Communication and social media influence on architecture is becoming more and more vivid. These tools have changed the way we interpret architecture, often flattening the discourse. I talked about this and other topics with Luca Sassi, who invited me to share my experience with Archinerds. Find our conversation, recorded in Italian, in this article and on the Archisax YouTube channel. On the same channel, you can also watch many other interesting videos about contemporary architecture, practices, architecture universities and design culture.
It’s not always easy to talk about your experiences, but it allows you to reflect on what you’ve done. I’d like to thank Luca Sassi, who invited me to do it on his YouTube channel. In the video, I tell about Archinerds, the architecture social media channel I edit since 2015.
Being involved with social media and architecture, I’ve often thought about the meaning and changes that these tools bring to the architectural debate. While social media has unleashed the voices of millions, these media lighten communication and risks flattening it into fashion and trends. This is a point I discuss with Luca, giving examples related to brutalism and showing how this term has turned into a keyword to generate traffic. We then talk about architectural references and the meta-verse, another buzzword widespread since Facebook changed its name to Meta. But also about the positive effects that AR and VR can have on design.
Three books on design, digital technologies and architecture
At the end of the interview, I present three books about the relationship between communication, architecture and the digital. For anyone interested in the books, they are:
- Da cosa nasce cosa, Bruno Munari, Editori Laterza;
- Le Architetture Liquide dalle reti del pensiero al pensiero in rete, edited by Matteo Ciastellardi, LED;
- The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality, Luciano Floridi, Oxford University Press.
The three books, though they may seem far apart, represent a path. It starts from the world of design, and thus from Munari: his words convey some of the essential concepts of design culture with great ease. Ciastellardi’s book, Liquid Architectures, is a text that helped me a lot during my research. The volume is about architecture as an expression of society, as well as on the internet and the new digital environment we live in. It allows us to approach the other book: The Fourth Revolution, by Luciano Floridi. This latest book, written by one of the leading contemporary philosophers, explains how technology can radically influence our lives. Issues that have an important impact on dwelling and that we, as designers and architects, need to be aware of.
Archisax, Luca Sassi’s architecture YouTube channel
Luca Sassi is an architect who returned to Italy after professional experiences in international studios such as Mecanoo. Besides his work as an architectural designer, he’s also involved in architectural dissemination on his YouTube channel: Archisax. The channel is one of the most interesting and watched on architecture in Italian. It’s full of videos about the experiences of architects in major contemporary firms and suggestions for those studying architecture. If you speak Italian and are interested in architecture, I invite you to follow it. On Archisax, you’ll come across topics that don’t always find space on specialised websites and media.
