The Architecture of Seduction: An Analysis on Digital Architectures within Consumer Society

Currently new digital tools used in architecture are often at the service of a conception of architecture as a consumer society’s cultural good. Within this neoliberal cultural frame, architects’ social function is no longer seen as the production of urban facts with sense of duty, but as a part within the symbolic logic that rules the social production of cultural values as it was defined by Veblen and developed by Baudrillard. As a result, the potential given by the new digital tools used in representation has shifted from an instrument used to verify a built project to two different main models: At the one hand the development of pure virtual architectures that are exclusively configured within their symbolic value as artistic “images” easily reproducible. On the other hand the development of all those projects which -even maintaining their attention to architecture as a built fact- base their symbolic value on the author’s image and on virtual aesthetics and logics that prevail over architecture’s materiality. Architects’ sense of duty has definitely reached a turning point.

Entretenimientos, fiestas, juegos y placeres en la corte de los reyes de Aragón en el siglo xiv Steffano

Este trabajo estudia la presencia e importancia de las diversiones y el placer en distintos momentos de la vida de la corte de los reyes de Aragón: las prostitutas, dirigidas por el rey Arlot, la música, el juego, el baile o los juglares, observando el aumento de su presencia a lo largo del siglo xiv, con el correlativo aumento de los gastos. También se observa el incremento en el lujo y la complejidad de estas actividades y la siempre mayor presencia de elementos espectaculares como bestias, carros, figuras alegóricas y otros entremeses en coronaciones, bodas o entradas reales, todos ellos aspectos de la progresiva glorificación de la monarquía.