Architecture Trends: Hip-Hop & Instagram
November 23, 2018 2:26 PM   Subscribe

 
See also: Happy Place, an itinerant Instagram paradise. See also: the murals a local family-owned restaurant, Fitz's, put up recently. It made me happy to see a group of Muslim women in hijab taking selfies in front of the new murals. It felt like St. Louis ought to feel. I'm looking forward to more diversity of surfaces and public art resulting from the drive to find new photographic material. If it decays...well, I'm kind of also looking forward to that.
posted by limeonaire at 3:50 PM on November 23, 2018


Just heard about something relevant to this today on No Such Thing as a Fish, the excellent podcast from the researchers of QI. A sunflower farm in Canada tried to get additional publicity by advertising it as a great spot for a selfie. Predictably, havoc ensued.
posted by turtlebackriding at 4:17 PM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


“cuts off some of the windows, making it too dark to live in though interesting to look at.”
Aren’t there enough buildings that aren’t designed to consider the people who live and work in them?
posted by Ideefixe at 4:29 PM on November 23, 2018 [6 favorites]


In Dubai, corporate firm Stride Treglown has followed its client’s Instagram-conscious brief to the letter. “The key was to make sure the design incorporated hashtags,” says practice director Robert Sargent, of the Rove hotel. “We considered where people would be wanting to take Instagram pictures and put the hashtag there: etched on the mirrors, on bedroom walls, in big cutout letters outside the hotel.”
#RELAX shouts a sign in the lobby.
“This is where I am,” notes a sign above the bed.
The resulting vibe is more like the office of a San Francisco start-up. The walls are covered with motivational messages, along with a sign urging guests to “create memories” – and perform some free advertising for the hotel chain in the process.
I feel old and grumpy
posted by JonB at 12:40 AM on November 24, 2018 [10 favorites]


I'm a bit frustrated by the use of the bean in Chicago as an example in the Instagram article. It certainly predates Instagram. Its opening (never mind conception and construction) likely predates Facebook (Millenium Park was a few years late). It predates cell phones with decent cameras, never mind smartphones. If the article was more than "let's moan about how Instagram makes people self-absorbed"*, it's an interesting example--was it expected that it would be a tourist attraction for people to stand under and photograph themselves? Or was that a surprising development? (I've honestly always been surprised that it's a tourist attraction at all, rather than generally ignored public art, but clearly the Millenium Park people are smarter than me.)

*With some weird orientalism going on, too.
posted by hoyland at 3:55 AM on November 24, 2018 [3 favorites]


It’s worth noting that Oliver Wainwright frequently uses Instagram as a critical tool, so the call is coming from inside the house, so to speak.

This is an interesting twist on the age old relationship between architecture and photography. I’m willing to say there are some situations where it has improved public space design, with designers playing to a more populist and eye-level lens. Those goddamn Instagram hotels though... [barf emoji].
posted by q*ben at 9:25 AM on November 24, 2018


Hip-hop architecture? Color me skeptical. When you consider that one central feature of hip-hop is it is a movement that celebrates it’s creation as a black art form and actively resists co-opting by white hegemony, I'm struggling to see where hip-hop architecture is a real thing and not just something some semi-clueless types are trying to make a thing happen.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 1:45 PM on November 24, 2018 [4 favorites]


There is a ton of remixing architecture going on all over the world, and an actual hip-hop architecture sounds intriguing, but I don't it now as a trend or thing so much as an exhibition. It seems a little forced, you'd expect it to be more grassroots and vernacular, real-world based and not just architecture students doing renderings and 3d printing of 'remixes'.
posted by signal at 6:41 AM on November 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


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