Instagrammability

Definition

Instagrammability names the degree to which a building or space invites photographic capture and sharing on Instagram, and the recognition of this as a design and curatorial demand in contemporary architecture. It embodies a "new cultural logic of the networked image" (MacDowall & Budge), in which architecture is conceived, produced, and appreciated through its circulation as an image rather than only through use. Architecturally it is linked to the pictorial turn, the shift of production toward immaterial media sites, and to "instagrammable spaces" designed to be shared.

Key Thinkers

• Nadia Alaily-Mattar — empirically models instagrammability's effects (visuality peaks, function lasts).
• Iwan Baan — the counter-example of narrative/documentary photography against "Instagram-face" images.
• Charles Jencks & Leslie Sklair — the image-centrality of iconicity that instagrammability operationalizes.
• (Related, not yet paged: Beatriz Colomina — Privacy and Publicity; the pictorial turn; Walter Benjamin on simultaneity of reception.)

Related Concepts

• Iconic Architecture — the iconic image is produced and circulated on the platform.
• Viral Architecture — instagrammability is a building's capacity; viral architecture is its circulation through the platform.
• Star Architecture — the commissioning context of instagrammable buildings.
• Spectacle vs. Function — the two modes of instagram content.

Synthesis

• The Spectacle, Iconic Architecture, and Social Media — the platform as the apparatus of the spectacle and the metric of iconicity.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Visuality Peaks, Function Lasts
• Building the Picture: The Story of Architectural Photography
• Social Media: Third-Person Perceptions of Architecture
• Viral Architecture, or the Unintentional Architecture Criticism of Social Media
• Spectacle, Simulation, and the Selfie (O'Sullivan 2024)
• Embodied Spaces in Digital Times (Wagiri et al. 2024) — Instagram as a "third space"; mediatization, temporal reshaping, and "Instagrammable" design.
• Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (Virilio 1977) — Bratton's introduction reads Virilio as a pre-history of the "software society"; Google Earth as the descendant of battlefield simulation, prefiguring the platform gaze that instagrammability depends on.
• War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (Virilio 1989) — the "sight machine" and automated perception as the military antecedent of the algorithmic/curatorial gaze that determines what is instagrammable.
• source-notes/madigan-munro-2006-house-beautiful
• source-notes/proto-2023-spectacle-and-the-screen

Open Questions

• Does the "visuality peaks, function lasts" pattern reflect a general law of architectural attention, or Instagram-specific dynamics of distraction and ephemerality?