SOL, Luísa

Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade Técnica de Lisboa;

Centro de Investigação em Arquitectura, Urbanismo e Design, C.I.A.U.D. -- Portugal

Projecto de Investigação em: ARQUITECTURAS IMAGINADAS: REPRESENTAÇÃO GRÁFICA ARQUITECTÓNICA E “OUTRAS IMAGENS”

This abstract aims to focus on the 8th research subject - Social Spaces and Social Interaction

- of the “ Architecture, Education and Society” International Workshop, Barcelona 2012.

This paper will analyse how people experience the City’s through the images that come on

the Television. Not only are these types of images mediators between the city, its

architecture and its lifestyle, but they are also responsible for making them more appealing

and in consonance with the lifestyle that viewers aspire to (Ventury, Scott-Brown, Jenks). This

derives from the intention of personalizing the viwer’s habitat. That is, the tendency to turn

the images enhanced by television into an inhabitable space.

The same city, the same area or even the same street can be captured, transformed and

filtered by the camera, allowing themselves to be presented in multiple ways to several

different Identities (Lacan, Freud).

Post-Modernism (Harvey, Jameson) has extinguished the possibility of representing the

world as a whole by replacing it by several realities that manifest the logic of individuality.

The television image establishes a seduction dynamic representing the “Illusion of the

Unlived” (Debord), while allowing us to be in places that we had never experienced, although

easily recognizable as familiar places. In the Hyper-reality (Eco, Lipovetsky) era, the city is

disseminated through a large number of such images with an illusive sense of accuracy that we

will inhabit without ever having been there before. The images that portray this type of city –

in films, music videos, advertisement, internet, magazines, postcards, guides, catalogues,

among others - became an inevitable visual heritage that will make us live (and choose) to live

in an illusionary kind of city. The audience to whom the image of the city is targeted to, will

inaugurate a new, specific, and (re)invented kind of city (its image, I mean).

Bearing this in mind, it should be noted that the LA boulevards (re)presented in Sunset

Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950), in Zabriesky Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970), in Annie Hall

(Woody Allen, 1977), in the music video Heaven (Eurythmics, 1987) or in Aphex Twins’

Windowlicker (1998) are (not) always the same city.

The relationship between city and its spectator (and citizen, as well) through the screen, helps

us to understand several contemporary phenomena, including the globalization, especially

concerned with the city and (its) architecture.

Hence, this paper wishes to analyse the screen as a perfect habitat with a better, illusory,

and more perfect lifestyle, though, better and more perfect than the “real” one.

Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) Heaven (Eurythmics, 1987)

Zabriesky Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970) Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)

Windowlicker (Aphex Twin,1998)

Lisbon, January 19th 2012