Scripted Realities?

The question is whether architecture can dent the current production cycle of imagery, if it still has any agency, if it can resist and meaningfully resolve the rising and all-pervading social aspirations for opulent living wrapped in imagery, or if it is at all the starting point for the meaningful transformation of our habitats away from the influence of fictitious and fabricated images of living

- P VENUGOPAL The writer is a practising architect based in Hyderabad

Exceptions notwithstanding, is much contemporary architectural work of particular types of buildings scripted by advertisements and related world views? The Good Life condominium advertisement is a typical sales pitch of luxury living, which invariably has an infinity pool with glass railing looking at an infinitely spacious and manicured landscape stretching almost to the horizon amidst a dense city.

Typically, a delicate glass cup with a beverage would find a place at the corner of the pool picture, and invariably, there is a large water body or an artificial lake as a foreground to the infinitely expansive landscape. This picture becomes a reality to live in to qualify for leading a good and successful life.

Substantial money is invested by patrons or customers buying the image of pride with an infinity pool, decked up and plush interior spaces almost all of a similar kind. Condominiums after condominiums are built this way to make up for a luxurious but secondhand reality.

A new surreal landscape is generated with hundreds or thousands of infinity pools stacked and brimming with flowing water, and many people live in them in dual realities of the image of the good life and images shaped in steel and concrete. In the process, the image becomes a reality, and architecture becomes a scripted reality.

The reference images may vary in the case of gated enclaves, vacation homes, villas, and others, even as much architectural work becomes a predetermined process and product.