Exceptions notwithstanding, is much contemporary architectural work of particular types of buildings scripted by advertisements and related world views? The Good Life condominium advertisement is a typical sales pitch of luxury living, which invariably has an infinity pool with glass railing looking at an infinitely spacious and manicured landscape stretching allmost to the horizon amidst a dense city.

Typically, a delicate glass cup with a beverage would find a place at the corner of the pool picture, and invariably, there is a large water body or an artificial lake as a foreground to the infinitely expansive landscape. This picture becomes a reality to live in to qualify for leading a good and successful life. Substantial money is invested by patrons or customers buying the image of pride with an infinity pool, decked up and plush interior spaces almost all of a similar kind. Condominiums after condominiums are built this way to make up for a luxurious but secondhand reality. A new surreal landscape is generated with hundreds or thousands of infinity pools stacked and brimming with flowing water, and many people live in them in dual realities of the image of the good life and images shaped in steel and concrete. In the process, the image becomes a reality, and architecture becomes a scripted reality.

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The reference images may vary in the case of gated enclaves, vacation homes, villas, and others, even as much architectural work becomes a predetermined process and product. In this repeated cycle of monotony, there is often no room for design innovation, even as the image of the good life is continually scripted and inscribed in our collective consciousness by the real estate dreams, advertisement world, and the contiguous aspirations of our society.

As the latter two feed each other, architectural productions seem like the images of the advertisement world and bec – ome another set of images to feed the former space. They are then held captive in a zone of scripted reality. Inhabitation becomes a packaged reality, untouched by the scent, texture and myriad nuances of life. In such a zone, architectural works are not merely image driven but part of the production process of recycled images. Narratives gradually consolidate into scripts. The latter becomes a definitive reference, and their influence can extend to defining what a good city should be.

The city novo should invariably have a plethora of expressways, tall building towers in steel and glass shining away into a hallucinatory landscape of prosperity on advertisement boards at the gates of airports and city centres. Architecture then becomes a tool to shape mirages. Further, urban living is engulfed by many images of look-alike opulent environments related to living, workspaces, recreation and even places of worship. Against this backdrop, urban habitats seem poised to march towards a scripted urbanity and singular destiny oblivious to our socioeconomic diversity, complexities of real ground and the needs of our society.

Other kinds of narratives guiding architectural productions manifest elsewhere in the designer world. In this world, there is a script which may be called the publishable work script. As part of this script, the needs and preferences of inhabitants or patrons who commission projects could become incidental or subservient to the designer’s image and aspiration about the architectural work to meet the publishing requirements. In other words, the publishing space becomes the reference script for some architectural productions, and the designer either chooses or inadvertently strives to comply with its norms. Except for good examples of sensitive architectural works, in many cases under the influence of this script, the publishable work invariably is like a clear premeditated image, qualified by clinical craft with conventional or alternate materials, definitive and less spontaneous in its makeup, photogenic and celebrates only the visual experience.

Architecture is also a social construct, but it can simultaneously envision plural ways of living and inhabitation. Arguably, architectural utopias of the twentieth century, for all their demerits, were also social visions. It may be argued that the utopias were also driven by the imagery of a specific manner of crafting architectural works and a singular worldview. Such criticism notwithstanding, the concern is not about the particular movement but about such disruptions to architectural discourse, if any today, becoming subservient to the influence of images continually fabricated and fostered in our imaginations by the advertisement world and contiguous social aspirations. Somehow, the cycle that feeds the cycle of prevailing world views and images about architectural productions must be disrupted before the scripts take us over, leaving no room for alternate visions of living.

The question is whether architecture can dent the current production cycle of imagery, if it still has any agency, if it can resist and meaningfully resolve the rising and all-pervading social aspirations for opulent living wrapped in imagery, or if it is at all the starting point for the meaningful transformation of our habitats away from the influence of fictitious and fabricated images of living. Perhaps questioning the roots of prevalent paradigms in the field of architecture and reflective thinking about the prevalent world views that shape our habitats could pave the way to breaking free of the scripted realities we seem to inhabit increasingly. Or the prospect of breaking free from the cycle of producing scripted realities of living may well lie outside the boundaries of the discipline and discourse of architecture.

(The writer is a practising architect based in Hyderabad)