The End Of Architecture History And The Representation of the Void

Mist and Myth; Progress and the Continuity of Story; Metanarrative and the reality of skill, architecture lies in between.

21th century human live in a surfaceless void, hollow and boundless. The end of modern era signify the collapse of the Centre, the Central Image, the great style and the Idea of Progress, of which prompted from the Enlightenment. The collapse of the Center left only a big void, a void where what occur are violence of images, struggle of representation and the fight for meaning.

This is an age of total visibility, of total elimination of secrecy. Our surrounding is bare and clear, where we finally found out that we stand on nothing, everything is a void which we couldn't grasp. This new phenomena is caused by the proliferation of technology, of media, of the free and fast trade of knowledge. Media like Cyberspace has made knowledge no longer privileged, no longer needed to be acquired. It is everywhere on the edge of the finger. Knowledge is dead when it start occupying us, when knowledge is everywhere, its existence cancel itself. When everything considered knowledge, no thing is called a knowledge. Human's learning will no longer be associated with training of minds and the acquiring of knowledge. The transmission and storage of knowledge will no longer relies on the organic brains but on computers. It will be produced and sold, travel faster than the speed of electricity.

Under this new condition, the metanarrative of myths and religion collapsed. The blurry world that we had live for thousands of year clarify itself. The Doctrines have became jokes and drama. We no longer have to legitimize anything, any claim, any myth. Knowledge has made it too clear that we finally recognise that they are mere voids. The metanarrative is dead.

Living under this big void, human now started to suffocate. The bare, hollow void that we live in is too real and clear, story-less. We need the story back, we need the meaning back. We need a hallucinating, blur, pampering life, full of myth and story, where everything represent something because the reality is unforgiving.

Therefore human start to replicate things, copying things, exaggerate things, representing things. They live in a world of abstract mass media, and submit themselves to advertisement and consumerism. The era of mass communications invades human's dark Void, embracing us with cool lunatic light, penetrating our most private recess. Human thus succumb to the fatal abstraction of media, the era of advertisement, of Facebook slavery, of self-representation, they have become the modern slaves of the representation struggle. Individual eager to put in representational self-image to themselves.

The brutally prevailing mass connectivity of information silently diminish culture. Locality and culture is challenged by the power of mass-sharing of information. The diverse plurality of narrative local culture is slowly giving way to the homogeneous converging global culture. Death of unique culture is looming.

Architecture with the phallocentric Center as prerequisite.

Building's art and science are now departed from the scope of architectural expertise. Buildings are crafted not on site but from factory. The over-determinant of industrially-designed-components on building's aesthetics has left architecture profession with the only task of creating Images of form and perspectives. It thus face with the violence of Images.

This violence inside the postmodern void is a technological one, of computerized and synthetic architectural images. It is the end of the imagination of the architectural image itself, the end of the Real, the true Form. The image is violent because what happens in images is the murder of the Real, the image is vanishing point of the Real, the true Form.

'In the field of artificial intelligence, the thought does not even have time to formulate itself. Maybe the computerization of the image is the perfect mode of the image. And just the same : the computerization of thought would be the achievement of thinking. But just because of this, it is at the same time their total denegation. In the very perfection lies the violence of synthetic images and artifical intelligence.' -Jean Baudrillard.


As Plato says 'image is the confluence of the light emanating from the object and of the light emanating from the eye, then we will soon neither have an object nor an eye, and thus no images anymore'. This would be my answer if asked why architecture now is no longer immortal. The interaction and the occurance of architecture would terminate immediately when the building images' connection with the human's sight stopped. The images are work like plastic surgery of all problems, being social or ethical. This is the typical violence of the media, of images, of the spectacular.

Architecture of the architects is replaced by mere building-surface-art of the artis. Objects of manufactured industrial component pretentiously claiming to be the 'architecture of the time'. They are the compensating representation of the unrepresentable Void.

Above is my abstract coding of our postmodern 'Anti-Reality's reality. History ends when everything is a void, there lies no chapter, the story of architecture comes to a stop, nothing is here, we have to create story to our architectural undertaking. Architecture skill and culture like the fate of Knowledge. Technological and industrial means made skill and culture no longer priviledged, materiality, space and technique each is a matter of how well technology and manufactured industrial building components are assembled together. Skill and culture have since cancel themselves, architecture have since march towards a homogeneous global discipline of building-component-assembling activity. Uniqueness now merely rely on how building form represent some past cultural objects. Architecture history in this age is merely the forceful representation of the unrepresentable, of the generic unknown and the Void!