Oberflaechenaesthetik und Raumtiefe. Die Medienfassade zwischen allopoietischer Realitaet und autopoietischer Vision [Surface Aesthetics and Depth of Space. The Media façade between allopoietic reality and autopoietic vision]

This chapter discusses how the new field of ‘media architecture’ is able to transgress traditional hierarchies between surface and structure and between scenography and tectonics to create new urban textures and spaces through the integration of media technology, media content and built architecture in a field where previously the sheer surface of the façade operated. The authors rally against the current and all-pervasive allopoietic reality of the media façade that consistently produces something different to itself, and instead for the development and implementation of self-creating and autopoietic systems of media architectures that produce and act contextually, interactively and out of themselves. It is shown that the traditional media facade operates as a medial alien body, attached to the outer skin of a building and thus operating as both parasite and masque. Following on from Perrella’s theory of the hypersurface, a kind of liquid architecture that is able to transcend the dichotomy between form and surface, body-subject and building (Perrella 1995), the authors discuss how the interactive space of the hypersurface adds to the complexity of a readability of the city. The chapter demonstrates the technological and conceptual development of the media face from its early beginnings (Nitschke 1934-36) and argues for a contemporary, architectural analogy of the biological notion of the productive cross talk between organism and parasite as a cross talk between the interior of a building and its outer shell. A new four step future model of the emergent genre of media architecture is developed by the authors that is centred around an autopoietic design process, that is able to develop a virus-like infiltration of the urban body in a bundle of information-giving and information-communicating medial instruments