These days everything is a product or object.

Modern society frames things.

Products are packaged. They are contained and thus sellable. This isn't that, its this. Specificity maintains a market advantage or a market viability. Nothing is a product or a sellable item until it can be placed within a frame. Website are bought and sold within the browser window. We no longer care about paying for our phone calls just our phones. Minutes are no longer contained within our phones, our phones have become the objects of communication and thus we have cases for them. The same occurs with the big mac, the computer and the person. Architecture is bought and sold in the photograph. We design for the image, for the camera. Ultimately the market place of the 21st century is purely optical, any other sensorial offerings are freebies. To resist the market is to resist the eye.



Image: Mark Weiss

As audience, we don't use art. This doesn't mean it doesn't have function but we don't put it in our hands everyday and use it as a tool to enable our daily tasks. We look at it, perhaps we understand it in relation to our bodies but, we do not take it apart and put it back together with our hands.

Designed objects, everyday objects, cooking utensils, doorknobs, cars, phones and the such operate as tools, they enable us to accomplish varied goals. Whether that be stirring onions in a pan, opening a door, traveling from A to B or communicating with another human. Not only can they be judged on how well they help or enable us accomplish this task, how much of the task they do on their own, but also on how enjoyable they make the task.



Images: Christopher Williams

Communication between architects and the public has recently increased its reliance on the rendering, or photo-realistic representation, to deliver an experience which is easily sold to the client previous to construction. Considered “more accessible”, this mode of communication negatively effects the architect’s design process and the public’s final experience of constructed environments. This trend in architecture has been paralleled in numerous other fields and even more generally, characterizes our mode of consumption in a modern capitalist economy. We purchase groceries, food, clothes, books, furniture and cars without touching, tasting, smelling or listening. In these visual and virtual transactions we lose a real embodied experience.



image: rendering of the adobe museum, an online museum without a physical presence "designed" by Filippo Innocenti -

Cornel West: philosopher, author, critic, civil rights activist and fashionista comments on style and substance. Courtesy of Street Etiquette's Blog.

Please don't say "form and function", "function and form", "form versus function", or "function over form". These are not the words of this blog, read a little farther and you might disagree. Form and function, function and form, there, I just broke the first two rules. It's not that we won't be obsessing over form and function - we will, but rather that we will be obsessed with their demise. Here at CultureTheory, we are striving to regain a theoretical discourse of our tangible and intangible existence(s); our objects, our images, our behaviors and our thoughts. This theory does not serve to further our understanding but rather our obsessive sanity and our obsessive libido by connecting it all, by creating one heady orgy.