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In our materialist and digital age, buildings are regarded as aestheticized objects and judged primarily by their visual characteristics. In fact, the dominance of vision has never been stronger than in the current era of the technologically expanded eye and industrially mass‐produced visual imagery, the ‘unending rainfall of images’,³ as Italo Calvino appropriately describes the present cultural condition. In today's media culture, architecture has been turned into an artform of image and instant gratification. The rapid triumph of computerized design methods over sketching by hand, and full involvement of the body in the design process, has brought about yet another level of detachment from embodiment and immediate sensory contact.

The consumer culture of today has a blatantly dualistic attitude towards the senses and human embodied existence at large. On the one hand, the fundamental fact that, experientially, we exist in the world through the senses and cognitive processes is neglected in the established views of the human condition. This attitude is also directly reflected in educational philosophies as well as practices of daily life; in our cult of physical beauty, strength and virility we live increasingly bodiless lives. On the other hand, our culture has developed an obsessively aestheticized and eroticized cult of the body and we are increasingly manipulated and exploited through our senses. The body is regarded as the medium of identity and self‐presentation as well as an instrument of social and sexual appeal. Current consumer capitalism has even developed a ‘new technocracy of sensuality’ and shrewd strategies of ‘multi‐sensory marketing’ for the purposes of sensory seduction and product differentiation. This commercial manipulation of the senses aims at creating a state of ‘hyperaesthesia’ in the consumer.⁴ Artificial scents are added to all kinds of products and spaces, whereas muzak conditions the shopper's mood. We have undoubtedly entered an era of manipulated and branded sensations. Signature architecture, aimed at creating eye‐catching, recognizable and memorable visual images, or architectural trademarks, is also an example of sensory exploitation, the attempt ‘to colonize by canalizing the “mind space” of the consumer’.⁵

We are living in an age of aestheticization without being hardly aware of it. Everything is aestheticized today; consumer products, personality and behaviour, politics, and ultimately even war. Formal and aesthetic qualities have also in architecture replaced functional, cultural and existential criteria. The appearance of things is more important than their essence. An aestheticized surface appeal has displaced meaning and social significance. The social idealism and compassion that gave modernism its sense of optimism and empathy have frequently been replaced by formalist retinal rhetoric. The lack of ideals, visions and compassion is equally clear in today's pragmatic and egoistic politics.