The Image is Everything

The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
Marshall McLuhan

We experience architecture primarily through images. Our first impressions of the Taj Majal, the Eiffel Tower, and the Empire State Building all come from representational images of them, and every successive image that we come across of said structures, further reinforces our first impression of it because that very impression has itself been manufactured as one in a constantly growing stream of images. When one actually goes to a place like the Empire State Building, or the Taj Mahal, something interseting happens. You experience a very strong sense of cognitive dissonanace since the structure itself leaves a far different impression than the imagined, or proxy one. It's not as big as you thought perhaps. Or once you get up close to it, you realize how inaccessible it really is. Instead of taking a picture of the building from a peculiar angle, you take a picture that is based on the images you have seen already in magazines or on T.V. Otherwise, how will people know you were actually there? In this sense, the building itself must take a second place to it's image. It is the immaterial presence of teh building that defines it more than the thing itself. While this is not a new condition, it is one that has steadily been growing more prominent and complex for centuries, and which in the past 20 years has undergone a period of unprecedented growth.