The body, landscape, time all progressively disappear as scenes. As inhabitants of late twentieth-century America we daily encounter the ephemeral hyperreality that Baudrillard describes, but as architects we acknowledge the existence of this new kind of reality hardly at all.
Architects tend to think in terms of concrete realities.
The ecstatic flurry of media images and mass communication has created countless new hyperrealities, not of the concrete and the enduring, but of the ephemeral, the virtual and the ever- changing. Since time and space are the vehicles through which we perceive reality, as our perceptions of space and time change, so do our experiences of that reality. In the hyperreality of postmodernity, time and space seem paradoxically to be simultaneously absolute and relative. On the one hand, the smooth functioning of the global economic and commercial complexes require precise and absolute constructs of time and space. It is through the insubstantial qualities and mythic content of image that commodities are made to appeal to us as consumers.