Digital Monuments

Digital Monuments: The Dreams and Abuses of Iconic Architecture
Simone Brott
Routledge, October 2019



Paperback | 5 x 7-1/4 inches | 196 pages | 49 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0367201128 | $44.95

Publisher's Description:

Digital Monuments radically explodes "iconic architecture" of the new millennium and its hijacking of the public imagination via the digital image. Hallucinatory constructions such as Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV headquarters in Beijing, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Zaha Hadid’s Performing Arts Centre in Abu Dhabi are all introduced to the world by immortal digital imagery that floods the internet—yet comes to haunt the actualised buildings.

Like holograms, these "digital monuments," which violently push physics and engineering to their limits, flicker eerily between the real and the unreal—invoking fantasies of omnipotence, immortality and utopian cities. But this experience of iconic architecture as a digital dream on the ground conceals from the urban spectator the social reality of the buildings and the rigidity of their ideology.

In 18 micro-essays, Digital Monuments exposes the stereotypes of iconic architecture while depicting the savagery of the industry, from the Greek and Spanish crises triggered by financialised iconic development to mass labour-deaths on construction sites in the UAE.

dDAB Commentary:

Iconic architecture is the subject of Simone Brott's Digital Monuments, but it's death that permeates the book's 18 chapters and comes to the fore as the hinge upon which iconic architecture depends. There are two types of death in Digital Monuments: the immortality at the heart of the Modernist project and the literal deaths that have occurred from the construction of iconic buildings in Middle Eastern countries.

The first type — the warding off of death via technology — is addressed in the first half of the book, whose 18 chapters are organized into 3- or 4-chapter chunks on the crises of iconic architecture, "genres" of iconic buildings, Santiago Calatrava in Athens, and Zaha Hadid. Although literal immortality is currently impossible, obviously, it's hard to deny how in modern times death is discussed rarely as a fact of existence and how corporations, institutions, and other non-human entities run are treated as if they will "live" forever. Will Google or Facebook be around ten years from now? They might not, feasibly, but often they are discussed as if they'll always be with us. In terms of iconic architecture, immortality is aligned with the highly polished, digitally created images that foreshadow their final existence but, to Brott, are more important than the actual building; and with the types of projects envisioned by architects, such as "Elysium," the digital blobs plastered with greenery as if they are recreating the afterlife on earth. Death aside, Brott's linking of iconic architecture to digital imagery gets at what's problematic: the image is more important than the real building.

If that's the problem with the first type of death, the second type reveals that the money being pumped into the iconic buildings is more important than the lives actually constructing them. Brott focuses on the deaths caused by the excessive heat and other dangerous conditions in building stadiums for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar and the comments by the late Zaha Hadid, architect of one of them. She was quoted in the Guardian in 2014, in regards to the death of hundreds of migrant workers in Qatar, "I have nothing to do with the workers. I think that's an issue the government – if there's a problem – should pick up. Hopefully, these things will be resolved. ... It's not my duty as an architect to look at it." Many articles were written after that report, one of them resulting in a lawsuit, but very little progress was made in architects acknowledging the moral responsibilities for the lives of people building their designs. Architects have clearly defined professional responsibilities for their clients and the end users, but those don't cover situations like Hadid's in Qatar. But they should. Perhaps it's just a matter of time before today's momentum over such concerns as the role of architects in the prison-industrial complex, the exploitation of architects' labor, and increasing the diversity of the profession extends to the consideration of all lives involved in architectural projects. In this context, Digital Monuments is food for thought on increasing the social agency of architects in the face of neoliberal entities that value architects for their image-making abilities over anything else.

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Author Bio:

Simone Brott is an architect and theorist, and Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Queensland University of Technology. Educated at Yale University and The University of Melbourne, she writes on the politics of the digital image in architectural production and the contemporary city.

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