Justice’s Hyperdrama

My first architectural epiphany was circa 2002 when I visited the Blue Mosque in Istambul. From the arrival, hand washing, head covering, shoe removal and finally entering the vast public interior, the sequence of spatial experiences culminated with the near clash of my head onto the circular light fixtures, quickly realising the purposefulness of this element. Forced to kneel down on the carpet, mimicking nearby bodies bowing, only to then have my eyes be guided towards the hovering dome, taking in the scale and color of the ornated ceiling above. Visually stunning and spatially monumental, it made me feel both small and big, as only the experience of awe can. No other architectural experience has made as much of an impact as this one. Until a few weeks ago.

This second epiphany wasn’t your classic ‘human meets building’ kind, but one that connected space and human experience at a level I had not experienced before. The fact that it happened at an electronic music concert was also unusual, as stadiums aren’t the epitome of architectural design or spatial experience, but bare with me and allow me to indulge in the fantasy that this can be Architecture...

The set is John Cain Arena, the concert is ‘Hyperdrama’ with Justice and Tame Impala. The show starts as any other electronic music show, in the dark, steady beats in sync with the lights introducing the French Duo facing each other on their mixing tables. Genesis. No surprises.

As the tempo increases, and the light show reveals itself, bodies vibrate to the smoothest loud sound you’ll ever hear. The DJs move smoothly, choreographed to perfection. They are framed by what looks like a suspended LED strip ceiling arranged on a grid with reflective surfaces in between. The Daft Punk references are there, but louder and grungier and everyone can feel it. The ceiling structure moves slowly, almost imperceptible upwards. In the dark, cavernous space, the beat progressively continues and I question if my eyes are tricking me... Are the strips moving? Am I imagining things? My eyes follow as the strips reach the top of the Fly Gallery. The beat speeds up and the lights turn on illuminating the DJs below. Abruptly, the grid flashes, turns and tilts, revealing the intricate set of light rigs that seamlessly rotate, flip, ascend and descend, blinking the strobing LEDs to the beat in myriad directions. The reflective surfaces and a number of screens positioned strategically add to the theatre and the smoke generator completes the cinematic apparatus with controlled clouds shapeshifting in the air. As the rigs move, and people move and lights shift and smoke rises, the experience of the space morphed into a cinematic series of intense, dramatic and formally expressive spatial experiences. In this dreamscape, my thoughts focus on the computational tooling required to achieve all this and I find it hard to believe we have any chance to survive machine intelligence when we are so easily seduced by what it can do. The public surrenders themselves to the delirious robotic movements of the rigs, mesmerised by the way they morph to create strange alien figures or cathedral-like structures we all seem to be willing to worship. The light show only de-intensifies when you see it through-the lens of all the mobile phones trying to capture all of it. We’re already dead, I think.

In the book Towards an Achitecture, Le Corbusier stated that ‘Architecture is the masterly correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage.’

While I couldn’t agree more, modernism did with this what it could with the tools of its time and cemented modernist principles of formal purity as gospel. And here is where this second epiphany falls. It wasn’t architecture, but it was. It was certainly a formally complex play of light and shadow comparable to Burley Griffin’s Capitol Theatre Ceiling, or the Blue Mosque. While no real or specific form was materially present, it was certainly perceptually. The smoke added to the interplay of light and sound to create nuanced subjective experiences for individuals depending on their location, the sonic experience intensified all this both in the way it reverberated through the mass of moving bodies as well as in the way it combined with the visual effects to compose a full narrative for the concert. Our eyes were made to ‘see forms in light’ even when form was not there.

The parallel with the Blue Mosque can be made in the way architecture allows humans to perform and perceive a series of actions throughout space. While my first epiphany involved materialized form and ornament seen and experienced through an act of human movement, the second involved the optic nerves capacity to perceive and absorb light, as well as our bodies capacity to sense and vibrate to sound allowing for a complete immersion of the self within an audio-visual large vessel. The first epiphany was easily captured in single static frames. The second is impossible to, and here lies an important shift from the modernist paradigm. The ‘Still’ VS ‘Realtime’. While Photography eternalised the composition of the Villa Savoye or the Miesian IBM Tower emphasizing architecture as object, facade, and the embodiment of power and capital, contemporary architecture has increasingly distanced itself away from obnoxious expressionism, giving preference instead to nuanced and deep internal experiences, utilising the section as design tool and in many ways shutting itself away from the public as capitalism invaded our private space and privileged architecture for the few who could afford it. Sections are meant to be experienced, not photographed and herein lies the ‘realtime’ shift I am interested in discussing. Moving image is necessary to capture the nuances of a section, as it’s a fully three-dimensional experience of the body in space. Film allows a different kind of immersion, that photography alone cannot capture. The stadium experience felt like a fully curated sectional experience for the masses, when most of our built environment, and much of our best architecture is affordable to a privileged few, this felt generous and meaningful for anyone with an interest in architecture, and the collective imagination of the contemporary city.

