Contemporary American Culture & Architecture in Relation to the Use, Intake, and Characteristics of Advertisements and the Media: A Research Institution and Public Information Center
Abstract
By analysis of the contemporary American Culture, specifically media driven consumerism, architecture can be
informed and designed to react to and embrace current trends. In order for architecture to be as ubiquitous
as prime time television, architecture must fall in line with the consumer structure that operates in America. Architecture must be consumable. There are two sides to the spread of advertisement and the media. One
side is problematic on fundamental levels that have to do with conformity (branding), confusion (mixed
messages) and entrapment of the consumer. Side two, on the other hand, involves a sophisticated means of
communicating and information gathering (intake) through the media that is favorable. These means can be
vast, visual, exciting and up to the second. The amount of information and learning that is possible through
layered messages, for example, is powerful and can be used advantageously to inform architecture and
people. To discuss many of the differences there must be acknowledgment of several problems as well as;
what are defining characteristics of our time that are advancements and are part of the structure we
operate in as a consumer culture.
To advance the ideas there are several fundamental values that will be applied to what are the essential
characteristics of consumerism. Abstraction of these ideas will take shape spatially to inform the design of
a building. Taking into account how problems have arisen will be equally important to how the characteristics
of the nature in which people consume goods as well as; the characteristics of media culture today can inform design. If we live in a consumer society, design today should react to that. The differences between the problematic side of a society driven by consumerism and the side that can inform us will be the line in which to design to. It will lie with-in fashionable integrity and awareness in the difference between what is real and what is false and what can have a reaction to today's situation; yet be durable and adaptable. Ideas are temporal, they recycle. Therefore, architecture needs to have changing information and it must be an incubator for ideas. What can make architecture more valuable is a permanent value within a system of disposability.