Beginning at the end of the 18th century, there was a gradual effacement of the tradition of idealized mimesis which invested form with symbolic content and made it indistinguishable from cosmic order. With the transformation of the traditional symbol systems to purely formal practices based on inner logic came the displacement of knowledge from the world as lived to an autonomous status enclosed in the elitist space of the academies. Thus, form and picture became the primary content and meaning, resulting in the modern phenomenon of art for art's sake.

Such architectural prototypes as the Panopticon and the Panorama are eblematic of the doctrine of modernity. Both of these machine-like structures are not only tokens of the self-referentiality of the modern condition, but they also represent the obscession with control and the predominance of vision over the other senses. In the case of the Panopticon - which was designed by Jeremy Bentham in 1775 as an ideal structure for the surveillance of prisoners, lunatics, pupils, etc - the priviledged position, that of the overseer, was in the central observation tower which was surrounded by a ring of cells that were laterally open so that the backlit silhouettes of the confined were easily discernible. The "enlightened" individual was thus separated from his surroundings, an alienated subject whose experience was strictly contemplative.

The same is true of the Panorama, a structure that started to appear in the urban centers of Europe at the beginning of the 19th century to satisfy the insatiable appetite of the newly formed bourgeoisie for images. Access was through a dark passage that lead from the street to a central observation platform within the cylindrical structure, the interior walls of which were covered with uninterrupted landscape or urban views. The middle ground was eliminated, and the bourgeois subject, separated from his surroundings, consumed the world as an image on display.

The commodification of space was the result of the substitution of use value by exchange value brought about by the industrial revolution and the new market economy. This created a breach between the self and the scene, between the subject and the object. The bourgeois monad was trapped inside what was virtually a wall of images, no longer able to comprehend the totality of the space that he inhabited or his position within it. His experience, his conception of the world, lost every trace of the tactile and became completely abstract.

The architectural products of the Modern Movement eloquently exhibit the qualities promoted by the project of the Enlightenment and established by the market economy. A fine and very popular example is Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye (1929-1931). The villa is basically a box that hovers over the orchard that surrouds it, clearly stating its presence as dinstict from the context. As in the case of the Panorama, one has to traverse a dim space in order to reach the interior which is organized around the ramp as a series of images that the visitor consumes during his architectural promenade. In this space, akin to a picturesque garden, the individual wanders endlessly consuming images of the interior, which is organized according to a purely formal and self-contained geometry, and of nature, which is offered as a picture framed by the ribbon windows.

The audience of Christo's wrapped buildings needs, like the visitor to the Villa Savoye, to wonder around the work admiring the object from a distance. As the artist himself points out, the emphasis is on the beauty of the form. The tight wrapping secured in place with ropes provides for a monolithic quality that emphasizes the "objectness" of the work and therefore sets it apart from its context. Yet, as one contemplates Christo's art - and especially some of his more colossal projects which involve thousands of square meters of fabric, years of preparation and a team of hundreds to complete - his/her experience escapes the realm of the picturesque and enters that of the sublime.

When something is so enormous as to evade comprehension by the human mind a feeling of awe and even terror is generated. Such feelings were reserved for nature in the pre-Enlightenment era, today they are induced by the enormous multinational corporations and the ever more complex networks of the computer age. The size and complexity of these enterprises crash any ambition of autonomy and obliterate any desire for control. The elitism and authoritarianism of the modern movement is now replaced by an aesthetic populism. The alienated subject, the bourgeois ego, is now extinct, the object and the subject are currently merged on the basis of their mutual abstraction. With the end of the subject, the angst of personal expression has been replaced by a stream of feelings that float with an unprecedented lightness amongst the multitude of surfaces and bits. Emotions are now emoticons.

In the computer age, lightness is an essential. The hardware is merely a function of the software, the latter gives the orders and interacts with the outside world while the former changes and evolves according to the requirements of ever more complex programs. Today production has been replaced by reproductive processes of such magnitude that they level any previously existent hierarchy and render everything as a series of links, a ubiquitous web. Now the context is the content. Even categories of time, so prominent in the Modern Movement, have merged into a synchronic collection of moments dominated by a novel spatial logic.

Contemporary culture calls for the invention of a new kind of space which can re-present the current condition but which can also help regain a sense of place within this ubiquitous web which is now so complex, enormous and confusing that it borders on threatening. We look at scaffolding as the archetype of the architecture of the future because the qualities of our time are implicit within it. Like computer science which is based on the principal concept of binary notation, scaffolding is composed of stable modules which have the real potential of endless and endlessly modified repetition. Scaffolding creates a space that can propagate infinitely yet maintain a recognizable and navigable system of coordinates. Scaffolding dissolves the monolithic quality of the form that it wraps, it transforms it according to the requirements of a new internationalism. As in the case of computers, where the friction of use occurs on the software level, so in architecture, weight has to be somehow replaced by a lighter interface.

Scaffolding is the model for a new spatial trans-formation.