Reading Response 2 (Week 4)

Beatriz Colomina's claim in the first week's reading that the house is "the most important vehicle for the investigation of architectural ideas in th[e twentieth] century" immediately stood out as a claim worth thoughtful debate. As the century that saw the rise (and peaking and beginnings of decline) of the American empire and its variety of predatory capitalism, perhaps its attendant architecture of choice – the office building – merits serious consideration for this dubious title. The high-rise office, unlike many homes, functions on two architectural fronts that are increasingly inseparable: the symbolic and the physical.

We encounter office buildings through representations (in media coverage, official literature, online discussions, etc.) and through personal experience (as a construction worker, employee, tourist, passerby, etc.). All this week's writers grappled with the massive ambitions represented in the architectural forms of corporate headquarters and the general dissatisfaction with working conditions within these structures. How do architects, developers, executives and employees negotiate the shifting borders between buildings intended as symbolic vehicles of corporate identity and as spaces for working employees? This problem arises especially in the new media offices visited by Andrew Ross in Silicon Alley and in the tensions between old- and new-media office archetypes found at the IAC headquarters in Shannon Mattern's article.

It seems almost fitting that the faltering American media industry should be the focus of these studies of buildings where the use of architecture as a medium has superseded its function as an inhabited space. Perhaps an ideal solution to this dichotomy, which Reinhold Martin shows has an architecturally rich history and evolution that includes Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Lever House building (seen under construction in 1952 above), lies in the digital landscapes where these companies do the majority of their work. As many of last week's writers suggested, digital architecture provides infinitely more possibilities than – and nearly none of the risks of – built environments. Rather than build a costly, inflexible structure for vast sums of money – as companies covered in Mattern and Martin's articles have done – a digital building with adjustable proportions, layouts, ornaments and designs might offer many new media companies a more appropriate architectural symbol.

Employees could have access to all areas of this virtual environment, freedom to pick where the information related to their job is displayed and have a say in the constantly adjusted appearance of the building on the company's website. Similarly, users, readers and customers could travel through this space to access products and information, and could even be consulted in the ongoing redesign process. The building could be structured around some original architect's vision – or not – but once inaugurated its functioning, layout and appearance would respond to the needs and preferences of its most frequent users. Evidently, this virtual solution doesn't solve the problem of an actual physical office from where media labor is done, but it seems capable of solving certain problems that lead companies to focus on architecture's representational function at the expense of its physical usability.