(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

This article explores the consumption and reading of our environment through digital-based experiences. Architecture increasingly becomes an image that we design for and is part of the cultural discussion of our identity. This is particularly noticeable of architecture in film and TV as we see the depiction of environments curated by a proliferation of technical specialists but directed by individual/s vision of what the architecture portrays. With motion added to the image on screen, the acceleration of the landscape and content deteriorates the quality of our reading of the technical image. Architectural detail is lost or blurred but its character is portrayed from its altered view to the new passive audience. In 2014, The Game was aired on BBC, a Cold War spy thriller set in 1970’s London. It’s aesthetic draws from the visual-tropes grey London. And MI5’s headquarters is housed in a brooding brutalist structure in the Square Mile. Except this building was not in London, it wasn’t even a functioning building. But it was Birmingham’s Central Library by John Madin, which laid vacant at the time and was condemned to be demolished. The distinctive ziggurat form was carefully superimposed in the unique architectural setting of the programme to emphasise the importance of the organisation alongside London’s other key civic landmarks. Except, in reality, Madin’s library was a divisive building that was refused statutory listing. These instruments of pixel manipulation construct these faultless fictions – in this context for the small screen – but is applicable in the process of image making or architectural storytelling. This paper questions the significance of relocating pixels beyond reality, and the reading of urban identity that is presented to us from these operations. Can it bring further meaning to our reading of buildings after they have been operated on screen? Or is this image a new medium that fundamentally alters our architectural experience? There is the additional question on legacy of these pixels that remain as a type of trace to lost architecture.