Hyperreal Culture: An Office for Wallpaper Magazine, New York

Christine Fahner

This Master’s Degree Project explores strategies of openness through: connections to the ephemeral world of the mass media; the display and exposure of utilization as event; and an articulation of space that is of service to the client while providing many experiential possibilities for the visitor.

The prominent position of visual mass media imagery in post-modern consumer culture has resulted in a cultural condition of hyperreality - the simultaneous existence of the real and unreal. Because of architecture’s association with representative imagery and existence within an image mediated culture, the current condition in which architecture resides is one located between reality and hyperreality. The objective of this project is to work within this condition through a critical engagement that investigates architectural strategies for a hyperreal culture.

The mixed-use design intervention, an office for Wallpaper magazine combined with retail and other public space, is conceptually ordered as a collection of elements that function together to filter exterior influences and structure the interior space. These elements create a generalized field against which a series of event spaces unfold. This organization, along with the blurring of typically public and private functions, creates a context in which the processes of the media and image creation are revealed, both to perpetuate fascination with the media and to sustain desire and consumption.

Through an architectural framing of the unpredictable relationship between visitor and magazine, the drama of everyday life and its related experiences unfolds. Acting as a continuation of the street, both inside and out, the building creates spectacle from ordinary events. Conventionally private functions are revealed, creating a new level of visibility and interaction between public and private, and subsequently, a multitude of potential experiences. These events, experienced through the exposed photography studio, magazine work areas embedded within retail space, or the incorporation of urban elements, prevent the architecture from being consumed as an image. These areas place absolute focus on the activities that are part of the process of creating this magazine. It is not just a physical blurring of public and private, but rather an extreme clarity that places visual focus on conventionally hidden activities.

Christine Fahner is a recent graduate of the MArch programme at the University of Calgary.