Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic “The medium is the message.” Marshall McLuhan’s irresistibly slippery aphorism, coined in 1964, keeps popping back. Architecture was once the medium of public life — cathedrals as bibles in stone, civic buildings as representations of urban identity, houses as expressions of wealth and taste. But the medium is changing. The architecture of culture, once the fundamental expression of human identity, is fading away beneath a barrage of LEDs into the immateriality of pixels. Architecture itself, once the ultimate art of three dimensions, is being reduced to two.The vanguard here is Las Vegas, where architecture has always played second fiddle to branding and, in the process, some of the most memorable images of pop iconography have been created. In one recent landmark, any pretence of an architecture has been stripped away entirely to leave only the representation. Sphere (there is no definite article, this is brand more than building) is a vast dome of LEDs, 112 metres high and clad in 54,000 sq m of lights, an immersive auditorium seating 18,600 spectators. The enormous glitterball was set to gain a twin in Stratford, east London, but proposals were withdrawn earlier this year after objections from mayor Sadiq Khan and locals anxious (understandably) about light pollution. There is something deeply unsettling about Sphere illuminated as, for instance, a monstrous eyeball, as often happens in a display of its capabilities. Perhaps this is because it makes manifest that just as we direct our gaze towards the screen, it is watching us as well.There was some surprise recently in London when the immersive “art” attraction, the Outernet on Charing Cross Road, a free attraction with open walls, announced it had had 6.3mn visitors over the year, an astonishing statistic for a relatively new attraction and half a million more than the vast British Museum a few blocks away, according to The Art Newspaper. How then were these visitors counted? It was via an AI-powered surveillance system. Never forget that this sort of immersive attraction is really an enormous billboard and some do not just beam ads at you but may also capture your image or harvest your data. In the quest for immersiveness, these 2D creations are made to seduce us into thinking we are perceiving depth as opposed to surface. Social media is saturated with images of billboards, featuring astonishing visual effects. The screen on Kuala Lumpur’s Pavilion shopping mall beams dazzling animations with effects on the public almost akin to the Lumière brothers’ 1896 film of a train arriving at a station, which reputedly scared the audience out of their seats. Others, including billboards in New York’s Times Square, Tokyo’s Shinjuku and Omotesando districts and London’s Piccadilly Circus, have transformed simple screens into immersive “experiences”. Seoul has, arguably, gone one better with its Nexen UniverCITY Infinity Wall, a lobby installation which comes through to the street with remarkable animations.This slow erosion of architecture by media was foreseen in the 1960s by speculative Pop designers and in the 1980s with science fiction. British provocateurs Archigram designed an “Instant City” in the late 1960s, a kit of parts that could be assembled to create megamedia: massive screens, blimps, balloons and canopies, all of which acted as surfaces for projection. It had the capacity to remake a village into Times Square for a few days and then move on. It foreshadowed both the media city and the contemporary pop tour with its vast, truck-borne paraphernalia, a pop-up pop spectacle.Those projects in turn inspired the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which was originally to have been wrapped in screens and scrolling text à la Jenny Holzer or the Times Square stock-ticker. The explosion in digital displays and the advances in animation are simultaneously dispensing with interior architecture too. Digital experiences, sometimes the animated works of artists (Van Gogh, David Hockney), have become blockbuster immersive events. They require only black boxes and can be underground, in leftover spaces or now-emptied office blocks, then globally licensed. Artists such as Refik Anadol and teamLab mine a lucrative market in artworks which replace architecture, needing no natural light, no quality of space — only screens.Superblue in Miami is sited in an anonymous converted food distribution warehouse. It looks like a generic shed on a movie backlot but the constantly changing magic happens inside, a garish, nauseating albeit dazzling visual artscape. Its first installation was designed by Es Devlin, queen of the stagy spectacular. In these black boxes, the dematerialisation and alienation are enhanced by visitors whose principal mode of consumption and communication is the screen, so these non-spaces are legitimised by being recorded and viewed second-hand, then disseminated to be seen on other screens. Their authentic life is fundamentally digital. The medium is still the message.You might argue that the prototypes for the these scripted spaces, the casinos, theme parks, megamalls, stadium rock spectaculars, are nothing new. That is, to some extent, true. What is, however, new, is that these kinds of architectures were once confined to edgelands, sites by the sides of motorways or in deserts, far from the messy unpredictability of the city. Now they are coming into the centre, while the city itself, with its generic brands, privately policed BIDs (business improvement districts) and POPS (privately owned public spaces), is being mollified and flattened into an idea of a city. One of the world’s biggest new cultural landmarks, Hong Kong’s M+ museum, is defined by its huge exterior billboard: a medium, yes, but also an elision, having its cake and eating it, stealing from the commercialised skyline as if afraid that it will be subsumed if it does not compete.The night-time city of the mid-20th century with its buzzing lightscape of neons was once only visible after dark, transforming the architecture visible by day into something else. Now the super-bright LEDs work all day as well, dazzling and overwhelming. Urban architecture is in danger of becoming a substrate, a screen for display rather than a medium in its own right: not a cityscape in which we are free to interpret and create narratives but one in which we are fed animated stories, scripted spaces, advertising and images seductively designed to be recorded and disseminated. Our lives are increasingly lived online, subsumed into the screen. The city must be allowed to remain a bastion against that, a place of messy, unscripted humanity and determinedly three-dimensional, a last refuge into the real.
