Skyline and Cityscapes
Recently, whilst reading the Sunday supplements I came across a holiday advertisement for Ontario with the by-line ‘The Towering Beauty of Ontario’ the accompanying photograph shows a benign public park with a trellis of trees supporting the skyline. The image, I presume, is meant to portray an iconoclastic representation of the modern city. But what attracted me to the photograph is how the skyline, although augmented with trees its vista clearly opens up to show Ontario’s communication tower. The ‘Communication Tower’ became a ubiquitous symbol of technological virility in the 1960s and 70s. Cities from Moscow to London erected these modern day obelisks. East Berlin, in particular, gave the west ‘the finger’ when it erected its 365m tower in 1969 (its observation platform swivels to this day).
The architectural posturing that accompanied the cold war years has ceased and the silhouette of urban architecture figures on the postmodern visual landscape for different reasons related more to commerce than ideology. Now, in this globalised environment, some of the traditional roles of architectural semiosis have changed – the Christian church spire no longer has to reach out to its parishioners and likewise the skyscraper to its investors – now, the former has satellite TV and the latter is exposed on market screens 24/7 . The Global city is, as Castells
points out, ‘a process’ rather than a physical space. And here is the rub, the city so long the hub of capitalist production is now, in this guise at least, dormant. We now live in a world of ‘flows’ both literal and metaphorical – refugees (if the rabid tabloids are to be believed) and data ‘stream’ from one capital to another. In a recent promotional video Hong Kong branded itself as a ‘portal city’ and this city branding is not a new phenomena, New York successfully re-branded itself as the ‘Big Apple’ and Milton Glaser’s ‘I love New York’ has become a design icon. Branding now increasingly uses the NY skyline– the profile has become both the synecdoche and the swoosh of the city. Although we can look at the biography of individual buildings and see how ‘cathedrals to commerce’ are commissioned, built and embedded with meaning; how, with developing techniques the skin of the building becomes a transcript of corporate hieroglyphs. But these individual architectural statements are left as potent silhouette’s of commerce – as the physical work of ‘old’ cities transfers to the new edge cities of call centres and internet bubbles. This process of transference of work from ‘branded’ city to periphery is a phenomena well documented in the market of brands. The President of Landor Branding Agency quoted in Naomi Kleins ‘No Logo” states “products are made in a factory…but brands are made in the mind” This dynamic is reflected in the use of the city skyline as logo or trademark – cities produce aspirations, the soft bedding for brands… September 11th reminded people just how potent the city skyline has become and after the event, the space left, ached in the news footage and photojournalism flowing out of the mourning city. One passenger on the Staten Island Ferry, looking up at the skyline, spoke of the city losing its two front teeth. This reaction can only be dreamed of by a brand manager and it is a brand loyalty exploited by both politicians and corporations. The medium for super brands, television, has been quick to exploit the branding potential of the city skyline. New York features heavily in sitcoms not only as narrative context but the skyline is used as an editing device; Friends, Sex in the City and Becker use the NY skyline as a ‘sting’ between edits – often the skyline appears, like the notorious subliminal advertising of the 1960s, in a nano second and at other times a more leisurely pace allows an indulgent sweep of Manhattan holding up the New York skyline.
There is one final strand of the skyline, the skyline that is mediated through news coverage; Gaza, Beirut and Haifa, have all become fragments in a skyline spliced with conflict. Recently, staring out from a hotel room in central Tel Aviv, I could not see the skyline (like the colours in the Israeli flag; blue against white) without the scene conflating with the images from all the newsreel footage I have seen (day in and day out) ¬— the skyline like a doppelganger becomes a composite or double exposure: depicting smoke rising; pockmarks and sirens ¬¬— the collateral damage of too many visual-bites on CNN, CBS, BBC and Al Jazeera. The skyline, the trace of a cityscape in outline; like any logo, emblem or sign, becomes part of the visual mapping we use to (mis)understand the world and, often fatally, can make the world seem easily digestible.
Colin Davies 2006
Excellent piece – a problem of visual culture exposed – images conflate and depict a ‘total’ world rather than the Diaspora, which is the real one. The ‘I love new york’ phrase/logo came out when the city was experiencing high levels of crime and deprivation; the question should have been who loves new york?
/Steven 10/12/2006