As we move around the urban fabric, thousands of images pass in front of our eyes, with an equal amount of visual messages as well. History has informed us about the concentration of images in our society and its roots linked towards the consumer society. With the great advertising hoarding and the publicity neons of the cities of capitalism, the offer to the society of a glamorous future remains ubiquitous as images always propose to us that to transform ourselves or our lives we must consume more or in other terms to envy others, we must spend more.

Publicity image is a culture that has for centuries navigated its way through societies and dramatically staged its necessity within the lives of people and with capitalism thriving on the abundance of labouring forces the inequality produced by this culture has often divided the society into classes, specifically into the bourgeois and the proletariat. This inequality forces us to question the structural and inescapable long-term effects of the system that are often blindfolded to the society with an image of temporary pleasure or envy.

The interplay of psychological effects of envy and glamour evokes a feeling of submerging into the deep levels of the city, where a flood of information overflows the human senses and a lot of noise surrounds the people. This leaves the so called free-society to alienate themselves from one another and surrender to the commodities. The human lives which craved for a human touch are left to satisfy themselves with possessing another commodity of capital society.

In a ‘free-society’ where contradiction between what a person is and what he would like to be exists perpetually, a two-fold dilemma arises whether one must submit to this state of capital exploitation or does one become fully aware of its causes and stands for the cause. The existential question is a self-reflective thought that questions the role of an architect amidst all the social anaesthesia that lies in the society? While we accept the fact that architecture is now a tool of capital, do we seek to exploit the structural hierarchy for a bourgeois society or do we stand firm on the stance that architecture at the end of the day must be addressed for the society as a whole for the proletariat?

*The following study is informed from multiple literature references including Ways of Seeing by John Berger and The Society of Spectacle by Guy Debord. *