11 Quotes by Francesco Proto

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).

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.

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.

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?

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.

…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.

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.

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)

More real than reality itself’ is, therefore, Baudrillard’s favourite definition of hyperreality.