We're all dressed up with something to show

"Our conventional view of architecture - they are just buildings after all - is being challenged by two visiting designers who have some provocative and unconventional ideas, writes Angela Bennie.Architecture is something we wear. We "wear" the rooms, the houses, the spaces we inhabit like we wear our clothes; so does a city "wear" its public buildings.On the other hand, cities do not exist. They are images, dreams, ideas in our heads."

"Wigley, the author of White Walls, Designer Dresses: the Fashioning of Modern Architecture (MIT Press, 1995), says that cities are dreams and ideas. Architects play with those ideas. This is architecture."

"All architecture, says [Beatriz] Colomina, but particularly modern architecture, is a form of representation. One can "read" a building like one reads a text, or a drawing, or a film. Indeed, it is the task of the architectural critic to do so. Conventional critical writings on architecture traditionally place it in the category of "high art", in direct opposition to mass culture.On the contrary, she argues, modern architecture, as opposed to the architecture that preceded the modern, is a product of the mass media. Without the mass media what we think of as modern architecture would not exist. Modern architecture is not so much the building itself, the object, as it is the images of the object that exist in our minds through the dissemination of it through photographs, drawings, exhibitions, competitions, magazines and other forms of mass media. The image prevails."