ABSTRACT

As the Experience Economy migrates extreme narrative practices from the theme park to more public sites of everyday life, we must evolve our critical apparatus to address its new architectural conditions. But the vast array of architectural theory and criticism which at least marginally takes it on as subject matter does little other than laud or dismiss it. While the end of the 20th century saw an evolving interest in the politics of architecture, the ability of the commercial economy to fluidly and rapidly produce innovative interdisciplinary projects and practices left all but a few adept firms and researchers in its wake. In particular, conventional architectural criticism – my own disciplinary heritage – foundered, as the artifactual nature of the “building,” its formal composition, stylistic legacy, and conventional urban character were displaced by graphic, informational, and socially networked architectures. The centrality of the building-as-artifact – and the arts and sciences which contribute to its construction – has been waning as other newly attendant disciplines challenge the value of this traditional architectural subject. At the service of brand management and commercialized experience, architecture has become a kind of “brand ambassador,” “living the brand” in all of its spatio-temporal extensions.