Corporate Realism
…presented at the 2024 UHPH conference at the University of Sydney…
Corporate Realism is a globally recognisable aesthetic. More than anything it’s a style of architectural visualisation, often described as ‘hyperreal’, arising with 2010s and 2020s advancements in digital image production. These advancements (or ‘innovations’) in image and video rendering have been fundamentally integrated into the generic immaterial labours of architecture and urban planning and design, parallel to the mass-circulation of architectural imagery across Instagram and TikTok. Corporate Realism is also buildings themselves, interiors, furniture, products, interfaces, perhaps even tv shows, and certain personalities. In the same way that Soviet Socialist Realist images can be broken down to a formula of archetypical settings, subjects, moods, and colours, Corporate Realism, as illustrated by the images above, offers an even tighter, digitised archetype. It’s personified by architects like Bjarke Ingels and his manifesto of ‘hedonistic sustainability’, but it’s generally produced in anonymity. It’s the realism of tech utopianism, ‘smart buildings’, forgettable forms, greenwashing, of modernism’s worst and most superficial derivative, of algorithmic diversity, of commercial positivity, of architecture and public space subsumed entirely into marketised and bureaucratised logics. The aim here is to claim this term as a useful tool of criticism, and to better understand architecture’s place in the Culture Industry of the 2010s and 2020s.
The term ‘Corporate Realism’ is a reminder of ‘Capitalist Realism’, a term that refers to the 1963 Düsseldorf exhibition of Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Wolf Vostell, and Konrad Lueg, for whom the term was of course a tongue-in-cheek response to the Socialist Realism of the Soviet Union and its allied or satellite states, the style in which Richter was famously trained before emigrating to West Germany in his late 20s. Capitalist Realism also refers more recently to the late cultural critic Mark Fischer’s 2009 book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? which like much of the writer’s work considered what he felt was the totalising hegemony of neoliberal capitalism such that all resistance and alternatives seemed futile, often read as a kind of depressive Left Fukuyamaism, which remains popular.
Fischer’s Capitalist Realism was reminiscent of a number of previous labels used historically to describe capitalism by way of a singular cultural totality: ‘Spectacle’ in Debord and ‘Simulation’ and ‘Hyperreality’ in Baudrillard for example. ‘Capitalist Realism’ was for Fischer’s book far more simply a punchy title as opposed to a term which engaged in any art or architectural historical dialogue with Socialist Realism: “Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself.”
Corporate Realism, I argue, is a particular type of realism, and can to a degree be considered in dialogue with 20th Century Socialist Realism for instance. It’s precisely these historical particularities which makes it useful as a term. Another important point in developing particular realisms with definite edges, is to avoid the potential edglessness and therefore potential formlesness of terms like ‘Capitalist Realism’, ‘Spectacle’, ‘Hyperreality’ etc. I’d therefore like to promote the use of Corporate Realism as an historically specific term, remaining entirely conscious of its theoretical limitations, and the tendency of similar terms to slide into hyperbole.
On the broadest historical scale, Corporate Realism exists on a trajectory of modern architecture globalized beyond local or national specificity. An early 20th Century moment in which such globalization was celebrated as the growing influence of an architectural avant-garde was the birth of the term ‘International Style’, derived from Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson's 1932 publication The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, corresponding to the MoMA exhibition of February 9-March 23 of the same year, ‘Modern Architecture: International Exhibition’, the press release of which stated that the exhibition would "...exert a most beneficial influence on architecture and building in the United States and particularly in the field of multiple dwelling developments both urban and suburban," including works by Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Erich Mendelsohn, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, Gerrit Rietveld and Frank Lloyd Wright among others. The International Style’s celebratory tone would diminish in the coming decades as Modern architectural globalization led to what postmodernists would decry as stylistic homogenization, or what Robert Venturi referred to as (puritanical) "orthodox Modern architecture" in his key text foreshadowing architectural postmodernism, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966).
Corporate Realism also brings into question the term ‘Corporate Modernism’. The term ‘Corporate Modernism’ is arguably just a particular development of the International Style, however focused on high-rise commercial space located historically in the post-war period American and European economic acceleration, manifesting in corporate high-rise buildings where services such as air-conditioning became standardized from the 1950s. A significant example of Corporate Modernism can be found in Gordon Bunshaft's 1952 'Lever House' tower for the construction company Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), documented in Nicholas Adams' 2019 book Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism. ‘Corporate Postmodernism’ similarly refers the kind of high-rise buildings that would otherwise, in the absence of anachronistic architectural motifs and devices, be referred to as Corporate Modernism. The high-rise work of Phillip Johnson’s office throughout the 1980s and 1990s exemplifies this category.
