1 MVRDV's Flightforum Eindhoven
2 Greg Lynn's theater Cardiff
3 Zaha Hadid's coffee and tea-set for Alessi (photo Carlo Lavatori)

Reviewing alternative television in Het Parool newspaper recently, Han Lips came up with the following: 'In the end, the subculture has no choice but to find an utterly mainstream programme absolutely fantastic all of a sudden.' A sentence that struck home. The subculture indeed has no choice, for TV is by definition the medium of the masses. All those progressive architects (the avant-garde as they used to be called, but that doesn't exist any longer) who suddenly discover the mainstream - motorways, amusement parks, computers - sprang to mind. Do these 'alternative types' have a choice? Or are they so rooted in everyday reality and programmes of requirements that there is no choice? Is that why they find something completely ordinary - a commercial street, say, or a car - 'absolutely fantastic'? Or get all worked up about escalators or flocks of starlings? I think the answer to these questions is yes. I think that in that one short sentence Lips the critic hit on a problem that is rife in modern society. Walter Benjamin wrote about 'the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction'. And Lips concisely summarises the yet-to-be-written and no doubt bulky standard volume on 'the work of art in the age of its technical omnipresence'. Everything can be made, downloaded and presented in digestible chunks, anywhere and everywhere. Everything is mainstream. All media, from architecture to graphic design, from the latest Hollywood hit to today's newspaper, are made using similar equipment and made to appear before us as if by magic. And the equipment is improving all the time: the latest Apple is always better than the last one. And that's why everything can be compared more easily, and why everything is starting to look alike - even though the computer seemed to hold up the promise of infinite possibilities. Everything has a digital feel to it now. It's time that changed, for nothing is more mind-numbingly boring than looking at umpteen renderings of a single abstract chunk of virtual architecture: thousands of forms, but uniformity throughout.

Today we can turn Benjamin's text backwards. Technical reproduction of art is, of course, the artwork of today. Alas, what's true for art isn't necessarily true for architecture or urban design. Owing to their roots in society, architecture and urban design have precious little to do with autonomous art. A public discussion on a new building proposal would be a washout if the architect on duty turned up with a story about art, enlivened with a PowerPoint presentation about chaos, fractals and flocks of starlings.

What's happened is this. Architecture underwent mechanisation in the second half of the nineteenth century and standardisation in the 1950s and 1960s. Then it was the turn of the building process, and that phase is also well and truly behind us now. Our new standard is digital. On top of that, with the same hardware and software. Just as every traveller sooner or later becomes a pedestrian, every artistic expression is ground down into 'zeros and ones'. There will always be a stage at which there is no difference between a newspaper and work of architecture, or between film and urban design (the word scenario is crucial in both disciplines). This is partly why some urban-design schemes only have graphic qualities, can only be enjoyed in 2D. But this is no great revelation; poor plans have always been around. The preceding stage - the idea - is what's at issue. That's where every design starts. It's then a matter of visualising the idea so that it can be understood by many more people. In the representation of ideas, architecture and urban design differ from all other design work in one respect: models. A good scale model is always preferable to the computer aided paradise we're served up today, which, once built, is often a nightmare. This, too, is down to architecture and urban design's roots in society. A 3D representation is simply a better way to communicate the real situation. Viewed in this manner, 'finding the mainstream so utterly fantastic' makes for a successful strategy in the world of autonomous art alone. Architects and urban designers would be better off taking a course in creative model-making.