If we leave epiphanies behind and list some of the biggest issues facing architecture these days, we can sum those up into three key topics:  the climate emergency, the rise of machine intelligence and the resource and energy crisis. All of these are interconnected, hard to understand for individual issues: aka ‘hyper-objects’, and impossible to find a single solution for issues: aka ‘wicked problems’. Like other professions, architecture has been slow to respond and, in some ways, shied away from making meaningful and impactful changes. In many ways, the profession seems to have regressed and become meeker, more conservative if attempting to restore some sense of long lost control, if there ever was any. It seemed ironic that the Justice concert happened on the day that Frank Gehry passed away, an architect that radically changed the way we operated and considered ‘the quest for purity a form of elitism – one that, at its worst, was driven by a desire to cleanse the world of the “other.”’ And I couldn’t agree more. However, the word that seems to be missing from the discourse of these two great architects, and one that often is disregarded when designing architecture, is time. Designers project the future: visions yet to materialise, and in order to build these visions, we require drawings, metrics and visual material in order to render visible, the nascent and illusory thoughts in our minds. But time is hard to draw, hard to visualise, unless moving images are included. The greatest change since Le Corbusier or Frank Gehry’s respective peak career periods has occurred digitally, as the tools that we have to make architecture have evolved to render it not as a static set of images and drawings, but as moving, real-time ones. The connection between architecture and film, always strong and conceptually relevant, is now embedded in the tools we use to practice and make architecture.  

As the music intensified with the rise of the robots (and our subsequent human decimation played in my mind), the lights shifted to a warm orange, and the audience sang together: I remember…neverender… suddenly mirrored on the large screen ahead a large crowd, reminding me that this experience is only possible because of us. Humans. And the Machines we create and control. En masse we move to the beat and rise our hands to the air immersed in the bliss of crowd energy, under a yellow light spectacle with the rigs facing us emulating a blazing sun. The evangelical nature of Justice’s performance isn’t done with us yet and the music comes to a halt, shifting onto another theme accompanied by blue and black colours, the big screen slowly drifting with images of what seems to be the earth seen from space, and the sea of mobile phones ahead of me capturing a blue halo that my eyes can’t see in the large screen. Is this the end?

Is ‘Architecture (…) frozen music’ or is music what we’ve been missing? The music continues taking a dark turn, the electronic sounds intensifying again and the solar lights changing to a deep red laser dance of beams that horrify the souls that survived a pandemic. And yet we do the D.A.N.C.E. and drift until the music shifts into a melodic bliss again, a constellation of stars ahead of us blinking in the darkness. We are your friends, you will never be alone again, come on!, everyone sings and moves and realises the constellation is not a projection, it is a mirror. It’s us, all around the stadium, shining our phones and blinking in the darkness. This is when the vastness of the stadium interior feels both big and small, we dance in awe, we try to capture the moment through our eyes, our body, but the architecture keeps shifting, flimsy, intense, nuanced, fast and hypnotic. We cannot capture it, we have to feel it. Time stands still and yet…space doesn’t. 

So, what is the point? Architecture is not frozen music, and it isn’t the play of light and shadow in pure volumes: it is us, our bodies in space experiencing a curated and choreographed spatial experience that has the ability to elevate our experience of the world and of ourselves. Architecture is pure and messy, it is movement and stillness. It is both able to be captured in a single moment, but mostly, it’s not. At it’s best, architecture has the capacity to make us feel something bigger than ourselves, a connection to something that transcends our bodies and our minds, bringing us closer to each other and humanity. As it faces unprecedented challenges, architecture needs to overcome it’s inherent desire for perfection and chose to embrace and amplify alternate forms of space-making,  formal expression and storytelling. It must welcome machine intelligence but not forget who is in control. It needs to build with purpose and material restraint, or build nothing at all, using light, smoke and mirrors to create alternative digital spaces that we can inhabit while saving the environment.

More than anything, it needs to strive to provide us with the explosion of emotions that it is capable of, enabling us to do what we do best, being humans and living, as the clock ticks.