Contemporary Corporate Realist architecture must also be considered retrospectively against architectural exchanges between technology and aesthetics from the second half of the twentieth century. ‘High-Tech’ is a loose term applied to architecture from approximately the 1960s to the present, though popularized in the 1970s in relation to buildings like the Centre Pompidou by Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini, which advocated the structural and mechanical expression of mid-to-late 20th century building methods and technologies. This style’s predating of ubiquitous computing and internet access (and therefore ‘smart building’) as well as 21st Century climate politics retracts or deflates by comparison, the aesthetic futurism of 20th Century High-Tech architecture, which might now read something like Steam Punk.
Corporate Realism is of course a part of a technological, digital history. The mid-2000s and on saw the advent of Facebook (2004/2005), YouTube (2005), Instagram (2010), TikTok (2016), the first iPhone (2007 – becoming the most successful consumer product in history in the 2010s), the iPad (2010), the MacBook Air (2010), iCloud (2011), Siri (2011), the death and martyrdom of Steve Jobs in 2011, the initial public offering of Tesla in 2010, and the initial public fame and heroization of Elon Musk during the Obama Administration. Internet speeds in this time increased from 1 megabit per second in 2005 (20 times dial-up speed) to 10 megabit per second by the early 2010s, with the Coronavirus Pandemic normalising the need for ubiquitous video streaming and remote working conditions. What the above diagrammed technological-historical window implies is an age in which digital moving and still images are both produced and consumed on a scale, in a quantity, and with a speed never before seen in history, with this intensity and ubiquity embedded in both the production and experience of things like Corporate Realism, which, like Big Tech, is both mundane and fanatical in equal parts. The significance of this recent technological history to design ideology is spoken to by Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones in an article that reads like parody,
The rise of the Apple aesthetic went along with the rise of coffee shops, the idea that work and leisure can combine in new ways. The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad: none of them are designed to keep you at home, addicted to the virtual. They are made to be carried about, used in cafes and on the bus, wherever you happen to be. Perhaps the greatest insight of Steve Jobs, when it came to design, was that the most beautiful, marvelous creation on earth is not the computer, but the person using it. The Apple aesthetic is profoundly humanist – and in this sense it has truly made the world a better place.
This points to a question of realism and human representation. A survey of renders produced by the 20th Century architectural movements from modernism on as mentioned above reveals either an absence of the human figure or its abstract representation. In comparing this absence or abstraction to the hyperreal depiction of human subjects in contemporary Corporate Realist renders, an obvious distinction between the 20th and 21st centuries, especially the 21st Century from the 2010s onwards, is simply the increasing ease with which one can digitally render or digitally-collage hyperreal or digital-real human bodies in still or moving architectural imageries, compared to the manual drawing and collage methods with which 20th century architecture was rendered. For example, in Mies Van Der Rohe's iconic modernist collages humans are either entirely absent or represented by scaled collages of classical statues. One of the most significant modernist architectural depictions of the human subjects is likely Le Corbusier's Modular Man, an abstract scaling device, which, like Da Vinci's Vitruvian man, is devoid of a realist depiction of culture from which the abstract figure historically corresponds: the Vitruvian and Modular men belong to architectural logics rather than predominantly aesthetic-political orders.
Architectural modernism's depiction of the human figure (or lack thereof) corresponded to various scales of abstraction in modern art more broadly, with Realism vs. Abstraction (or Realism vs. Modernism) defining culture war debates between Western vs. Stalinist-Soviet art, with proponents of Socialist Realism, most notably György Lukács in his 1938 essay "Realism in the Balance'', arguing that abstraction was incapable of revolutionary messaging and conscious-raising, with Clement Greenberg arguing one year later in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch'' (1939), that Socialist Realism existed on the same impotent plain as any other form of kitsch produced by fascist or liberal democratic societies. Just as modernist architecture conveyed through its formal composition an interest in abstraction shared historically by modernist art, literature, theatre, film, and music, Socialist Realist architecture cross-pollinated with painterly and pictorial Socialist Realism through the inclusion of realist representations of workers as architectural motifs, through engraving, sculpture, painting, and mosaic for the sake of an aesthetic world construction in tandem with a political world construction.
