Part 1: Assignment 2: The Experience Economy
1. What is the new role of aesthetics in the experience market? (p. 44)
“‘[T]he importance of ‘aesthetic skills’ has grown along with lifestyle oriented service businesses, in which aesthetic environments attract customers and good-looking employees function as ‘human hardware enhancing the company image.’” - Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence.
For both Goleman and Klingmann, aesthetics are a new kind of quasi-commodity. Delivered through the experiences which surround products, as in the case of Apple, aesthetics operate as an environment in which consumers live and identify themselves through. Klingmann offers the example of Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vals as a quintessential aesthetic experience, in which the building was design to elicit a very precise experience of bathing through the deployment of a quasi-religious aesthetic experience.
2. How does architecture construct the ‘gut feeling’ people have about a brand? Aaron Betsky calls the branded icon an “object of adoration, and a fetish, and in all of these ways it creates something we can see that condenses and makes physical the invisible or the unnamable forces that control our world… Icons are objects that represent the unpresentable.” Architecture, by both providing experience and by providing icon to which experience is attributed, serves as the physical manifestation of the ‘unpresentable’ material which generates the ‘gut feeling’ in the consumer. In addition, the consumer instantaneously identifies other people who share their ‘gut feeling’ about certain brands when they see the relationship that those people have with certain brands.
3. What responsibility might architecture have in the ‘fragmenting’ nature of the hyper-modern brand-saturated society?
“In our media-saturated times, it falls to architecture to have the direct [a]esthetic experience of the real at the center of its concerns.” (Michael Benedikt)
Through the generation of aesthetic experiences, architecture serves as both inertia and catalyst of the fragmentation of society. In one sense, architecture provides a tangible icon for those qualities which Betsky explained could not be expressed. We see this phenomena manifested in the oft remarked ‘Bilbao Effect’ in which a new, iconic architecture provides a city with a richly branded identity. In another sense, the variety of experiences provided by architectural icons could begin to erode certain qualities of national identity or genus loci.
