Faire de l’architecture pour internet ? Observations sur quelques stratégies architecturales par Instagram

Abstract

While digital media has taken an important place in our personal and professional lives, this article will examine the use of the platform Instagram. In order to move beyond lamenting the ‘Instagramisation’ of architecture, reducing these uses to mere technological formatting, we will explore the notion of intermediality as a means of bringing practices back into focus. We will look at the media as instituted material practices incorporating a number of resources and integrating them into a social space to produce artefacts. Based on this reinterpretation, we will examine a number of architects in the English-speaking world who claim Instagram as an integral part of their design practices, a medium offering specific properties. Going well beyond the idea that production is determined by the mobilisation of a digital medium, we will show that the practitioners whose work is discussed use Instagram in conjunction with pedagogical projects, theoretical intuitions, methods of composition, aesthetic experimentation and so on. Lastly, we will discuss the ambiguous status of these images, which reflect a sincere interest in ‘digital culture’, but whose mode of production and dissemination encapsulates the workings of the contemporary economy of attention and its correlates.

Image: Instagram feed of CAMESgibson. © CAMESgibson, 2023.