In considering the formal distinctions of Corporate Realist architecture from other realist and abstract styles, it appears to synthesize elements of both sides of the 20th Century divide: the architecture itself is abstract; a form of corporate modernism inflected by 21st Century environmental requirements, a form of high-tech architecture in which the nature of "high"-technology is no longer masculinely formal but invisible, theologically relegated to the cloud(s), and yet the Corporate Realist representation of architecture relies on depictions of human subjects, of consumers, users, workers, far more so than it does on architectural qualities, or even claims of architectural qualities. Corporate Realism combines the workerism of Socialist Realism (albeit a post-industrial worker), with an essentially homogeneous modernist language.
The digital advancements of the 2010s allow for the humans in Corporate Realist renderings, including video renderings, to comply with neoliberal-versions of representational politics. Rendering softwares produce a mechanical and perhaps cynical pluralism, an algorithmic diversity, which balances business progressivism and conservatism, ultimately remaining socially conservative. Corporate Realism depicts a business-class homo-liberalis in the same way that Socialist Realism depicted a homo-sovieticus. This is historically unique, as previous architectures used to flagship neoliberalism – the work of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid for example, as included in Douglas Spencer’s The Architecture of Neoliberalism – were entirely disinterested in such depictions, siding far more than Greenberg’s formalism than with Lukács’ realism. If Zaha or Gehry or Koolhaas were the avant-gardes of neoliberalism, then Corporate Realism is its rearguard.
A key characteristic of this architectural realism is in fact the backgrounding of the medium of architecture behind a forefronted ideological message. A Corporate Realist advertisement for a mixed-use commercial & residential development under construction in Dublin as of 2024 offers the following monologue:
What makes a place? Coopers Cross is an investment in user experience for your employees and beyond!
The world is changing, and Coopers Cross is designed to meet that change head-on.
Futureproofing and flexibility are a guiding principle of the Coopers Cross design philosophy. We will be at the heart of an emerging city quarter where exceptional architecture, active public realm, community, and culture are combined to create a world class destination.
The vision for Coopers Cross is anchored by our desire to create an exciting user experience. We are delivering an exciting new space that makes strong connections between its built form and the outside world.
Social space has a positive impact on people’s productivity — so enabling wellness at work has been fundamental in our designs. For example, we have used glazed stairwells to encourage physical movement and collaboration through the building.
Watch above to see the future you could be a part of today.
Don’t miss out on a collaborative, social future. Speak to our agents to book your viewing of Coopers Cross today: https://www.cooperscrossdublin.com/en...
Much of the language from this excerpt – such as “collaborative, social future” – is often dismissed, with good reason, to be completely meaningless jargon. Other terms used here however read as ideologically and/or historically significant and precise:
User Experience for example refers to the digitisation of life, the rendering of the human subject as a ‘user’ – an anonymous object that rates things out of five and gives ‘up’ or ‘down’ thumbs,
Futureproofing treats the future – the future conceptualised as something other than the present as an unending Fukuyamist Groundhog Day state – as a disaster to avoid,
Flexibility is used as a term to make economic precarity and overwork sound fun,
An Emerging City means anywhere with a lot of homelessness,
World Class means the same,
Wellness doesn’t mean anything but is meant to sound like it does, and in the context of potentially sinister sentences like ‘social space has a positive impact on people’s productivity’ represents the aesthetic disjuncture or contradiction between a positive surface and a negative reality that’s often exaggerated in sci-fi-horror.
Corporate Realism is ultimately an aesthetic of triumphant mediocrity. Mediocrity here is not meant necessarily as a critique implying failure, as mediocrity is exactly what is aimed for, which is the intention of societies in which the market and consumer consensus is the fundamental logic for making or doing anything. Mediocrity or averageness or consensus is accessible to a far greater market audience than the terrible or the great (and therefore, perhaps, difficult). What’s interesting about Corporate Realism’s banality is that it is in fact a complex aesthetic-political attempt to resolve a multitude of tensions which now appear inherent to capitalism and its contemporary ideology: tensions between concepts of global and local, between work and life, individuality and conformity, between left and right, between classes. Corporate Realism is an aesthetic of the generic, of AI-esque aggregation. It avoids the more absurd forms of tech-spiritualism that seem to lead, inevitably, to eschatological depression or insanity. However, because tensions do exist, attempts to please as many and offend as few as possible end up allowing the generic to be perceived as the extreme: Corporate Realism can be read equally as globalist-progressive tyranny or as a glibly veiled rightist attempt to humanise the brutality of capitalism. Corporate Realism ultimately reveals an aesthetic attempt to maintain the End of History, the post-political dream of neoliberal consensus that’s come under significant fire and crisis in the last ten years from various forces and circumstances. Despite its apparent positivity, the aesthetic reveals societal neuroses over a present whose longevity is indeterminate, for whom the future is a battleground between an enduring present and various alternatives and problems.