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The work of a Rotterdam design collective called Studio Sputnik, Snooze extends the inquiry begun a generation ago by architects like Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, in Learning from Las Vegas, and continued more recently by Lars Lerup, in After the City — the exploration of how architecture, so long a redoubt of high culture, might interact with popular culture and mass media. Or, as the authors put it, right at the start: "The lifestyle magazine Wallpaper* has a clever title. The asterisk refers to the subtitle: 'the stuff that surrounds you.' That is what this book is about: the spatial environment as a sum of the stuff that surrounds you, in the broadest sense of the word: the city and the landscape, but also the immaterial world that surrounds us: adverts, radio and television broadcasts, fashion hypes. In short, mass culture." One might, of course, expand the list of what makes up mass culture — surely the lurid celebrity trial now constitutes a category of its own, ditto the omni-media Paris Hilton — but there's no doubt that all this stuff — insubstantial and ephemeral but ever-present and powerful — does indeed surround us, and that it poses a challenge to architects. How do you make buildings meaningful nowadays, when the mood and image of a place can be set as much by promotional campaigns for sneakers and cars as by works of architecture? Can a profession that continues to fetishize the heroic, the individual genius-creator and the singular masterwork, be anything but marginal in an economy that favors quick delivery, fast turnaround, and mass consumption?
Snooze contends — reasonably, I think — that for a long time architects have tended toward one of two approaches to mass culture: either that of the reformer, the idealist and utopian who knows "what is good" and is eager to use that knowledge to improve the world, or, more recently, that of the pragmatist, the practical "surfer on the swell of the age," who is content to "take things as they are." From the authors' perspective — as youngish architects, still in their first decade of practice — both attitudes have outlived their usefulness, and they propose, with disarming non-insistence, a middle ground between idealism (which can tilt toward elitism) and pragmatism (which can curdle into cynicism). They describe this middle ground as akin to avant-pop — a term popularized in the mid-'90s by the literary critic Larry McCaffery, who wanted to capture the unexpectedly rich blending in contemporary art of avant garde and pop culture — and suggest that this sensibility, with its fertile mix of the progressive and the popular, offers architects a productive approach to the "pluriform extravaganza" of mass culture.