Manhattan’s skyscrapers aren’t really built for people anymore. For more by The B1M subscribe now - http://ow.ly/GxW7y Full story here - https://theb1m.com/...
That fucking realtor ghoul absolutely gushing over these overvalued ziggurats of excess as if this is just perfect and normal. 169,000,000 for a fucking unit? We need Minecraft and then a sequel
The synthesis of marketing intelligence with rendering software has generated a social milieu in which architecture is constituted in the production of investment images.
The English political economist William Davies writes, “The only resource on which financialization is necessarily dependent . . . is the future.” Transhumanist monuments are already a feature of finance capitalism, but what about the next step: an investment-oriented architecture that moves further and further away from materiality itself? As the vibrant presales market suggests, it is already happening. What will be left of architecture in this emergent condition could be what is already the essential fact of architectural production: representation and its potential realization. If one imagines the duration of presales increasing to ten years, to twenty years, to fifty years, to perpetuity, where only the investment image exists as the medium of investment, then one can glimpse one possible outcome of the financialization of nonfinancial entities.
From this vantage point, it is possible to conceptualize rendering software as not only an architectural tool, but also a type of FinTech. For through it, architecture sublimates into the financial electrosphere—all that is solid is now all that could possibly be solid. Virtual and augmented reality now achieves a sophistication that indicates an imminent role in everyday life. In this version of representational agency, current truisms of architecture give way to a form of representation that is less virtual reality and more real virtuality. Reinhold Martin recognized this when he wrote of architecture, “It has become a kind of real virtuality, in which, from the point of view of the markets and those who manipulate them, the actual, tangible existence of anything that can plausibly be called a useful object (i.e., a real building) has been superseded by a set of representations.”
(from the book in the above video: Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra-Thin: Architecture and Capitalism in the 21st Century )