Baudrillard for Architects Quotes

“Barthes referred to semiology, the science of signs, in pursuing this task. He followed Ferdinand de Saussure’s claim that a sign is merely the outcome of an arbitrary relationship between a signifier (a word, picture, utterance) and a signified (a concept or mental image to which the signifier gives rise) – implying that the words we use have no fixed meanings in themselves. De Saussure called this ability of the sign to represent or convey meaning signification.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“…architecture is addressed [by Baudrillard] as a double- edged site of enquiry that acts as both a repository of contemporary theoretical practices as well as empirical applications from where a novel understanding of the discipline might extend.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“Abstracted into signs, objects can be understood as a self-referential
system with no relationship to either the natural materials or colours, or
traditional societal structures. A substratum of meanings, objects become a
lowest common denominator to which the connotative meanings imposed by
advertising are attached.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“Symbolically meaningful (and symbolically insignificant), glass intensifies all the contradictions at play in contemporary furniture: the inability of people to determine their own condition and destiny (Baudrillard, 2005: 42). By promising proximity, intimacy and transition (while at the same time promoting distance, detachment and immobility), glass reproduces in the microcosm of the domestic ambience the inequalities at work within the macrocosm of contemporary society. The happy ending embedded in its discourse is thus retracted by its ‘see- but- don’t- touch’ aesthetic quality.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“By symbolizing the end of elite privileges (culture was finally made available to the most), the Pompidou was being offered to the masses as a transparent (read: democratic), manipulable (read: empowering), enjoyable (read: ideology- free) and larger- then- life (read: inoffensive) Troy horse meant to defuse masses’ scepticism towards the government, which just ten years before had been contested in the street of Paris. Sounds good, right?”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“By addressing the building as an empty signifier (just as the Bauhaus lamp reveals the electrical wiring inside, so the Pompidou exposes its content and function according to a relationship that Baudrillard deems totally arbitrary), the Pompidou Centre is downgraded from architectural icon to hyper- functionalist failure.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“Discussing the system of objects, Baudrillard focuses on the relationship between connotation (external) and denotation (internal) to the system; yet in addressing the Pompidou Centre, both are collapsed into an oversized commodity whose signifier/ signified (aka form/ function) relationship is unstable.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“This is, then, no longer a sequence of mere objects, but a chain of signifiers, in so far as all of these signify one another reciprocally as part of a more complex super-object, drawing the consumer into a series of more complex motivations. (Baudrillard, 1998: 27)”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“More real than reality itself’ is, therefore, Baudrillard’s favourite definition of hyperreality.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“Elevated to a symbol of American culture, Disneyland instantly became the equivalent of the ‘Gothic cathedral’ and, as such, sums up a contemporary worldview from which architecture is disappearing.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“A second way of interpreting Baudrillard’s hyperreality can therefore be found in his critique of the sign where consumer society, in its unstoppable process of deterritorialization, reduces objects to signs and the latter to empty signifiers. Hyperreality can eventually be understood as the pathway leading from a condition where the sign bears some semblance to reality to one where the sign becomes self-referential.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“A model whose referential is lost’ is therefore Baudrillard’s definition of an operation primarily meant to deterritorialize culture and knowledge via architecture (Baudrillard, 1994: 54).”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“Baudrillard’s positioning of the first stage of simulation during the Renaissance: by reproducing appearances accurately, not only does the perspective window initiate the indefinite manipulation of the environment, but also the predominance of vision in the West. Now understood as a geometrical calculus of distances and proportions, space is born, a theatrical ambience where life unfolds according, and thanks to, the distance separating the viewer from the stage. ... On the other hand, no understanding of reality is possible in the absence of a gap distancing the subject from a world within which s/he used to feel completely merged and subjugated (Descartes, [1637] 2006); just as no understanding of the self is to the same extent possible in the absence of a gap distancing the subject from its own image in the looking glass (Lacan, [1936] 2006). An effect of representation, the perception of reality and individuality both owe to the perspective window their initiation and realization.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects